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Rec of the day goes meta
Taking a short break from reccing fic to point to this article in Time Magazine which is making the rounds:
The Boy Who Lived Forever by Lev Grossman
A mainstream article about fan fiction that finally gets it right! Balanced, entertaining, informative, at no point did I cringe or feel the urge to protest. The article does away with many of those pesky common misconceptions about fic, shows both the fans' and the creators' point of view, talks a little about the legalities, but most importantly the motivation behind writing fic, the joy of creating and playing in an established universe, really come across. None of that "it's like training wheels until they become real writers".
Lev came to LJ last week to interview fic writers to get firsthand accounts and quotes for the article. (Revolutionary new approach - to get an idea about what fanfic is, talk to actual fanfic writers and readers!) He seemed sincere and determined to get it right, but after reading article after article that made me want to bang my head against the keyboard I was still a little sceptical. But he really pulled it off, gotta say. Great job.
The interview questions are still up at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
lg_interview; lots of interesting answers. It's a closed comm but you can read the posts once you join.
btw...
Imagine how Harry Potter's story would have played out if on his first day at Hogwarts he'd been sorted into Slytherin instead of Gryffindor.
I'd read that scenario. Can anybody rec me a fic like that? (gen preferably, plotty, not interested in a shippy exploration)
The Boy Who Lived Forever by Lev Grossman
A mainstream article about fan fiction that finally gets it right! Balanced, entertaining, informative, at no point did I cringe or feel the urge to protest. The article does away with many of those pesky common misconceptions about fic, shows both the fans' and the creators' point of view, talks a little about the legalities, but most importantly the motivation behind writing fic, the joy of creating and playing in an established universe, really come across. None of that "it's like training wheels until they become real writers".
Lev came to LJ last week to interview fic writers to get firsthand accounts and quotes for the article. (Revolutionary new approach - to get an idea about what fanfic is, talk to actual fanfic writers and readers!) He seemed sincere and determined to get it right, but after reading article after article that made me want to bang my head against the keyboard I was still a little sceptical. But he really pulled it off, gotta say. Great job.
The interview questions are still up at
lg_interview; lots of interesting answers. It's a closed comm but you can read the posts once you join.btw...
Imagine how Harry Potter's story would have played out if on his first day at Hogwarts he'd been sorted into Slytherin instead of Gryffindor.
I'd read that scenario. Can anybody rec me a fic like that? (gen preferably, plotty, not interested in a shippy exploration)
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http://painless-j.net/blog/2007/11/15/themed-list-sorting-aus-by-character/
(it marks stories she liked, but she's a slash fan)
but the gen Snape & Harry archive has its own section for the genre too, so there are many gen ones around. Unfortunately most aren't very good.
I looked at my AU recs, and most of the Slytherin!Harry stories I enjoyed were slash. My favorite is hands down the Two Households series by Martha which is unusual in that it is Harry/Ron with Slytherin!Harry, it does have plot besides the romance:
http://bestmate.quillandink.org/fiction/viewstory.php?sid=216
The gen one that might be closest to what you are looking for is probably Stealing Harry by Sam Vines, though it diverges earlier in that Sirius and Remus rescue Harry from the Dursleys earlier, but once he starts school he's in Slytherin:
http://sam-storyteller.dreamwidth.org/tag/stealing+harryverse
(ETA: Actually the Stealing Harry universe has the background pairing Sirius/Remus, so depending on the purity of the definition it might not be counted as strictly gen, but they appear just in the way parents show up in children's stories.)
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Background Sirius/Remus is fine. I just don't want a story focused on Harry/Draco or Harry/Snape because I'm not interested in either of those pairings and I can imagine they are particulary popular in that kind of AU.
Thanks for the recs!
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http://archiveofourown.org/works/205899/chapters/305999
(stumbled across another rec on the way and it sounds very promising indeed.)
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http://lameos-maximus.livejournal.com/20786.html
Power, by Gatewaygirl, which is basically H/D after quidditch sex, but with interesting glimpses of a Slytherin!Harry backstory:
http://www.the-archive.net/viewstory.php?sid=2615
and then for the truly epic (like well over three million words or so in seven parts) there is the Sacrifices universe by Lightning Wave. Its premise sounds like complete wacky badfic (the author says it was written in an attempt to make the those cliches work, i.e. "Slytherin!Harry, Harry and Draco as best friends becoming lovers, Harry having a twin sibling who is thought to have defeated Voldemort, and Snape as Harry's mentor"), and I would not recommend it to someone who reads for strict canon characterization (in particular I had problems with Dumbledore and Lily here), but it really worked for me as entertainment, and not in a trainwreck sense, but by completely hooking me. I mean I stuck with it for millions of words, and practically lost some days, because I couldn't put it down easily (which is a problem at that length), and then I read the last part while it was still a WIP, waiting for updates. I really liked the things it did with magic, too:
http://archive.skyehawke.com/authors.php?no=1324
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Good quote:
"We don't own nonfictional people," Maltese says, "and at the end of the day, I don't think we can own fictional ones either."
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