The gateway fandom
always
“Harry Potter is like the gateway fandom. You start reading the books, and then all of a sudden, you have a Sonic Screwdriver, you’re carrying salt everywhere and awkwardly in love with Sherlock Holmes and you don’t really know how any of it happened, but you’re pretty sure it started because Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Dursley of 4 Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal thank you very much.” - found on tumblr
My first experience with fan fic was Harry Potter (Hermione / Snape, to be exact) and I have to admit, it was pretty upsetting. I decided that fan fic - while an absolutely fascinating concept - was just not for me. The pairings were weird, the settings were weird, it was just… weird. I felt dirty reading it.
Fast forward about six years or so, and I’m sitting in a room in a Boston hotel where a teenaged girl is obsessing over a thing she posted on some website called ‘tumblr’ that was getting hits in the high five figures.
(Draco Malfoy attended Fred Weasley’s funeral. He stood in the far back, careful not to be seen, and after he thought everyone had left, he lingered a bit. He’d never let on that he secretly thought the twins were quite funny, and he was truly sorry he’d been part of the reason that Fred died. He felt that way in regards to everyone that had been hurt and lost in the war, but he could barely get up the courage to go to Fred’s funeral, let alone anyone else’s. Draco would never tell anyone he was there, and George would never tell anyone he saw him cry, apologizing to a headstone.)
And… BOOM!
I became curious about fan fiction again, curious about tumblr, and life as I knew it would never be the same.
I never thought that everything would come full circle and I’d come back to Harry Potter fan fic.
But I did.
All that to say, I posted the first chapter of my quick little Drarry fic (the Draco POV version) on AO3 a few hours ago.
Commence freak out.