Harry Potter Fanfic

[thistlechaser]

I have some unexpected time off from work, and I fell into reading some old Harry Potter fanfic. And when I say old, I mean it.



I have no interest in the canon anymore, but there's so much good fanfic out there. My rec page was last updated in 2003 (heh...), so nearly all the links are broken, but some stories have been reposted elsewhere.

I wonder what happened to the authors though. Some I had been close with, and some I only knew in passing. I just finished one of my old favorites When We Were Gone Astray by Malecrit. I remember speaking in comments to her (him?) 20 or so years ago. I wonder what they're doing now.

isiscolo I have stories listed from you on Geocities (heh!), thedarkarts.org, and isis.arithmancy.net. At least there's AO3, hopefully that will stay online for a good long time.

loupnoir, yours are on my old page, too (also from when they were on thedarkarts.org).

I should probably venture out and try new stories instead of reading all of my old favorite ones.

Comments

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Hee! I didn't actually know I had anything on Geocities or thedarkarts.org. I know Ink Stained Fingers got imported to AO3, and as far as I know Skyhawke is still around - I think I posted a few things to FictionAlley also, but those are the only fic sites I recall using.

My old arithmancy site, hee, that's been gone for at least 15 years now. It got replaced by hieroglyfics.org, which then I got tired of maintaining, but I moved all my fic over to AO3 before letting that go (in 2014). Really the saddest thing about that is the loss of my recs site, but by the time I dropped the site I hadn't updated it since 2009 and most of the links were dead anyway.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

I still have my website, but every year it's a hard decision to keep it. Hosting prices keep going up, and I use it for so little. I didn't so much as choose to renew this year, instead purposefully put off deciding until auto-renew just happened.

> Really the saddest thing about that is the loss of my recs site, but by the time I dropped the site I hadn't updated it since 2009 and most of the links were dead anyway.

Yeah, that's what happened with mine, too. Some things I can google and find elsewhere, but sadly a lot of fic is just gone.

[jeane nevarez (from livejournal.com)]

I still have not read any fanfic at all, but your sense of loss here makes me think of how sad I am when I find that books bloggers I used to follow back in the day, have quietly dropped off and don't post anymore. Some I didn't realize until weeks or months after they'd gone silent, and I still wonder what happened, where have they gone, did they just get tired of it? And twenty years! Wow. It's hard to believe so much time has gone by. When HP first came out, I was in college. It doesn't feel that long ago, but it really was.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Agreed, it doesn't feel like that long ago, but it really was.

While I love the way we can make so many friends online, the "vanishing without a trace" thing is unique to this. If a friend you knew RL vanished, you'd go to the police! But online, it's sadly common place.

[jeane nevarez (from livejournal.com)]

So true. Makes me realize how little I actually know the people I think of as my "online friends", if I have no way to contact them, or don't know any of their other friends to reach out to, when they disappear.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Yep. I'd never ask for an online friend's phone number, because to me that would be crossing a line. But the other side of that coin is no way to contact them if they vanish...

[jeane nevarez (from livejournal.com)]

Exactly

[loup_noir]

Every now and again, I Google my author name and Durmstrang to see where my stories have ended. All over the place, that's where. I was really surprised to see how many places FA and its daughter sites have been replicated. Someone contacted me last year or so to let me know that there was a migration from the FA sites to an archive of our own, but that doesn't seem to have happened. Probably for the best, as there's another loupnoir there.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Hopefully they would have just made you loupnoir2 or something.

As long as it doesn't bother the authors, I'm glad old fanfics are being saved elsewhere. It's such a sad thing to lose good writing! The same thing with pre-ebook books. They vanish and that's it, gone forever.