Harry Potter fandom
The Harry Potter fandom is the community of fans of the Harry Potter books and films who participate in entertainment activities that revolve around the series, such as reading and writing fan fiction, creating and soliciting fan art, engaging in role-playing games, socialising on Harry Potter-based forums, and more. The fandom interacts online as well as offline through activities such as fan conventions, participating in cosplay, 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 fans had grown so large that considerable security measures were taken to ensure that no copy of the book was leaked before the official release date. Harry Potter is considered one of the few four-quadrant, multi-generation spanning franchises that exist today, despite Rowling's original marketing of the books to tweens and teens.
Pottermania
Pottermania is an informal term first used around 1999 describing the craze Harry Potter 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 listed the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as one of "Entertainment's Top Moments" of the previous 25 years.Diehard fans of the series are called "Potterheads". Some even theme their weddings around Harry Potter. A Bridal Guide featured two real weddings soon before the release of the final film, which quickly spread through the fandom via Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.
The craze over the series was referenced in Lauren Weisberger's 2003 novel The Devil Wears Prada as well as its 2006 film adaptation. In the story, the protagonist Andrea Sachs is ordered to retrieve two copies of the next instalment 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.
Some celebrity fans of Harry Potter include Lily Allen, Guillermo del Toro, Ariana Grande, Stephen King, Keira Knightley, Jennifer Lawrence, Evanna Lynch, Barack Obama, Simon Pegg, ASAP Rocky, Seth Rogen, Matt Smith, Jeremy Davis, Kellan Lutz, and Margot Robbie. Robert Pattinson said of the series, "Harry Potter was what made me become an actor. I credit Harry Potter with everything else that's come since for me. I didn't know what I was doing before that."
Fan sites
There are many fan web sites about Harry Potter on the Internet, the oldest ones dating to about 1997 or 1998. One of the most famous sites allows fans of the book an opportunity to be sorted into a house themselves. 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 Black, 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 honour 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, 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, 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, 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 was honoured. 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 "favourite fan site." In 2006, the Brazilian website Potterish was the only site honoured, in recognition of its "style, Potter-expertise and responsible reporting."
In May 2007, Harry Potter Fan Zone 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 magazine, Rowling expressed her gratefulness at the site's successful work raising awareness and sign-up levels among anti-genocide coalitions.
At one time, Warner Bros., 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, 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 or fan fiction.
Podcasts
The Harry Potter fandom has embraced podcasts as a regular, often weekly, insight to the latest discussion in the fandom. Apple Inc. has featured two of the podcasts, MuggleCast and PotterCast. Both have reached the top spot of iTunes 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 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, 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 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. MuggleCast is currently the highest-rated Harry Potter podcast on the Internet.
PotterCast was released less than two weeks after MuggleCast's first episode. Produced by The Leaky Cauldron, 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 Potter podcast to produce regular interviews with people directly involved with the books and films. The first show featured interviews with Stuart Craig, art director of the films, as well as Bonnie Wright, who plays Ginny Weasley. PotterCast has also interviewed Matthew Lewis, Evanna Lynch, Jamie Waylett, Rupert Grint, Chris Columbus, Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, Arthur A. Levine and Cheryl Klein, and Rowling herself.
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, Las Vegas, and California. From time to time, hosts on one podcast will appear on their counterpart.
Other notable Harry Potter podcasts include:
- Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, in which the books are read as if they were a religious text;
- Witch Please, which looks at the books through a feminist lens;
- Potterotica, in which actors read Harry Potter fan fiction aloud;
- Potterless, a comedy podcast in which an adult man reads the books for the first time and tries to predict future plot points;
Fan fiction
A well-known work of fan fiction is The Shoebox Project, created by two LiveJournal users. Over 8500 people subscribed to the story so that they would be alerted when new posts update the story. The authors' works, including this project, were featured in an article in The Wall Street Journal discussing the growth in popularity of fandoms.
The current most reviewed piece of fan fiction, with over 40,000 reviews, is All The Young Dudes by Archive of our Own user MsKingBean89. The work is the most-viewed piece of fan fiction on Archive of Our Own, with over 16,000,000 hits.
In 2006, the "popular 'bad' fanfic" My Immortal was posted on FanFiction.Net 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 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 eventual approval from Rowling herself.
In 2025 the novel Alchemised by SenLinYu based on their fan fiction story imagining a relationship between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy was set to be published by Penguin Books with the film rights purchased by Legendary Entertainment.
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 or Anne Rice 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 letters to sites that host adult material.
Potter fan fiction has a large following in the slash fiction genre, stories which feature sexual relationships that do not exist in the books, often portraying homosexual pairings. Famous pairings include Harry with Draco Malfoy or Cedric Diggory, and Remus Lupin with Sirius Black. Harry Potter slash has eroded some of the antipathy towards underage sexuality in the wider slash fandom.
Tracey "T" Proctor, a moderator of FictionAlley.org, a Harry Potter fan fiction website, said 'I don't really get into the children's aspect of it, but rather the teachers, the adult characters. I read someone once who said, "If she didn't want us fantasizing about her characters, she needs to stop having these handsome men portraying them." And that's the truth: It's very hard not to look at Alan Rickman and Jason Isaacs and not get erotic thoughts. I have some fan fiction at Fiction Alley. You want to write stories about the characters that J.K. is not writing, about their love lives that you don't see in the book.'
In November 2006, Jason Isaacs, who played 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."