I think this is an important thing for people to understand about #Malfoid. It's not that Rowling wrote a bad book series. If she had, the whole thing would have been forgotten. Indeed, she wrote a spectacular series that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams! And as they say, it's hard to argue with success. It's a testament to how good a job she did that the Malfoid improvements don't need anything except the gender change, and everything slides in organically. Rowling wasn't focused on the romantic elements. That's fine. Malfoid is tapping in to what people feel is missing, and very much yearn for. That's also fine. But here's something to keep in mind: It's been 19 years since the release of Deathly Hallows. As clear as it seems in hindsight, it took almost two decades for the fans to come up with this! So I think we can forgive Rowling for not thinking of this at the time. But this is also why mythmaking is so important. Shakespeare's Hamlet was written only eleven years after Ur-Hamlet, the play upon which it's based. It was mythmaking that allowed Shakespeare to make Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and so many other plays that magnificently derived the source material into something new. It's how Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and so many other folk tales developed—just faster, now that we have the Internet. Without the creativity-sucking insanity that is modern copyright laws, people would be able to take the beloved stories of their childhood and transform them into something new, just as we have throughout the history of mankind. Malfoid fans talk about the yearning: how we all yearn for love, devotion, commitment, family, and a happy ending. The same yearning that's pushed the development of classic stories for thousands of years. But there's a different kind of yearning we're seeing now as well: a yearning for the power of myth, the kind that can only come when a derivation of a classic story takes hold in our hearts. What could the fans have done with Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and so many others if we'd truly been able to make them our own? Instead of waiting decades for Hollywood to condescend to resurrect our favorite stories, only to turn them into absolute garbage for the sake of a cash grab. We shouldn't have to wait until 70 years after Rowling dies to do this. It's amazing to watch this happen now, in real time, and so magnificently. And that just makes it harder to watch as so many people derisively condemn it as "mere fanfiction." Maybe the term "fanfiction" should disappear from the vocabulary. Maybe we should make the point by calling it what it truly is: mythmaking. And it's every bit our right as humans to do.