Fan Fiction and Harry Potter

There was a fascinating piece of news published a week or so ago. I stumbled onto it in a link to a site called "Stuff" or, more properly, stuff.co.nz, which means, according to my understanding of these things, that the site is registered in New Zealand.

The gist of the story is that a Harry Potter fan, George Lippert by name, wrote a story involving Harry Potter that takes up after the end of the final book in J.K. Rowling's massively successful seven book Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and then posted his story on his own website.

Now, there's a long underground tradition of what is referred to as "Fan Fiction." Essentially, fans of a given book or movie or TV series use the characters and settings from their favorite, or favorites if they're feeling extra-frisky, and write original adventure stories that fall outside the established (read "published" or "broadcast") canon. In these stories, almost anything can happen from romances to marriages, from wild adventures to cross-species mating. I first heard of this sort of thing in association with the original Star Trek TV series back in the 1960s and I think that may even be where a lot of the ideas for this sort of thing originated since there don't seem to be too many examples that pre-date that time.

The trick with all of this, of course, is that the various media franchises from which these fan writers "borrow" the characters and settings are owned by large media entities who have shown, on occasion, a tendency to be highly litigious in order to protect the value of the properties they control. In a lot of cases, these corporations may be aware of the existence of these unauthorized stories and simply turn a blind eye as long as they don't see the fan writers doing anything ambitious like printing and selling copies of their stories. Think of it as some dirty little secrets that aren't really secret and probably aren't all that dirty either.

The interesting news part, though, is that J.K. Rowling herself has taken a public position and said that she won't be suing anybody who writes Harry Potter stories as long as they don't sell them and as long as they make it clear that Rowling is not herself personally involved in the stories. That's more than a bit of a leap past the point of turning a blind eye and strikes me as, if not revolutionary, at least generous-hearted and benign. From all I've seen over the years, that doesn't surprise me about her but I do tend to wonder what her publishers and her movie production company think about her decisions to say in public what they've only really ever allowed "under the table," so to speak. The photo that leads this story is from that "Stuff" story link and I can't help but think that the smirk in her expression is the result of feeling the power she now has to make large entities smile and do what she wants–and more power to her.

- John