Unpopular Opinion Time
I’m really tired of seeing that post going around claiming that JKR transformed the fanfiction landscape for fans. I’m particularly rolling my eyes at people using Anne Rice as an example of “how it used to be” before JKR “liberated fandom.”
The internet liberated fandom.
The internet also turned Anne Rice into a laughingstock.
Anne Rice got in arguments with amazon reviewers who left critical reviews on her books – she wrote lengthy hubristic screeds. She sued fanfiction writers. Her anti-fan attitude reached new heights after her divorce. She fired her editor.
Anne Rice treated her fans poorly, and she looked “hysterical” and “unhinged” doing it. The public chalked her behavior up to her having a midlife crisis, or a nervous breakdown.
We give JKR too much credit for making supporting fanfiction a cool thing to do. And we don’t give Anne Rice enough credit for making terrorizing fanwriters an uncool thing to do.
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I hear older fans say that fandom “forgot what it was like” in the days of Anne Rice.
But Anne Rice wasn’t just ‘forgotten’ was she? No. She was deliberately and systematically discredited and erased.
By fandom.
.
Stop talking like JKR did fandom some big favor by supporting fanfiction. Supporting fanfiction was lucrative for her. Supporting fandom always did more to benefit JKR than it did to benefit fandom.
Stephanie Meyer similarly treated her fanwriters well because it was the financially intelligent move.
Because the whole internet saw what happened to Anne Rice. Because Anne Rice showed authors that there are consequences to disrespecting your fanbase.
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Do you know why authors today are so nice to fanfiction writers? Because the ones who aren’t get punished, just like Anne Rice was punished.
Because being mean to fanwriters, in this day an age, is CAREER SUICIDE.
JKR didn’t change the rules. Fandom did. The internet did. The internet gave fandom a voice. The internet made that voice loud. So loud that it drowned out the voices of individual authors. So loud that authors became beholden to their fans in a way they had never been before.
So I’m getting real sick of seeing that post going around claiming “if it weren’t for JKR we wouldn’t have AO3″
JKR didn’t create modern fandom.
Modern fandom created authors like JKR.
I think good ol’ Anne was laughed at well before it had anything to do with fanfic though. There was that incident involving the abandoned building getting bought and made into a tacky restaurant… so she took out ads in the local paper in the persona of Lestat because… IDK… Because Anne Rice.
The big change I remember with HP was that it was a book megafandom even before there were movies. I recall that JKR was kind of against porny fanfic at one point, but the fanbase was much too large and too full of horny teenagers to give a shit. (Did the writer of that other post forget this? I distinctly remember people thumbing their nose at “No dirty fic” or “No dirty fic in public” or whatever her reaction was way back when.)
When I talk to oldschool fans who were writing fic in the 1980s and before, they often see a huge gap between a book fandom and a tv/movie fandom. Younger fans rarely see a sharp division. I think HP contributed a lot to that shift.
But yeah: the internet is what created modern fanfic fandom. It is no longer possible to force a zine publisher to hand over every copy of their zine for destruction.
HP got big right around the time that big, public fanfic archives were a thing, and it had some great organizers who were already experienced in other fandoms and new how to build great websites. That contributed to its fanfic fandom’s culture as much as anything JKR did. One effect was that a number of those sites were full of slash and porn and whatever else fans wanted to post. Some of the earlier megafandoms would have a more public het or gen presence but lock down the slash and maybe the more explicit het stuff too.
FictionAlley’s existence probably contributed a bit to the founding of OTW, but JKR being mildly pro-fic? Pfft!