Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of ... - Yuuyami.com

of HP fandom, two significantly. Firstly, Dinah hasn’t read “all the ‘famous’
HP fanfiction out there, and fandom mostly revolves around fanfiction.” This
explanation fascinated me, because, though many slash fans would agree with
Dinah’s notion of fanfiction as the heart of a fandom, it seemed to me that
Dinah’s view of fandom was “fic-centered.” When I asked her to define
fandom to a complete stranger to the concept, she elaborated that she would
first explain what fanfiction is, and then deepen this by clarifying that fandom
was a community revolving around fanfiction “or other things relating to the
books.”
In each slash fandom there are certain “traditional pairings” and their
counterpart “non-traditional pairings.” These traditional pairings are often
either derived from the amount of subtext seen in the source text – in other
words, the two male heroes of a cop-show or the two characters with the most
charged interaction – or according to likelihood and/or aesthetics. An example
for that is given in the Lord of the Rings (2001) where there are fanfics pairing
the elf Legolas with the dwarf Gimli, but the overwhelmingly “traditional”
slash pairing due to aesthetics is that of Legolas with the human Ranger
Aragorn. In the Harry Potter slash fandom two of these traditional pairings
are Harry and Ron, as well as Harry and his enemy Draco, and consequently
the overwhelming part of fanfics are centered around these pairings. Most of
the “famous HP fanfiction” Dinah refers to are Harry/Ron or Harry/Draco,
but since Dinah does not read these pairings, she cannot participate in
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