What's odd about that is that I see a lot of people saying "well, it's their first fandom". But there are a lot of other new-ish fandoms that are people's first fandom. I'm sorta-kinda-ish in KOTOR fandom (was about to start writing for it, but the main archive is PG and I got sick of the game), and oddly enough, it's the first fandom for most of the people in it. (You'd think they'd have come from SW fandom, wouldn't you? But no, they're mostly gamers who came to SW through the game-- many hadn't even seen the movies!) I've never seen this attitude there. Others can say whether they've seen it in any of the anime fandoms (which I'd suspect are also first fandoms for a lot of people), and I haven't seen anyone attesting to that.

I just wonder what was so different about HP. Especially since one of these people is a journalist-- even if plagiarism *were* part and parcel of fanfiction, wouldn't a journalist have felt uncomfortable with that? I'm just... confused.