fandom thoughts-- how much do you care about the minor characters?

[timepiececlock]

So, I've been reading and skimming past fanfic in the HP fandom for a few months now, as well as going to the huge general HP forum Fictionalley.org. And something continues to baffle me about HP fandom that I haven't noticed in Bufffy fandom, or the various anime fandoms I'm familiar with. What I'm talking about is the extreme and wide-spread familiarity with the very minor, minor characters of canon.

There are stories I've seen written-- often romance-- about Harry Potter characters that appeared once in the books, or were throw-away names, or had a single line three books ago. Characters whose name I didn't even remember reading, they were so minor. And then you have the people who write fics about Harry's parents as teenagers, characters we know very little about, and only witnessed one real scene of (through Snape's slanted perspective) in the last book. And yet the fanfic authors run with it, inventing wildly different characterizations that eventually combine to turn into a sort of fanon idea of what these people were, that has nothing to do with the actual books or films.

Now, this is not a bad thing. But it is kind of amazing to me. It'd be the Buffy equivalent of writing a 35,000 word romance between the blond girl eating breakfast in Buffy's kitchen in Storyteller and the boy who exploded at school for not getting that foot massage.

You have the main characters in a show (I'm leaving out most of the villians).
In BtVS, that was Buffy, Dawn, Willow, Xander, Spike, Giles, and Anya.
In HP that's Harry, Hermione, and Ron.

Then you have the important sub-characters.
In BtVS that's Tara (arguably a main character), Riley, Robin, Kennedy, Andrew, Faith, Joyce, Oz, Cordelia (she got demoted after season 3);
in HP that's Dumbledore, Sirius, Snape, Draco, Hagrid, Neville, Ginny, the Weasely family, and now Luna.

Then you get into the signficant minor characters that have some role in supporting/definining the other characters or plot.
BtVS: Jonathon, Ethan Rayne, Amy the Rat, Harmony, Drusilla, Halfrek, Ben, Amanda, Rona, Travers, Snyder, Clem, Jenny Calendar, the First Slayer.
For HP: Lupin, Lucius, Crabbe & Goyle, Cho, McGonagall, Trewlaney (sp?), Cedric, Harry's cousin/family, Dobby.
(I know Lupin is a popular character, but he is less significant than Sirius, so I put him on this level for now.)

Then you stat to get into the even more minor characters:
BtVS: Forrest, Graham, Nancy, D'Hoffren, Rack, Doc, Chloe, Cecily, Holden Webster, Jessy, Percy, Olivia, Nikki the NY Slayer, Glory's minions, the Knights.
HP: real!Moody, Tonks, Harry's parents, Moaning Myrtle, Fudge, Viktor, Percy Weasley, what's-his-name that wanders Hogwarts at night with his malicious cat, Umbridge, Headless Nick, the Centaur who becomes a Professor, Peeves, the beetle-lady reporter, Kreature.

Then we get to the one-liner characters, or names we only hear but never see. The ones that make one scene, or one episode. I can't even remember all of those, and I won't try to list them. Yet, they're often characters I seen written about for HP. (I'm sure I forgot some; I'm hardly a connesieur of HP canon)

I wonder why they have so much interest, when they're hardly there? Is it just that they provide a forum for Self-Insertions? Or is it more like writing original fiction, since you have to basically make up the personality/motivations since its not given in the book? Why is there such a wealth of these fics about minor characters in HP fandom, whereas a fandom like Buffy rarely focuses on them? Not that they never do-- there's definitely fics about Ethan Rayne, or Nikki, or the monks who made Dawn. But overall, they're few and far between. What's different about the fandoms?

Comments

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but if you compare them, even Johnathon has more devlopment than Harry's parents (and you can fit a lot of material into both 7 seasons and 5 books), has shown up in many more scenes, and had a lot more dialogue, even for a minor character. The James/Lily thing surprises me because although they're talked about a lot, we've only REALLY seen them the one time. But people write hoards of stuff about them. And about characters even more minor. It just... baffles me.