Harry Potter fandom
Encyclopedia
J. K. Rowling
Joanne "Jo" Rowling, OBE , better known as J. K. Rowling, is the British author of the Harry Potter fantasy series...
's Harry Potter
Harry Potter
Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry...
series. The fandom
Fandom
Fandom is a term used to refer to a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of sympathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest...
works through the use of many different forms of media, including web sites, fan fiction
Fan fiction
Fan fiction is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator...
, podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
s, fan art
Fan art
Fan art or fanart is artwork that is based on a character, costume, collage, item, or story that was created by someone other than the artist, such as a fan, from which the word is derived from. The term, while it can apply to art done by fans of characters from books, is usually used to refer to...
and songvid
Songvid
Vidding is the fan labor practice in media fandom of creating music videos from the footage of one or more visual media sources, thereby exploring the source itself in a new way...
s. Harry Potter fan fiction
Fan fiction
Fan fiction is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator...
, stories based on the series but written and distributed by fans, is the most searched-for subject of all fan fiction on the web, surpassing even those in the Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
fandom, or Trekdom. However, the fandom not only interacts online in Internet forum
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
s, but also gathers at scholarly fan convention
Fan convention
A fan convention, or con , is an event in which fans of a particular film, television series, comic book, actor, or an entire genre of entertainment such as science fiction or anime and manga, gather to participate and hold programs and other events, and to meet experts, famous personalities, and...
s, tours of iconic landmarks relevant to the books and production of the films, and parties held for the midnight release of each book and film.
By the fourth Harry Potter book, the legions of Harry Potter fans had grown so large that considerable security measures were taken to ensure that no book was purchased before the official release date. Studies on the fandom have shown that both children and adults are fans, despite Rowling's original marketing of the books towards children aged nine to twelve.
Pottermania
Harry Potter
Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry...
fans have had over the series. Fans held midnight parties to celebrate the release of the final four books at bookstores which stayed open on the night leading into the date of the release. In 2005, Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
listed the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the fourth novel in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling, published on 8 July 2000.The novel won a Hugo Award in 2001, the only Harry Potter novel to do so...
as one of "Entertainment's Top Moments" of the previous 25 years.
When the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in the UK, the queues on cruise ships were said to be "massive."
The craze over the series was parodied in Lauren Weisberger
Lauren Weisberger
Lauren Weisberger is an American novelist and author of the 2003 bestseller The Devil Wears Prada, a speculated roman à clef of her real life experience as a put-upon assistant to Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour....
's 2003 novel The Devil Wears Prada as well as its 2006 film adaptation
The Devil Wears Prada (film)
The Devil Wears Prada is a 2006 comedy-drama film, a loose screen adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's 2003 novel of the same name. It stars Anne Hathaway as Andrea Sachs, a recent college graduate who goes to New York City and gets a job as a co-assistant to powerful and demanding fashion magazine...
. In the story, the protagonist Andrea Sachs is ordered to retrieve two copies of the next installment in the series for her boss's twins before they are published so that they can be privately flown to France, where the twins and their mother are on holiday.
The series has come with its share of criticism as well. Allegations of witchcraft and the Occult found in the text, and legal disputes, one doctor coined the term "Hogwarts headache" in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine
New England Journal of Medicine
The New England Journal of Medicine is an English-language peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. It describes itself as the oldest continuously published medical journal in the world.-History:...
shortly after the release of Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the fifth in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling, and was published on 21 June 2003 by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom, Scholastic in the United States, and Raincoast in Canada...
, the longest book in the series, at 766 pages in the UK edition, 870 pages in the US edition, and over 250,000 words. He described it as a mild condition, a tension headache
Tension headache
A tension headache is the most common type of primary headache. The pain can radiate from the neck, back, eyes, or other muscle groups in the body. Tension-type headaches account for nearly 90% of all headaches...
possibly accompanied by neck or wrist pains, caused by unhealthily long reading sessions of Harry Potter. The "symptoms" resolve themselves within days of finishing the book. His prescription of taking reading breaks was rejected by two of the patients on which he discovered this headache. On the contrary, researchers in Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
found that the admission rate of children with traumatic injuries to the city's ER
Emergency department
An emergency department , also known as accident & emergency , emergency room , emergency ward , or casualty department is a medical treatment facility specialising in acute care of patients who present without prior appointment, either by their own means or by ambulance...
s plummeted on the publication weekends of both Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the fifth in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling, and was published on 21 June 2003 by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom, Scholastic in the United States, and Raincoast in Canada...
and Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the sixth and penultimate novel in the Harry Potter series by British author J. K. Rowling...
.
Some diehard fans of the series even theme their weddings around Harry Potter
Harry Potter
Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry...
, featuring a sorting hat and wands on the escort table, long tables divided into houses, a reception venue that mirrors the Great Hall, a candy bar with treats from Honeydukes, and much more. Bridal Guide featured two real weddings soon before the release of the final movie, which quickly spread through the fandom thanks for Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
, and Tumblr
Tumblr
Tumblr is a website and microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. The service emphasizes ease of use. The site ranks as the 10th...
.
Fan sites
There are many fan web sites about Harry Potter on the Internet, the oldest ones dating to about 1997 or 1998. J. K. Rowling has an open relationship with her fan base, and since 2004 periodically hands out a "fan site award" on her official web site. The first site to receive the award was Immeritus, a fan site mostly devoted to Sirius BlackSirius Black
Sirius Black is a fictional character in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Sirius was first mentioned briefly in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as a wizard who lent Rubeus Hagrid a flying motorbike shortly after Lord Voldemort killed James and Lily Potter...
, and about which Rowling wrote, "I am so proud of the fact that a character, whom I always liked very much, though he never appeared as much more than a brooding presence in the books, has gained a passionate fan-club."
In 2004, after Immeritus, Rowling bestowed the honor upon four sites. The first was Godric's Hollow; for some time however, the site's domain name was occupied by advertisers and its content was lost and there is no further record on Rowling's site that Godric's Hollow ever received the award, although in 2010 the website came back online again albeit with a lot of content missing. The next site was the Harry Potter Lexicon
Harry Potter Lexicon
The Harry Potter Lexicon is a fan-created online encyclopedia of the Harry Potter series.-Overview:The site was created by school librarian Steve Vander Ark. It contains detailed information for all seven published Harry Potter books...
, an online encyclopedia Rowling has admitted to visiting while writing away from home rather than buying a copy of her books in a store. She called it "for the dangerously obsessive; my natural home." The third site of 2004 was MuggleNet
MuggleNet
MuggleNet is a Harry Potter fansite founded by Emerson Spartz. The site is composed of news, editorials and synopses of the Harry Potter books and films, an encyclopedia of the books, an IRC network, in which the fans of Harry Potter can discuss predictions and share thoughts, a discussion forum,...
, a web site featuring the latest news in the Potter world, among editorials, forums, and a podcast. Rowling wrote when giving the award, "It's high time I paid homage to the mighty MuggleNet," and listed all the features she loved, including "the pretty-much-exhaustive information on all books and films." The last site was HPANA
HPANA
The Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator, or HPANA, as it is better known, is a Harry Potter fansite created in 2002 to monitor news on the Internet about J. K. Rowling's series of novels about the eponymous wizard.-History:...
, the first fan site Rowling ever visited, "faster off the mark with Harry Potter news than any other site" Rowling knows, and "fantastically user-friendly."
In 2005, only The Leaky Cauldron
The Leaky Cauldron (website)
The Leaky Cauldron, also called Leaky, TLC, or Leaky News, is a Harry Potter fansite and blog. The site features news, image and video galleries, downloadable widgets, a chat room and discussion forum, and an essay project called Scribbulus, among other offerings...
was honored. In Rowling's words, "it is about the worst kept secret on this website that I am a huge fan of The Leaky Cauldron," which she calls a "wonderfully well designed mine of accurate information on all things Harry Potter." On another occasion, Rowling has called the Leaky Cauldron her "favorite fan site." In 2006, the Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
ian website Potterish was the only site honored, in recognition of its "style, [its] Potter-expertise and [its] responsible reporting." It is the only non-English language website to be awarded.
In May 2007, Harry Potter Fan Zone
Harry Potter Fan Zone
Harry Potter Fan Zone is an Australian Harry Potter fansite created in 2003 by Australian teenager Andy McCray. Harry Potter author J. K...
received the award. Rowling recognised the insightful editorials as well as praised the site for its young and dedicated staff. In December 2007, the award went to The Harry Potter Alliance, a campaign that seeks to end discrimination, genocide, poverty, AIDS, global warming, and other "real-world Dark Arts", relating these problems to the books. Rowling called the project "extraordinary" and "most inspirational", and paralleled its mission to "the values for which Dumbledore's Army fought in the books". In an article about her in Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
, Rowling expressed her gratefulness at the site's successful work raising awareness and sign-up levels among antigenocide coalitions.
At one time, Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
, which owns the rights to Harry Potter and its affiliates, tried to shut down the sites. The unsuccessful attempt eventually led to their inviting the webmasters of the top sites to premieres of the films and tours of the film sets, because of their close connection with the fans. Warner Bros. executives have acknowledged that many fans are disappointed that certain elements of the books are left out, but not trying to avoid criticism, "bringing the fan sites into the process is what we feel is really important."
These fan sites contain news updates into the world of the books
Harry Potter
Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry...
, films, and film cast members through the use of forums, image galleries, or video galleries. They also host user-submitted creations, such as fan art
Fan art
Fan art or fanart is artwork that is based on a character, costume, collage, item, or story that was created by someone other than the artist, such as a fan, from which the word is derived from. The term, while it can apply to art done by fans of characters from books, is usually used to refer to...
or fan fiction (see below). Some YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
member pages devoted to fan videos, which are typically in the form of anime music video
Anime music video
An anime music video is a music video consisting of clips from one or more animations set to an audio track ; the term usually refers to fan-made unofficial videos. An AMV can also be a set of video game footage put together with music which is known as a GMV...
s or songvid
Songvid
Vidding is the fan labor practice in media fandom of creating music videos from the footage of one or more visual media sources, thereby exploring the source itself in a new way...
s.
Podcasts
The Harry Potter fandom has embraced podcastPodcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
s as a regular, often weekly, insight to the latest discussion in the fandom. Apple Inc. has featured two of the podcasts, MuggleCast and PotterCast
PotterCast
PotterCast is the official podcast of the Harry Potter fansite The Leaky Cauldron. Its episodes are posted once per month and are typically about an hour long. In every episode, the hosts discuss particular passages, themes, and questions from the Harry Potter books and films, and they go over the...
. Both have reached the top spot of iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
podcast rankings and have been polled one of the top 50 favorite podcasts. At the 2006 Podcast Awards, when MuggleCast and PotterCast each received two nominations for the same two categories, the two podcasts teamed up and requested listeners vote for PotterCast in the Best Entertainment category and MuggleCast in the People's Choice category. Both podcasts won these respective categories.
MuggleCast, hosted by MuggleNet
MuggleNet
MuggleNet is a Harry Potter fansite founded by Emerson Spartz. The site is composed of news, editorials and synopses of the Harry Potter books and films, an encyclopedia of the books, an IRC network, in which the fans of Harry Potter can discuss predictions and share thoughts, a discussion forum,...
staffers, was created in August 2005, not long after the release of Half-Blood Prince. Topics of the first show focused on Horcruxes, "R.A.B.", the Goblet of Fire film
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (film)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is a 2005 fantasy film directed by Mike Newell and based on the novel of the same name by J. K. Rowling. It is the fourth instalment in the Harry Potter film series, written by Steve Kloves and produced by David Heyman...
, which was due for release two months later, and the website DumbledoreIsNotDead.com. Since then, MuggleCast has held chapter-by-chapter discussions, character analyses, and a discussion on a "theory of the week." MuggleCast has also added humour to their podcast with segments like "Spy on Spartz," where the hosts would call MuggleNet webmaster Emerson Spartz and reveal his current location or activity with the listening audience. British
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
staff member Jamie Lawrence tells a British joke of the week, and host Andrew Sims reads an email sent to MuggleNet with a strange request or incoherent talk (dubbed "Huh?! Email of the Week"). MuggleCast is currently the highest rated Harry Potter Podcast on the Internet. On August 18, 2008, MuggleCast stopped recording weekly episodes but are still releasing them every few weeks, or whenever substantial Harry Potter news is released.
PotterCast was released less than two weeks after MuggleCast's first episode. Produced by The Leaky Cauldron
The Leaky Cauldron (website)
The Leaky Cauldron, also called Leaky, TLC, or Leaky News, is a Harry Potter fansite and blog. The site features news, image and video galleries, downloadable widgets, a chat room and discussion forum, and an essay project called Scribbulus, among other offerings...
, it differed from MuggleCast with a more structured program, including various segments and involvement of more people on the Leaky Cauldron staff compared to MuggleCast. It also was the first and is still the only Potter podcast to produce regular interviews with people directly involved with the books and films. The first show featured interviews with Stuart Craig
Stuart Craig
Norman Stuart Craig OBE is a noted British production designer.He has also designed the sets, together with his frequent collaborator set decorator Stephanie McMillan, on all of the Harry Potter film series films to date. At Potter author J. K...
, art director of the films, as well as Bonnie Wright
Bonnie Wright
Bonnie Francesca Wright is a British actress and fashion model. She is best known for playing Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter film series.-Early life and education:...
, who plays Ginny Weasley. PotterCast has also interviewed Matthew Lewis (the actor who portrays Neville Longbottom), Evanna Lynch
Evanna Lynch
Evanna Patricia Lynch is an Irish actress who rose to prominence playing Luna Lovegood, a supporting role in the Harry Potter film series adapted from the book series of the same name. Lynch was cast as Luna at the age of 14, having previously acted only in school plays...
(Luna Lovegood), Jamie Waylett
Jamie Waylett
Jamie Michael Waylett is an English actor known for his portrayal of Vincent Crabbe in six of the Harry Potter films. Waylett was born in Kilburn, London. He has yet to appear in any other production.-Criminal Record:...
(Vincent Crabbe), Rupert Grint
Rupert Grint
Rupert Alexander Lloyd Grint is an English actor, who rose to prominence playing Ron Weasley, one of the three main characters in the Harry Potter film series. Grint was cast as Ron at the age of 11, having previously acted only in school plays and at his local theatre group...
(Ron Weasley
Ron Weasley
Ronald Bilius "Ron" Weasley is a fictional character and one of the three protagonists in the Harry Potter book series written by J. K. Rowling. His first appearance was in the first book of the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as the best friend of Harry Potter and Hermione Granger...
), Chris Columbus
Chris Columbus (filmmaker)
Christopher Joseph "Chris" Columbus is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Columbus had his largest success with the first two films in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, along with Home Alone, the last...
, Alfonso Cuarón
Alfonso Cuarón
Alfonso Cuarón Orozco is a Mexican film director, screenwriter and film producer, best known for his films Children of Men, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Y tu mamá también, and A Little Princess.- Early life :...
, Mike Newell
Mike Newell (director)
Michael Cormac "Mike" Newell is an English director and producer of motion pictures for the screen and for television. After the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2005, Newell became the third most commercially successful British director in recent years, behind Christopher Nolan...
(directors of the first four films), Arthur A. Levine & Cheryl Klein (editors of the books at Scholastic), and even the author of the book series, J.K. Rowling.
The two sites are friendly rivals and have aired several combined episodes, which they call "The Leaky Mug", a separate podcast released on a separate feed from time to time. Live joint podcasts have been held in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, Las Vegas
Las Vegas, Nevada
Las Vegas is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and is also the county seat of Clark County, Nevada. Las Vegas is an internationally renowned major resort city for gambling, shopping, and fine dining. The city bills itself as The Entertainment Capital of the World, and is famous...
, and California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. From time to time, hosts on one podcast will appear on their counterpart.
In addition there have been podcasts solely based on a particular character, such as Snapecast which previously focused on determining the loyalty of Severus Snape
Severus Snape
Severus Snape is a fictional character in the Harry Potter book series written by J.K. Rowling. In the first novel of the series, he is hostile toward Harry and is built up to be the primary antagonist until the final chapters. As the series progresses, Snape's character becomes more layered and...
.
Although the series is now complete, the podcasting community is still expanding to new generations of podcasters. One example of the aforementioned is Hogwarts Radio. This podcast follows more of a radio show format featuring news stories, interviews, discussion, and wizard rock. Hogwarts Radio was featured on iTunes under the "New and Notable" section during September and October 2008, and held a featured position under "Literature" in July and August 2009. In July 2009, all the hosts from Hogwarts Radio attended HPEF's Azkatraz in San Francisco, California. There, the show featured a live interview with actor Chris Rankin, who portrays Percy Weasley in the Harry Potter films. Hogwarts Radio continues to be a presence in the podcasting community as the official podcast for HPANA.
One other relatively new podcast is one entitled The Potter Pensieve. This podcast focuses solely on discussion of the Harry Potter canon. Beginning on January 2, 2010, the hosts analyzed the series from beginning to end, working together to discover unanswered questions from the series. In January, 2011, this podcast was featured as one of the top 10 podcasts in Podomatic.com's literature section.
Fan fiction
Rowling has backed fan fictionFan fiction
Fan fiction is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator...
stories on the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, stories written by fans that involve Harry Potter
Harry Potter (character)
Harry James Potter is the title character and main protagonist of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. The majority of the books' plot covers seven years in the life of the orphan Potter who, on his eleventh birthday, learns he is a wizard...
or other characters in the books. A March 2007 study showed that "Harry Potter" is the most searched-for fan fiction subject online. Some fans will use canon established in the books to write stories of past and future events in the Harry Potter world; others write stories that have little relation to the books other than the characters' names and the settings in which the fan fiction takes place. On FanFiction.Net
FanFiction.Net
FanFiction.Net is an automated fan fiction archive site. It was founded in late 1998 by Los Angeles computer programmer Xing Li, who also runs the site. The first fics to be posted were a few stories about Buffy the Vampire Slayer...
, there are over 552,625 stories on Harry Potter . There are numerous websites devoted solely to Harry Potter fan fiction. Of these, FictionAlley.org has grown to be one of the largest: it hosts over 80,000 stories and 20,000 works of fan art, while HarryPotterFanFiction.com is the most popular and widely used dedicated Harry Potter fan fiction site (based on traffic rankings). Another Harry Potter fanfiction site is fanfiction on mugglenet.com, in which every story is evaluted by moderaters before posting, bringing the stories archived to a higher quality.
A well-known work of fan fiction is The Shoebox Project, created by two LiveJournal
LiveJournal
LiveJournal is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community....
users. Over 8500 people subscribe to the story so that they are alerted when new posts update the story. The authors' works, including this project, were featured in an article in The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
discussing the growth in popularity of fandoms.
The current most reviewed piece of fanfiction, with over 15,000 reviews, is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky is an American artificial intelligence researcher concerned with the singularity and an advocate of friendly artificial intelligence, living in Redwood City, California.- Biography :...
writing under the pseudonym of Less Wrong.
In 2006, the "popular 'bad' fanfic" My Immortal was posted on FanFiction.Net
FanFiction.Net
FanFiction.Net is an automated fan fiction archive site. It was founded in late 1998 by Los Angeles computer programmer Xing Li, who also runs the site. The first fics to be posted were a few stories about Buffy the Vampire Slayer...
by user Tara Gilesbie. It was deleted by the site's administrators in 2008, but not before amassing over eight thousand negative reviews. It spawned a number of YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
spoofs and a number of imitators created "sequels" claiming to be the original Tara.
In 2007, a web-based novel, James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing, was written by a computer animator named George Lippert. The book was written as a supplement to fill the void after Deathly Hallows, and received quite a bit of media attention, much more than Harry Potter fan fiction usually receives.
Rowling has said, "I find it very flattering that people love the characters that much." She has adopted a positive position on fan fiction, unlike authors such as Anne McCaffrey
Anne McCaffrey
Anne Inez McCaffrey was an American-born Irish writer, best known for her Dragonriders of Pern series. Over the course of her 46 year career she won a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award...
or Anne Rice
Anne Rice
Anne Rice is a best-selling Southern American author of metaphysical gothic fiction, Christian literature and erotica from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history...
who discourage fans from writing about their books and have asked sites like FanFiction.Net to remove all stories of their works, requests honored by the site. However, Rowling has been "alarmed by pornographic or sexually explicit material clearly not meant for kids," according to Neil Blair, an attorney for her publisher. The attorneys have sent cease and desist
Cease and desist
A cease and desist is an order or request to halt an activity and not to take it up again later or else face legal action. The recipient of the cease-and-desist may be an individual or an organization....
letters to sites that host adult material.
Potter fan fiction also has a large following in the slash fiction
Slash fiction
Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on the depiction of romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex...
genre, stories which feature sexual relationships that not exist in the books (shipping), often portraying homosexual pairings. Famous pairings include Harry with Draco Malfoy
Draco Malfoy
Draco Malfoy is a fictional character and a major antagonist in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. He is a Slytherin student in Harry Potter's year. He is frequently accompanied by his two accomplices, Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle, who act as henchmen...
or Cedric Diggory, and Remus Lupin with Sirius Black
Sirius Black
Sirius Black is a fictional character in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Sirius was first mentioned briefly in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as a wizard who lent Rubeus Hagrid a flying motorbike shortly after Lord Voldemort killed James and Lily Potter...
. Harry Potter slash has eroded some of the antipathy towards underage sexuality in the wider slash fandom.
In the fall of 2006, Jason Isaacs
Jason Isaacs
Jason Isaacs is an English actor born in Liverpool, who is best known for his performance as the villain Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, the brutal Colonel William Tavington in The Patriot and as lifelong criminal Michael Caffee in the internationally broadcast American television series...
, who plays Lucius Malfoy in the Potter films, said that he had read fan fiction about his character and gets "a huge kick out of the more far-out stuff."
Discussion
Prior to the publication of Deathly Hallows, much of the energy of the Potter fandom was devoted to speculation and debate about upcoming plot and character developments. To this end, clues from the earlier books and deliberate hints from J. K. RowlingJ. K. Rowling
Joanne "Jo" Rowling, OBE , better known as J. K. Rowling, is the British author of the Harry Potter fantasy series...
(in interviews and on her website) were heavily scrutinised by fans. In particular, fan essays were published on websites such as Mugglenet
MuggleNet
MuggleNet is a Harry Potter fansite founded by Emerson Spartz. The site is composed of news, editorials and synopses of the Harry Potter books and films, an encyclopedia of the books, an IRC network, in which the fans of Harry Potter can discuss predictions and share thoughts, a discussion forum,...
(the “world famous editorials”), the Harry Potter Lexicon
Harry Potter Lexicon
The Harry Potter Lexicon is a fan-created online encyclopedia of the Harry Potter series.-Overview:The site was created by school librarian Steve Vander Ark. It contains detailed information for all seven published Harry Potter books...
and The Leaky Cauldron
The Leaky Cauldron (website)
The Leaky Cauldron, also called Leaky, TLC, or Leaky News, is a Harry Potter fansite and blog. The site features news, image and video galleries, downloadable widgets, a chat room and discussion forum, and an essay project called Scribbulus, among other offerings...
(Scribbulus project) among others: offering theories, comment and analysis on all aspects of the series. The Yahoo discussion list Harry Potter for Grown Ups (founded in 1999) is also noteworthy for its detailed criticism and discussion of the Harry Potter books.
Speculation intensified with the July 2005 publication of Half-Blood Prince and the detailed post-publication interview given by Rowling to Mugglenet and The Leaky Cauldron. Notably, DumbledoreIsNotDead.com sought to understand the events of the sixth book in a different way. (Rowling later confirmed, however – on 2 August 2006 – that Dumbledore was, in fact, dead, humorously apologising to the website as she did so.) A collection of essays, Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?: What Really Happened in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? Six Expert Harry Potter Detectives Examine the Evidence, was published by Zossima Press in November 2006. Contributors included the Christian author John Granger
John Granger
John Granger is a speaker and writer whose principal focus is the intersection of literature, faith and culture. He is most well known as the author of several books analysing J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels. He writes a weblog called 'the Hogwarts Professor'.Granger was born in Corning, New...
and Joyce Odell of Red Hen Publications, whose own website contains numerous essays on the Potterverse and fandom itself.
In 2006, in advance of the arrival of the seventh Potter novel, five MuggleNet staff members co-authored the reference book Mugglenet.Com's What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Falls in Love and How Will the Adventure Finally End, an anthology of unofficial fan predictions; while early in 2007, Leaky launched HarryPotterSeven.com, featuring “roundups and predictions from some of the most knowledgeable fans online” (including Steve Vander Ark of the Lexicon). Late additions to the fan scene (prior to the publication of Deathly Hallows) included BeyondHogwarts.com (the successor to DumbledoreIsNotDead.com), which billed itself as “the only ongoing online Harry Potter fan conference”, as well as Book7.co.uk, which offered an hypothetical “evidence-based synopsis” of the seventh novel. To this day, debate and reaction to the novels and films continues on web forums (including Mugglenet's Chamber of Secrets community and TLC's Leaky Lounge).
Conventions
Harry and the Potters
Harry and the Potters are an American alternative rock band known for spawning the genre of wizard rock. Founded in Norwood, Massachusetts, the group is primarily composed of Joe and Paul DeGeorge, who both perform under the persona of the title character from the Harry Potter book series...
(see below) (Prophecy, 2007). Lyrics for these bands can be found at http://www.realwizardrock.com. Still, the conventions try to attract the fandom with other activities, often more interactive, such as wizarding chess, water Quidditch
Quidditch
Quidditch is a fictional sport developed by British author J. K. Rowling for the Harry Potter series of novels. It is described as an extremely rough, but very popular, semi-contact sport, played by wizards and witches around the world...
, the watching of Harry Potter films, or local cultural immersions. Sometimes live podcasts have been held at conventions.
These conventions are now incorporating into their itinerary the recently opened theme park The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, built inside Universals Island of Adventure.
At the latest Harry Potter Fan Convention; Infinitus 2010, a special event was held at the park. An after hours event for convention intendes to experience and explore the park by themselves. The event included talks given by creators of the park, free food and free butterbeer.
"Ship debates"
In the fandom the word "'ship" and its derivatives like "'shipping" or "'shipper" are commonly used as shorthand for the word "relationship."The Harry Potter series generated ship debates with supporters of the prospective relationship between Harry Potter
Harry Potter (character)
Harry James Potter is the title character and main protagonist of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. The majority of the books' plot covers seven years in the life of the orphan Potter who, on his eleventh birthday, learns he is a wizard...
and his close female friend Hermione Granger
Hermione Granger
Hermione Jean Granger is a fictional character and one of the three protagonists in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. She initially appears in the first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, as a new student on her way to Hogwarts...
at odds with supporters of Hermione ending up instead with Ron Weasley
Ron Weasley
Ronald Bilius "Ron" Weasley is a fictional character and one of the three protagonists in the Harry Potter book series written by J. K. Rowling. His first appearance was in the first book of the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as the best friend of Harry Potter and Hermione Granger...
, close friend of both.
Quotes from Rowling which seemed to contradict the possibility of Harry ending up with Hermione were usually countered by claiming them to be deliberate obfuscations designed to lure astute observation off-course (though such claims were far from undisputed, given that these allegedly vague quotes included such phrases as "[Harry and Hermione] are very platonic friends", and were repeated on at least three different occasions).
An interview with J.K. Rowling conducted by fansite webmasters Emerson Spartz (MuggleNet
MuggleNet
MuggleNet is a Harry Potter fansite founded by Emerson Spartz. The site is composed of news, editorials and synopses of the Harry Potter books and films, an encyclopedia of the books, an IRC network, in which the fans of Harry Potter can discuss predictions and share thoughts, a discussion forum,...
) and Melissa Anelli (The Leaky Cauldron
The Leaky Cauldron (website)
The Leaky Cauldron, also called Leaky, TLC, or Leaky News, is a Harry Potter fansite and blog. The site features news, image and video galleries, downloadable widgets, a chat room and discussion forum, and an essay project called Scribbulus, among other offerings...
) shortly after the book's release turned out to be quite controversial. During the interview Spartz commented that Harry/Hermione shippers were "delusional", to which Rowling chuckled, though making it clear that she did not share the sentiment and that the Harry/Hermione fans were "still valued members of her readership". This incident resulted in an uproar among Harry/Hermione shippers. Many of them complained that both sites had a Ron/Hermione bias and criticised Rowling for not including a representative of their community, as a way to avoid difficult questions. The uproar was loud enough to merit an article in the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
.
Rowling's attitude towards the shipping phenomenon has varied between amused and bewildered to frustrated, as she revealed in that interview. She explained:
In a later posting on MuggleNet, Spartz explained:
Rowling has continued to make references, less humorous and more, to the severity of the shipper conflicts. In one instance she has joked about trying to think of ways of proving to Emerson, when inviting him for the aforementioned interview, that it was really her and not "some angry Harry/Hermione shipper trying to lure him down a dark alleyway"; In another, she has described her impression of the Harry Potter fandom's shipping debates as "cyber gang warfare".
Other relationships
On a less intense scale, other relationships have been doted upon in the fandom from suggestive hints or explicit statements throughout canon, such as those between Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson, Harry Potter's parents James PotterJames Potter
James Potter was a soldier, farmer and politician from Colonial- and Revolutionary-era Pennsylvania. He rose to the rank of brigadier general of Pennsylvania militia during the Revolutionary War, and served as Vice-President of Pennsylvania, 1781-1782.-Family and early life:James Potter was of...
and Lily Evans, Rubeus Hagrid
Rubeus Hagrid
Rubeus Hagrid is a fictional character in the Harry Potter book series written by J. K. Rowling. Hagrid is introduced in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as a half-giant who is the gamekeeper and Keeper of Keys and Grounds of Hogwarts, the primary setting for the first six novels...
and Olympe Maxime, or Percy Weasley and Penelope Clearwater, or Rose Weasley and Scorpius Malfoy. A potential relationship between Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood was originally dispelled by Rowling, though she later retracted this and said she noticed a slight attraction between them in Deathly Hallows. Some couples, besides Harry and Ginny and Ron and Hermione, have been explicitly stated in the series: Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour are married in Deathly Hallows after dating throughout Half-Blood Prince. In Half-Blood Prince, Nymphadora Tonks keeps her feelings for Remus Lupin to herself, but remains depressed when he refuses her advances; he feels that his being a werewolf would not create a safe relationship. Tonks professes her love for him at the end of the book, and she and Lupin have been married by the beginning of Deathly Hallows and have a son 'Teddy' later in the book. Other couples, such as Harry and Draco or Lupin and Sirius Black
Sirius Black
Sirius Black is a fictional character in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Sirius was first mentioned briefly in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as a wizard who lent Rubeus Hagrid a flying motorbike shortly after Lord Voldemort killed James and Lily Potter...
, are favorites among fans who read fan fiction about them. There is also debate about Lily and Severus vs. James.
Roleplaying games
LARPing often involves re-enacting or creating an original Quidditch team. Match rules and style of play vary among fandom events, but they are generally kept as close as possible to the sport envisioned by Rowling. The 2006 Lumos symposium included a Quidditch tournament played in water. More common are ground-based games such as the handball style developed by USA Team Handball and featured at the MuggleNet
MuggleNet
MuggleNet is a Harry Potter fansite founded by Emerson Spartz. The site is composed of news, editorials and synopses of the Harry Potter books and films, an encyclopedia of the books, an IRC network, in which the fans of Harry Potter can discuss predictions and share thoughts, a discussion forum,...
-sponsored Spellbound event, as well as the Muggle Quidditch
Muggle Quidditch
Muggle Quidditch is a sport based on Quidditch, the fictional sport developed by British author J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series of novels. It is popular with fans of the novels, aficionados of fictional sports, and children. The sport was created in Advance, North Carolina.In Muggle...
style played intramurally at Millikin University
Millikin University
Millikin University is an American co-educational, comprehensive, private, four-year university with traditional undergraduate programs in arts and sciences, business, fine arts, and professional studies, as well as non-traditional, adult degree-completion programs and graduate programs in...
(at left).
Internet-based roleplay tries to simulate the Hogwarts experience. Most sites are forum-based, such as Vault 713, emphasizing taking classes taught by staff members in order for the players to earn points for their respective houses. Some internet-based roleplay sites go more in depth into canon and storylines, and do not specifically rely on posting as the only method for gaining house points while others have expanded to include activities such as Quidditch, dueling, and board-wide plots. Examples would be Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, one of the longest running forum-based HP RPGs, which has been online since 2000, and Enchanted Hogwarts, which has been online since 2001.
2007 saw the launch of World of Hogwarts, a completely free MMORPG
MMORPG
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....
Harry Potter
Harry Potter
Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry...
roleplaying game in Second Life
Second Life
Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab. It was launched on June 23, 2003. A number of free client programs, or Viewers, enable Second Life users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars...
, set ten years after the Battle of Hogwarts
Hogwarts
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry or simply Hogwarts is the primary setting for the first six books of the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, with each book lasting the equivalent of one school year. It is a fictional boarding school of magic for witches and wizards between the ages of...
. Here, roleplayers can create an avatar and interact with other students, attend lessons organized by other roleplayers, play Quidditch
Quidditch
Quidditch is a fictional sport developed by British author J. K. Rowling for the Harry Potter series of novels. It is described as an extremely rough, but very popular, semi-contact sport, played by wizards and witches around the world...
, sit for their exams, earn and lose points for their house, visit Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley and the Forbidden Forest, get a job at the Ministry of Magic
Ministry of Magic
The Ministry of Magic is the government of the fictional Magical community of Britain in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. First mentioned in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the Ministry makes its first proper appearance in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix...
, explore several secret passages within the castle, and even immerse themselves into intricate and well-composed storyline plots that have, through time, grown into the canon rules of the game.
One of the main role-playing sites is Enchanted Hogwarts. EH focuses on inviting one into the world of Hogwarts. Everyone must register so that they may be sorted into an appropriate house. Interaction has always been a key emphasis of the site, but it is primarily focussed on the development of the writing and analytical skills of its members and is set in a unique Alternate Universe, which means that members are able to play as canon characters who have died in canon, and are able to alter them a little as long as their new actions remain in-character.
Another Role-playing site is a branch of MuggleNet, Mugglenet Interactive. On this site there are many forums for taking classes that earn you Galleons, Sickles and Knuts, and discussion boards about the books, among other things. The role playing on this site allows you to create a character which you can make storylines for and interact with other members. There are several landscapes on this site, including Diagon Alley, St. Mungo's Hospital, Hogsmeade, Hogwarts, and other wizarding places. A main forum board is that of the Gryffindor Common Room, where many players go to meet other characters and become involved in the daily drama that occurs there.
A website created by ISO Interactive, called the Chamber of Chat is a free online interactive virtual world under a MMO
Massively multiplayer online game
A massively multiplayer online game is a multiplayer video game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously. By necessity, they are played on the Internet, and usually feature at least one persistent world. They are, however, not necessarily games played on...
format. Although not a full MMORPG
MMORPG
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....
format, Chamber of Chat is set up with 3D virtual chatrooms and avatars where fans can socially interact with each other in Pictionary
Pictionary
Pictionary is a guessing word game designed by Robert Angel and first published in 1985 by Seattle Games Inc. The game is played with teams with players trying to identify specific words from their teammates' drawings.-Objective:...
and Harry Potter Trivia
Trivia
The trivia are the three lower Artes Liberales, i.e. grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the topics of basic education, foundational to the quadrivia of higher education, and hence the material of basic education, of interest only to undergraduates...
l games or participate in discussion groups about Harry Potter or Film media or perform plays as a theater group to other fans as audience. They hold special community event such as Harry Potters Birthday or Halloween and have seasonal house competitions. Fans are able to create their own avatars, collect or be rewarded coins to purchase furniture items for their own "clubhouse". However, the website emphasizes more social interaction between fans' avatars to stimulate the Hogwarts student experience. "Chamber of Chat is a graphical Social Virtual World with a few Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
plug-ins. The Harry Potter Virtual World is designed for fans. This give users the feeling that they are interacting in the actual 3D world. You can hang out with other students, relax in the common room, mingle at the pub, play games like Pictionary and even download cool looking wallpapers." On 19th April 2007, Chamber of Chat was awarded Adobe
Adobe
Adobe is a natural building material made from sand, clay, water, and some kind of fibrous or organic material , which the builders shape into bricks using frames and dry in the sun. Adobe buildings are similar to cob and mudbrick buildings. Adobe structures are extremely durable, and account for...
Site of the day. Chamber of chat has also been awarded a place among the SmartFoxServer Showcase. "Chamber of Chat is an MMO community inspired to the magic worlds of the Harry Potter saga. The application is a great example of integration between Director/Shockwave (client) and SmartFoxServer PRO.". Chamber of Chat has been a long time associated branch of The Leaky network and although as part of the network with The Leaky Cauldron
The Leaky Cauldron (website)
The Leaky Cauldron, also called Leaky, TLC, or Leaky News, is a Harry Potter fansite and blog. The site features news, image and video galleries, downloadable widgets, a chat room and discussion forum, and an essay project called Scribbulus, among other offerings...
, Pottercast
PotterCast
PotterCast is the official podcast of the Harry Potter fansite The Leaky Cauldron. Its episodes are posted once per month and are typically about an hour long. In every episode, the hosts discuss particular passages, themes, and questions from the Harry Potter books and films, and they go over the...
and "Ask Peeves" search engine, it was ranked number two behind Indiana Jones's
Indiana Jones
Colonel Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr., Ph.D. is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Indiana Jones franchise. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg created the character in homage to the action heroes of 1930s film serials...
TheRaider.Net out of 25 essential fansites of "The Best of the Web" by Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
in December 2007.
Numerous sites have cropped up that are set in the Harry Potter world, but not at Hogwarts, giving the opportunity for more creativity as authors roleplay at schools outside of those mentioned in the books. While these schools follow canon, the extent to which they do so varies from school to school. Examples include Durmstrang Institute, Hogwarts New Zealand, and Rocky Mountain International School for Magical Enlightenment. Wizarding colleges have also sprung up on the internet as well. The first example, unlike its counterparts, provides an interactive game along side the role-playing environment where students can buy and sell wizard items, and make potions.
Other sites use modified versions of phpBB
PhpBB
phpBB is a popular Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name "phpBB" is an abbreviation of PHP Bulletin Board...
that allow for a certain level of interactive roleplaying and are what is commonly referred to as "forum-based roleplaying". Interactive gaming can include player versus player
Player versus player
Player versus player, or PvP, is a type of multiplayer interactive conflict within a game between two or more live participants. This is in contrast to games where players compete against computer controlled opponents, which is correspondingly referred to as player versus environment...
features, a form of currency for making purchases in stores, and non-player characters such as monsters that must be fought to gain levels and experience points. However, these features are more prevalent in games that are not forum-based. Advancement in such games is usually dependent on live chat, multiplayer cooperation, and fighting as opposed to taking classes or simply posting to earn points for one's "house"; like at Hogwarts, players in forum-based games are sometimes sorted into a different group distinguishing different values within a person.
Iconic landmarks tours
HPANA
The Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator, or HPANA, as it is better known, is a Harry Potter fansite created in 2002 to monitor news on the Internet about J. K. Rowling's series of novels about the eponymous wizard.-History:...
, was designed by and for fans of the series, and tours noteworthy Potter-related locations in the United Kingdom. Since 2004, they have exclusively chartered steam locomotive #5972 Olton Hall
GWR 4900 Class 5972 Olton Hall
The steam locomotive no. 5972 "Olton Hall" is a 4-6-0 Hall class locomotive.In the 2000s the locomotive achieved fame after it was used to haul the "Hogwarts Express" in the Harry Potter series of films.-Service:...
, the locomotive used in the films as the Hogwarts Express, as well as the carriages labeled as such and seen in the movies. The travel agency Your Man in Europe began hosting Magical Tours in 2006, in conjunction with fan site MuggleNet
MuggleNet
MuggleNet is a Harry Potter fansite founded by Emerson Spartz. The site is composed of news, editorials and synopses of the Harry Potter books and films, an encyclopedia of the books, an IRC network, in which the fans of Harry Potter can discuss predictions and share thoughts, a discussion forum,...
. They offer four different tours through England and Scotland.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the first novel in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling and featuring Harry Potter, a young wizard...
, and Edinburgh Castle
Edinburgh Castle
Edinburgh Castle is a fortress which dominates the skyline of the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, from its position atop the volcanic Castle Rock. Human habitation of the site is dated back as far as the 9th century BC, although the nature of early settlement is unclear...
, where Rowling read from the sixth book on the night of its release to an audience of children. Filming locations visited include Alnwick Castle
Alnwick Castle
Alnwick Castle is a castle and stately home in the town of the same name in the English county of Northumberland. It is the residence of the Duke of Northumberland, built following the Norman conquest, and renovated and remodelled a number of times. It is a Grade I listed building.-History:Alnwick...
, where some exterior locations of Hogwarts
Hogwarts
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry or simply Hogwarts is the primary setting for the first six books of the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, with each book lasting the equivalent of one school year. It is a fictional boarding school of magic for witches and wizards between the ages of...
are shot, places in Fort William, Scotland; Glen Nevis
Glen Nevis
Glen Nevis is a glen in Lochaber, Highland, Scotland, with Fort William at its foot. It is bordered to the south by the Mamore range, and to the north by the highest mountains in the British Isles: Ben Nevis, Càrn Mor Dearg, Aonach Mòr, and Aonach Beag...
, Scotland; the Glenfinnan viaduct
Glenfinnan Viaduct
Glenfinnan Viaduct is a railway viaduct on the West Highland Line in Glenfinnan, Lochaber, Highland, Scotland. It was built between 1897 and 1901...
; Christ Church Cathedral
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford
Christ Church Cathedral is the cathedral of the diocese of Oxford, which consists of the counties of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. It is also, uniquely, the chapel of Christ Church, a college of the University of Oxford.-History:...
in Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
and the Cloisters located within New College, Oxford
New College, Oxford
New College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.- Overview :The College's official name, College of St Mary, is the same as that of the older Oriel College; hence, it has been referred to as the "New College of St Mary", and is now almost always...
.
Wizard rock
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
with Harry and the Potters, though it has grown internationally and has expanded to at least 750 bands. Wrock bands mostly consist of young musicians that write and perform often humorous songs about the Harry Potter universe, and these songs are often written from the point of view of a particular character in the books, usually the character who features in the band's name. If they are performing live, they may also cosplay
Cosplay
, short for "costume play", is a type of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea. Characters are often drawn from popular fiction in Japan, but recent trends have included American cartoons and science fiction...
, or dress as, that character.
In contrast to mainstream bands that have some songs incorporating literary references among a wider repertoire of music (notably Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin were an English rock band, active in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Formed in 1968, they consisted of guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant, bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham...
to The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...
), wizard rock bands take their inspiration entirely from the Harry Potter universe. In preserving the promotion of reading, too, bands like to perform in libraries, bookstores, and schools. The bands have also performed at the fan conventions.
We Are Wizards
We Are Wizards is a feature length documentary by Josh KouryJosh Koury
Josh Koury is an American filmmaker, best known for his documentary films and Standing by Yourself.Koury was born in upstate New York, and currently resides in Greenpoint, Brooklyn....
about the Harry Potter fandom. It features Wizard rock bands Harry and the Potters
Harry and the Potters
Harry and the Potters are an American alternative rock band known for spawning the genre of wizard rock. Founded in Norwood, Massachusetts, the group is primarily composed of Joe and Paul DeGeorge, who both perform under the persona of the title character from the Harry Potter book series...
, Draco and the Malfoys
Draco and the Malfoys
Draco and the Malfoys are a wizard rock band founded in Woonsocket, Rhode Island in 2004. The group is composed of half-brothers Brian Ross and Bradley Mehlenbacher, who both perform under the persona of Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter book series....
, The Hungarian Horntails, and The Whomping Willows. The film also features Heather Lawver, Melissa Anelli
Melissa Anelli
Melissa Anelli is an American author. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Harry, A History, which chronicles the Harry Potter phenomenon with exclusive interview material and a foreword written by Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling...
, and Brad Neely
Brad Neely
Brad Neely is a American comic book artist and television writer/producer known for his work on books such as Wizard People, Dear Reader, I Am Baby Cakes, The Professor Brothers, and China, Illinois, and TV series such as South Park and China, IL.-Personal life:Brad Neely is originally from Fort...
. We Are Wizards had its World Premiere at the SXSW film festival in 2008, then traveled to 20 film festivals worldwide. The film opened theatrically in 5 cities on November 14, 2008. The film can be seen on Netflix, Hulu.com, and DVD.
WiZarDs GoNe W!LD
WiZarDs GoNe W!LD is a documentary due out in 2010 that is based on fandom submissions. The producers Miranda Marshall and Amy Henderson starting accepting video submissions in early March 2009 and plan to accept them through 2010. WiZarDs Gone W!LD is affiliated with the The Fan Book of HP Fans, yet another fandom project based on submissions that has recently extended its submission deadline date.The Wizard Rockumentary
The Wizard Rockumentary: A Movie about Rocking and Rowling is a feature documentary chronicling the rise of Harry Potter tribute bands. Producers Megan and Mallory Schuyler travelled around the United States compiling interviews and concert footage of bands including Harry and the PottersHarry and the Potters
Harry and the Potters are an American alternative rock band known for spawning the genre of wizard rock. Founded in Norwood, Massachusetts, the group is primarily composed of Joe and Paul DeGeorge, who both perform under the persona of the title character from the Harry Potter book series...
, Draco and the Malfoys
Draco and the Malfoys
Draco and the Malfoys are a wizard rock band founded in Woonsocket, Rhode Island in 2004. The group is composed of half-brothers Brian Ross and Bradley Mehlenbacher, who both perform under the persona of Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter book series....
,The Remus Lupins, The Whomping Willow and The Moaning Myrtles. The film was released in April 2008 and has screened in libraries around the country. The producers are currently negotiating broadcast and home video rights.
Books about the fandom
In addition to films about the Harry Potter Fandom a couple books have been recently published on the Fandom Experience.Harry, A History, by Leaky Cauldron Webmistress Melissa Anelli Harry, A History.com and
The Ultimate Guide to the Harry Potter Fandom by Erin Pyne http://www.WhatTheFluxComics.com
http://www.ErinPyne.com