"In a time when fewer people than ever, it seems, are reading books, the parched publishing industry has wrung some quenching juice from an unexpected source: Dramione fan fiction. "Dramione," for those unfamiliar-as I was until a couple of months ago-is a portmanteau of, and " ship" name for, Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger, two characters from Harry Potter. This summer, two Dramione fics turned rewritten novels became New York Times bestsellers, and a third-arguably the most highly anticipated of the three-debuted this week."
"But what is it about this particular couple that romance readers are finding so interesting? Is the Dramione phenomenon just, as the Times insinuated in a recent piece about the fandom, a cheat code for aging, politically savvy millennials to keep on reading about Harry Potter-but make it spicy -well into their 30s? And do the books hold up as ostensibly original novels, stripped of all copyright source material and attributable byproducts of She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?"
"Full disclosure: I haven't touched a word-or watched a film, or enjoyed a theme park ride, or played a video game, or attended a play-emerging from the Harry Potter universe since about 2003. This is not the result of a concerted effort to boycott billionaire author J.K. Rowling's anti-trans activism so much as a simple accident of birth, being a little bit too old to have cathected onto the IP the way it seems as if a full 75 percent of millennials did."
Dramione pairs Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger into a popular romantic pairing. Two Dramione fan fictions rewritten as novels became New York Times bestsellers this summer, and a third debuted recently. The phenomenon prompts questions about why readers gravitate toward that couple, whether nostalgia and millennial cultural attitudes fuel the trend, and whether the novels function as original works once divorced from explicit Harry Potter copyright. A reader who had not engaged with the Harry Potter universe since about 2003 approached three new Dramione books—Rose in Chains, The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy, and Alchemised—as romance and romantasy.
Read at Slate Magazine
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