HONS: | The Unstoppable Bra

Fanfiction on Harry Potter, specifically, has grown into its own subculture, with websites that come up with data on Harry Potter through scientific knowledge and educational guesses based purely on a world created by one person. That is the power of Fanfiction, to influence lives and to build on worlds that fans love so much they cannot help, but write more about it.

The above quote is from an article my friend, Calvin Li, wrote called, What is Fanfiction and How Harry Potter Became its Champion, it beautifully summarizes how fans continue to show their adoration for certain books. There has been a vast number of FanFictions written just solely for the Harry Potter series. As of today the count for Harry Potter FanFiction on FanFiction.net is 614,784 FanFictions, which is by far the highest amount of FanFiction written for any genre on that website.

Fandom provides a platform where many authors, artists, and video producers are able to unleash their creativity and fantasies while still remaining anonymous. The anonymous atmosphere allows for authors to write or create a lot of different pairings and not be judged by cultural hegemony [societal norms]. Sometimes authors get heavily criticized or “flamed” for many reasons including posting up stories that deviates from the “norms” of society. Therefore, anonymity tends to give creators the comfort to create whatever they wished, be it a story of how Harry should have ended up with Hermione or Harry and Draco falling in love during their Hogwarts years.

[Here is the space where I explode into a monologue about how big of a Harry Potter fan I am…]

Pairing monikers for the different Harry Potter pairings are also widely used when searching for content on search engines (i.e. Google) or YouTube for fan created art or videos. Harry Potter monikers include: “Harmony” refers to Harry and Hermione, “Dramione” is Draco and Hermione, “Drarry” refers to Harry and Draco, and “Drapple” for Draco and Apple (no joke).

Proof that Drapple Exists!
[Taken from Instagram Festival Cultural Zacatecas 2012]

My fellow blogger, Sarah Hatoum, raises an interesting point when she talks about how slash is part of “romantopia” in her blog post, Subverting the Media: Slash FanFiction & Women. However, it truly depends on what sort of slash is being written as the slash written for FanFiction can fall under both categories: “pornotopia” or “romantopia.” Any type of pairing can be sorted into either one of the categories as it all depends on how the author writes the FanFiction and how the reader interprets the story.

For example, my deep seated belief that Harry and Hermione should have ended up together at the end. The hero always gets the girl right? Apparently not. However through Harmony FanFictions, Harry and Hermione will live those “happily ever afters” that we all imagined.