Nostalgia and frustration: a return to Azeroth

[dreamerinsilico]

So two close friends from my time in Japan + my brother and I have a standing Saturday morning (here)/evening (there) meetup-to-play-video-games-together time.  It's quite a bit of fun, but finding games all four of us can get into has been a recurring challenge, and the most recent attempt is the game I didn't really think I'd ever touch again: World of Warcraft.

I played WoW from vanilla through Cataclysm (with a break in there - I stopped in Wrath and came back for a handful of months during Cata), which spanned from my first year of undergrad through my first year, year and a half of graduate school.  From fairly early in Burning Crusade through about halfway through Wrath of the Lich King, I played it very, very seriously.  (We're talking progression raiding 3-5 nights a week, with goof-off raiding another two nights, or stacked with progression raids, for a while.  Literally played like it was my job, on top of a full engineering course load + extracurriculars.  I think back to how little sleep I got by on in those days with horrified envy.)  My housemates and I ended up leading our own medium-core progression raiding group for the back half of the time I was in undergrad, and I was also an admin of the multi-guild umbrella raiding organization we were a part of.  

Any time I was at home and not doing necessary bodily/household functions, homework, or occasionally Guitar Hero or Super Smash Bros to let off steam, I was on WoW (or WoW-related forums), in those days.  When I came back to it for a while in Cataclysm as a reward to myself for surviving my PhD qualifying exams, I raided in the group one of my friends from the admin crew led, and it was fun?  But it wasn't the same.  The game didn't have nearly the same hold on me as it had when I was eating, sleeping, and breathing it, go figure, so I stuck around long enough to help with the organizational re-structuring that was happening in my raiding family, and then quit once more.

The one major joy in that game that I did have that didn't revolve around the social and logistical puzzle that was leading a serious raid group was running 5-player dungeons with my friends.  Our core group of five leveled a set of alts for forty levels, once, doing nothing but dungeons, and it was so much fun.  And that's the experience my current little group is chasing with this return.  I'm not even on my old account - can't find the authenticator and can't be arsed to contact Blizzard to try to recover it.  It's probably for the best, because I'd probably be very upset to log onto my old shadow priest main and find her mechanics unrecognizable.  

We've been playing two weeks, now, with our characters at level 20-21.  The nostalgia is... nice but also kind of keenly painful, because the game has changed so much from what I remember - not just the mechanics, but the world as well.  It's very "visiting your home town after a few years away and finding your favorite shops and restaurants are all either gone or under new ownership, and the roads have changed a lot, too.  And maybe a few traffic laws."  :P  

The thing that's bugging me the most is the mechanics, though.  

My new character is a druid, and I'm the group's tank.  My secondary main back in the day was also a druid, whom I primarily played as Resto, but I leveled her Feral (as one did in TBC) and tanked dungeons all the way up.  Lowbie bear tanking in TBC? Fucking hard.  And super satisfying because of that.  Lowbie bear tanking now?  I could do it in my sleep.  On our first Deadmines run I think I used my taunt once.  My brother was healing on a priest and I'm pretty sure he never went below half mana.

On the one hand, I can understand and appreciate the philosophy of making the group content much more approachable than it used to be.  Running dungeons back in the day was kind of a nightmare if you had to do it mostly or all with pick-up groups.  (I took a political science course in freshman year that actually had us doing pick-up dungeons in WoW to take data for a project about small group cooperation and success - back in vanilla, when I was playing a rogue.  It was a neat class, but the data collection was a COLOSSAL pain in the ass!)  On the other, I'm honestly quite bummed that it looks like the fun of tackling challenging five-player dungeons with my friends as we level alt characters is a thing that's thoroughly in the past.

I think the one change I've found unequivocally delightful is that my druid's travel form is a kickass stag and I can carry a rider.  That's pretty damn cool!  (And our party is aesthtically amusing, as we're three gnomes and a worgen.)

However long we end up playing these characters together, I'm finding myself rather intensely interested in the official re-release of WoW Classic that's apparently going to be a thing.  I'd rather TBC than Classic, frankly, because in Classic playing a "hybrid" class meant you just got pigeonholed into tanking (for warriors) or healing (for everyone else), but at this point I'll take what I can get.

Comments

[dreamerinsilico]

Progression raiding (and the process of going from a new recruit, to an officer, to a class lead, to a raid leader) taught me a lot about how to manage and set boundaries with people, and shaped the way I think about leadership, success, and failure to this day. Probably a lot of people learn about those things in their early 20s, but the specifics of how I learned them are not something I can easily share with most people.

HARD SAME. Honestly I don't know where my social skills would be today if I hadn't had that experience, because I learned SO MUCH from it, and while I have described it to a few people who have seemed to understand, for the most part people (especially those of older generations, and non-gamers) seem to get incredulous at the idea of playing a video game involving such a sophisticated degree of organization and group social skills. Which is ridiculous, because getting a group of 10+ people to work together on anything is a major undertaking in itself, let alone work together well, but something something get off the internet and make some real friends, why don't you.

But it seems to me that when they try to do Big Story it's often repetitive (the Old Gods are threatening the world! again!) or they write themselves into a corner (the characters are tired of war... but the war can never end because it's baked into the game).

pfffft, yes. I also had/have some friends who are really into the lore, but I play actual RPGs for lore and Blizzard games for mechanical challenges and shiny aesthetics.

This sounds like you would love mythic+, because that's exactly what I get out of it. But I also hear you on not wanting to do the leveling slog.

I might actually go for it, if I was sure of having a group to do it with me, but from experience thus far with this group, one member in particular is probably going to get bored before we get anywhere close. But I'm glad to hear the leveling dungeons do ramp up a bit!

I loved playing CoH holy and I healed most of the way through BC, but in Wrath I was the swing healer spot and I ended up going shadow more often than not. I played shadow for a while in Cata too (it was awesome then!)

I feel kind of silly for saying it, but I actually preferred shadow in TBC (even though it was still quite fun to play in Wrath and Cata!) because of the special snowflake factor I had for my DPS output at the time; at least on my server back then most spriests were primarily healers who respecced because Vampiric Touch was the bee's knees, and they tended to play very conservatively, whereas I had started out as a rogue and had the e-peen to match. xP (I remember there being a lot of Serious Discourse on the priest forums about when it was and wasn't appropriate to use Shadow Word: Death, and my answer was "stack crit and use it every cooldown unless it's literally going to kill me :3", which attitude I got away with because my healers never had mana problems. And it was always funny to get teased when I occasionally slipped up and used it on the Prince fight in Karazhan, or something. Good times!)

I enjoyed healing as a priest at the time, too, but had more fun on my druid - the Lifebloom rotation with Swiftmend felt really good to my brain, probably because it wasn't all that different from playing the spriest, except that there was a reactive aspect to it.

but for some reason being in that front-and-center role makes me so damn nervous in a way that I never am when I heal or DPS. I can't relate at all when people talk about being scared to heal, because healing has been my comfort zone for so long.

Yeah, I never tanked progression content, and would not have wanted to! I remember being SUPER nervous the first time I tanked a raid at all, because our normal tank roster was *stupidly* good; DPS got away with so much shit in our raids that they absolutely didn't in other groups (the organization we were part of had open sign-ups, so a lot of people raided in multiple groups, and I frequently got asked to fill in on my alts for other people's no-shows), and quickly found that it was much harder to actually lead the raid (in the voice-over, shot-calling sense, which was by that point My Job) from Boss Crotch view! Healing is really the role that I've found gives the best understanding of what is going on overall in a fight, though of course you're still not going to see Everything.

I really really enjoyed the level of collaboration between the different role leads needed to troubleshoot fights - that was really cool. And I miss our healer lead and main tank bickering like an old married couple, because wow, did they ever. xD (The MT was one of my roommates, and the healer lead only lived a few hours away, so he actually visited us semi-regularly. When we'd raid all in the same apartment the MT would be yelling about how he was going to die and Liss would yell back at him to shut up and stop being such a baby and it was so funny, oh my god.)

How did you find Wildstar to be?

It was very pretty, and had a lot of potential; the mechanics were interesting and felt quite different from WoW's - you frequently had to aim things! Buuuut it had balance issues out the wazoo and the raid content was, at the time we quit, basically unplayable. It was a big disappointment; my core crew from WoW + a very old friend of mine who had no-lifed WoW in a different timeframe than I did had gotten together and formed a guild and we had been very excited when the game launched.

[pauraque]

people (especially those of older generations, and non-gamers) seem to get incredulous at the idea of playing a video game involving such a sophisticated degree of organization and group social skills

I know! The best I've been able to do is tell people it's like organizing a sports team or a theater group, but even that doesn't always get the reality of it across.

I remember there being a lot of Serious Discourse on the priest forums about when it was and wasn't appropriate to use Shadow Word: Death, and my answer was "stack crit and use it every cooldown unless it's literally going to kill me :3"

Haha, the two priests who primarily played shadow loved me because I told them it was okay to do that, and stood up for them when the healer lead (an rsham) questioned it. I was like look, with this much spirit and chain chugging pots I don't even know what oom means anymore, I think we can handle it. And I vividly remember the MT piping up like "Yeah I agree, as long as [pauraque] has 1/3 mana I just pull." XD

I enjoyed healing as a priest at the time, too, but had more fun on my druid - the Lifebloom rotation with Swiftmend felt really good to my brain, probably because it wasn't all that different from playing the spriest, except that there was a reactive aspect to it.

I raided with someone in BC who said the exact same thing. I think the rdruid was her original main and then she started with spriest, and I remember her saying they both lit up the same parts of her brain. (This is where it starts to feel uncanny and I want to ask did we actually raid together?? but not all the details match up.)

the organization we were part of had open sign-ups, so a lot of people raided in multiple groups, and I frequently got asked to fill in on my alts for other people's no-shows

I'm honestly curious about the details here if you don't mind taking the time to explain. Was this like a big guild with multiple groups, or a crossguild thing along the lines of OpenRaid or what?

Healing is really the role that I've found gives the best understanding of what is going on overall in a fight, though of course you're still not going to see Everything.

This has been my experience too. Aside from just the ranged visual perspective, I think people who aren't healing can't easily gauge whether the damage going out is manageable or whether the healers are secretly crying behind their keyboards, because sometimes what looks scary is actually fine and vice versa. We are also very aware of which DPS are standing in stuff, even if they think they are getting away with it. :P

healer lead and main tank bickering like an old married couple

Healers and tanks have a special relationship that no one else can truly understand. I ended up moving across the country and literally marrying one of the tanks from our BC guild. :)

Buuuut it had balance issues out the wazoo and the raid content was, at the time we quit, basically unplayable.

Ahhh, that sucks. So many 'wowkiller' MMOs have come and gone with the same story. You know, it's easy to criticize WoW, and it does have its problems, but it turns out making an MMO that puts all those moving parts together just right and is worth investing your time in is fucking hard, and most that try come absolutely nowhere close to succeeding.

[dreamerinsilico]

This is where it starts to feel uncanny and I want to ask did we actually raid together?? but not all the details match up.

No kidding! That's wild about your druid friend saying the same thing. I mean, we both said it because of a very real mechanical similarity, but still. xD


I'm honestly curious about the details here if you don't mind taking the time to explain. Was this like a big guild with multiple groups, or a crossguild thing along the lines of OpenRaid or what?

Not at all! I don't know of OpenRaid, but maybe? My server, Silver Hand, was an RP server with a pretty vibrant networks of RP guilds. A bunch of people wanted to raid, but didn't want to leave their RP guilds, so somewhere in late-ish vanilla they got together to form Leftovers Raiding. (My crew didn't come over to that server until TBC, so we weren't a founding charter.) Small groups of people who wanted to lead groups applied for Charters, and once accepted could post raids on the website's calendar. Anyone could join the website and sign up for any raid; the leads of each charter then slotted their raid rosters from those signups however made the most sense. Some groups (particularly those heavily focused on progression) tended to have a fairly committed core group of people (and might or might not have rules about how often you had to be around to be guaranteed a slot), while others (for instance, the goof-off farm group I was also a charter lead for) would explicitly try to slot a certain proportion of new people for each raid so as to give them a friendly, low-pressure intro into the community and help them gear up.

We had an organization-wide points system, tracked by character (not player), and you earned points per time spent in a raid. We used a version of the Shroud loot system - I don't honestly know how common that was, so if you're not familiar with it, but it's a tiered bidding system that handled gearing well for us. Organization-wide rules adjudication (and adjustment) and website/forum admin was handled by a small group of Overall Leads, of which I was a member from mid-late TBC to when I quit the game.

My group initially intended to only run 10-player raids and do 25s with existing charters, but we didn't all find regular homes with the existing 25s progression charters, and we were getting enough signups to support 25s very quickly, so we transitioned to 25s and things went swimmingly from there. Our charter leadership was all in the same in-game guild, and a lot of people who raided with us regularly ended up in the guild over time, but there was never any functional distinction in terms of raid slotting and whatnot between people who were in the guild and people who weren't.

While the actual website seems to finally be defunct, we actually got a 15 Minutes Of Fame interview of some of the Overall Leads crew (not me, though :P) at one point, if you're interested. (My favorite part is its reference to our 3rd anniversary celebration, in which we fielded 8 simultaneous, unchartered Gruul/Mags runs. Guess who slotted all eight of those raids from several hundred signups, alone? xD And then was leading one of them while trying to coordinate fill-ins for all the other groups during the actual event? XDDDD I finished that night with one of the worst tension headaches I have EVER had, but it was totally awesome and worth it.)

Basically, we functioned as a mega-guild who would ultimately take anyone who wasn't an intentional malefactor and find an appropriate group for them to raid in, at whatever skill/gear/commitment level.


I think people who aren't healing can't easily gauge whether the damage going out is manageable or whether the healers are secretly crying behind their keyboards, because sometimes what looks scary is actually fine and vice versa.

Exactly. xD


I ended up moving across the country and literally marrying one of the tanks from our BC guild. :)

:D That's awesome! Two close friends of mine are also a healer/tank married couple who met in WoW. (And I originally met them in WoW - we'd been raiding together for months and it came out in healer chat that they lived like 15 minutes away from my parents!)


it's easy to criticize WoW, and it does have its problems, but it turns out making an MMO that puts all those moving parts together just right and is worth investing your time in is fucking hard

Yes!! I think it's particularly emblematic of the idea that Blizzard may not be the most innovative video game developer, but you know that whatever they release is almost certainly going to be way more polished than what other studios are putting out.

[pauraque]

Wow, that is really interesting, thanks for telling me about it! How long did the organization stick around for? Were you raiding with them basically until you quit or had you moved on?

In vanilla I raided with a casual group called Alliance of Guilds (odd choice of name, since we were Horde...) made up of guilds that wanted to stay small/social but still have an opportunity to raid, so a similar setup to yours but not nearly as many people. It was kind of a circuitous introduction to raiding for me, because when I first started playing I was mostly focused on PvP and wasn't really interested in PvE. I'd joined the social guild I was in because they were LGBT-friendly (this was around the time when Blizzard had gotten in trouble for taking disciplinary action against players for advertising LGBT guilds in chat, if you remember that at all) and they were a member of AoG. Some of the friends I made in the guild were super gung ho about the raids and eventually coaxed me into signing up.

And oh man, when I say casual, they were soooo casual. They'd been raiding MC for months and the only bosses they could kill consistently were Luci and Magmadar, and I can't even say they were on farm because it was still like, max focus, constant vent calls, and we still didn't always one-shot them. During the time I raided with them, I think the furthest we got was... Shazzrah or Baron Geddon? Downing Garr was a BIG deal. That was my first experience of the whole, people cheering in vent, taking a group picture in front of the boss thing. That was what hooked me on raiding. Eventually there was an exodus from the guild I was in because of unrelated conflicts with the officers, and I ended up transferring servers with a bunch of people I knew and joining a guild that was a bit more serious about raiding, and connections I made there led to raiding hardcore when BC hit.

OpenRaid was something that came around much later, a community site that let you post pug raids or guild raids that needed fill-ins and have people sign up. You could rate and comment on how people did and view their history, so it was a step above just spamming trade chat and checking the armory, and made up a bit for the loss of server communities. I made some good friends through that site but I think it went under a while ago.

Two close friends of mine are also a healer/tank married couple who met in WoW.

Healer/tank OTP! :D Looks like you've connected with my wife walgesang. We actually initially met through Harry Potter fandom, but then we became WoW friends too and that was when we got really close and eventually started dating.

[dreamerinsilico]

I left LO for good in the... I think it was 2012? Late Cata. I stuck around to help with an organizational transition (it had, by that point, gotten too big to comfortably operate under the old paradigm - Overall Leads in the original sense only really worked when everyone - or at least, all the charter leads - knew at least one or two of us directly. When the OL team was roughly a dozen active members but the raiders numbered 1k+, that was not really possible) and checked back on the website a couple of times - it's down now, but it was up as late as 2-3 years ago, I think.

I definitely didn't raid with anyone else after LO, but I did raid some before then. In vanilla I had only a rogue at 60 and was a member of a small guild (whose name I can't remember and that fact is driving me BONKERS) that was allied with a larger, well-known raiding guild, and they had some regulars from our little guild on their raids, as well as pulling fill-ins from our group when needed. (I was a fill-in, having come late to the party and being competent but nothing special on my rogue.) I mostly got pulled in for ZG and MC, both of which were on farm for them at the time. In TBC my (and my roommates') little guild started doing its own thing, since there were no new 40-player raids and we had the numbers for 10s and 25s. We actually chose to split off and switch servers when Gruul/Mags were cutting-edge because of drama regarding one of my roommates and tanking; basically, he'd been playing a paladin for forever but had been tanking in TBC but always got short shrift compared to the old-school warrior main tank who wasn't as good. It got REALLY dramatic and explosive, more than was at all warranted, but the net result was that our apartment fucked off to Silver Hand to start over, because my other roommate knew people who were around for the founding of LO and we really liked the concept.

Coming out of that experience of transitioning I was pretty ardently attached to the LO model of "throw things at a wall and see what sticks." Like, there was *never* in any group I ever ran with, a reiteration of the pigeonholing of old-school vanilla raiding. It was always just, are you adequately contributing? In what ways are you contributing and can this be used even if it's unconventional? The flexibility of mindset in the LO community as a whole was very precious to me.

The very back end of my raiding experience, when I came back in Cata and was no longer leading a group, was running with the charter that was led by one of my friends in the Overall Leads + her wife. So I was still in the organization proper but associated with a different charter group. (And I joined their guild at some point because ours was a ghost town. It's... funny, I know one of my alts on that account is still the GM of Cry Havoc, but I don't even remember which.)

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Oh my god, I remember when there was stuff about Blizzard being like "don't advertise being LGBT in chat." >.< I was too far into the closet then to make noise about it but that sure was a thing and fuck that.

And honestly, getting 40 people to coordinate enough to get anywhere in vanilla raid content is... a feat unto itself. I'm glad you got to experience that kind of mass YEAH!!!! when downing a new boss then because... given how much it meant to me in TBC 25s I wish I'd been there for new boss kills in vanilla. (While I did get invited to some AQ raids in vanilla, I was never present for a new boss kill.)

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I'm... kinda saddened by the loss of server communities as a thing. I get why they did it, but that's another aspect of the game that feels unfamiliar. I'm faffin' around on the new character and trade chat is all people from Scarlet Crusade (my original server, where I did the vanilla and early TBC stuff first) and I'm just like O.o.

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Yes! Hannelore and I have interacted briefly and I am super pleased to meet both of you! (What context of HP fandom, if I may ask? I... have read a positively obscene number of words of HP fanfic for someone who has rarely considered themselves in the HP fandom proper.)

[pauraque]

a small guild (whose name I can't remember and that fact is driving me BONKERS)

Try searching your rogue on WarcraftRealms?

basically, he'd been playing a paladin for forever but had been tanking in TBC but always got short shrift compared to the old-school warrior main tank who wasn't as good

Ohhh boy, BC prot pally drama. We had some of that too. Our main raid leader was a pally who switched between healing and tanking, and when he tanked it drove one of the warrior tanks crazy. She was still stuck in "only warriors are real tanks" mode, and anytime he tried to do something, she wanted to do it instead and better. You're going prot to pick up adds? Fuck that, she had improved thunderclap and stormchops so who needs consecration! Prot pally outdamaging her (because...you know...picking up all the adds)? Better put on half DPS gear and use her orc racial that mortal striked herself! Not, uh, much of a team player. That wasn't the only reason that guild fell apart, but it did not help, and when I made my own guild in Wrath I invited a lot of people I had previously raided with but definitely not that warrior.

I'm... kinda saddened by the loss of server communities as a thing. I get why they did it, but that's another aspect of the game that feels unfamiliar.

Yeah, for sure. There have been a lot of choices over the years where you can understand what their thinking was and what problems they were trying to solve, but the tradeoffs involved ended up changing the nature of the game in ways that make you question whether it was worth it. (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.)

What context of HP fandom, if I may ask?

LJ, probably like 2004? In those days the fandom was growing fast and I was friending people left and right, so I don't remember exactly how we met, but we both ran in Snapeslash and rareslash circles. I know we both wrote for Pornish Pixies (a slash comm with ~invite-only posting access, so exclusive!) but I don't remember if we knew each other before that. You know, sometimes you friend people and there isn't a big memorable catalyst... like say finding out there's another ex-raider in fandom and getting all excited and tackling them with a huge wall of text and being really pleased they seem to like talking to you but also hoping they don't secretly think you're some kind of weirdo. *cough*

What kind of HP stuff do/did you read? As the fandom has gotten smaller I've expanded my horizons a lot -- which I guess sounds funny, but in the 2000s the fandom was just so overwhelmingly big that it was impossible to follow everything, so you kind of had to pick a niche, and even in that niche you didn't know everyone. The HP people on my friends list now are a lot more diverse in their tastes, so mine have diversified too.

[dreamerinsilico]

Try searching your rogue on WarcraftRealms?

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.")

[pauraque]

I tried to read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality a long time ago, and I just peeked at the first couple of chapters again and remembered why I didn't keep on with it. I wasn't sure how seriously I was supposed to take it (like, is the author really that self-congratulatory, or is he partly poking fun at himself?) and Harry's characterization made him not very likable to me. Then I wondered if it was all going to be a retelling of the books on this same theme that was already kind of grating on me, so I gave up. But I've also heard it gets much better in the later chapters, so maybe I didn't give it a fair chance. (Not that I have time to read fan novels anymore, something I somehow did on a regular basis while also raiding a zillion hours a week.)

I also heard there was drama with the author, but wherever that was happening, it was far enough away from my corner of the fandom that I only had a vague sense of Trouble. If you want to tell me what happened I'd be interested, just out of curiosity about what was going on elsewhere in HP while my attention was focused on the dramas of my own niche. :P But if you'd rather not dredge it up that's okay too.

Astolat has good stuff. Not surprised at all that she went pro.

I am very familiar with Tamora Pierce! (Forgot when I did that meme that I've met her too; when I was a kid my best friend had sent her fan letters and gotten replies, and they struck up a friendship, eventually leading to Tammy coming to visit our school. I believe one of her books is dedicated to my friend.) I haven't heard of that fic but it sounds like an interesting one. If people only post on FFN I tend not to know about their stuff, because I normally just read on DW and AO3.

I want to say I've read that Squid/Hogwarts fic, but knowing this fandom, there's probably more than one. :) I suspect some of the weird stuff in HP probably reads even weirder when taken out of the context of the fandom as it was in the 2000s, at least on LJ. There was a lot of enthusiastically egging people on and daring each other to get weirder, find something that hadn't been done yet, go more over the top. Sometimes serious explorations of dark taboos, sometimes wild (but genuinely enjoyed) fantasies, sometimes cracky silliness, sometimes riding the edges between all three. (Maybe this is partly why I have an "is this serious?" reaction to HPMOR.)

I always got the impression that the part of the fandom that was invested in the major het pairings, which seemed to mainly exist on web forums, had a very different and much more straight-laced fannish culture. Neither I nor most people I interacted with on LJ had any concern over who Hermione might end up dating in the books. How boring! We were too busy with our crossdressing!Lucius/animagus!Sirius fisting porn. (That's not a real fic. At least not one I know of. But someone probably wrote it.) Present-day HP fandom on DW is mostly made up of people who came from LJ, so hints of that saucy-leaning-towards-raunchy playfulness are still in there, though it's calmed down a lot.

[dreamerinsilico]

re: HPMoR - the author is 100% that self-congratulatory; I'm not remotely going to push you at the rest of the fic if you found it grating already and stopped (and again, *I* haven't read the whole thing myself).

The community I'm referring to has nothing directly to do with fandom at all - Eliezer Yudkowsky was the founding impetus behind LessWrong, which was a community blog that operated on some reddit-ish mechanics and focused on human rationality in both a philosophical and practical sense. There was some legitimately fantastic material on that site, a significant amount of it written by him, but as best I understand it - I wasn't active during the major dissolution period - over time it got increasingly circle-jerk-y and focused on him as the ultimate arbiter of Rightness, and he just... isn't/wasn't. He's a smart person with some good ideas, some fairly useless ideas, too little empathy for people he doesn't identify with, and an enormous ego. I don't know specific drama beyond that, but I was entirely unsurprised when I found out about the trajectory the community ended up on. (I follow/occasionally interact with one of my favorite people from that community on Tumblr, still, and I'm mostly aware of the history via her.)


I am very familiar with Tamora Pierce! (Forgot when I did that meme that I've met her too; when I was a kid my best friend had sent her fan letters and gotten replies, and they struck up a friendship, eventually leading to Tammy coming to visit our school. I believe one of her books is dedicated to my friend.)

That is really cool! :D

The fic series in question is a huge-ass time investment, but in my experience an entirely worthwhile one. Drastically differs from canon in that it thoroughly humanizes/makes sensible the Slytherin characters (that Harry sorts into Slyterin and Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson end up being her best friends - though she also makes friends in all the other houses, and Snape is Very Grumpy but not a total shitheel, which is good because he features prominently), and spends a lot of time fleshing out the magic system, so it's.... not remotely the Standard HP Fare, but so good if you're into the idea.


There was a lot of enthusiastically egging people on and daring each other to get weirder, find something that hadn't been done yet, go more over the top. Sometimes serious explorations of dark taboos, sometimes wild (but genuinely enjoyed) fantasies, sometimes cracky silliness, sometimes riding the edges between all three.

Hah, this has very much been my experience with the Hannibal fandom (of which I am a fairly recent but very enthusiastic member); I am not at all surprised to hear it of the HP fandom. XD After the canon material ends, it seems like the die-hard core of the fandom kind of marinates and turns into its own particular cultural gestalt. I think that's really cool to watch and think about. :)


Neither I nor most people I interacted with on LJ had any concern over who Hermione might end up dating in the books. How boring! We were too busy with our crossdressing!Lucius/animagus!Sirius fisting porn. (That's not a real fic. At least not one I know of. But someone probably wrote it.)

Someone probably did, indeed! Oddly sounds a bit like The Elder Scrolls' fandom, put like that? I used to moderate a Skyrim kink meme on LJ, and obviously that's not a fandom with a lot of canonical shipping to begin with, but it was *profoundly* "anything goes" in terms of fan content, and that was neat even though I ran across a few things that required brain bleach. xD

[pauraque]

It is interesting to think about fandom cultures and how some are wild and some are tame, and how hard it is to predict what the fandom will be like based on the canon. Obviously sometimes you can see why certain things become common in particular fandoms — like if you have teens and adults among the main characters you're more likely to get crossgen/underage, and if your two main characters are brothers you're more likely to get incest shipping, etc. — and once some taboos are broken I think there can be a tendency to want to break more.

I also always thought the long breaks in between HP canon helped encourage writing and thinking about more unusual stuff, because we had so long to sit and speculate on everything. (And it wasn't just about kink fics; even the meta and theory postings went wild too.)