Harry Potter: Fan Fiction Reaction

Harry Potter: Fan Fiction Reaction

"Harry has one girlfriend and two boyfriends. The boyfriends surprise him. The first is Paul, a friend of Bill and Fleur's. They meet at Louis's christening, play against each other as Seekers in the pick-up Quidditch match that follows at the Burrow, and leave together in the evening to find a quiet pub" (6).

As can be seen in the introduction of a 'gay' element to this Harry Potter story, fan fiction is often a surprising genre. On one hand, it is cannibalistic and parasitic. By its very nature it relies upon the creative intelligence and output of someone else to be realized. It would not exist without the original source. It could be regarded as merely derivative as a result, much like a Star Wars or Harry Potter action figure. However, unlike these commercially-marketed devices, it is still the original creation of a reader. It is evidence of a dynamic and creative response to a work of literature, not a manufactured experience. This can be seen in the work of Harry Potter fan fiction entitled "Scars." The work fills in the years between Harry's adolescence and adulthood, illustrating what Harry is thinking and doing year after year in a brief format. It aspires to 'fill in the gaps' between the end of the final novel in the series and the final summing-up of what happened to all of the characters. Eventually, the fan fiction circumvents J.K. Rowling's summing up and takes them on another life path entirely. Harry does not marry Ginny Weasley and have a child and Severus Snape survives his snakebite.

Like much of fan fiction, "Scars" begins relatively true to the original story's characters, before it takes its detours. It is a Potter story because it uses the setting of Hogwarts, uses all of the major characters, and features wizardry in a relatively matter-of-fact manner. However, it also exhibits notable deviations from the Potter format. The first and most important one is the introduction of a bisexual element to Harry's desire. The idea of gay relationships in a boarding school setting is not unusual, of course, but it is not present at all in the J.K. Rowling books, where Harry is exclusively heterosexual and all of his crushes are girls. The end of the story involves a relationship developing between Harry and Severus Snape, one of the series' most ambiguous characters.

But perhaps the most dramatic deviation between the fan fiction and the actual Potter books is the seriousness and lack of humor in the fan fiction. The Harry Potter novels were notable for their magic candy, broomsticks, spells and other forms of levity that lightened some of the serious issues pertaining to death, curses, prophesy, and an emerging adult awareness of the characters. Rowling often used a very ironic tone in the dialogue and in her authorial voice. This Potter fan fiction has a modernist, almost Hemingway-like style as it quickly moves from year to year in somber, spare sentences, talking about Harry's grief regarding his circumstances and the death which magic has caused. Harry is clearly finding himself as a person, and the focus of the fan fiction is more internal than external.

It is difficult to imagine Rowling's books having had such a hold upon the imagination of children if they had taken the same kind of authorial style as "Scars." This, however, is also the nature of fan fiction. The author focuses upon the particular dynamics of the work of literature that resonated with him or her, distills them, and then brings them to the forefront of the fan's own printed work. What interested this particular author was the fact that Harry labored under a curse and struggled so mightily as an orphan to craft out his identity (hence the focus on Harry's sexuality and guilt about the events which transpired because of his special status as a wizard). There is less of the quaint British boarding school drama in the actual work that captivated so many children.