I... had not been aware of that site! I found the history, thank you! (The guild was called The Fel Watch, which I definitely would not have come up with without help. Good grief, that was a long time ago.)
Ohhh boy, BC prot pally drama.
Yeaaaaaaah. That seemed to be a thing all the hell over the place. Much as I miss vanilla/TBC, I'm glad the game moved decisively away from role pigeonholing for hybrid classes after that. Nobody (that I knew of, anyway) was batting an eyelash over a protadin or bear MT by Wrath.
(No crossrealm junk in Classic, though! Well, maybe crossrealm BGs, since that happened during vanilla, but that wasn't nearly enough to kill server communities.)
Hah, yeah. While Ye Olde Days of intra-realm Alterac Valley rivalries are nice to think about, I'd rather just have the short queue times, when it comes to BGs.
You know, sometimes you friend people and there isn't a big memorable catalyst...
LMAO, yes, indeed. (Please, be assured, I was 100% delighted and 0% weirded out by your enthusiastic response to my serendipitously-timed WoW navel-gazing. However long this particular conversation thread lasts, it's a topic I always enjoy revisiting and am very pleased to have made your acquaintance in general. :) )
What kind of HP stuff do/did you read?
The first HP fic I followed was Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I can't strictly recommend because I haven't finished it, but it was highly entertaining if a bit intellectually masturbatory for the amount I read. (The author... gods, that's a whole long-ass explanation in itself, about another online community I used to be a part of that had some really, really good aspects but also some serious problems, many of which were embodied by the person who wrote that fic. But TL;DR, that's a fic I followed happily for some time and it's Long.)
A few years ago I fell into an archive binge of astolat's Drarry fic thanks to someone I follow on Tumblr. I can't remember having any reaction to any of those fics other than thorough enjoyment. They vary in level of sophistication but are all pretty great.
Then, most recently, a friend pointed me at a series by murkybluematter, which is a "Song of the Lioness" (a YA fantasy book series by Tamora Pierce, if you're not familiar with it) Harry Potter AU, and it's still ongoing and I'm head-over-heels in love, and it makes my day every time the most recent installment updates. Without going into an overly-involved explanation, various people are alive, the political situation is different, Harry is Harriet, and she switches identities with her cousin Arcturus "Archie" Black in order to go to Hogwarts (and to send him to his dream school in the US). This Harry is an exceptionally cerebral, pragmatic (and genderbent, although that only really matters so far inasmuch as she's pretending to be her male cousin) MC and I love basically everything about the series so far.
...And then there was the one weird pornfic of the giant squid x Hogwarts Castle? But I only read that to satisfy my curiosity, and wow, was that curiosity ever satisfied. xP
That really makes sense about fandom narrowing making your interests/attention shift/broaden, though. In my case, I was always very aware of the canon (I read all the books, saw all the movies, though I haven't bothered with the recent additions), but only read fanfic that I encountered or was recc'd to me in other contexts. (Ship-wise, I'm generally positively-disposed toward Drarry if they're rather altered in a more sensible direction from their canon personalities, generally pro Sirius/Remus though I've never read any fic of that nature, and... otherwise don't have a lot of opinions other than "I'm sorry but Ron and Hermione together will never make sense to me.")
no subject
I... had not been aware of that site! I found the history, thank you! (The guild was called The Fel Watch, which I definitely would not have come up with without help. Good grief, that was a long time ago.)
Ohhh boy, BC prot pally drama.
Yeaaaaaaah. That seemed to be a thing all the hell over the place. Much as I miss vanilla/TBC, I'm glad the game moved decisively away from role pigeonholing for hybrid classes after that. Nobody (that I knew of, anyway) was batting an eyelash over a protadin or bear MT by Wrath.
(No crossrealm junk in Classic, though! Well, maybe crossrealm BGs, since that happened during vanilla, but that wasn't nearly enough to kill server communities.)
Hah, yeah. While Ye Olde Days of intra-realm Alterac Valley rivalries are nice to think about, I'd rather just have the short queue times, when it comes to BGs.
You know, sometimes you friend people and there isn't a big memorable catalyst...
LMAO, yes, indeed. (Please, be assured, I was 100% delighted and 0% weirded out by your enthusiastic response to my serendipitously-timed WoW navel-gazing. However long this particular conversation thread lasts, it's a topic I always enjoy revisiting and am very pleased to have made your acquaintance in general. :) )
What kind of HP stuff do/did you read?
The first HP fic I followed was Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I can't strictly recommend because I haven't finished it, but it was highly entertaining if a bit intellectually masturbatory for the amount I read. (The author... gods, that's a whole long-ass explanation in itself, about another online community I used to be a part of that had some really, really good aspects but also some serious problems, many of which were embodied by the person who wrote that fic. But TL;DR, that's a fic I followed happily for some time and it's Long.)
A few years ago I fell into an archive binge of astolat's Drarry fic thanks to someone I follow on Tumblr. I can't remember having any reaction to any of those fics other than thorough enjoyment. They vary in level of sophistication but are all pretty great.
Then, most recently, a friend pointed me at a series by murkybluematter, which is a "Song of the Lioness" (a YA fantasy book series by Tamora Pierce, if you're not familiar with it) Harry Potter AU, and it's still ongoing and I'm head-over-heels in love, and it makes my day every time the most recent installment updates. Without going into an overly-involved explanation, various people are alive, the political situation is different, Harry is Harriet, and she switches identities with her cousin Arcturus "Archie" Black in order to go to Hogwarts (and to send him to his dream school in the US). This Harry is an exceptionally cerebral, pragmatic (and genderbent, although that only really matters so far inasmuch as she's pretending to be her male cousin) MC and I love basically everything about the series so far.
...And then there was the one weird pornfic of the giant squid x Hogwarts Castle? But I only read that to satisfy my curiosity, and wow, was that curiosity ever satisfied. xP
That really makes sense about fandom narrowing making your interests/attention shift/broaden, though. In my case, I was always very aware of the canon (I read all the books, saw all the movies, though I haven't bothered with the recent additions), but only read fanfic that I encountered or was recc'd to me in other contexts. (Ship-wise, I'm generally positively-disposed toward Drarry if they're rather altered in a more sensible direction from their canon personalities, generally pro Sirius/Remus though I've never read any fic of that nature, and... otherwise don't have a lot of opinions other than "I'm sorry but Ron and Hermione together will never make sense to me.")