That's a good point and one I was thinking of as I was reading the thread. Do you think if some of Blaise's backstory was given earlier on it would have been less of a problem? Because honestly, if we'd heard that little about him earlier I can see him having been incorporated into fanon easily.

See, as I said over in jazzypom's thread, I'm still not seeing how what we were given about Blaise in HBP was so much information as to render it impossible to fill in the blanks with him the way people had been doing before HBP (and I'm drawing a distinction here between something like ataniell93's WWL - where it's simply not *reasonable* to expect that she go back and make the whole thing "canon compliant" or to make it canon compliant from this point forward; too much work's been done there for that to be feasible -- vs. people who've written Blaise in the past in one-shot type stories, i.e, they've written him in stand-alone stories, PWPs, etc.). What we were given of Blaise in HBP really is still pretty thin and sketchy: we know he's black, he's got a mom who's been married multiple times, and he buys into Pureblood ideology on some level (and really, is this a *surprise*? regardless of whether he's a *zealot* about it, he still got sorted into Slytherin House, and I actually don't think the Sorting Hat-as-written-by-JKR would put you anywhere else if you bought into/were in any way sympathetic to the Pureblood ideology; that Blaise is a Syltherin at all suggests to me that people should have always considered the possibility that while he may not have been a DE-in-training, he still thought Pureblood ideology *made a certain amount of sense*).

I really don't see how those things are such an impediment to writing about the character. Or is the idea that background tertiary characters like Blaise and Theodore Nott are only appealing if they're a *complete* tabula rasa? I can sort of see that -- any backstory makes this type of character a less appealing plaything. But I don't know. I don't think the information given about Blaise in HBP was so significant in terms of its substance to make it difficult or impossible to continue playing 'fill-in-the-blanks' with him.