Dave Brown

I dunno, fanfic is really not a stick i want to use to measure the awesomeness of any particular story.

Yeah, but fanfic is what propelled Harry Potter to the heights it attained. Sad, but true.

Stimulating the imagination of the fans is a surprisingly-good metric of the lasting power of some random franchise. Sure, the original story might be lame (the first Harry Potter story was awful), but if there’s enough other stuff for the fans to latch onto, you might be onto a winner regardless.

Far be it from me to argue against the importance of third-party attention, but: how much of HP’s ascendancy should we really attribute to fan fiction as opposed to just plain fans? The main target market, at least for the first couple books, was children rather younger than most fanfic writers. I think it became a Big Thing because of young kids wanting to read the books, before fanfic got into the picture.

If HP hadn’t been good enough to inspire fan fiction, J. K. Rowling wouldn’t have had to tighten up her game as much as she did by the last book. She knew that there were fans out there who were paying attention to every last detail and writing about them, so she had to make her plot and characters much more three-dimensional as a result.

At the end of the first book, Harry solves a puzzle that he has the knowledge to solve, and (and this is a very very bad thing to do) the reader doesn’t. If she’d kept writing like that, Harry would have been an obscure fantasy character instead of the icon that he turned into.

Funny you should say that she tightened things up by the last book… personally, I found that she got loose and sloppy in the last few and they were in serious need of some editing and work. I also found the cosmology to be pretty much non-existent for a fantasy work of that length, and that character development was also pretty weak. Mythology got some development, but in the end it really made me wonder why I should care about the current generation at all… even without the threat of Voldemort, the parents generation seemed to be developing far better. By the end of the 6th book, I really wanted to read their story, because nothing much was happening with Harry… who, as a Chosen One, pretty much never solves any problem himself… he stumbles into things or is given answers just before he needs them, and in the end he often doesn’t have any clue how he survived until the debriefing when the Deus Ex Machina is explained to him (and sometimes he still doesn’t really understand). Things start out with potential, but then just get washed out by the end. It’s probably a good thing that Harry had established himself as an icon years before the final books (and before the movies that probably are partly responsible for them not getting the care they deserved).

The one real strength of Rowling is in the story construction… she’s always very solid on the basics, hitting the turning points, decent hooks, dropping the key foreshadowing early in each book (making it very easy to tell who’s going to die). That, at least, doesn’t change… she manages to hit every check point to make Harry into an epic hero, including the trip to the underworld. Although, I suppose that sweeping Quidditch under the carpet in the later books is also a sign of improving something that was horribly designed from the start.

And the logic puzzle (solved by Hermione, because Harry can’t do anything… probably the source of his appeal, he’s like George W Bush, but he isn’t faking ignorance) is solvable with the information given to a satisfactory level. You can work out where the back potion is exactly, and that the forward must be the largest or smallest and must be in position 3 or 4 (and that the one in the other position cannot be the smallest or largest because it must be poison). That not only tells you that the solution is obvious to a person who can see the bottles, but that the solution is completely unambiguous. That’s good enough for me, because I used to do logic puzzles that worked in this “Encyclopedia Brown” format of “How can X know the answer?” instead of “What is the answer?” all the time.