[	Tags	|	meta, rambling writer, updates:general	]
[	Current Mood	|	curious	]

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.

[	Tags	|	meta, policy, updates:general	]
[	Current Mood	|	accomplished	]

The title of this post is basically the law of my life, just now. It’s taken a while for me to realise it (no surprise there), but there it is. My best decisions are ones that I make over and over and over again, after hours of thought. I prod and adjust and flounce away and flounce back and think things over until I’m sick of them. Then I make a decision, and keep on prodding at it to see if it holds up.

My decision to write fanfiction has held up for the last two or three years. It still holds.

My decision to build a personal archive has held up for the last year or eight :D. It still holds (and, if you’re not put off by works in progress, you can take a peep here to see how it’s holding).

My decision to write in the A Surreal Tale universe— for it is a universe now— has held up for the last two years. It still holds.

You’ve heard about those decisions a lot over the last year, if you’ve followed me on LJ or kept track of my changing profile at FF.net. One decision you haven’t heard much about, though, is my decision to be in HP fandom.

( You see, I thought I didn't have to make that decision. )

So, my decision to be part of HP fandom has held up since I picked up the first book, and got lost. It’s been closely questioned, ignored, avoided, prodded with sharp sticks, and slowly backed away from. It still holds.

And writing the AST universe as part of the larger HP universe…it’s consciously rearing up its head for the first time. It’s an old, half-made decision. But I hope it holds.

As always, this entry is all about how I make sense of things. I don’t doubt that other ways of participating in fandom exist, and agree that there’s more than fifty ways of measuring when you become a fan of something. But I’ll always think the way that matters most for measuring yourself is the one that you use. A broad standard that makes sense for everyone else may not makes sense for you, so.

Has anyone else just not noticed this? Or perhaps it just passed me by when someone did notice it, for whatever reason. I’m crossposting this (LJ) so everyone I flist with sees it, so pardon me if you see this twice, but please:

WHY IS THERE WIZARD RADIO IN HP???

I am guessing it is there for plot reasons— so Molly could listen to it in CS. Because it sure as hell doesn’t fit into the HP world in a way that makes initial sense.

For instance, where is the broadcasting tower? I know little about radio, but I know that there has to be one. How do they know how to make a broadcasting tower, if there is one? Have they just co-opted a Muggle one? Because that would go against the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts law, right? And besides, how would any of them know how to operate it, anyway??

Second, if the tower issue can be smoothed over in a way that makes sense, riddle me this: how would people participate? Because, last time I checked, wizards didn’t know how to use Muggle telephones. Which are the one thing you can use to, hmm, call in to the show? This was what actually tripped me up initially; I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking about, but I suddenly realised that, duh, they can’t have a wizarding radio show, because how would people call in? Would they Floo in? Wouldn’t that just be an easy way to get kidnapped or piss someone off if you went to the wrong grate? Now, that actually does sound like it might be a solution to this part of the problem— I can just see people not wanting to live with Floo connections close to that sporadic bunch that belongs to a radio station. Imagine the huge amount of ‘wrong grate, mate’s you’d have to say XD.

And of course that gets me thinking about the fact that you mightn’t have the Floo network in the US— how hard would it be to control whose fireplace is hooked up and whose isn’t in such a big country? Would American wizards want to have their travel monitored in that way? My gut reaction (post American History class this semester— you’ve no idea how much it’s starting to come in handy when I’m writing) is no. And that by the time a majority of the wizards decided it might be a good idea, it would be too late and too expensive for the magical government to handle. So broom travel prevails, and wizarding radio is huge in America because wizards grudgingly use the muggle phone (which works incredibly well even with magical interference) and muggle communication technology, because bar apparation, portkeys, brooms and carpets (America draws them because the govt didn’t see the point of outlawing carpets especially if they were properly disguised per regulation— carpet racing and licensing brings in enough revenue that it makes no sense to just put a stop to it), American wizards have been stuck with using mostly muggle technology for communication and travel in some respects because the main forms of magical communication don’t scale as well as their muggle counterparts. So though an average wizard there would take a little longer to come in contact with most muggle technology, pretty much everyone there uses and follows it once the government has tested it and declared it safe for magical use.

So wizard radio is not hugely different from muggle radio in the US— you just have to have a special set to receive the signal. And you can call in using a telephone. So wizard radio afficionados in the UK are up on muggle technology— the American equipment isn’t illegal to import or use, by now— and constantly bewail the fact that their fave producers and shows are mostly US-made, and that most talent in the UK flows in that direction. And maybe this flow bleeds into the broom market— can you imagine how successful broommaking technology in the US would be? Because though it serves a market about as small as the one in the UK, that market is composed of very different people. Rich sports stars and sports teams get bleeding-edge type innovation, and others who use a broom because they really have to (live in impassable terrain, find it cheaper to get a couple brooms than to get a car, etc etc) get the new features added in after about two years of testing by professional fliers, for a far lower price. Because if you’re upper middle class and above, you can afford a muggle car and brooms, and naturally you have both, because there are times you have to see muggles, and will need your car, and times when you have to fly to someone’s place instead of Apparate or whatever, and will need a broom or carpet to get there.

Okay, so tower issue is solved for the US, but not the UK. ARRGH. Maybe the US idea for using the tower came from the UK idea of using the tower? Except the Ministry in the UK began to heavily regulate that because it was being used for bad purposes, and never bothered to take those strict regulations off the books, so they could have a nice tight leash on radio stations, and look the other way when a station complies with their demands and not do that when it doesn’t. So the radio industry in the UK is artificially stunted because of heavy government intervention, and has always lost talent to America or elsewhere.

Now, I think that makes sense, but would still love to see if anyone else has thought/posted about this. Remember a post? Have time to hunt it down? I will worship you for ever!

PS: Pardon my obvious plotty meanderings in here. But since the radio thing is important in AST along the line, I needed to think about it, and couldn’t cut out all of my thinking process from this post without gutting it entirely ;)