I am watching… a LOT, actually. Just finished season six of Buffy, and I’m almost done with Locke & Key and the second season of The Expanse. And I’m streaming Samurai Jack because that’s free right now and that show is awesome.
Anyhow I reread this book by the webmistress of the HP fansite, The Leaky Cauldron. This Note’s going up on the Blogger site and also on a photo on my Facebook, to see if I’ll continue this book thing.
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Harry, A History and Fandom
Harry, A History by Melissa Anelli is a sort-of memoir that details one Harry Potter fan’s journey through the HP fandom and its various movements and drama. And I remember when I first read it, I really liked the book. And upon rereading, I still really like it. But I feel different about it, and it seems as if I picked up an artifact of a different age. Fandom culture has changed so much since this book’s release in 2008.
In a way, it’s a bit like reading Ready Player One except without as much of the cringe in the dark turns gamer culture took. That makes this book sound bad, so I’ll try to explain with more detail.
When I was reading reviews of Harry, A History on Goodreads in preparation for this Note, I kept seeing a lot of the same idea repeated by many readers: this claims to be a sort of biography of the Harry Potter phenomenon, but it’s not really reflective of the average fan’s experience. Anelli’s telling the story of someone who became a superfan; someone who had reading parties with her friends after waiting in line for the next book to come out; someone who went to conventions that hosted shipping debates; someone who went on tour with a band that based their entire image and musical career on the HP books. Yeah, maybe the average fan had some involvement with some of this, but not all of it by a long shot. And especially now over ten years after the release of Deathly Hallows, so much of this has become obscure fanlore.
The book spends quite some time detailing the formation and exploits of a band called Harry and the Potters, and all the spin-off bands that it spawned. But I had never heard of any of these bands before reading this book, and I don’t think most HP fans today have a passing familiarity with the bands at all.
There’s also quite a lot the book leaves out. Admittedly, there are some big fandom moments like A Very Potter Musical (which is FANTASTIC, by the way) which couldn’t make it because they weren’t released yet. But Potter Puppet Pals? That was a massive part of Internet culture, even outside of the hardcore Potter fandom, for years, and it’s not mentioned at all in this book. Things like college Quidditch teams, or unofficial guide books, or that weird Snape cult (YA RLY) never get mentioned. Sure, I don’t expect the book to cover every single aspect of the fandom ever, and maybe I’m only speaking from my experiences and I’m wrong, but I figured some of these were huge parts of the fandom and deserved at least a mention. Everyone I knew could quote “Mysterious Ticking Noise” and yet it’s not mentioned at all, but Harry and the Potters get a whole chapter?
I was also struck by the chapter on shipping, appropriately titled “The High Seas.” For those not in the know, “shipping” generally refers to fan preferences in relationships. So for the HP fandom, the big Ship War (which to my frustration, some people still argue about) is between Harry/Hermione and Ron/Hermione. And people care a lot about this; there were debates at conventions. When Half-Blood Prince came out and made it pretty obvious where this series was going, people received death threats and a man in his thirties wrote to Rowling about how disappointed he was that she wasn’t a better writer. A thing that certainly didn’t help was that the screenwriter for the films admitted to thinking Harry and Hermione should get together, which kind of shows in the movies if you watch them.
What got to me most was that this book more or less presents the fandom of Harry Potter as one big happy family, aside from the shipping wars. And I’m glad that Anelli felt that way, that she was able to make lifelong friends and connections which have made life better for a lot of people. But fandom is hardly always so beneficent. Cassandra Clare, now famous for her Mortal Instruments series, got her start in the HP fandom as the author of the fandom-defining novel-length fanfiction series the Draco Trilogy (many bits of which she cannibalized and reused in her original fiction). And that fanfiction also got her into a messy plagiarism scandal that haunts her to this day, and a history of cyber-bullying to boot. And hey, let’s not downplay that there were fans who sent death threats to the author, other fans, and actors from the films over the romantic relationships of fictional characters.
I mean, heck, I learned through Wikipedia that the author herself was cyber-stalked by someone banned from the site.
It’s also a bit funny because the impression Anelli gives of Rowling is of a humble Everyday Jo who’s just glad that people gain enjoyment from her books. If people read deeper into her books, then alright. And that’s the way I tend to read Harry Potter. But over the past few years, it seems like Rowling bought into her own hype, and tries to paint the books as a woke political commentary which… doesn’t work if you do more than broad thematic ideas, because if we read Harry Potter as political tract, we’d have to say it’s calling almost all government corrupt and useless and asking us to arm our children with weapons the government is trying to regulate. And that’s without getting into House Elves. Or goblins. I suspect none of that is the message Rowling was trying to convey, and that she was writing something of a modern fairy tale fantasy, but she won’t say that now, she’ll act as if somehow Voldemort represents Donald Trump or something.
So it’s a little uncomfortable reading this image of Rowling as a humble but brilliant author that is seemingly surprised by her own cultural importance because these days it feels as if she’s embraced that cultural importance, perhaps a bit too much.
Still, it’s a very good book; Anelli puts much more detail than I would in covering several fan movements, and you do feel a sort of palpable excitement when she recounts her own anxiety and anticipation for the books as they’re coming out. It feels a bit like a time capsule from the early 2000’s, or a slice of the past that I’d almost forgotten. Maybe it’s because I’ve become a bitter and cynical raisin of an individual, but I don’t feel that sort of excitement for movies or books anymore.
And while I am miffed about a lot of what’s left out, I’m amazed at the level of detail of most of what’s in the book. There’s an entire chapter about an interview Anelli did with Laura Malory, the soccer mom from Georgia who famously tried to get the Harry Potter books banned from schools and one of the leaders of the Christian movements against the series. And Anelli doesn’t seem to like her, but she portrays this woman a lot more sympathetically than I would have expected; certainly more than most of the fandom would. There are sections about how the books got published in the first place, how seriously the spoilers for the final book were guarded, how Warner Brothers reacted to all the fan content being produced, and just how big this freaking series got. This was worldwide news, guys.
Maybe Harry, A History isn’t completely reflective of everyone’s experiences, and maybe it leaves out quite a lot. But it’s a celebration of a book series and a fandom that brought people together, and I can’t exactly fault it for that.
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