#fu-harrypotter

[fu-harrypotter]

Final Lecture: Harry Potter - Global Phenomenon

What Harry Potter Has Meant to Me (and to the world) When I was twelve years old, my cousin told me about this book she was reading. She told me I would love it. She invited me to sit in one night and listen to her mother read a couple chapters of it out loud. My first introduction to Harry Potter was chapters nine and ten of the first book. I listened as this kid named Harry accepted a challenge from a questionably-named kid called Malfoy to sneak out of bed and go fight a duel at midnight, which even I, not knowing the circumstances or characters at all, could tell was a trap. I listened as these four kids found a three-headed dog locked up in a corridor of their school, and I listened as a troll was let loose on Halloween, and at the end of the night, I said, “I need to read this book just to figure out what was going on in those chapters.” So I got my hands on a copy of the first book, and my mother read it out loud to me. And then we got the second. And then the third. And I was hooked. That was 1999. The first three books had just been published in the US, and I had to wait two years for book 4 to come out. I am a voracious reader. I’m a part-time librarian, and I average about 120 books a year. I have read a lot of books. I have been touched and affected by a lot of books. My perception of the world has been altered and tweaked and adjusted by a lot of books. But books that have actually changed my life? Changed fundamentally who I am as a person? They number only seven, and all seven belong to the same series. This is not exaggeration for the sake of making a point. I met three of my closest friends, my three best friends for most of college, because of Harry Potter. I had the first real conversation with my fiancé, the conversation that actually led to us dating, over Harry Potter. I developed a strong mentor relationship with one of my favorite and most influential professors because of Harry Potter. I started writing because of Harry Potter. When I say that these books changed my life, I mean that I would be an entirely different person living a vastly different life if not for Harry Potter. I tell you all my story because I feel that it echoes a lot of personal Harry Potter stories out there. I also feel that, in a small way, it echoes the book series in the world as well. When JKR first started trying to publish Harry Potter, nobody wanted it. It was too different, too long, too difficult. And then it was published, and the world showed that, no actually, it wasn’t any of those things. Harry Potter is a global phenomenon. Everyone knows what it is. Even if people have never read the books or seen the movies, they’ve almost certainly heard the name. They know that Harry Potter is a thing in the world, and the series revolutionized children’s literature and fantasy literature, and it opened the gates for longer children’s books, for more complicated children’s books, and for children’s books that bridged the gap between adult and child readers. Harry Potter has had such a huge impact on the world, and maybe I come at this from a slightly biased perspective, but I look at what has been published in YA and Children’s lit since Harry Potter, and I am so encouraged by how the quality of literature has risen. I read somewhere that the true magic of Harry Potter was that kids, boys and girls alike, as young as eight, up through high school, were waiting in huge lines, showing up to midnight sales events, eager and yearning and desperate to read an 800-page book. Harry Potter changed the way the world looked at literature and fantasy and the capabilities of children, and that, to me, is phenomenal. We’ve spent the last four months or so talking about Harry Potter, exploring and examining the books and the fandom and the impact these seven books have had on us and the world at large. And now, we come to the end of our time together, students. Officially, our semester ends next week. But this is the last lecture from me, because I want to give you plenty of time to think about your final assignment. So we’ll just have a discussion question this week, and your final assignment will be worth double the points. And the discussion question is this: What didn’t we talk about this semester that you’d like to touch on? We couldn’t fit it all in, I know. There are the supplementary novels, there’s Pottermore, there’s Harry Potter as social commentary, and so much more. What do you wish we had touched on, and what would you like to leave us with concerning that topic? I’ll post the final assignment later today, and next week I’ll post the class rewards available for the points you’ve accumulated. I’ll message each of you privately to let you know how many points you have, and what weeks have outstanding assignments, if you’d like to complete those and turn them in to accumulate more points toward you rewards. Thank you all for being a part of this experiment. I hope you’ve enjoyed it at least a bit. Professor Guion

[fu-harrypotter]

Week 14: Fanfiction!

Well, folks, we've reached that point of the semester -- love it or hate it, we can no longer put off talking about fanfiction. 

Now, fanfiction gets a bad rap, which is a shame, because honestly, there's a lot of good stuff out there if you can wade through the crap. I admit unabashedly and without shame that I write fanfiction. I write a lot of fanfiction. I've been writing fanfiction for the past decade, and I currently have close to 60 HP fanfictions written and posted on my profile, and I'm damn proud of really all of them. The ones I am not proud of (mainly those written when I was 14, 15, and 16) have been taken down. My user name is Realmer06, and here's the link to my profile. Go. Read if you'd like. 

See, there's a stigma attached to fanfiction that I'd like to dispel. I have a whole rant on this, but this isn't the place or platform for it, so I'll probably post that on my personal Tumblr sometime soon. Suffice it to say, just because something is fanfiction doesn't mean it's bad. And it certainly doesn't mean we should be ashamed of having written it. There's a whole lot of published brilliant work in the world that is technically fanfiction -- The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is technically fanfiction. Breathing new life and offering a different perspective is not something we should duck our heads about and pretend to not take seriously.

I mean, yes. My Immortal exists (click that link at your own risk). Stories that are ridiculously bad, reading like they were written by 13-year-olds (because a lot of them were), with utterly awful characterization, complete disregard for canon structure, and basically just an excuse for a literary version of the author to have graphic sex with every character in the books. But hey. That sort of thing has been published, too.

Long story short, the fact that a piece of fiction can't be published doesn't mean it's bad anymore than the fact that a piece of fiction has been published means it's good.

Soapboxing done. Onto the lecture itself.

In the end, however you feel about fanfiction -- love it, hate it, support it, disagree with it, feel completely indifferent toward it -- you'd better get used to it, because fanfiction in general and Harry Potter fanfiction in particular, isn't going anywhere. 

When we talk about fanfiction, we are talking about works of fiction, both short and long, written by fans, incorporating characters and worlds of a published author (or movie or TV series or what have you). The bigger the fanbase, the wider and more varied and more prolific the fanfiction. Harry Potter is one of the largest fanbases, and fanfiction.net, the larger hosting site online for fanfiction, currently houses more Harry Potter fanfictions than works for any other fandom. Last count was around 639,000 works. 

And it is an undeniable part of the fandom. In fact, it's how I personally was introduced to the fact that there was a fandom at all. I found Harry Potter fans online when I was 14 through Harry Potter fanfiction. 

Generally speaking, fanfiction falls into seven categories.

Alternate Universe (AU)/Speculative Fiction

I'm lumping speculative fiction in with AUs here just because it's not really possible to write speculative fiction for Harry Potter anymore. Speculative fiction requires an unfinished and ongoing story, like TV shows and current book series. There was a time, of course, when the HP pages of fanfiction sites were rife with speculative fiction, stories that wrote about Harry and Ron and Hermione hunting for Horcruxes before Deathly Hallows was published, stories projecting who the trio and other students would end up with, stories that killed off Hagrid and McGonagall and Snape and Percy Weasley long before any final battle took place.

But with the conclusion of the series, speculative fiction has died away, replaced by Alternate Universe fiction, where fans pretend that certain events of the books didn't happen, or that the same characters exist, but in a different setting. These are the "What If" fanfictions. What if Hermione had been Sorted into Ravenclaw? What if Fred Weasley hadn't died? What if Harry and Hermione had gotten together? What if Harry Potter and his friends were Muggles who wanted to start a boy band? 

AUs give authors the freedom to ignore parts of the series they wish had happened differently, or to speculate on how the story might have turned out if someone had made a different choice. Some of these (what if Harry and Hermione got sucked into a time portal and went back in time to the Marauders era, and Lily fell for Harry instead of James and Harry had to get his parents back together!) are very silly. But some of these (What if Arthur Weasley had died in OotP? or What if Neville had been the Chosen One?) are fascinating. 

Missing Moments

Missing moment stories take scenes that we know happened but didn't get to see, and write them out for us. For example, Harry and Cho kissing in the Room of Requirement is a moment we don't get to see. Ron hanging out with an Obliviated Lockhart in the Chamber of Secrets is a scene we don't get to see. What Dumbledore wrote to Petunia and how Petunia responded to it is a scene we don't get to see (sorry, that one, I'm still a bit frustrated about. I WANT TO KNOW!). 

Whether because Harry's not present for it or there just wasn't time, there are plenty of events that we know happened but that we don't get shown over the course of the novels. And that's good, in many ways, because an author can't show us everything. But if you want to know how Hermione woke Ron up while Harry was off fighting Quirrell or how Krum asked Hermione to the Yule Ball, missing moments stories are the way to go.

Different Point of View (POV)

Different POVs are very similar to MMs, and there's definitely the potential for overlap. Basically, these provide the opportunity to see iconic scene from another character's perspective. What was going through Hermione's head when she kissed Ron? What was Remus's real reaction to seeing the Marauders' Map again? Was Dean truly that shocked when Harry kissed Ginny after the Quidditch match? 

Different POVs combine with MM stories when we start looking at scenes that we know happened, but that happened outside of the events shown in the book and don't even come close to involving Harry -- Charlie getting Ron's letter about the dragon, for instance, or what was happening at Hogwarts during Harry's seventh year, or what, if anything, went on between Luna and Dean the three weeks they spent alone at Shell Cottage. We know that these things happened, but they're often largely unimportant to the plot -- inquiring minds just often want to know.

Character Studies

Honestly, these are some of my favorite stories fanfiction has to offer. These are the pieces that don't necessarily have a story to tell; the aim is more just to get inside a character's head. I've written so many of these -- for Snape, for Petunia, for Peter, for Lavender, these characters who are so different from me, whose motivations I want to explore and understand. I've used this kind of story to try and express better than I could in essay form why Snape wasn't fully evil and wasn't a coward. I've used this kind of story to make Lavender Brown bearable instead of someone I wanted to constantly slap. I've used this kind of story to try and make more sympathetic characters who typically get brushed off. 

But these don't have to be done only of characters on the fringes -- I've seen some excellent ones written about Ron and Dumbledore and Ginny and Lily Potter. This is the kind of fanfiction that allows us to delve into a character's head and spin a narrative designed to understand him or her better.

PWP

I told you; I'm not going to try and pretend the smut doesn't exist. It does. It's referred to most often as PWP, which either stands for "Plot? What Plot?" or "Porn Without Plot" depending on how frank the author in question is choosing to be. And . . . yeah. It's exactly what it sounds like. Fiction written to provide the opportunity, canon or otherwise, for two characters to engage in swoodilypooping activities. And a lot of what you'll find might also cross the line into . . . 

Crack!fic

So, crack fic is fanfiction that is purposefully ridiculous. You want to pair Aragog with the Giant Squid and write about their tragic love affair? Crack. Want Harry to decide halfway though OotP that hey, you know what, Voldemort might be on to something? Crack. Want to see the teachers of Hogwarts lose a bet and have  to play Quidditch naked? Crack. There's really not that more to be said.

Prequels and Continuations

These are often the fanfics that come closest to being original fiction, depending on how far back or far forward the author choose to go. Basically, this category consists of any fanfiction that takes places outside the time frame of the series. It can be as soon after the events as finding out if Harry ever got that sandwich or as far in the future as watching Neville become Headmaster of Hogwarts in 70 years' time. As soon before as figuring out what Hagrid did with baby Harry during those missing 24 hours, or as far back as writing the tale of the Founding of Hogwarts.

What I've noticed is that the prequels, however, tend to focus mainly on the Marauders and/or the first Order of the Phoenix, while the continuations most often focus on the Next Generation, and because we know very little or nothing at all about these characters, fanfiction affords us as many different characterizations as there are authors, using the names and the world JKR gave us to create characters that are, essentially, original.

  Conclusion

  There are good and bad fanfics available in all of these categories, of course. And what I personally find fascinating is that, five years after the end of the series, the HP fanfic writing community is still going strong. There are fests and exchanges running constantly if you know where to look for them, and this is a huge part of the fandom, whether you know it's there or not.

[fu-harrypotter]

Week 13: Harry Potter Movies versus Harry Potter books

Now, we could not talk about the Harry Potter fandom and phenomenon without talking about the movies. However, opening this conversation puts us in some slightly sticky waters. Because I have tried very hard to be objective as I’ve posted lectures this term, but it is difficult for me to be objective about the Harry Potter movies. Now, let me be clear. I don’t hate them. For the most part, I even enjoy them. But I do personally feel that the movies suffered from too many directors, a poor screenwriter, and being made too soon. But I’ll get to that. The seven book Harry Potter series was made into eight full length movies over the course of ten years. The first movie came out in 2001, right around the time that Goblet of Fire was being published (and I type that and it doesn’t seem possible . . .) The movies had four different directors (1 and 2 - Chris Columbus; 3 - Alfonso Cuaron; 4 - Mike Newell; 5-8 - David Yates) and two different screen writers (1-4;6-8 - Steven Kloves; 5 - Michael Goldenburg). The movies star Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley, Emma Watson as Hermione Granger, Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy, Dame Maggie Smith as Minerva McGonagall, and Richard Harris/Michael Gambon as Dumbledore. The eight movies combined grossed 7.7 trillion dollars at box offices worldwide. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II alone grossed 1.3 trillion total. The main trio of the film are instantly and universally recognizable, and there’s really no way to argue that this wasn’t an incredibly successful film franchise. But were the movies good? And were they good adaptations of the novels? That’s a different question, and it’s one that has to be answered movie by movie, really. Personally, I think that the movies are, for the most part, pretty well done as movies. I enjoyed 1 and 2, 3 was okay, I really liked 5, 6 was great with one notable exception, and 7.1 and 7.2 were really good except for how the final battle was handled. Most of these movies, I am happy to watch and rewatch.

But as I stated before, they do suffer from constantly changing directors and poor screenwriting, but they suffer most from the fact that they started being made when the series was only half out. My personal unpopular opinion is that, even though it would have meant sacrificing brilliant performances from the child actors who took on these roles, the movies should have waited until the entire series had been published. You can’t foreshadow what you don’t know is going to happen. We talked for weeks about the brilliantly constructed narrative JKR gave us in her series. She pioneered the writing technique of taking seemingly unimportant details from earlier books and making them incredibly important later down the road. I mean, they almost left Kreacher out of the fifth movie because he just didn’t seem like that pivotal a character. JKR had to step in and tell them to keep him in. Alan Rickman was told of Snape’s motivation so he could act it convincingly throughout, and he often had to tell directors that he wasn’t following their direction because it didn’t fit with Snape’s motivation, unrevealed until Deathly Hallows was published. Much as I might enjoy the movies on an individual level, they do not function as a movie series, telling one continuous story. They’re just eight adaptations of individual books. The throughline of the stories isn’t there – how can it be when you don’t know what will end up connecting? And sometimes (*coughGobletofFirecough*), the screenwriting got so focused on hitting the major scenes in a book that the movie even managed to not have an individual throughline. The Harry Potter movies are fine. I watch them, I enjoy them (except Goblet of Fire; I can’t stand that movie), but they do not tell the Harry Potter story that I love. I think they should have waited for all seven books and then found a director and a creative team that was asked, like the actors, to commit to the entirety of the series I am not an adaptation purist. I do not think movie adaptations of books have to be exactly like the books; in fact, I don’t think they should try, and some of my favorite scenes have been scenes written specifically for the movies. My problem with the HP movies lies not in the ways they were unfaithful to the individual novels. My problem lies with the fact that they started telling a story before they knew the ending, and the result of that is a collection of movies that have the same characters but don’t take place in the same universe or tell the same story. This is only my opinion; you are free and encouraged to have your own. And that’s our discussion for this week: What did you think of the HP movies, as movies, as a series, and as an adaptation of the books? What would you have done differently? What would you have kept the same?

[fu-harrypotter]

Week 12 Assignments

Reader (3 points): How involved are you in the Harry Potter fandom? What aspects touched on in today's lecture have you been a part of, and what has been your experience with them? Are there any aspects of fandom you're involved in that were not listed? What fandom aspect are you interested in learning more about?

Enthusiast (4 points): Find one of the fandom aspects discussed in today's lecture that you were not previously familiar with, and do some research. For Wizard Rock, listen to some bands and find a favorite or favorite few songs. For the HPA, find a project they've undertaken that you might be interested in helping with. For AVPM, watch the musical or part of it (be warned -- it's about 2.5 hours long in its entirety) and write down your thoughts.

Scholar (5 points): Find an aspect of fandom NOT discussed in today's lecture, and participate in it in some way, then write a summary of your experience, how you discovered the fandom aspect, and what you thought of it.

Assignments are due Saturday; you may complete any or all that you choose.

[fu-harrypotter]

Week 12 Discussion

Read the lecture, and answer the following question:

In your opinion, what is it about the Harry Potter series that made it such a phenomenon? What inspired the fandom and caused it to grow in the way that it did?

Discussion responses are due by Saturday and are worth 2 points.

[fu-harrypotter]

Week 12 Lecture: The Harry Potter Fandom

So we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the Harry Potter series, but now it’s time to delve into what has made the perception and existence of the Harry Potter series what it is – the Harry Potter fandom. There are days when I look at this existence of this fandom, this worldwide cultural phenomenon, and I have no idea how it happened. I mean, book series have been popular in the past – Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Roald Dahl’s books – but Harry Potter was different. Harry Potter exploded overnight, on a global scale. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in England in 1997, and you all probably know the story that goes along with that: Nobody wanted it. I mean, nobody wanted to touch it. A supposed children’s book about wizards and witches at a secret school in Scotland, that was several thousand words too long to really be considered a children’s book? There was no audience for that kind of book. It was a huge risk, and no one wanted to take it. If you ever find yourself having regrets, just think of all those publishers who passed up Harry Potter. I bet yours won’t seem quite so crushing after that. And to be fair, the series didn’t take off overnight. It took four years and another three books to become an international phenomenon. And it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why Harry Potter took off the way that it did, though in my opinion, it had a lot to do with the length of the series and how long a wait there was between each book. Kids today are spoiled, with their series releasing a new book each year like clockwork. Remember reading HP as it came out? Not having any idea how long you’d have to wait for the next book to come out? Three years between four and five, two years between five and six, two between six and seven? Actually, honestly, do you remember that? Because I grew up with Harry Potter, but I’m uncertain the average age of those of you reading? Were you a first generation Potter child, or was the series before your time? I experienced the desperation of needing the next book to come out, thirsting for a title or a release date or anything to just keep me going. Those waits built up the hype for the series, so I think they definitely contributed to the HP success, but international acclaim and obsession isn’t just built on time lapse alone. But whatever the reason, Harry Potter took off like a rocket, and now, even five years after the publication of the last book, this fandom is thriving. Do you fully understand everything that Harry Potter has spawned? We have eight movies, a trilogy of musicals, an interactive website, an entire genre of music, a theme park. So let’s talk about this fandom. The movies, Pottermore, and fanfiction will get their own weeks, so I’d like to focus on some aspects of the fandom you may or may not be familiar with. Wizard Rock Once upon a time, there were two brothers who liked to write music and both liked Harry Potter, so they decided to write songs about the Harry Potter series as if they were two different incarnations of Harry Potter. They called themselves Harry and the Potters, and they were the first wizard rock band. Two friends of theirs decided to parody their band and created Draco and the Malfoys. That was 2002. More than a decade later, there are I don’t even know how many Wrock bands out there, hundreds, most likely. They span all musical genres and all HP characters. Justin Finch-Fletchly and Moaning Myrtle and Crookshanks all have wizard rock bands named after them, so it’s probably safe to say that any character you can imagine is the namesake for a band somewhere. Wizard Rock bands write songs about Harry Potter – the series, the characters, the phenomenons. You can go to wizard rock concerts (I’ve been) and follow wrock bands on twitter and buy their music on iTunes. Last I heard, there was a documentary being compiled about this phenomenon. It’s huge, even if you’ve never heard of it. I’m going to link to the official wizard rock website, and to several of my personal favorite bands for your edification.

The Ministry of Magic

The Butterbeer Experience

Riddle TM

Neville's Diary

Harry Potter Alliance Did you know that Harry Potter has spawned its own charity organization, and that it’s huge? Well, it has. It’s called the Harry Potter Alliance, and it’s run by such big names as Melissa Anelli (she runs the-leaky-cauldron.org), Paul DeGeorge (one of the Harry and the Potters), and Matt Maggiacomo (another big Wizard Rock name). Okay, so maybe they’re only big names if you’re immersed in the fandom, but Evanna Lynch, better known as Luna Lovegood, is also heavily involved, and serves as Head of Ravenclaw House for the group. John Green, another name that might be familiar, is currently listed as Head of Hufflepuff. The HPA is huge, in other words, and has done a hell of a lot. They raised over $123,000 for disaster relief in Haiti. They’ve collected and donated over 87,000 books to impoverished countries around the world. They collected over 50,000 signatures on a petition to get Warner Brothers to release information on whether Harry Potter chocolate comes from fair trade sources. And that barely scratches the surface. The Harry Potter series has inspired a charity that is all about doing good in the world, in line with the message of the series itself. And that’s pretty amazing. A Very Potter Musical and sequels So, fan creation is such a huge part of the Harry Potter fandom. This includes fanfiction, which will get its own week; wizard rock, discussed above; fanart, which is plentiful and very often utterly amazing; HP inspired crafts and jewelry and costumes and T-shirts available all over the internet; and then we have A Very Potter Musical. It started off as a student project at a university in Michigan. A bunch of friends got together and decided to write a Harry Potter parody musical and perform it. It ran one weekend, and that was supposed to be the end of it, except it was filmed and put on YouTube for the cast and crew, and it went viral. I’m talking huge. I’m talking, you know Darren Criss, who plays Blaine on Glee? This project was his brainchild, he wrote the music, played Harry, gathered a fanbase, and that’s basically how he got launched into TV fame. A Very Potter Musical and its sequels, A Very Potter Sequel and A Very Potter Senior Year are all mashups of the various events of the seven books, but they’re very successful as parodies largely because you can tell the love that the creators have for the source material.

-- And that’s what all of this boils down to, really. Whether you read and obsess over the books or write songs or fanfiction, draw art, create musicals, use HP as a means to decrease worldsuck, Harry Potter has become the phenomenon it is largely because of the fandom and the love that the readers have for the series. There are a lot more aspects of the fandom than what I’ve listed here – it is as varied and diverse as the members who make it up. But the Harry Potter experience is so much more than just reading the books. That’s fine, too, of course, if that’s all you’re interested in doing. But for those of us interested in delving deeper, immersing ourselves more fully into this world, there is plenty of room to do that.

[fu-harrypotter]

A Welcome and a Homework Assignment!

First of all, we've gotten a wave of new followers recently, to whom I say hello! I'm glad you've found your way here to us! We're a tumblr course through Fandom University, so each week, I post a lecture and assignments, which you are welcome to complete for points. This is not required, but the more assignments you do, the higher your point total, and the more intricate your reward from me will be at the end of the semester (things like personalized fanfic, handmade HP charms, earrings, and cross-stitch art, to whet your appetite).

Assignments can be turned in late, at any point in the semester. Or, if you'd like to just lurk and read, that's fine, too! It's very low-key around here.

So! Onto our Week 10 assignments!

Reader (3 points): What is your favorite class offered at Hogwarts? Which class interests you the most, and which do you think you would excel at or do poorly in?

Enthusiast (4 points): If you were a wizard, what would be your chosen career and why? Don't limit yourself merely to the careers we see outlined in the book; use your imagination and fit yourself into this world! What would you do with your life, why would that job fit you, and would you choose a similar career to what you are doing/want to do in the Muggle world?

Scholar (5 points): Consider magic and how it works in the world of Harry Potter. Write an in-depth theory on what makes a powerful wizard and why. Consider what we see of silent spell-casting, non-incantation magic, connection to emotion, etc.

Assignments are due Saturday. You may complete any and all that you choose.

[fu-harrypotter]

Week 10 Lecture