eating cucumbers without permission...

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” was a pleasant surprise after the awful disappointment that was books four and five; it’s nice to see the series redeemed somewhat. I take issue with parts of it, but the relief at not needing to fight off waves of drowsiness was sufficient compensation. A year ago, that’s where my interest would have ended; now, the Harry Potter fandom is a not-insignificant part of my life, and I’m burning with curiosity over the effects it’s going to have, on the fandom in general and on the fanfiction in particular. And worry, for that matter, since there’s a fair chance the book is going to throttle it.

At this point, a note: this entry contains spoilers. “Spoilers” as in major “will give away the entire novel” spoilers. If this concerns you, stop reading now.

The Harry Potter fandom is very large, and very diverse — fans from every background, with every proclivity and fetish, exploring every possibility or tangent. But in some ways, I think, it’s also very fragile.

There’s a feature in this month’s Wired, including an essay by William Gibson, on the rise of remixes, fusions, cutups, mashups, mods — “recombinant” culture, culture co-opted by the people and spun back out, mutated in ways never forseen by the original author.

Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today’s audience isn’t listening at all - it’s participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.

And this is fanfiction. It’s about active response to a text — about building on it, adding to it, changing it. It’s about exploring the open spaces: as sequels, like the multitude of sixth-year “Order of the Phoenix” continuations; as prequels, like Lily/James romances set in 1975; in “off-camera” moments, featuring minor or original characters, filling in the background details of events in the originals; and as alternate universes, asking “what if, what if things had gone just a little differently?”

The problem is that only with the last of these, the alternate universe, are authors free to use and abuse as much, or as little, of the original as they choose. For authors who see themselves as extrapolating from the canon, their freedom is proportional to the lack of detail in the originals. Intriguing hints provide inspiration and guidelines, but too much detail and there’s no scope for creativity. The absence of romance, for example, has given writers the freedom to pair characters off at will. Vanilla pairings like Harry/Hermione, Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny are very popular, but so too are Harry/Draco and Hermione/Snape. They’re improbable, but not impossible, because there’s nothing to explicitly contradict them. There are stories for almost every possible couple, though some of the most unusual — like that secret lust between Dobby and the Sorting Hat — are deliberately unlikely, satirizing other fans’ obsession with bizarre relationships.

Fans of Sirius Black were understandably distressed when the character died at the end of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”, yet there are surprisingly few stories written in which he is still alive. The most common solution involves somehow retrieving him from beyond the veil, which is certainly no direct contradiction — the concept of magic is amazingly versatile, and it has proven trivial to write plausible accounts of his recovery. The relative lack of these stories seems to be out of a desire to avoid violating the spirit of the canon, and because it feels rather cheap — it’s barely a step up from announcing, “Dallas”-like, that the previous book was really just a dream. As a result, I’ve read one fan of the Harry/Sirius pairing complain that post-”Order of the Phoenix” Sirius stories are simply “impossible”. This is not the attitude of someone who has claimed the source material to use as they see fit — it is the attitude of someone who is deliberately marginalizing her own creative impulse.

If fanfiction is like scribbling in the margins, it’s just lucky that the margins, up until now, were so very large. With “Half-Blood Prince”, writers of Harry Potter fanfiction are limited in ways they’ve never been before.

Harry/Ginny, Lupin/Tonks, and Ron/Hermione are now canonical relationships. Personally, I hate that she’s made official three of the pairings I hate above all others, and done it in such a cackhanded, clumsy way; for the really obsessed, though, this is having part of their self-identity torn apart. Writing other pairings, unless in alternate universes, has become astronomically more difficult. We’ll undoubtedly see many, many stories in which one of the official couples has a horrible breakup, leading — of course! — to the One True Pairing, whichever is favoured by that particular author. But I think there will be just as many that will never be written.

Snape and Draco have been working for the Dark Lord, so — at the very least — neither can credibly return as teacher or student at Hogwarts. Either can be credibly sympathetic, but there’ll be no more erotic Hermione/Snape detention or Draco/Ginny snogging in the library. There’s a popular subgenre of stories featuring Harry and Snape in a father/son or mentor/student relationship (see “A Year Like None Other“, “Resonance“); it’s a little hard to imagine any more of them set as sequels.

Fleshing out Tom Riddle’s backstory was ruinous for all the stories expanding on his past.

Dumbledore is dead, and amusing as Zombledore stories might be — “Braaaaaains! Leeeemon drooopppp?” — he’ll be a little harder to write. And there’s no more Dumbledore/McGonagall wrinkly romance.

Most importantly, I think, the revelation of the Horcruxes has locked in the plot for most sequels. “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” suggested that Voldemort was actively looking for a means to immortality, be it unicorn blood or the Philosopher’s Stone; now we know that he already had one. There can be no more speculation about artifacts of power, strange rituals or otherworldly pacts. There’s nothing for Harry to do but find the remaining Horcruxes and destroy them. This particular plot point casts its shadow across alternate universes too, because any non-Horcrux universe needs to diverge twenty years before Harry was born.

Maybe I’m worrying unnecessarily. If the variety of extant fanfiction has taught me nothing else, after all, it’s that fan creativity shouldn’t be underestimated. Already there are people talking about rewriting “Half-Blood Prince”, presumably with surgical excision of unwanted elements, and I’ve read dozens of reasons why it’s perfectly consistent with the book to break up all of those couples. The series is winding down, though, and its universe is shrinking. The fandom isn’t dead, and might never be, but there’s nowhere to go from here but down.