Fan Fiction For Harry

I was doing a little bit of research.

I found a website with over 16,000 pieces of Harry Potter Harry Potter fanfiction stories. They run the usual fan-fic gamut from earnest sequels to alternate histories, to cross-overs with other characters to romance and, yes, slash (For those unfamiliar with the term, “Slash” is fan-fiction, usually written by women, about homosexual relationships between characters, the earliest fan-fiction usually cited as Kirk-Spock slash).

That’s a whole lotta’ Harry Potter mania.

The reason I was doing this was because I was toying with the idea of writing a counter-argument to what I was complaining about yesterday. It would involves an enormously talented Slytherin girl who is focused, good hearted, and absolutely obsessed with winning the House Cup because there is a reward involved in winning that just might save the life of her dying mother. Over the course of the story, this Slytherin girl would receive encouragement from Snape who would tell her things like, “As you long as you work hard, you’ll win. I don’t think even Dumbledore would play favorites” and she would begin to wake up the gentle side of Draco Malfoy with her earnest belief that if you do what the teachers tell you and trust that they sincerely want to see you succeed, you will.

The end of the story is, of course, that just as she’s on the verge of achieving victory and thinking that she has—legitimately and through endless sacrifice and hard work—managed to score a win for her house. More importantly though, this will save her mother’s life with the magical reward which she couldn’t afford otherwise. Dumbledore cruelly snatches defeat from the jaws of victory by giving all those extra points to Harry and friends, thus condemning this girl’s mother to a slow, painful death. Snape is outraged, Draco swears vengeance, but the girl tries to keep a stiff upper lip about the whole thing. Even when she is brought to a private conversation with Dumbledore afterwards and it is explained to her that “Harry is the best of us. He must win. He must succeed. I’m sorry about your mother, but she’s just not as important as Harry.”

This, at least, would go some ways towards showing that not all the Slytherin kids could not possibly suck, and that perhaps the favoritism bestowed on Harry isn’t as cut and dried as it appeared in the movie. Especially if it led to someone’s—admittedly insignificant, compared to Harry—death.