A curious phenomenon

There are lots of people who write “fan-fiction” here in the West, but I guess our ferocious copyright laws mostly prevent them from hitting the mainstream until after a substantial amount of time has passed between the death of the author and the present day.  People do stuff with Sherlock Holmes all the time, after all, and – increasingly – with the characters and world of Jane Austen.  They make for fun reads, if not always brilliant ones, but they’re necessarily based on very old properties.

In China, things seem to be very different.  That’s an almost uselessly true statement, to be sure, but I’m speaking here of the issue of copyright and engagement with works that are still going concerns.

The appetite for J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books is apparently just as vast in China is it is elsewhere in the world (note to self for later: what about Iran, North Korea, and so on?), and certain Chinese authors, not content to wait for Rowling to produce the material herself, have taken the task in hand in some truly startling ways.

Consider the possibilities.  There’s Harry Potter and the Leopard Walk-Up-To Dragon, which is – in a very literal sense – Tolkien’s The Hobbit except with the Harry Potter characters (plus Gandalf).  There’s Harry Potter and the Chinese Overseas Students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in which six Chinese students swoop in to save the day.  There’s even Harry Potter and the Filler of Big, in which the students of Hogwarts are suddenly and inexplicably afflicted by a wave of transformations into small wooden stools.  I don’t even know, man; I didn’t write them.

Anyway, check them out (there are eleven profiled in total, as the site’s name would suggest).  It’s worth clicking through for the bewildering cover art alone.