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franzen
2013-03-21 12:28 am UTC (link)

You could definitely replicate Ms.Scribe's tactics (which aren't that clever, in my view -- she lucked out with timing, in that she appeared just when LJ started to become the new fandom area); I don't think anyone could repeat her results, though. HP fandom was huge, between the books and the movies, and there's nothing that's so omnipresent and/or a cultural touchstone -- no fandom is going to make a big deal out of a meetup for a movie premiere, not now.

Every fandom has a certain shelf-life and period of peak activity, but HP was odd in having two major forms of media being released simultaneously (the books and the movies), so that 2001-2005 (post-GoF, pre-HBP) era was just... huge.

I was a BNF in a fandom. It's not hyper-interesting, but it's easy to achieve if you enter at the right time. Honestly, timing is probably more important than content, as God knows I wish I could forget my early fanworks. But I was consistent in terms of putting stuff out for fans, I networked with the "right" people, etc. If I'd known I could have gotten a laptop out of the deal, I wouldn't have spent so much time answering every e-mail with a sincere "thanks & [personal comment]" -- c'est la vie. This was before LJ, though, which changed the game significantly. Whereas in the pre-LJ days, you could possibly show up on a BNF's radar by leaving them comments in a guestbook or the like, linking to them, etc., and hoping they might check you out, LJ made it very obvious just how popular you were. Sockpuppeting makes more sense there, since having a sizable "friends of" list will increase the odds of other people friending you, because they'll assume you're popular. (Same thing happens on Twitter.)

This is why I just lurk, man. It's so much less effort.

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	spawn_of_kong 2013-03-21 01:11 am UTC (link)
	no fandom is going to make a big deal out of a meetup for a movie premiere, not now. Dunno, from what I've heard, the Tolkien fandom put in a good effort for the premiere of the first Hobbit movie this past December. Plus, there's always the inevitable premiere of Episode VII of Star Wars (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

franzen
2013-03-21 02:29 am UTC (link)

Right, but was the attention on the BNFs? LotR initially rivaled HP for wank, but HP is an odd fandom because you had simultaneous book and film releases. The erratic scheduling for the first four movies combined with "new director" and the fact that the books weren't done meant canon wasn't settled. In that kind of environment, it's much easier to rise as a BNF -- con-organization, fandom organization (Fiction Alley was pretty popular for discussion at one time), writing and/or drawing fanwork, fanwork recommendation... and that was pretty much the state of things at HP's height, as the movies brought in new fans and until HBP, the universe was a wide-open sandbox. (Fuck the Horcrux plot.)

On the other hand, LotR is a closed canon (well, Tolkein is dead -- there's not going to be anything new written, but that doesn't stop the wank) and Peter Jackson announced the movie schedule in advance, the actors didn't change between films, and his style was consistent. So LotR fans arguably knew what they were in for with each movie (up to a point) and had less to wank about, whereas HP fandom had Hermione's Pink Hoodie of New Plot Powers. Star Wars is almost the opposite, in that it has all kinds of "canon," but the sign of a true Star Wars fan is that you hate Star Wars and can fight with another fan for six hours over whether or not X is valid canon.

All three fandoms are huge and can support a huge number of fans (not to mention wank), but Potter fandom (in the era described) was the most conducive to BNFdom and making a movie premiere a chance to see OMG BNF in the flesh.

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