Cassandra Claire

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Fan
Name: Cassandra Claire
Alias(es): epicyclical, thegraybook, Cassie Claire, Cassandra Clare
Type: fan writer (retired), professional author
Fandoms: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings
Communities:
Other: writes profic as Cassandra Clare
URL: * cassandraclare.com
* cassandraclare at LiveJournal
* cassieclaire -- LiveJournal -- The original pervy hobbit fancier's Journal, Archived version
* cassandraclare at Tumblr
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Cassandra Claire was a fan and fan writer in the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings fandoms.

She now writes professionally as Cassandra Clare and is author of young adult fantasy series The Mortal Instruments.[note 1]

She is often considered to be one of the Harry Potter fandom's first Big Name Fans after gaining popularity (and notoriety) for her epic fanfiction series The Draco Trilogy and its resulting plagiarism controversy.

The majority of her fanfiction was written as the fandom was rapidly gaining popularity and played a major role in shaping Draco Malfoy's fandom characterization.

Her fans were extremely numerous. Mailing Lists and rec lists had MANY references to "her genius," writing skill, and humor. It wasn't unusual for fans to refer to her as a "goddess" and the like.[note 2]

A fan wrote in 2001:
... I went and read through the files and I found one that has all these posts that our Idols, the Goddesses Lori, Cassie, Penny, Carole and Queen Ebony wrote early in their FanFiction Careers. It was so cool. I've been feeling a bit inferior because I have major writer's block and I just read all this wonderful stuff by our pantheon so.... But Like it has a message that Cassie wrote about posting her first story and she was worried that it wasn't that good or something (never think that Cassie, you're wonderful) And I realized (sorry Goddesses) that they're all human too. I just had to laugh at some of the original ship preferences and ideas and the ideas that were born and then incorperated into their stories.[1]

She was formerly a member of the group of Harry Potter some fans collectively referred to as "The Inner Circle."

Outside the Harry Potter fandom, Cassandra Claire wrote The Very Secret Diaries, which was wildly popular in The Lord of the Rings fandom.

Cassandra Claire has since retired from fandom and taken her fanfiction offline as she launched her profic career. She is now the author of several bestselling YA novels.

Interviews

Notable Fanworks

For a complete list of Claire's fanworks, see Cassandra Claire/Fanworks.

Early Screenshots of Cassandra Claire's Fic Summaries

Controversies

See LaptopGate.

See The Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Debacle.

Cassandra Claire has been involved in a lot of controversy in Harry Potter fandom. In 2004, a fan, Aja, asked: "Okay, yes, this is wanky, but. I just have to ask. Is there a jurisimprudence corrolary [sic] to Darwin's Law that says that the longer a Harry Potter wank lasts, the greater becomes the probability that someone will bring up Cassandra Claire, thereby extending the wank by no less than 300 comments? Because. Damn. *bangs head on desk*".[2]

These controversies include, but are not limited to, the subjects of plagiarism, bullying, and profiting from fandom.

Plagiarism

Over the years various fannish circles noted with distaste the similarities between portions of The Draco Trilogy and various science fiction television and print sources, resulting in flare-ups of plagiarism accusation (and debate, and wank) on a regular basis between 2001 and 2006. Locations of this discussion include the Glass Onion mailing list, Fanfiction.net, and several HP venues.

On June 22, 2001, Cassandra Claire was blacklisted from FanFiction.Net for plagiarism.

In 2006, Avocado wrote a lengthy exposé of the plagiarism in Claire's writing for Bad Penny, providing evidence of (and a venue for) many more observed instances of plagiarism than had previously been counted.[3] This effort also chronicled the timeline of obfuscations and rationalizations Claire provided when readers queried her about unsourced and uncredited quoting. See The Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Debacle.

Censored and Deleted: Fannish Voices Silenced, History Erased

The most organic, primary sources of 2001 fannish discussion are mostly gone. They were deleted by the community mods where the comments had been posted. The posts were probably deleted in a mixture of embarrassment, loyalty, protectionism, and legalisms. In any case, their removal erased a massive amount of fannish history, and was a form of censorship and silencing voices. What remains on these lists are bits and pieces of benign comments, scattered about with little context.

The FanFiction.Net forums no longer exist. The relevant posts on GAFF and the old SugarQuill Forums are lost; I can't access them directly, and they don't appear in the Wayback Machine as far as I can tell.

More recently, almost all posts dated June 23, 2001 on the ParadigmOfUncertainty list have been deleted or screened. The cassie_and_rhysenn list has been renamed "Rhysenn" and all message archives are locked and only accessible by list moderators. ETA: Rhysenn has posted below that she has unlocked the archive (thank you); posts from 6/23 to 6/26 are missing. There may also be missing posts on the Harry Potter for Grown-ups list, but I couldn't find those last year when I was researching the incident on mailing lists, so I assume that deletion is of much longer standing.

I will usually be reproducing the full text of posts where I have it available rather than be accused of twisting a line out of context. I will bold the specific lines I want to draw attention to. With the exception of posts from the hpslash and Glass_Onion lists, all posts are from lists which had no age restrictions and required no moderator approval to join at the time of the incident. These are: HP_FanFiction, cassie_and_rhysenn, HP_Paradise, ParadigmOfUncertainty, and Ranting_page.

ETA: I had assumed that the missing posts had been screened and were available to the list moderators, but Lori has confirmed that she cannot see the missing posts on ParadigmOfUncertainty. At this point, I presume the missing posts on cassie_and_rhysenn and ParadigmOfUncertainty have been permanently deleted. I am sorry to hear that; I had hoped it would be possible to make them available again.[4]

Profiteering and Bullying

Claire has also been accused of profiting from fandom [note 3] (see LaptopGate) as well as cyberbullying other fans and taking fandom squabbles offline.[note 4]

In 2018, Flourish Klink explained the beginning of one incident:
"FK: To this Twitter post in which someone was like, “fuck Cassie Clare,” Cassandra Clare, the YA novelist, “because she doxxed a preteen girl and called her mom and ratted her out about all the stuff she was doing on the internet.”"... And what was interesting about that was that I looked at that and I knew from the way that this rumor has developed over the course of many years that the preteen girl in question is actually me. Me, 20 years ago [when I was 12 years old]. [laughs] Because I’ve followed the different ways that this rumor has gotten passed around Tumblr, and has been, you know, gone everywhere. And like most rumors, it starts from a seed of truth in that I was a preteen person and Cassie Clare definitely had at least one conversation with my mother. [laughs]... She was like 23 or something. Anyway. So we had met this way, and so some people I guess maybe think that that meant that we still hated each other later, but we didn’t? I was sort of publicly not into her fic, and then we were working together to found this fanfic archive, because it’s possible to work with people whose fic you don’t like, it turns out, to found a fanfic archive. And because of doing all this there was a bunch of legal stuff and so the adults involved wanted to talk to my mom to make sure it was OK that I was taking part in this project. Right? So yes, I gave them my dox so that they could call my mom and confirm that it was OK! [laughing] [much snipped] [5]

Kenyon Copyright and Trademark Violation Lawsuit

On the 5th of February 2016, American sci-fi and fantasy author Sherrilyn Kenyon sued Clare for alleged copyright and trademark infringement, seeking damages for the same and an injunction against Clare publishing any further works in her profic Shadowhunter series.[6] In the suit, Kenyon alleges that Clare's series is so similar to Kenyon's own Dark Hunter novels that Clare's publisher once mistakenly printed 100,000 copies of a Shadowhunter book referencing the DarkHunter logo on its cover.[7] Kenyon also alleges that Clare originally used Kenyon's trademark term 'darkhunter' in her works to refer to her protagonists, and then continued to use and eventually give great prominence to the similar term 'shadowhunter' despite assurances she would not.[8]

Fannish Retirement

In early 2005, shortly before announcing that she had sold her profic series The Mortal Instruments, Claire deleted her NC-17 rated fanfiction from all sites except the Restricted Section.[note 5]

On August 6, 2006, Claire announced that she would be taking all her fanfiction offline in an author's note at the end of Draco Veritas, the last chapter of which had been posted August 4, 2006.

August 4, 2006 was also the same day Avocado published The Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Debacle.

Cassie wrote in "Draco Veritas'" end notes:

VERY IMPORTANT NOTICE: After this last chapter has been up for a while, all my fanfiction on Fiction Alley and elsewhere will be deleted. If you would like to be able to read the Draco Trilogy again in the future, I recommend that you download it from this web page (each part is available as a separate .pdf file complete with references and illustrations) so that you'll have it after it's removed from the Net:www.heidi8.com/dt/ [9]

Claire's work was removed from fic archives and mailing lists in mid-August.[10] The Draco Trilogy, A Lot to Be Upset About, and Something Impossible were made available for download as PDF files from August 2006 through March 2007.[11] With the announcement, fans scrambled to save and share copies of Claire's other works before (and after) they were deleted.[9]

Profic Career

Claire published her first profic novel, City of Bones, in 2007 under the name "Cassandra Clare".[12] It is part of an urban fantasy series known as The Mortal Instruments, which shares the same title as a Ron/Ginny fanfic she wrote in 2004 (but is otherwise unrelated). As of 2013, Claire has published eight books and has several more in the works, and a film adaption of City of Bones was released on August 21, 2013.

Though Mortal Instruments and the Draco Trilogy do not share a plot, some fans believe that Clary and Jace are based on Claire's fanon versions of Ginny and Draco. Additionally, one passage from Draco Veritas, which tells the story of Draco's pet falcon, appears word-for-word in City of Bones; the only differences are minor punctuation changes and the amendment of "Draco" to "the boy" (now referring to Jace).

Wank about the fan did occur when the published author put out her first novel, which involved both media fandom and science fiction fandom, but in general the allegations of plagiarism and bad behavior against the fan are not well known among people who interact with the published author.[note 6][note 7]

Cassandra Claire: Featured in Fanworks

From 2002:

~*An Ode To Cassandra Claire*~
Hail to three, Cassandra Claire!
Fanfic author, great and fair!
Writer of the VSD's,
We worship thee on bended knees.
For when compared to thy hum'rous tales
All other fan-made fics must pale.
Thou art a god! Thou art a saint!
A cheesy Mary-Sue thou ain't.
We love thine writing, quick and smart,
Your Draco fics are truly art.
The "Diaries" have brought thee fame,
And Tolkien fans now know thy name.
We await the next with bated breath,
And wonder how you see Haldir's death.
Yea, hail to thee, Cassandra Claire!
Fanfic author, great and fair! [13]

Further Reading/Meta

Notes

  1. ^ "Emma:... And you are publishing under the name Cassandra Claire, correct? Cassie: Without the "i". Emma: Without the "i", okay. So now people will know how to look for you on Amazon.com and that kind of thing. Cassie: Yes." -- from Slashcast Insider Interview with Cassie Claire
  2. ^ One such example, out of hundreds, is "I swear to God, [Draco Dormiens] is one of the most humorous, most dramatic, and most poignant fics up there, and C.C. must be some sort of genius." -- comment at Harry Potter for Grownups by Alicia/Sue Spinnet, September 3, 2000
  3. ^ In this tumblr post, for instance, which cites several other examples (links near the bottom).
  4. ^ For example, see Sinéad (finnyrachel)'s October 2012 Tumblr post; reference link and Aja's Me & CC; or, BNFs do not have more fun (2006, updated August 2011); reference link. Reblog; reference link and the Oh No They Didn't blog recap; reference link of the Tumblr post (now removed), which detailed the fan's recollection of Cassie using IP addresses to call her LJ critics on the phone or report them to the police. The Tumblr also described the fan's own experience nearly getting kicked out of university after her boyfriend used someone else's login to troll the "Harry Potter for GrownUps" (HP4GU) Yahoo mailing list, and she was blamed for it. Sinéad suggested that Cassie either fabricated the transcripts or falsely confessed while pretending to be her:
    I immediately got the best tech lawyer in Boston and saw all the documents the HP4GU people sent to BU- AngieJ/Cassandra Claire/the male mod sending them chat transcripts of me admitting to the hacking and I honestly said that I had talked to AngieJ and the Male Mod as recently as February but I’ve never admitted to hacking (several of my friends said that it wasn’t my ordinary chat behavior, including my mom) and frankly, I hadn’t talked to Cassie in PM for several months prior to February.

    I brought ALL my documents- Cassie’s Livejournal entries condemning me (her behavior towards me, at the time, was atrocious and uncalled for) and other documentation, etc. And, ironically, it was these exact documents which completely cleared me of hacking because she basically wrote her intent in the comments section to get me kicked out of university as payback.

    However, others contest the extent of Cassie's involvement in the incident: see one HP4GU mod's 2006 version of events (reference link), as well as Aja's (reference link) and Heidi's (reference link) responses to Sinéad's Tumblr post.

  5. ^ Her NC-17 fics were linked on the front page of her LiveJournal through February 2005. The links were still up as of February 26, 2005, but deleted as of March 1, 2005. She wrote in March 2006 (WebCite):
    "I took down all of my NC-17 fic about a year and a half ago because there'd been some legal trouble in fandom with people's NC-17 fic being accessed by readers under 17, so I deleted them all. There's still some on the restricted section, which is very careful about age limits and passwords"
    Claire also changed her Restricted Section account name from "Cassandra Claire" to "epicyclical", and only three of her stories were archived there (see Restricted Section: Authors C, archived 03 July 2004 by the Wayback Machine; WebCite). She announced The Mortal Instruments series on April 6, 2005 (see this thread at ParadigmOfUncertainty; WebCite).
  6. ^ John Scalzi. Crimes of Fanfic. Whatever blog post 8 August 2006. (Accessed 10 December 2008.); (reference link). See comments by Barry Goldblatt (August 10, 2006 12:23 AM)--Her sale has nothing to do with her fanfic reputation. Her publisher doesn't have a clue what fanfic is. The book was bought off the strength of the writing, plain and simple.--and Justine Larbalestier (August 12, 2006 04:51 PM). Larbalestier reported asking a roomful of publishing people, If you were publishing a book and it was revealed to you that the author had been well-known as a fanwriter who had plagiarised some of their fan writings how would you respond? The responses were either: "What's fanfic?" or, "Well, it's fanfic isn't that all plagiarism?".
  7. ^ In conjunction with the film's release in 2013, a few non-fan online media outlets reported on the plagiarism incident (at Flavorwire = (reference link) and The Daily Dot) (reference link), and sometimes wildly exaggerated rumors circulated among Twitter users. Business as usual.

References

  1. ^ untitled post, June 29, 2001, a day after Cassandra Claire was banned from Fanfiction.net for plagiarism
  2. ^ Aja (bookshop) wrote in jurisimprudence, Archived version, March 9, 2004
  3. ^ The Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Debacle [1] in Journalfen's bad_penny community, posted 2006-08-04 by avocado. Accessed 9 December 2008. WebCites: Post 1, Post 2, Post 3, Post 4, Post 5, and Post 6.
  4. ^ Avacado: the brawl, August 2006
  5. ^ Transcript: Episode 84: Purity Culture; archive link (October 3, 2018)
  6. ^ Cassandra Clare sued for copyright infringement, The Bookseller February 9, 2016.
  7. ^ SHERRILYN KENYON V. CASSANDRA CLARE, a/k/a JUDITH RUMELT, a/k/a JUDITH LEWIS and DOES 1 through 50, inclusive, February 5, 2016.
  8. ^ Copyright Clash Over Demon-Fighting Stories, Courthouse News Service, February 08, 2016.
  9. ^ a b Looking for Draco Trilogy/Cassandra Claire's Fanfic? at FictionAlley Park. 06 August 2006. (Accessed 08 April 2013.); (reference link)
  10. ^ ParadigmOfUncertainty post #27171: Re: PoU Draco Series, quoting a message from Cassandra Claire made on her Yahoo! group. 17 August 2006. (Accessed 08 April 2013; WebCite.)
  11. ^ www.heidi8.com/dt/. (Archived 22 March 2007 by the Wayback Machine.)
  12. ^ Wikipedia page about Cassandra Clare Accessed December 10, 2008; See the (reference link for the Dec 2008 version of the page. Since then, the page has gone through significant edits including removing a list of CC's other fan fiction titles as being "unsourced". See this Wikipedia entry from Dec 2014; WebCite).
  13. ^ by aimee_evilpixie, December 29, 2002 at untitled; archive link, one of 433 comments
  14. ^ WebCite.
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