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Contents 1 Introduction 2 The Archivists 3 Archive Policies 4 Archive History 4.1 Stalker Gate 4.2 Isolationist Practices 5 Archive Funding 6 Archive Size 7 External Links 8 See also

[edit] Introduction

Gryffindor Tower was created after SugarQuill and Fiction Alley. The site was primarily a Harry/Ginny fan fiction archive. It closed in September 2003.

[edit] The Archivists

Former moderators include.

• Ashwinder
• Caitlyn
• Carissa Lynn
• Chryslin
• Cranberry27
• Firebolt909
• Imogen
• Kvader
• MaidMarian
• Magoo42
• RunechildUK

[edit] Archive Policies

This section needs more information.

[edit] Archive History

• January 2001 rolled around. Canon purists on HPforGrownUps had begun to realize that various established places for Harry Potter discussion were not for them. [1][2][3] The ship war back in October 2000 had confirmed it. Authors like Cassandra Claire and Lori Summers were immensely popular and had a fan base who would and did push their fan oriented views on canon purists. This pushiness, this trying to assert control over the nature of various discussions of the canon, which was still going on, led to SugarQuill being founded on January 3, 2001. This pushiness would also lead to some harshness later over such issues as Cassandra Claire's stalker, Gryffindor Tower and more. The canon purists that stay on HPforGrownUps tended to be ones who were not invested in the fan fiction community. Still, there were bigger issues going on that month that would be more memorable in this history of Heidi and Cassandra Claire's involvement in the fan fiction community.
• September 2001 came. In this month, Gryffindor Tower was founded. This site, unlike SugarQuill and FictionAlley.Org allowed smut and adult rated material. It was dedicated to Harry/Ginny. This pairing was hated by Cassandra Claire. [4] She has stated repeatedly her hatred for this pairing. [5][6][7] This sort anti-Harry/Ginny attitude helped fuel tensions between Gryffindor Tower, SugarQuill, and FictionAlley.Org as Cassandra Claire's friends and fan girls had a long history, back to at least October 2000 of defending Cassandra Claire's positions because Cassandra Claire was their friend. [8] Heidi was very much in the camp of defend Cassandra Claire because she was Cassandra Claire's friend as Heidi shipped a different pair: Draco/Hermione.
• On September 8, 2001, Gryffindor Tower officially opened. [9]
• On May 8, 2003, Irina announced that her stories had been removed from the Gryffindor Tower archive due to moderator edits to her summaries and discussion board posts. [10]
• In late May, 2003, Gryffindor Tower admin RuneChildUK declared that Gryffindor Tower considered itself superior to the rest of fandom, and did not want to be associated with them.[11]
• In September, 2003, Gryffindor Tower closed their doors for good, due in part to massive infighting between it's founding mods, the "Queens."

[edit] Stalker Gate

In late November 2001, the set up for what was to become the "Jeff, the Stalker" incident took place. Charlotte Lennox described the situation as follows:

The admins at GT didn't like this. At all. The ones who didn't like it the most were Imogen and a woman named Chryslin who had written another fic in Imogen's Alpha and Omega universe called (I believe) Deconstructing Harry. Anyway, there was turmoil, flame wars, angry emails, etc. Chryslin had a husband named Jeff, and Jeff, bristling in defense of his wife, her friends, and their beloved ship, sent Cassandra Claire and a teenaged girl named Emily some exceedingly nasty emails.

This is confirmed in an FLocked LiveJournal entry of a member of Gryffindor Tower, discussing this event which clarified it as:

It started with (as told in Charlotte Lennox's tale) CC asking for H/G fic recs and reading and dissing Imogen's fic. I have no idea what Jeff might have written to CC, but if he wrote anything to her it would have been regarding Imogen's fic and not the plagiarism. Perhaps he addressed that part as well, but the plagiarism wasn't the catalyst of all this.

A comment in that entry from a Gryffindor Tower member, regarding the events as they went down, described it as this:

I have no idea what CC's reply might have been but I'm going to say something here that I haven't told anyone (outside the GT admins) since all this went down. When CC dissed Imogen's fic on FA, I contacted her as well. I did not use profanity, but I was cold and disapproving. CC saw fit to reply to me not once, but twice, the second time CCed to Heidi. The first might have been as well, but frankly I didn't notice at the time, and I no longer have copies (unfortunately, I deleted them when GT closed, as I didn't think I'd have any need for them). While neither of CC's replies to me were profane, they were nasty and provocative. In the second email, she specifically said (I remember this much) that she wasn't expecting a reply. Basically she was throwing down a gauntlet for me to reply to her, to engage her, whatever. I didn't. Call me passive-aggressive, but I wasn't going to give her what she wanted (and frankly in retrospect, it was the right thing to do).

So while I have no idea what specifically CC might have said to Jeff, I can easily imagine that she was just as provocative to him as she was to me. I can easily see how it was all a pissing contest. From all appearances, that's what she was trying to get into with me.

I do not know what Jeff emailed to CC at all through the whole fiasco, but I do recall CC making posts long after the fact that seemed embellished to me. She'd post things like "Jeff thinks I should be garroted with a piano wire".

Note she doesn't come right out and say that he said this to her. She just speculates that he thinks that. But how many of her fangirls would note the difference. I also found it laughable that she'd attribute such a dramatic turn of phrase to Jeff, since, while this was going on she described him as a "sub-moronic troglodyte".

[edit] Isolationist Practices

One of the defining features of Gryffindor Tower was their isolationist practices, and their stated desire to have nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the fandom.

• After she removed her stories from their site on May 8, 2003, [12], popular Harry/Ginny author Irina described the Gryffindor Tower message board policies, making it clear that the admins of the site couldn't stand any links or references to an outside site, especially the hated Fiction Alley:

On GT's old boards, there was a thread discussing "What fic turned you to H/G?" Another poster wrote that there weren't any H/G fics at FA. I replied that it's true that there weren't many, but FA will post whatever H/G people write, so if we all band together and send them H/G, we can tip the 'ship balance on that site. My post included an on-topic discussion about what fic turned me H/G. An admin edited my post without notifying me or asking my permission, and deleted all the stuff referring to FA, but left the post before mine (the one that said that claimed FA didn't have H/G fics) perfectly intact. This admin left a note at the bottom of my post that told me I would have to plug "my website" at GT's Gilderoy thread "just like everyone else." I had not been plugging anyone's website - certainly not my own; I don't even *have* a website - rather, I was correcting a previous poster's misconception of the reception of H/G in other parts of the fandom. The poster's misconception was left to stand in the thread, while my clarification was erased. I was not notified of the edit, but left to discover it on my own. [13]

• In late May, 2003, in preparation for the Harry Potter fan convention Nimbus 2003, a Fiction Alley mod named Cygnus announced that he was planning to make a game called Fandomopoly to bring to the con. It would be a version of the game Monopoly, but with prominent fandom sites as the squares on the board, instead of street names. Included in his list were Fiction Alley, The Restricted Section, Veelas Inc, Fanfiction.net, Potter Slash Archive, The Sugar Quill and Gryffindor Tower. However, Gryffindor Tower did not want to be associated with the rest of the fandom in this way, and on May 22, 2003, Gryffindor Tower admin RuneChildUK commented to Cygnus and declined the invitation:

As a representative of the Gryffindor Tower administration team, I would ask that all references to Gryffindor Tower be removed from this project. The administration of Gryffindor Tower is not prepared to be included in the same project as open NC-17 archives, incest fiction, and certain other websites. To allow our website to be associated with those that we morally distance ourselves from would be to violate every principle we stand for. The administration of Gryffindor Tower is not prepared to be included in something such as this, especially when money is involved.[14][15]

[edit] Archive Funding

This section needs more information.

[edit] Archive Size

This section needs more information.

[edit] External Links

This section needs more information.

[edit] See also

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