Fanfiction, among many things, can be a great way to practice writing. Rather than creating your own world from scratch, you take a setting and characters that you already know and have at it. However, fanfiction is not a great way to read the actual book. In fact, it’s literally the opposite of the real book. One new Harry Potter fan found that out the hard way.
Friend is reading Harry Potter for the first time. He suddenly realizes he's read a fanfiction Order of the Phoenix instead of the real one. pic.twitter.com/tKNgT6usi6
— Shelley Zhang (@shelzhang) July 10, 2017
Somehow, this man managed to read the first four actual Harry Potter books but confused a fanfic Order of the Phoenix for the real thing. The fake one is called Harry Potter and the Psychic Serpent, written in 2001, and is over 330,000 words long. To put that into perspective, A Game of Thrones is 298,000 words long. This fanfic is 10% longer than A Game of freaking Thrones! Not only that, the The Psychic Serpent is incredibly, comically dark and disturbing. Yes, the novels do get more mature as they go on, but in the “Snape kills Dumbledore” sense, not the “Dudley Dursley is forced to jump off a building and Malfoy pretends to assault Ginny” sense.
What’s even better is that this guy bought a Harry Potter set containing all seven books. Somebody, somewhere, created a bundle that traveled from Sorcerer’s Stone to Deathly Hallows by way of an obscenely long fanfiction. But wait, there’s more. The Psychic Serpent has two sequels, The Time of Good Intentions and The Triangle Prophecy that are each even longer!
How about you? Want to share your long-hidden The Sorcerer Gets Stoned fanfic like I do? Throw down a link in the comments below!
Images: Warner Bros
