English Audio Request

Fans get up to much more. As the books and films took off, the hunger for Harry Potter news and content quickly became so much greater than Warner Bros or the increasingly press-shy Ms Rowling were able to supply that alternative sources began to spring up. The emerging internet fuelled their growth. The most obvious of them are fan websites like MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron, which mix official announcements with rumours. But the most intriguing is the strange world of fan fiction.
Re-telling the Harry Potter story is a popular pastime. One website dedicated to it, Fiction Alley, added 14 book chapters in November 2009 alone, together with many shorter works. Would-be Rowlings push the Harry Potter story in new directions by focusing on different characters or writing about years not covered in the books. Many plunge into the characters’ romantic lives—perhaps the weakest point of “the canon”, as the original series of books is reverentially known. These amateur stories, which are often subjected to rigorous criticism from other fans, are for the most part competent. The students in them often talk the way teenagers actually talk. “I can’t just be an arse to him for no reason,” splutters Harry at one point in the third book in the “Lily’s Charm” series, by a writer called ObsidianEmbrace. That carries a convincing whiff of the playground.
As Harry Potter’s commercial footprint grew and fans’ activities became more commercial (some websites sell advertising), a clash became inevitable. By early 2001 Warner Bros’ lawyers were sending cease-and-desist letters to people running websites, many of them teenagers. The bigger websites fought back, writing ominously that forces “darker than He Who Must Not Be Named” were trying to spoil their fun. So began the Potter wars. Led by Heather Lawver, a 16-year-old from Virginia who showed a gift for media management, the insurgents forced the studio to back down. It continues to pursue some people who seek to profit from Potter. In October a London supper club had to cancel Harry Potter-themed events. The club held “Generic Wizard” nights instead.
Hollywood studios now understand that fans are not content to sit and passively absorb stories, and that they can wreck a film’s prospects if affronted. Led by a producer, George Lucas, enlightened talents have encouraged fans to play with characters and even provided bandwidth for their home-made films. Fans are also given privileged access to news. And it would be a foolish fantasy-film director who failed to turn up at Comic-Con, a nerdy convention in San Diego.