it’s summer and the weather lately has been pushing me to read r/hr fan fictions.

i started reading harry potter fan fictions summer of 2005. the sixth book in the series was recently released then and after reading the book in a span of two days (i attended a party so i wasn’t able to finish it in a day as much as i wanted to), i felt that there was something amiss. obviously, i craved for more. being the self-confessed obsessed ron-hermione shipper that i was (still am and will forever be), i thought that many things happened in between those pages that j.k. rowling chose not to write about. i sought for the undisclosed romance that  i was absolutely convinced existed in the missing pages of the book.

so i went to the next best thing – google. i searched for stories that would quench my thirst for r/hr romance and google did not disappoint. in fact, i was overwhelmed with the results i got. i never imagined that there were so many thousands of fans as devoted to r/hr as i was, whose written works were what exactly i was looking for.

i remember the first couple of stories i read – the multi-chaptered la vie en rose and the one-shot not as a last resort. i enjoyed both because the characters stayed true to the books and there was a story to support them. but there was too much literature that it was difficult to filter which ones were well-written and which ones were as bad as tabloid reading. fortunately for me, i soon found out through my sister that there is checkmated.com, a ron-hermione fan fiction archive. all the stories in the site are not only well-written; they are also proof read and edited before publishing. since then, i have stopped googling r/hr stories and became a regular visitor of checkmated. to this day, my two favorite fan fictions can be found in checkmated: the book of morgan la fey and the final reckoning by lavenderbrown.

if there is one thing to be said of fan fictions, it is that the magnitude of people’s imagination is truly limitless. and i envy such imagination.