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Potter and the gay fantasy
31/08/2005 11:39 - (SA)
New York - As Harry Potter fans speculate what still lies in store for the world's favourite boy wizard, few envisage him leaving Hogwarts and settling into a committed gay relationship with arch foe Draco Malfoy.
But some do.
"Draco's breath is warm against his neck, his body gradually relaxing as Harry holds him, refusing to let go, and Harry discovers this is the most comfortable he's ever been in his entire life."
Welcome to fan fiction, or "fanfic" - stories, millions of them, that people write about their favourite characters from literature, television and film, and then post online.
An old 'trend'
Fanfic has been around for three decades in one form or another, but it is only in recent years with the rise of the internet that it has emerged as a literary sub-genre with global appeal.
The largest repository on the web is at fanfiction.net which boasts an archive of well over one million stories about every imaginable fictional character, from Hamlet to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Most popular are the Harry Potter fanfics, which number more than 200 000 and range in ambition from a snippet of imagined conversation between two minor characters to complex, novel-length adventures divided into cliff-hanging chapters.
"For most people, I think, it's just about the excitement of writing something, having it read and getting the feedback from the online reviewers," said Jennie Levine, 33, a librarian at the University of Maryland.
A launch pad for aspiring writers
The major attraction of fanfic is that it presents aspiring writers with a ready-made fictional universe, complete with defined characters.
"It makes for a good starting point," said Levine. "We also hope it would be a springboard for people to eventually write their own original stories."
A large number of fanfic writers are "shippers", so called because they specialise in developing romantic liaisons between their favourite characters.
"As long as it's well written, I'll post it," said Vikki Dolenga who set up the adult-themed Potter fanfic site, Restrictedsection.org, in 2002.
Dangerous liaisons
A large number of submissions to the site fall into the category of "slash" fanfic - so called because it explores homosexual pairings of traditionally straight characters, such as Harry and Draco.
Slash has it origins in fanfics written in the mid-1970s that imagined breathless couplings between Captain Kirk and Mr Spock from the iconic Star Trek series.
With content ranging from unfulfilled homoerotic yearnings to the sexually explicit, slash writing is, perhaps surprisingly, dominated by straight women writers.
The growing, internet-generated popularity of fanfic has attracted mixed reactions from the original authors of the works being co-opted.
Potter creator JK Rowling and her publishers have adopted a more conciliatory approach, objecting only to fanfic that is sexually explicit, violent or profane.
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South Africa
