One thing I've observed re: overwhelming shippiness in HP is that we experienced a three year gap in canon right after the end of the fourth book - when things started getting a bit shippy in canon. There was the ball, we now had Remus and Sirius and more human Snape, etc, and I think fandom got sort of...stuck, there. IMO lots of the angst over OotP not being as "good", etc. was that it didn't turn into a romance novel, which was the frame of mind so many fans were in.
It gets self-perpetuating after that, too - if you want feedback and recs, you have to write ship in this fandom.
Anyway, this is just speculation, my reading patterns are way skewed vs. fandom generally, so it's an outsider's perspective. ;)
To round off this too long comment, I'm going to second hpgen100 because it's really very good.
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timeasmymeasure
from d_s
Date: 2005-04-23 02:15 am (UTC)It gets self-perpetuating after that, too - if you want feedback and recs, you have to write ship in this fandom.
Anyway, this is just speculation, my reading patterns are way skewed vs. fandom generally, so it's an outsider's perspective. ;)
To round off this too long comment, I'm going to second