I don't know if most Tom/Harry shippers realize how good we have it these days.
When I started reading and writing HP fanfiction back in 2001 (no, that's not a typo, lol), hardly anyone cared for Harry/Tom or Harry/Voldemort. I did, passionately, but I was one of the few who wanted to see this ship written as more than Harry gets captured by Voldemort and a non-con Death Eater orgy ensues.
There just wasn't much interest in that back then. When it came to slash, there were two main pairings: Harry/Draco and Harry/Snape. Even pairing Harry with Sirius or Remus, or even Ron or Neville was pretty out there at that time. Heck, I wrote the first ever multi-chapter Harry/Lucius story on ff.net before their first smut purge.
I wrote some Harry/Snape because I enjoyed that pairing well enough and at least it got some readers. My early Harry/Voldemort and Harry/Tom works were far less popular. So while my heart was into Harry/Tom, I wrote lots of other ships just so people would read it.
Eventually, I decided just to try and trick people into reading Harry/Tom by throwing Snape into the mix. That worked! Just having Harry/Snape on the box lured in plenty of readers and both The Soul Adores and The Semblance of Peace had a pretty decent audience. It felt as if a shift might be coming, but unfortunately around that time (2006/2007) I suffered a bit of a fandom burn out and I needed a few years to recharge my battery.
I ignored the fandom. I didn't read or write anything for years and years and in my absence the Tom/Harry ship flourished.
You can imagine my surprise that when I first came back to fandom for a while back in 2011, I found Tom/Harry fic. Mountains of it. Short, smutty stuff. Long, plotty stuff. And fanart. Oh, the fanart!
It was like coming out of a fandom desert into a mythical land of plenty. And most importantly, these fics had an enthusiastic audience, such as I'd never seen before!
It would still take me almost a decade to truly get back into writing HP fanfiction (mental illness can be a bitch) but during that time I did read all the Tom/Harry stories I could find and it was better than I ever could have imagined.
Nowadays, when I post my Tom/Harry stories, I don't have to cheat by adding another character, or wonder if anyone will even want to read my stuff in the first place, and it makes writing fanfiction so much better.
So thank you, Tom/Harry readers and writers. You've all made this old gal very happy these past few years.
