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edenfallingThis is the first fanfiction story I ever wrote.
I discovered fanfiction in February, 2002, when I was going through one of my periodic depressions. I can't remember anymore exactly how I found the first stories, but I think it involved a magazine article decrying the sexualization of HP characters, and Cassie Claire's LotR "Very Secret Diaries." Anyway, I started reading HP fanfiction.
After a few months, I noticed that I was mostly reading Harry/Hermione stories. I wondered if that was a genuine preference, or if I was simply being lazy, and I decided to investigate some Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny archives. One of those was the now-defunct Gryffindor Tower site, dedicated to H/G. And while that site hosted some good stories, most of them were horrible. They were tacky. They were cutesy. They were trite. They were riddled with inbred, self-referential tropes -- sock-stealing, anyone? Harry's characterization was butchered. The personalities elaborated for Ginny were completely unsupported by her few canon appearances. JKR's magical system was blatantly ignored. The realities of teen romance were worse than ignored.
I was, to put it mildly, irritated. See, I like the idea of Harry/Ginny. I think it can be kind of sweet, if it's done realistically. The key word here is realistically.
So, since I'm of the opinion that the best way to refute a badly-handled pairing is to write a story that handles it well, I sat down to write a Harry/Ginny story without soulmate theories, teen pregnancy, star-crossed romance, Sorceress!Ginny, Wimp!Harry, or any of the other dreck I'd waded through.
That story is Five Years Is an Awful Lot of Later. It's a very simple story: Ginny overcomes her embarrassment enough to ask Harry on a date, and he says yes. That's all there is to it.
I recently revised it, because the dialogue and the paragraphing in the old version were starting to irritate me, but it's basically the same story I wrote then. OotP has made it a sort of grandfathered AU -- pretend that Dolores Umbridge died sometime before the summer of 1995, so Harry and Dudley never got attacked by Dementors, and Harry didn't go stay at Grimmauld Place with Sirius and the Weasleys.
(The sequel, "First You Have to Get There," is up here at Fanfiction.net and here at FictionAlley. The ff.net version is more definitive.)
I discovered fanfiction in February, 2002, when I was going through one of my periodic depressions. I can't remember anymore exactly how I found the first stories, but I think it involved a magazine article decrying the sexualization of HP characters, and Cassie Claire's LotR "Very Secret Diaries." Anyway, I started reading HP fanfiction.
After a few months, I noticed that I was mostly reading Harry/Hermione stories. I wondered if that was a genuine preference, or if I was simply being lazy, and I decided to investigate some Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny archives. One of those was the now-defunct Gryffindor Tower site, dedicated to H/G. And while that site hosted some good stories, most of them were horrible. They were tacky. They were cutesy. They were trite. They were riddled with inbred, self-referential tropes -- sock-stealing, anyone? Harry's characterization was butchered. The personalities elaborated for Ginny were completely unsupported by her few canon appearances. JKR's magical system was blatantly ignored. The realities of teen romance were worse than ignored.
I was, to put it mildly, irritated. See, I like the idea of Harry/Ginny. I think it can be kind of sweet, if it's done realistically. The key word here is realistically.
So, since I'm of the opinion that the best way to refute a badly-handled pairing is to write a story that handles it well, I sat down to write a Harry/Ginny story without soulmate theories, teen pregnancy, star-crossed romance, Sorceress!Ginny, Wimp!Harry, or any of the other dreck I'd waded through.
That story is Five Years Is an Awful Lot of Later. It's a very simple story: Ginny overcomes her embarrassment enough to ask Harry on a date, and he says yes. That's all there is to it.
I recently revised it, because the dialogue and the paragraphing in the old version were starting to irritate me, but it's basically the same story I wrote then. OotP has made it a sort of grandfathered AU -- pretend that Dolores Umbridge died sometime before the summer of 1995, so Harry and Dudley never got attacked by Dementors, and Harry didn't go stay at Grimmauld Place with Sirius and the Weasleys.
(The sequel, "First You Have to Get There," is up here at Fanfiction.net and here at FictionAlley. The ff.net version is more definitive.)
