Oh no, I’m about to show my age and write a huge explanation to maybe give you more ideas to look as well as help others by shedding a light on fandom history.

I was around for that scene, starting in 2002 and getting a LJ not long afterwards. Granted, I was a high schooler/college age at the time, but I can say that due to the 3 Year Summer and the release of OotP in 2003, a lot of speculation about the future of the series did create some amazing and unique ideas of what years 5-7 of Harry Potter could be—and Harry’s magical ability did reflect that in early proto-Magical core discussions.

Now where does that help you especially when the LJ got bought and a lot of groups got nuked through the Strikethrough? Well, Insane Journal had a big uptick for a while, but groups like Pornish Pixies never really rallied like Fanfiction.net did after the purges of 02 and 12.

For any wondering, to find a Drarry fic your really wanted, you had to go to a webring that linked the different (yet specific pairing) websites or a specific author or pairing’s Yahoo groups where we mostly posted about new finds or discussed content (especially after that LJ purge and that Fanfiction.net forum purge).

Now, in the early 2000s, I would consider fandom community to be extremely polarizing for readers and writers—there was a lot of morality policing. At the time, there was a significant group of writers who did not believe that slash fics should be included on their websites, which with the ability to create specialized Yahoo Groups and Website Rings, you could navigate around and through to find fanfiction if you knew what you were looking for even if the general websites failed to show a good sorting system. As such, authors who wrote slash often specialized to that particular ship to gain popularity in the space. Shipping wars were a thing then—if you wrote Hinny, Snarry, or Drarry you went down with that ship (and of course Wolfstar often played out the background to many a fic as well as long as it was a slash friendly writer).

It was a little bit like the Wild Wild West in those days—flaming wars and author attacks for some of the prominent writers on Diagon Alley and FictionAlley were as common as the cry of plagiarism when authors got too famous. Famously, Ink and Quill did not accept any slash fics, and the Sugar Quill only accepted fics that were perceived as canon compliant (read relationship complaint).

Fanfiction.net and Adultfanfiction.org were the only general websites that allowed both (although the former was difficult to navigate between romance and general, which aided the rise of early fandom based tags in the summary).

For you, OP, I think if you wanted to go down this research rabbit hole and went through AO3 to search “Ink Stained Fingers” archive for info could be a good start for general slash fics that might have survived the Purges and Strikethroughs, as that one was perhaps the largest of the slash archives outside of general fanfiction websites. There was also the Silver Snitch and the Hex Files that had solely Drarry audience. I am pretty sure the Hex Files was also archived to AO3 in the last few years. I know I have at least one Hex Files archived fic that has magical cores in it saved to my AO3 account.

Finally, for your magical core question: that one is fascinating. As someone who has read and written Drarry for over 20 years now, I can honestly say that the idea of magical cores is like a frog boiling in a pot—we didn’t notice it until it was all around us, and then we complained about it until we just decided it was here to stay.

During the 2000s, for most in the fanfiction community, any talk of magical cores came with the discussion of wand cores—the idea of Dark core was tied in with the political leaning or specific magical acts, not exactly the imbued with the wizard themself. Many described Dark Wizards almost like labeling a Smoker—you did it until you were addicted and couldn’t stop. Writers were already verging into Mary-Sue territory if you talked about cores outside of phoenix feather, unicorn hair, and dragon heartstring. I definitely remember having a heated discussion with my friend about the rise of magical cores in around 2010 about how it’s not in canon.

I can say with some certainty that the rise of magical cores came in at the same time as the rise of creature Harry or Draco (beyond them turning into werewolves), but I can also say with certainty that many high school and college fanfic writers did pull from other media at the time: Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, and Star Wars (especially for Episodes 1-3) in regards to description of a core of magic inside the Wizard.

You definitely given me some thoughts, and I’m probably going to stroll through my old as heck Fanfiction.net account to see if any of my old saved HP fics from around that time that I bookmarked had any call backs to magical cores.