InsaneJournal

Current mood:	curious
Entry tags:	meta, rambling writer, updates:general

HP as my genre

It is likely inadvisable to try and attempt to take a crack at this subject this early in the morning, especially when I don’t have quite enough time to expand on it. Then again, it might force me to just hammer something down without wibbling and or taking side trips.

In a nutshell, the Harry Potter fic fandom is to me as the sci-fi/fantasy genre is to me. I’ll read pretty much anything, so long as it isn’t along trope lines I dislike. I like some areas of it less than the others, just like with SF&F. Military/hard SF doesn’t usually catch hold of me from the first page and keep going, just like, say, it may take scrolling down a couple times for me to get into a typical Harry/Draco or Harry/Ginny story. And I’ll never get over my craving for fantasies with fairly complex political skullduggery (random plug: HELLO Holly Lisle! And Daniel Abraham. And Joshua Palmatier. And— okay, stopping there), just as I’ll never stop wanting HP fic that is substantially AU.

I don’t leave the HP fandom for the same reason I would never abandon SF&F. There’s a shared set of assumptions at work, and whether the list of them is tiny and some of the points are occasionally ignored, I am pretty much guaranteed to take a look at a good story written with those assumptions in mind.

And that is why I will never pin down a part or section of HP fandom and make my home there, even if I hang out in a specific region for a while. It would be like only ever reading sword and sorcery books for the rest of my life. And jesus christ, I can’t do that. I’d miss all kinds of good stuff.

NOTE: Above realization came about as a result of maddened thinking over the years as a HP fan. Dunno if this metaphor fits, but good god, it’s the first one that makes sense.

So. coughs What’s your genre in HP? Is it the entire fic space in the fandom, or a good chunk of it, or the canon-hugging camp, or the slash camp? I have an idea of how it feels like for other fans sometimes, but I really don’t know.