The Harry Potter fandom has a wealth of creative material—Harry and the Potters, the band; A Very Potter Musical, the stage show; Leakycon, a full-on convention for just the series, and only one of its kind; and, of course, the plethora of cosplayers, writers, and artists who have contributed their talents in service of the series. What all of these things have in common is their departure from canon—that is, they may take the setting or characters Rowling created, but insert them into completely different contexts and storylines.
In my experience, out of all the fandoms I’ve seen, the transformative aspect of Harry Potter fan culture is unparalleled. The most popular relationship that fans write about, for example, is Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy—an idea that anyone who has read the books (including those who ship Harry and Draco) would likely agree is fairly far-fetched. This fact, however, has little bearing on fandom interpretation, and it stretches beyond the “Drarry” phenomenon as well; very little of the fan-created works follow Rowling’s actual series, at least when it comes to character relationships and characterization itself.
One possible reason for this could be the diversity of the Harry Potter fandom; the books and films gained international popularity to an extent that not many series had been able to do until them or have been able to do since. Harry Potter was (and still is, somehow) known and loved by people from different racial backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, and belief systems. It is fairly understandable, then, that the minorities of society—people of color, non cishet people, people with mental illnesses, etc.---would be interested in taking characters they love and shaping them to fit aspects of their lived experience. Though the “Drarry” shippers do have members that are only interested in fetishizing gay male relationships, there is no shortage of LGBT people who also engaged with the concept; it’s actually a fairly popular notion that a gay man’s first experience with “gay media” could have been Drarry fanfiction. Another popular headcanon that goes rather directly against canon is that of Harry Potter being an Indian person, and of course there is also the idea of Hermione as black that we discussed in class.
The fact of Harry Potter’s diverse fanbase, then, in relation to the relative non-diversity of the actual series (the single Asian character is named Cho Chang? Really?) plays a definitive and rather obvious role in the transformative works that get created for the series. People like to see themselves in their favorite stories, and if those stories deny them that, then they must take that responsibility into their own hands.
Perhaps this is one reason Rowling is trying to retro-actively write her books; perhaps she realized that they were popular with people outside of her own (white, British, cisgender, heterosexual, abled, neurotypical) social sphere and felt the need to cater to them in some way. It feels a bit tokenistic, though; she’s able to say that her world is diverse without actually putting in the effort to make it that way. In my opinion, the work of the fans has far more value in terms of good representation that Rowling’s half-baked, unfinished, late attempts at the same thing.
I think your evaluation of the fandom reaction to Harry Potter is interesting (and accurate, as far as I’ve seen in my limited experience.) The transformative nature of the fandom really pales in comparison to how non-fandom readers responded to it, which more followed the nature of a general reader of any book—accepting everything the author gives you as fact, and not often venturing beyond those ideas.
ReplyDeleteThis lack of exploration into the characters of Rowling’s world led to some extreme reactions when Hermione, as you mentioned briefly here, was played by a black woman in the Cursed Child stage show. Many people were aghast at the idea, so set in their belief that Hermione could be nothing but Emma Watson’s white depiction of her.
A lot of this comes from Rowling’s writing—like you said, she gave readers no reason to believe that the characters in her book would be anything besides white, so the idea of them being that feels ‘wrong’ to people who have read the books and spent the whole time imagining that the characters were white. The readers are not so much at fault as Rowling for assuming that the characters are white—as readers, most pop culture depictions of any character are white. It’s considered a basic default assumption that characters are white. For a character to be written as non-white, they would need to be clearly written that way, something Rowling fails to do.