#also probably going to remove the end of 2022 deadline for this project because it’s literally may lol

[ao3readingproject]

All the Young Dudes — The End: Processing

The first fic I’m reading on my mission to read the top 10 fics on Ao3 in 2022. See a masterpost of all my chapter commentary here. Thoughts on the final section below the cut!

Well. I finally finished this. I’m going to talk more about Grant later, but right now I’m just going to dump my feelings. Actually I’m not because I realized after typing that last sentence that I don’t have any words. I think I just need to lie down for a while. I’m mostly just glad that I realized with four chapters to the end that this ends at the beginning of OotP and not the end. Which would have been obvious from the chapter titles if I knew how to do math. But that doesn’t matter now because what’s really important is that I did not have to experience the last 100 pages of OotP from a fresh new hellish perspective.

I think I’m going to use this space to wrap this into my broader project of fic reading since the ending didn’t leave me with many coherent thoughts about the actual content of the fic. Harry Potter seems to be an outlier in terms of fic in a lot of ways, in that a huge chunk of the fic written for it isn’t actually about the main characters. Wolfstar is the second most popular Harry Potter ship on Ao3, which is both surprising and completely unsurprising. Unsurprising because I’ve been on the periphery of Harry Potter fandom spaces for well over a decade now and I know how loved the Mauraders are, but surprising because I can’t think of a single other fandom where side characters in a completely different generation are this prominent. Especially since I wouldn’t say they get any more or less characterization than the parents of characters in a lot of other hugely popular fandoms. My completely uncited hypothesis is that these characters gained popularity because it can be so easily be read as a queer narrative, while many others in other fandoms can’t — at least not without some more liberal bending of canon. To me it makes sense, since fandom tends to be a queer space.

Overall, it seems fitting that this was the first fic I had to read for this project. Harry Potter was my introduction to fandom, so I kind of like that it’s also my introduction to this weird exploration of potentially unhinged content that I’ve started. Next I have my introduction to rpf, which I’m not too thrilled about, but I am excited at the prospect of truly consuming a fic like a book, so stay tuned!