Harry Potter Fandom - Fan Fiction

Fan Fiction

Rowling has backed fan fiction stories on the Internet, stories written by fans that involve Harry Potter or other characters in the books. A March 2007 study showed that "Harry Potter" is the most searched-for fan fiction subject online. Some fans will use canon established in the books to write stories of past and future events in the Harry Potter world; others write stories that have little relation to the books other than the characters' names and the settings in which the fan fiction takes place. On FanFiction.Net, there are over 593,200 stories on Harry Potter as of May 2012. There are numerous websites devoted solely to Harry Potter fan fiction. Of these, FictionAlley.org has grown to be one of the largest: it hosts over 80,000 stories and 20,000 works of fan art,.

Whilst HarryPotterFanFiction.com is the most popular, best and widely used dedicated Harry Potter fan fiction site (based on traffic rankings). The website has a popular forum and is a sister site to 'HarryPotterPodcasts'.

Another Harry Potter fanfiction site is fanfiction on mugglenet.com, in which every story is evaluated by moderators before posting, bringing the stories archived to a higher quality. A well-known work of fan fiction is The Shoebox Project, created by two LiveJournal users. Over 8500 people subscribe to the story so that they are alerted when new posts update the story. The authors' works, including this project, were featured in an article in The Wall Street Journal discussing the growth in popularity of fandoms.

The current most reviewed piece of fanfiction, with over 17,000 reviews, is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky writing under the pseudonym of Less Wrong.

In 2006, the "popular 'bad' fanfic" My Immortal was posted on FanFiction.Net by user "Tara Gilesbie". It was deleted by the site's administrators in 2008, but not before amassing over eight thousand negative reviews. It spawned a number of YouTube spoofs and a number of imitators created "sequels" claiming to be the original Tara.

In 2007, a web-based novel, James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing, was written by a computer animator named George Lippert. The book was written as a supplement to fill the void after Deathly Hallows, and received quite a bit of media attention, much more than Harry Potter fan fiction usually receives.

Rowling has said, "I find it very flattering that people love the characters that much." She has adopted a positive position on fan fiction, unlike authors such as Anne McCaffrey or Anne Rice who discourage fans from writing about their books and have asked sites like FanFiction.Net to remove all stories of their works, requests honored by the site. However, Rowling has been "alarmed by pornographic or sexually explicit material clearly not meant for kids," according to Neil Blair, an attorney for her publisher. The attorneys have sent cease and desist letters to sites that host adult material.

Potter fan fiction also has a large following in the slash fiction genre, stories which feature sexual relationships that do not exist in the books (shipping), often portraying homosexual pairings. Famous pairings include Harry with Draco Malfoy or Cedric Diggory, and Remus Lupin with Sirius Black. Harry Potter slash has eroded some of the antipathy towards underage sexuality in the wider slash fandom.

In the fall of 2006, Jason Isaacs, who plays Lucius Malfoy in the Potter films, said that he had read fan fiction about his character and gets "a huge kick out of the more far-out stuff."