So, I've been having a lot of fun looking around fictionalley.org, the Harry Potter fan-forum extraordonaire. First off, the thing is HUGE. There's like 5 major foum sections, with subdividing forums like you wouldn't believe, and then within each of those 20 or so, there's multiple pages worth of varying threads. It's like a zoo.
I've been paying attention and sort of absorbing the way the fans behave. The shippers generally make the effort to be nice to each other even if they disagree, and I get the feeling that the place is highly patrolled by mods. Everyone talks about everything, including going into immense detail about little things-- like philosphizing on the motivations of very minor minor characters. People seem to have very strong fanon opinions-- things they think about the characters that aren't mentioned in the book. There seems to be a subtle pressure to look at the characters the way they do, rather than straight from the book. However, there's so many different opinions about everything that nothing is uniform or set in stone.
I did notice something that reminded me of Buffy fandom, especially shipper fanatics. There's this huge sense of entitlement amongst everyone, like they feel JKR owes them their pairing, and this one single line in an 850 page book proves it beyond all doubt. Everyone loves to reach, make connections that seem almost ludicrous they're so threadbare, and yet they get accepted. It's like the feeling I get when I used to visit the Ducks Babble Board (it was my espionage shipper phase.)
Entitlement is something I don't really feel about fandom. For instance, when I started watching Buffy in season 6, I wanted a Spuffy ending. Badly. I really really did. But I never felt like it was *owed* to me. I may have joked about it (in fact I'm fairly sure that I did after Tabula Rasa and OMWF), but the sense of due was not there. So when we got a Spuffy ending I was happy and satisfied, but not feeling like I had collected a debt. The Buffy/Angel forums I visited at verious points last year often went back to the same complaint-- Angel was Buffy's first love, and maybe her soulmate (though wasn't that a fanon idea, NOT a canon statement?) and therefore Joss owed them a B/A ending. I just want to say "What makes you think they owe you anything. They're the creators, not you. You choose to watch of your own accord, so stop complaining." I have come to have a smiliar outlook on Spike. So you think he ought to remain bad and snarky forever, and they ruined your favorite character? Tough. If you can't like the way characters have changed, don't watch.
I pretty much feel that writers don't owe their fans anything. I know lots of people feel differently, but that's really how I see it. It's your work, and they're paying for the right to watch it or read it. Now, let me clarify. They do owe their fans politeness. Celebrities should be polite to their fans, I've always felt. But they owe them nothing in what they create. We often feel great attachments to characters like Tara and Spike, but when it comes down to it, they're not our characters, they're Mutant Enemy's characters. And Joss decides to kill them or write them into a spin-off, that's the way it goes, folks. It's all canon now. If you write a book or make a movie or tv show, it's your project, your creative work. If fans embrace it that's wonderful, but bowing to the demands of your fans means you're not doing it any more, and chances are it will lose that special thing that attracted fans in the first place.
There's a term for that. Sell-out. Doesn't bring positive connotations, does it?
What would I like to see in the rest of the Harry Potter books? I'd like to see Harry/Luna as a pairing. Does the fact that a few possible hints were dropped in OotP mean that she owes it to me? No. It's her books. And more to the point, I want to read the books written by JKR, not by JKR's fans, even myself.
Now, there is one situation in which I almost came close to that entitlement feeling, and that was with The X Files. I did kinda feel that the longer the show lasted, the more Chris Carter was duty-bound to make a Sculder ending. But since I left after middle of season 7, that feeling never really came to the forefront of my fan perspective of the show. In my head Mulder and Scully were soul mates, and it was just happy coincidence that CC brought them together for the ending (which I did take the time to watch, though I didn't understand a lot of it.)
The question of entitlement is a bit different though, when it comes to remaking something or transferring from a book to a film. In that case, the writer/creator isn't original, and therefore he does owe to the original work, and fans have a right to expect that the new work be a good match ot the original that they loved. Since Buffy, the XF, and the HP books are not remakes, it's a moot point.
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