On a whim one night, Simona Stallone clicked on some Harry Potter fanfiction, and quickly tumbled down a rabbit hole.
Ms. Stallone, a 28-year-old real estate agent and content creator who lives in Toronto, kept seeing posts about “Dramione” all over her feed. People on TikTok were raving about stories set in the world of Harry Potter, written by fans, that imagined a romance between the bookish Hermione Granger and her antagonist, the arrogant bully Draco Malfoy.
As a Harry Potter enthusiast who had always thought that J.K. Rowling should have brought Draco and Hermione together, Ms. Stallone was primed to become a Dramione addict.
Lying next to her sleeping boyfriend, she clicked on “Manacled,” a dark fantasy set in an alternate universe where Harry Potter is dead and the evil wizard Voldemort has triumphed. The story centered on an illicit, morally ambiguous romance between Hermione, a magic-wielding healer, and Draco, a vicious executioner who later holds Hermione captive as a prisoner of war. It had familiar elements from the Harry Potter books, but with a delicious twist — the characters were a little older and a lot hotter. And they were cast in decidedly more adult scenarios.
“Manacled” quickly became her “whole personality.”
“I was fully consumed by this book,” Ms. Stallone said. “I define my life as before and after ‘Manacled’ — you know, how some people are like, before Christ. ”
She got tattoos of imagery from “Manacled”— a constellation on her shoulder and a hummingbird on her ankle. She read the book half a dozen times, and when she wasn’t reading it, she listened to a fan-made audio recording of the story on triple speed to get to the best parts faster. Her friends gave her a three-volume, 1,188 page bound edition of “Manacled” for her birthday. She started a “Manacled” book club and pressed the story on anyone who would listen.
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The post Why Magic, Dragons and Explicit Sex Are in Bookstores Everywhere appeared first on New York Times.
