Apparently, I’m into Harry Potter (and Draco Malfoy) now

I’m months late, announcing this shocking new development. It started quite a while ago, perhaps as early as in March, though I only realized the extent of the obsession in May. A bit of a strange story, the whole thing, and I’m about to tell it in all the juicy detail.

With all my previous fandoms, the route was: 1) watch or play or read; 2) daydream; 3) write; 4) reluctantly engage with the community, mostly with the goal to advertise my creations. With Harry Potter, it was all backwards. First, I started reading fanfiction, then daydreaming, and watching, reading and playing came almost as an afterthought.

I’ve seen the movies before all this. Multiple times, in fact! I enjoyed them, but they never stirred that inscrutable craving for more. The Harry Potter fandom always seemed slightly ridiculous to me: it’s kids stuff, and I didn’t understand how a mature person could possibly become attached to it.

And there’s also the sad fact, which I’m a little ashamed of, that I was never really much of a fanfiction reader, although I’ve been a fanfiction writer for more than a decade. So, how in the world did I manage to develop a hyperfixation with Harry Potter by reading fanfiction?

The answer is two-pronged.

One part of it is related to the Rec Center (a weekly newsletter with fandom articles, fanart and fanfiction recs), which I learned about by listening to Fansplaining (a podcast by, for and about fandom). I was receiving the Rec Center emails for several months before I found the first rec for a fic in a fandom I was familiar with enough to try and read anything. Funnily enough, that fandom was Good Omens, and the fic was muddle through somehow by curtaincall. While it didn’t exactly blow my mind (because I have no intrinsic interest in Good Omens), I was so impressed with the craftsmanship that I redoubled my efforts to find more fics I could read among the recs.

The next one I found was Let the River Run by astolat, a Game of Thrones fic that did blow my mind by being, easily, several tiers better than the official books (which I started reading and dropped due to being bored). For the first time in my limited experience, I was reading fic so good I could learn from it; fic way better than anything I could produce myself.

I know this sounds arrogant, but it’s the result of experiences that ranged from bad to mediocre in fandoms I entered by my “usual” route, which is to say, preloaded with my own, highly developed headcanons, and a sense of ownership of the characters of interest that prevented me from exploring other people’s takes: they were different, and therefore “wrong”. And while I knew on a rational level that the characters of interest do not by any means belong to me, that other interpretations and headcanons are just as valid as mine, and last but not least, that I couldn’t possibly be the only competent writer among the millions out there, these misconceptions and circumstances put me in a place where I simply couldn’t enjoy most of the fic in any of my previous fandoms.

The two awe-inspiring stories above opened my eyes to just how wrong I was, especially in believing that fic is generally not worth my time the way traditionally published literature is. I wanted more, but I could still only find anything feasible in the Rec Center once in a few months.

We come to the second prong of my two-pronged answer. This is when I remembered betts, an author, writing coach, and editor of OFIC (the indie publisher to whom I sent my novel, Under Her Wings) who I’ve been following on Tumblr for years with great interest and respect—and that she mentioned writing fanfiction of her own. It’s incredible, in hindsight, that I never thought of this before. I looked betts up on AO3, and found, to some initial dismay, that she only wrote a single fic in a fandom that I’m even remotely familiar with—none other than Harry Potter. The fic was Albus Potter and the Elixir of Erised, and it swept me off my feet. Which, in this case, came as no surprise, as I already knew what I could expect from betts.

Further encouraged by this awesome experience, I started thinking: Harry Potter is a huge and ancient fandom, which might be brimming with works as good as this. But how do I discover the good ones?

It was then I had the eureka moment. I started looking through betts’s bookmarks. And there I found my first Harry/Draco fic: Then Comes a Mist and a Weeping Rain by Faith Wood.

This fic changed my life. It’s so good. Although at this point I harbored no feelings for Harry/Draco and Harry Potter stuff in general, I was compelled to start reading everything Faith Wood has written for this fandom, and their other stories were mostly just as good. Several titles in, I realized I was getting hooked. When I checked the date on the last thing Faith Wood had posted, I was sad to see it was in 2014. Already fearful of a future without a reliable source of excellent Harry/Draco fic, I cleverly checked out Faith Wood’s bookmarks, and found Right Hand Red by lq_traintracks, the first Harry/Draco fic that gave me serious and lasting feels.

I’m not going to list all the excellent fics I have read since; I have been keeping a tally on Tumblr. But there’s one I have to mention: Beholden, also by Faith Wood, who came back to writing for this fandom after ten years, just when I entered it. I know, right? It’s a conspiracy-theory-tier coincidence and undoubtedly a portent of good fortune.

So that’s how I got into Harry Potter (and Draco Malfoy). More into Draco, really. He holds the same sort of alure Nihlus did, only he’s blessed with so much more material. Now that I’m reading the books (just started the fourth), it’s easy to see why Harry/Draco is the most popular enemies-to-lovers ship on AO3. In the efforts to make their animosity pop, J. K. Rowling inadvertently created a situation where they are both investing wildly disproportional amounts of emotional energy into one another. And, boy, am I glad! Lol.

Other than reading the books, I treated myself to the movies yet again, as well as the Fantastic Beasts series. I’m yet to decide whether I’ll read and/or find a way to see The Cursed Child, because I’m of the EWE (epilogue? what epilogue?) persuasion. The massive heteronormativity of the epilogue, as well as Rowling’s tarnished reputation with regards to respecting gender identities constantly hover at the edges of my daydreams, making me all the more motivated to write gay fanfiction with a gender-queer Draco.

And in fact, I already started! Last week, I posted my first fic for this fandom—Bruised—and it’s about an 11-year-old, pre-Hogwarts Draco trying on his mother’s clothes.

I have several more stories in various stages of completion and I’m writing more. My head is fairly buzzing with ideas. As a by-product of taking an unusual route into this fandom, I’m as yet unattached to any headcanons or specific interpretations of the characters. Most everything I read, if well-written and persuasive enough, sounds equally “right” to me and holds equal promise. And so, for the first time in my fandom career, I find myself in the delightful situation where I’m perfectly able to develop mutually exclusive and generally incompatible ideas for my own writing, instead of sticking to a single, monolithic verse. I’m writing things that are canon-compliant, and things in the Harry-is-a-Slytherin AU, things EWE and things where parts of the epilogue did happen, things set in the Hogwarts era and things set in the 8th year, and almost none of it fits with any of the rest. And it’s so much fun? I never knew that having no verse could be so liberating.

I’m also making fanart. The piece featured at the top of this post is my best portraiture work so far and I’m shamelessly proud of it. I have another portrait of Draco, done with the pencil, that I like so much I keep it on my shelf and stare at lovingly every day:

I finished a more complex piece, with figures and clothes and backgrounds and all, earlier today, and I can’t wait to post it, just like I can’t wait to share my stories.

The little I’ve seen of this fandom so far is worlds away from the BG3 fandom and the complaints I had about it. There are many accounts that share and recommend fanfiction, yearly fests like H/D Erised and H/D Wireless, and numerous people ready to engage. But also—and this is maybe one of the greatest attractions—there are plenty of people from my generation. Although I’ve barely done anything yet, I already feel much more seen than I ever did with BG3 (not to mention Darksiders). The vibes I’m getting are similar to my early days with Mass Effect and it’s such a breath of fresh air.

I don’t plan to abandon BG3 and my Golden Boy. In fact, I have a new story that’s almost ready to post, and I plan to polish and post any others that are reasonably complete. But HP takes precedence now, and with the constantly growing list of WIPs and recommended fics on my reading list, I hope it’ll be a long, long time before I’ll tire of it.

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