Harry Potter

[ladysophiekitty]

Not sure how done I am with Harry Potter in general because a part of me will always treasure it and love it but:

As of this moment, I am DONE with the HPFF forums. DONE! (well okay, I might still play at the arcade, but that's it.)

Most of the awesome people have left, so what's mostly left are fucking idiotic brown nosing bastards. While this isn't the cause of me signing off, I am sick of the Harry/Hermione thread being full of people who basically go "OMG EWWW HHR IT'S LIKE INCEST RHR FTW I CAN'T SEE HHR HAPPENING AT ALL EVEN JKR SAID SO!!!!!!!" It also doesn't help that I am a Harry/Hermione loving HBP and DH and Twilight hating person while everyone else are Harry/Hermione hating DH and HBP Ron/Hermione Harry/Ginny Twilight loving people.

Sure, there are a lot of asshole Harry/Hermione shippers out there. Our ship often has a bad name because of them. And yet for some reason, I feel so fiercly protective of them, too. It's because I tend to feel over-protective over ships that get a hard time in fanon/canon. I feel the same exact way about Angel/Cordelia.

Another thing?  Phillip Pullman had a lovely quote about this that I can't find, but an author only has a certain amount of control over their work. Once it leaves their hands, it is free for people to interpret it in different ways. J.K. Rowling might have meant for Draco Malfoy to be a character everyone hates, but there are many MANY people out there who love him. It doesn't mean that they are wrong or that she's wrong. What you take out of a book or a movie or a TV show or a CD is going to be different than what I take out of it. It doesn't mean that I'm wrong or you're wrong.

ETA-this site is one of many sites that makes me pissed off and I sometimes (very rarely but on occasion) take it out on the fandom/author/other people. I apologize if this was ever the case for you. I really don't hate J.K. Rowling or the first 5 books or anything else I might have said at one point or another. I just feel frustrated sometimes at various parts of the fandom, and since I don't usually have a place to put that frustration, it comes out in the worst way possible.

Comments

[avidbeader.livejournal.com]

Not sure if this is the quote you mean. I think there's another that says the same thing a little more succinctly.

"The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter."

I can understand. I don't think I ever braved HPFF, but it was hard enough dealing with snotty canon-thumpers at places like emmawatson.net, where they'd invade and make nasty comments on the H/Hr thread and take quotes back to their threads to dissect and whine about. I think the only place that the mods managed to make everyone play nice was the boards at Fiction Alley. And even there the H/Hr threads have died off since so many of us have retreated to other places or just moved into new fandoms.

[accordingtomel.livejournal.com]

Well, here's the thing for me. Everyone has the shows that they love and the fandoms they are a part of for a reason. But pretty much everyone also eventually leaves said fandom for one reason or another. So really, you're entitled to have your opinions about why you're done with Harry Potter and I don't think you should apologize for that :). Plus, I never got the impression at all that you were being rude or insulting to anyone with that post.

So yeah...you have your reasons, and as far as I'm concerned - that's good enough! Doesn't matter if people agree with them or not, as long as you feel okay about the decision to leave the fandom *hugs* :)

[iamtheliquorr.livejournal.com]

So you and HPFF are fucking done professionally? (Sorry, Bale Out will just never stop being funny).

HP fandom is strange in how canon-obsessed they are. It was weird coming into that from the Buffy fandom where pretty much anything goes. Sure, there were ship wars, but the big pairings (B/A, C/A, B/S) were all canon at some point, so you didn't have anyone flailing about UR WATCHING IT WRONG!

And I've always been of the opinion that JKR tries entirely too hard to have complete control over her work and how fans interpret it. There's a point when you have to let go and realize readers are going to take what they will from your work, and whether it's what you wanted them to see or not, your job as a writer is done. But then, I'd probably the kind of writer who'd love ship wars and purposely write in a way to stir them up, rather than calling half my readership wrong or something. And I'd delight in creating a morally ambiguous character and watching the fandom fight over whether or not he (cos it's always a he) is a woobie or an evil bastard. And then I'd cackle evilly and crack my knuckles. But um, yeah, part of the beauty of literature is all the different interpretations you can take from one work. If authorial intent were the final word--if zombie!Shakespeare could burst into a ninth-grade English class and say definitively, "No, this is what I meant, you illiterate bastards!"--then an entire area of study would cease to exist, and seeing as that's my major, would I ever be up shit creek without a paddle.

[kairimagic.livejournal.com]

Hey, I don't blame you. The site admins piss me off to no end (they banned me from their RPG forum because I suggested something the admins change about their rules. How dare I suggest there was something wrong with their site?!). As for the Harry/Hermione bashers...don't let them bother you. I'm a R/Hr H/G person myself, but I learned a long time ago that you can't let what other people say about it bother you too much. 75% of the internet is made up of idiots, anyway.

[mist-shadow.livejournal.com]

I didn't realise you were THAT into the ship that you'd let silly comments bother you this much. Though, to be honest, I've never been enough of a shipper to ever be that involved in a single ship. But people do have to remember to respect other people's opinions. A person can dislike or like a certain ship, but one doesn't have to bash everyone else's because it doesn't agree with one's opinion. :(

It's sad you have to go, but if you're not enjoying it, then there's no point in trying to make you stay. I actually think that things have improved there from two years ago, but oh well. At least I'll still see you on LJ. ^_^

[woahpip.livejournal.com]

People just suck ass. They need to learn that different people interpret things in different ways. Not everyone ships canon, duh!
Grrrrrr. Canon sometimes really sucks anyway. And if you're through with a fandom, I'm sorry people have driven you to that point.

At least you can now go spread your beautiful writing with a fandom that doesn't suck so hard.

;D