Full disclosure: I was very close friends with Cassie at the time—more real life friends than fandom friends, as we live in the same city—but for mysterious reasons (I think mostly having to do with my being neither hugely popular nor particularly wanky) my name (Clio) was never connected to most of the wank. (I was also very close personal friends with msscribe.) But yes, things got very crazy up in there, and stayed crazy for a while. Though I don't think it was all of that, that really lead to the feral fandom claims.
Wow! So the two of us have had almost polar opposite experiences with HP wank of that era--I wasn't in fandom, so I'm stuck reading reports, and you were right up close to it all. Did you get hit with a "May you live in interesting times" curse? o.O
Anyway, yeah, I think those were the years that convinced everyone that all of HP fandom was a huge wankfest (and what do you expect, with a Tower named for Gryffindor involved? /obligatory Gryff dig) which is ridiculous, because it's too damn huge to be homogeneous in any way.
Interesting that you were in Snape fandom, as I think that was the fandom that was the most interconnected to traditional SF-F fandom, while the rest of fandom (especially the H/D slashers, etc) were coming more out of anime fandom, or were in their first fandom. Snape fandom always seemed very separate from the rest of what was going on.
I don't know about fandom overlap particularly, but yeah, Snape fandom was rather separated from everything else. Mostly because the average person reading the Harry Potter series tended to get the message of "Slytherins: ugly and evil, except for Draco, who is pretty and evil; Snape is an especially ugly git who may still uncomprehensibly be working for good; yay Marauders and Fred and George, isn't Sirius Black hawt?!" Which, um, was a radically different reading from the ones we had, which tended to go more "Dumbledore is a git who oppresses the Slytherins and lets them get bullied TO DEATH, no wonder they all turn out to hate everyone else, it's a survival mechanism to keep them from getting killed by the Weasley twins or Potter; even the best of the Marauders is a coward and an enabler; isn't Severus Snape conflicted and interesting?!"
It was always a shock reading discussions in other fora on topics like "Was Severus Snape born wicked, or was he raised that way?" (answer: he was born wicked, and grew worse) and "Snape's Worst Memory: did he totally have it coming and just got put in his place, or were the Marauders just having a bit of harmless fun?" I'd be sputtering things like "but--it was sexual assault" and "Rowling didn't even show the whole scene, if she thinks it's bad enough to fade-to-black it's awful!" The fact that Rowling thought attraction to Draco was "bad boy syndrome" when the worst things he did paled in comparison to the Trio's worst things, and she herself has this huge crush on Sirius Black--!
*cough* Anyway, yeah, separate, largely incompatible in mindset. I can still type out my favorite authors on LJ in a flash, get to Snapecast or the Snapedom (in hindsight, a bit more iffy of a name than I realized) comm pretty quickly, but I will stare at you blankly if you ask for pretty much any other kind of HP fanfiction but one that recognizes that Slytherin isn't all that bad. Or stories without Snape in them. Umm...Lust Over Pendle? Copperbadge's HP fic? Maya had a bunch of H/D and Hufflepuff fic? I could find some crossovers I liked....
Advantage of huge fandom: insularity within subfandoms.
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Wow! So the two of us have had almost polar opposite experiences with HP wank of that era--I wasn't in fandom, so I'm stuck reading reports, and you were right up close to it all. Did you get hit with a "May you live in interesting times" curse? o.O
Anyway, yeah, I think those were the years that convinced everyone that all of HP fandom was a huge wankfest (and what do you expect, with a Tower named for Gryffindor involved? /obligatory Gryff dig) which is ridiculous, because it's too damn huge to be homogeneous in any way.
Interesting that you were in Snape fandom, as I think that was the fandom that was the most interconnected to traditional SF-F fandom, while the rest of fandom (especially the H/D slashers, etc) were coming more out of anime fandom, or were in their first fandom. Snape fandom always seemed very separate from the rest of what was going on.
I don't know about fandom overlap particularly, but yeah, Snape fandom was rather separated from everything else. Mostly because the average person reading the Harry Potter series tended to get the message of "Slytherins: ugly and evil, except for Draco, who is pretty and evil; Snape is an especially ugly git who may still uncomprehensibly be working for good; yay Marauders and Fred and George, isn't Sirius Black hawt?!" Which, um, was a radically different reading from the ones we had, which tended to go more "Dumbledore is a git who oppresses the Slytherins and lets them get bullied TO DEATH, no wonder they all turn out to hate everyone else, it's a survival mechanism to keep them from getting killed by the Weasley twins or Potter; even the best of the Marauders is a coward and an enabler; isn't Severus Snape conflicted and interesting?!"
It was always a shock reading discussions in other fora on topics like "Was Severus Snape born wicked, or was he raised that way?" (answer: he was born wicked, and grew worse) and "Snape's Worst Memory: did he totally have it coming and just got put in his place, or were the Marauders just having a bit of harmless fun?" I'd be sputtering things like "but--it was sexual assault" and "Rowling didn't even show the whole scene, if she thinks it's bad enough to fade-to-black it's awful!" The fact that Rowling thought attraction to Draco was "bad boy syndrome" when the worst things he did paled in comparison to the Trio's worst things, and she herself has this huge crush on Sirius Black--!
*cough* Anyway, yeah, separate, largely incompatible in mindset. I can still type out my favorite authors on LJ in a flash, get to Snapecast or the Snapedom (in hindsight, a bit more iffy of a name than I realized) comm pretty quickly, but I will stare at you blankly if you ask for pretty much any other kind of HP fanfiction but one that recognizes that Slytherin isn't all that bad. Or stories without Snape in them. Umm...Lust Over Pendle? Copperbadge's HP fic? Maya had a bunch of H/D and Hufflepuff fic? I could find some crossovers I liked....
Advantage of huge fandom: insularity within subfandoms.