Luke's Harry Potter Fan Site

About this site

I am on the older end of those who grew up with the Harry Potter books, and did not start to read them myself until after the fourth book (if I recall correctly) came out. It was thus around the year 2000 or 2001 as I was a student in college that I first read them. It was not until roughly 2019 that I really became obsessive about the books. I am not sure what triggered it really. I had never read fan fiction before that, and if you go through my "Random Unfinished Thoughts" you will quickly see that I rarely commented on my personal reading. So why did I all of a sudden start taking admittedly obsessive notes about different aspects of the Harry Potter books, and consolidating my analysis of the various entirely fictional characters therein as if they were real people whose moral worth had real consequence? I really cannot say. I just know that I have been, and that while others, like the Harry Potter Lexicon have a more extensive collection of facts that I have unabashedly mined as tertiary sources for my own notes, I find them ultimately dissatisfying.

This is primarily because of the questions surrounding canonicity. The Harry Potter Wiki is incredibly liberal in accepting sources, and is not always incredibly great about having accurate footnotes. The Lexicon is much more conservative about sources, though even worse about documenting which source a particular fact comes from. However even at their most conservative, both of them include things that I am reluctant to include in my personal list of "canonical" sources.¹

Additionally, I have, as I stated, been reading fan fiction. This has lead to two things. One, I have started to dabble in writing fan fiction. I have discovered that I am abysmal at doing so. I cannot write dialog to save my life. Thus I am unlikely to actually complete anything. I am by nature better suited to help some other author build back story and world mechanics than to be an author myself, though I doubt any real author would accept my micromanaging their world. Secondly, I have discovered that the existing tools to keep track of fan fiction that I like and to discover fan fiction that I might like are both equally lacking. I am thus also dabbling at building my own such tools, for now centred on Harry Potter fanfiction, here as well.

There will thus be three main sections to this site.

1. Encyclopedic notes and analysis of the canonical world as I see it.
2. My own fan fiction
3. tools to track and discover other people's fan fiction.