Harry Potter!

I've been obsessed with Harry Potter for as long as I can remember. I was the first of my friends who got the first book, which my copy was from England and is titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. So I started with the series before Scholastic started publishing the books here in America. I've had HP themed birthdays (last one was last year when I turned 21), gone to HP World, stood in line at B+N for over five hours waiting for each book release, and now I'm waiting for Pottermore to get out of Beta testing.

Pottermore to me seems to be a way for the fans of the franchise to still enjoy new content from the series even though they've now ended. There are a lot of interactive reading experiences I've been told by friends, as well as being sorted into a house and playing small games. The website seems to be "The Leaky Cauldron" for HP fans. Many fans appraise the site, but critics who don't necessarily read the books or like the series are always saying negative things about it such as "it's just Rowling's e-book store." HP is not just about the content anymore, but the experience.

Take for instance HP World at Universal, I read an article the other day that there could be another HP theme park built in the United States and maybe more in Japan and Singapore. I believe they said the one in the US is planning to be an expansion of the Universal Studios in Los Angeles.



I've also decided that I need to start saving money every month to save up a trip to Leavesden Studios in the UK. In 2012 they're opening up the sets up HP for tours.




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I think HP is fascinating as a world-wide phenomena. Not many things become as widely-praised and enjoyed all around the globe, and by people of all ages. Lots of people compare HP to the Twilight franchise, but in my mind Twilight has NOTHING on HP. It's not as widely accepted outside of the age groups of 12-16 year old girls and lonely moms in their 40s. I believe Twilight is mocked MUCH more than it is praised, and you don't see theme parks modeled after the series... thank you God...

So for this week I read some HP fanfiction on fanfiction.net, which I've never really done before; I've always been satisfied with the books themselves. I found that HP is the most highly written about book series with almost 600,000 stories written (Twilight was next with almost 200,000). No other book series even breaks 50,000 stories.

I chose a couple that seems interesting and stayed FAR away from all the erotica and what I found they call "non-canon" pairings of characters who are romantically involved lol. It was interesting how some stories were really able to stay true to the original characters, while others create new personalities and lives for them. I think part of the reason why so many people write these fanfictions is to keep the characters that they love alive because there aren't anymore published works with them being present. A lot of the works were written after the 7th book came out. Some authors weren't happy with how the ending of the book turned out or who ended up married to whom, and so they wrote their own work about how they pictured the series coming to an end.

Some stories are insanely popular and have almost a cult following, creating fanfiction works of art for it, posting pictures of the characters' outfits in certain chapters, making fanfiction trailers using footage from the HP films, and even creating Wiki pages on the story. So, in a sense, fanfiction can even become a sort of franchise in itself.