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There seems to be a trend on Tumblr where people call Classical works such as: Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and other as Fanfiction because they use characteristics that are used in fanfics today.
And the issue is that you are taking something that exists today and putting it into context thousands of years ago.
Dante’s «La Divina Commedia» was completed in 1320. Do you think he just “Self-inserted to get with the main character”…? Do you think he thought about fanfiction?
I have to take a quote from @janiedean ‘s post about Dante over here ( x )“It’s fanfics that exist because of those tropes and use them because they were successful in published literature.”
This is not a put-down of Fanfiction. We love fanfics. Holy shit fanfiction is what got me into writing. There are so many beautifully crafted fanfics.
But, you need to stop calling Milton, Dante, Dumas etc a fanfic writers because they are not.
If you don’t want to read the entire long post here is the paragraph where I copied the line from:
“But please, do tell that thinking about it should make me feel better about writing fanfic when it’s not Dante writing fanfic tropes, it’s fanfics that exist because of those tropes and use them because they were successful in published literature. Actually, don’t put Dante and fanfic in the same sentence again ever because it just shows you haven’t read the book and if you did then you skipped all the notes and the introduction. Don’t be like the guy who took that stuff above, made a video game where Dante is a muscular hunk who kills his way through Hell to save Beatrice from it saying that it seemed like a good idea and when asked if he’d have done the same with, say, Macbeth, answered that ‘it could work but Shakespeare is sacred so I wouldn’t touch him ever’. Newsflash: Dante is the same as Shakespeare to us except more important because Shakespeare didn’t write the first major opus of English Literature, and Dante did, so…. just please don’t. Thanks. Bye. “
See, here’s my issue with posts such as these:
terms such as ‘fanfiction; have certain (albeit negative) connotations today that did not exist in the past, and while Dante and Shakespeare were not thinking about that, because, honestly, HOW COULD THEY?, that doesn’t negate the fact that a solid argument is that they did write what could be considered to be fanfiction.
The thing with linguistics and general terms is that they exist long before we put actual names to them. Fanfiction as a concept is nothing more than fiction that is based off of other works: using characters or plots from other places that came before it. And in this context, the shoe fits.
Here’s my issue: we have placed classical literature and canon upon an unreachable pedestal, and while I admit that classical works can be great, awe-inspiring, wonderful, that does not mean that other things cannot be. To say that “it’s not Dante writing fanfic tropes, it’s fanfics that exist because of those tropes and use them” is, frankly, ridiculous. It’s a chicken and an egg scenario. If he is implementing those tropes, creating them, then he is taking part in them and is, by DEFINITION, a part of it. The idea that somehow we are…sullying? classical works by comparing them to fanfiction is asinine. Was Dante brilliant? Undoubtedly. Writing an entire text in nothing but cantos is ridiculously impressive. He was a gifted writer. But fanfiction is not a bad thing to be compared to. It is posts such as these that imply that, yeah, fanfiction is OKAY, but it isn’t REAL writing like the GREATS, that gives it a poor name.
Fanfiction is wonderful. It starts people’s writing careers. It inspires imagination. And, the best of it: it is the most pure way of showing that literature, as a conversation existing between author and reader via written work, is a permeable dialogue that can, in fact, go both ways. And that is GORGEOUS. Everything is influenced by something else: Fanfiction is just the most blatant about it.
Taking something that exists today and using it to explain things that occurred several thousand years in the past is what humanity DOES. Fanfiction is no new concept that came about when the internet was born. In the same way people looked at the sky and didn’t have names or explanations for what was happening up there: we fill in the gaps. WE, now, explain these things using terminology that relates to us today.
Because if we put literature in a great glass case and claim it is untouchable by modern hands, we’re doing it an insult. Did people from the 1800′s have feminist analysis? Of course they did: in a way. They didn’t CALL it that but there is no doubt that people DID feminist analysis, at least once.
Feminism existed long before a word came to it. Astronomy existed long before a word was attached to it. Saying that we cannot compare Milton, who wrote a retelling of the bible, a, regardless of theological significance, text that existed before it, or saying that we cannot compare the fact that Shakespeare wrote of Desdemona despite borrowing her entire character from a different writer to fanfiction holds little to no weight. It is, at best, implying that Fanfiction is something that is an insult to be compared, and, at worst, claiming that classical works should never be compared to modern and thus reaks of the hoity toity pretension of dusty academia and gatekeeping.
So, frankly, to the person in the quoted segment: Fanfiction is something that is beautiful for a multitude of reasons. The biggest reason it has such a bad name is because there are no gatekeepers. And that is both wonderful and awful, but that’s a conversation for a different day.
Literature evolves. It always will. And all literature is subject to scrutiny and comparison. Even your ‘sacred’ Dante.
Because, guess what? Fanfiction is not an insult no matter how much people want to use it as such. And, by virtue of definition, if Dante and Shakespeare and Milton and what and who have you used tropes that paved the way for what Fanfiction is today: that means they took part in it, regardless of whether we had a name to analyze or compare it to such, yet.
I was always under the assumption that the main purpose for comparing classical literature to modern fanfiction was not to downplay the worth of classics but actually protect the value of the fanfiction. Modern scholars are not dismissing or downplaying the achievements of Dante or James Joyce because they did not create entirely new worlds and characters, and so too should scholars and laypeople not dismiss contemporary fanfiction as lacking value for that same reason. I can understand seeing Internet Speak about it as flippant and hyperbolic, and so some of that meaning can be lost, but overall I thought the message was clear that it was meant to validate the struggles of modern fanfic authors, not invalidate renowned authors. People who have been ridiculed for working within the confines of a previously established canon can use it to feel that their passion is not inherently without worth.
I am sorry, but here we’re talking about Tumblr and Tumblr is full of people who actively belittle such works as La Divina Commedia in order to raise the value of fanfic and the moment you feel the need to do that, you already lost your argument. Nobody here is demeaning fanfiction, but it is a matter of fact, and anybody with basic logic and knowledge about what they are talking about would know, that they are not the same thing.
The concept of originality and its praise has not always been a thing until recent times. In the past your works were valued if they took pre-existing tropes and characters/people from the culture you were immersed in and gave them an inventive/new/stunning spin to them or outright modified them to a point of being considered better. Which is a thing that can also happen in fanfiction, but those people don’t talk about that.
What Tumblr people are saying is, “look! The classics used pre-existing elements in their works, so they are the same as fanfiction. Let’s ignore the whole package that comes with these works because fanfiction lacks those and we can’t be intellectually honest if we go on with this argument. But whatever! Who cares? Like, Beatrice was just a manic pixie, right? Also, let’s call Dante a self insert, when self inserts are something that our community itself generally dislikes and we are missing the point of his work anyway!”
Do you know what La Divina Commedia has that fanfiction doesn’t. A context in which it gave one country it’s language and it shaped that country’s culture. Oh, also the fact that Dante invented a new rime and that he used that rime consistently throughout all his verses, which were all made out of 11 sillables each. Political, philosophical, literary and religious commentary is also there, as well as different styles of writing based on the theme he dealt with and an amount of knowledge so huge that you’d ask yourself how so much of it even had any room to fit in his head.
Like, I’d like to see today one fanfic author write such a work and spend 20 years of their life creating and perfecting it.
Like, the point is that there is no comparison. Yes, people who belittle fanfic because it uses pre-existing characters and tropes are idiots who basically ignore that classic literature did that as well, but saying that La Divina Commedia (or Paradise Lost or whatever) IS fanfic because of that is frankly very ignorant and I have not seen one post on Tumblr making this comparison without demeaning the DC in the process (or other works that dictated the history of literature that came after) in order to give fanfic more value. That makes no sense. That’s anachronistic. That shows a lot of ignorance.
And like, everybody is free to dislike it all they want, hell knows that I do to an extent, but let’s be intellectually honest about it, at least. Having learned SOME things about it (as in, I learned a lot and then removed it after finishing HS), I can easily say that fanfic and that work are not the same thing, for so many reasons.
I can understand the kind of value that it has, which fanfic doesn’t, and the context that surrounds it and its history.
In turn, fanfic has values which classic works don’t have and is special in its own way because of that.
One of those values is the lack of gatekeeping, anybody having the possibility of trying it and writing it in whatever language they feel like and in whatever regionalism/slang of that language and share it with a fandom and the freedom to express yourself however you want and to explore what the hell you want, even the darkest of themes (if we ignore fandom police trying to stop people from doing that, at least, but they are irrelevant, truly).
The moment people learn to praise fanfiction BECAUSE OF ITS OWN MERITS without dragging other works down in the proccess, without trying to make other works and in turn fanfic as well something that they are not, is the moment fanfiction truly wins.
Lemme put on my professor hat here
MOST CLASSICS ARE 100% FANFIC
Hamlet was a satire on an older play about Hamlet that was so bad history swallowed it up and literature thanked it,
The Merchant of Venice was heavily inspired by Marlow’s the Jew of Malta which was based on tropes that were popular at the time, the damsel who needs to be protected from her wicked father, who in the Jew of Malta was actually a very wicked character, and made worse by virtue of being Jewish so the anti semitic audience [although they wouldn’t have known that term] knew exactly who the villain was
Do you know how many people have rewritten the story of Faust that there are at least 4 seminal versions of it and people talk about it with pre and post redemption arcs
Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” was based on Malory, and Malory’s was based on Chrettienne de Troyes and he was based on Geoffrey of Monmouth who based his stories on popular folklore and ballads
Even putting aside the idea that Milton’s Paradise Lost was written by his daughters [young women being the most common fanficcers] he based his story on the existing narrative of Lucifer’s fall, and everyone forgets the rather less successful sequel.
Dante’s story was a self insert where he went through the medieval image of Hell heavily relying on Virgil’s narrative to the point where he put Virgil in it!
If those came out now we’d call them derivative or fanfic
I can do that for just about every classic going, because you know what the big difference is between non-fanfic and fanfic now
non-fanfic gets paid
but that is the point: the concept of fanfiction has always existed, true, but the phenomenon of fanfiction is linked deeply with the coming of mass culture, internet culture, and the concept of copyright.
Before XX century, the was no copyright: an author was good not because of how original it’s idea was, but how they were able to used that thrope somebody else used at some point.
Let’s talk about Dante, to stay on the matter: the thrope of the descent to hell and the conversation between the hero and the dead souls existed since the Sumerians, the first time it appeared is in the Epopee of Gilgamesh, and appears again in Homer’s Odyssey. The same thrope is used in different ways though: Gilgamesh descends to hell seeking a way to become immortal, because death terrifies him; Odysseus descends in hell to know how and when he will be able to go home.
aother example: in Virgil’s Aenid, Aeneas descends to hell because he wants to see his father and to understands what it’s the purpouse of his journey.
Same thrope, different uses. Now let’s look at Dante: his descent to hell is only the start of a long journey, in which he has to travel through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise to amend his soul and give a good example to humanity in the troublesome time of the Europe of the XIV century.
He descends in Hell, shows to the reader the consequences of a life full of sins and depravities, seeks political and theological redemption in Purgatory, and he’s finally allowed to contemplated the light of God in Paradise and reach full happiness. All the while creating a language that is still used today, a way to write poetry that only he could use since it was so difficult, and creating a work, La Divina Commedia, that is practically an encyclopedia of Medieval knowledge why people like to ignore these i don’t know, not talikg about you specifically btw but there was along battle between Italians and the rest of tumlr about the cultural value of the Divine Comedy, that is way is a touchy subject.
Four different approches to the same thrope, all of them could be described as fanfiction of the Epopee of Gilgamesh, but here’s the trick: they are not, because they were not written after the creation of copyright and of the internet.
Fanfiction is deeply linked to the conteporary times, because with the coming of the phenomenon of mass culture and internet culture, everyone was potencially able to do anything: TODAY, everyone can write and draw, and receive a confrontation indipendently how good they are; IN THE OLD TIMES, not everyone could write or draw, because education was accessible only to the richest and the clergy.
When the concept of copyright was created - XVII century - so was the concept of creating a specific type of media that was really close to be a violation of the new regulations regarding narrative. But these stories were not fanfictions, not yet: we have to wait the coming of internet, the consequently dissapearences of the monetary costs and difficulties to learn to write and draw, to have fanfictions and fan-art as we know them today.
Fanfictions are a direct product of mass culture and internet; without mass culture and the internet, there aren’t fanfictions.
That is why everything that was created before the XX century can’t be classified as fanfiction, it’s not a matter of being paid or not.
No, it’s not
the difference is that people are now educated to the point where they can create this work and have it in a medium that promotes shle because aring
until very recently in history the concept of writing for pleasure was unthinkable due to lack of materials and skill, but people still told those stories, they passed them on through oral histories
for the first time the traditional stories that were passed, Robin Hood, King Arthur, King Horn, Bevis of Hampton, the local stories etc, including the local ghost and monster stories, have been replaced by stories that were written not recited because people can read and write, but those stories existed for hundreds of years, in varying forms because they WERE told
I gave the example of how King Arthur’s story evolved in print, but those are not the only versions of the story, the brother’s Grimm collected folktales and sanitised them so those stories, which before had been mostly localised, became part of the collective
what fanfiction does is replace the local stories, the “collective” into stories that we are presented by media that did not exist previously
but people were recreating those stories, Chrettiene de Troyes added a gary stu to make the story appeal more to the French and he became part of our collective knowledge of King Arthur, but we might not know his variation of the story, but we do know about First Knight, or King Arthur, etc. We know the story, so how is retelling it, not fanfiction, because fanfiction is transformative - de Troyes added lancelot and a love triangle and changed the villain - is that not transformative
Dante’s version of Hell was a transforming of popular medieval catechism, not the bible, and why did he do it, to get revenge on people that he didn’t like by giving them horrible fates in Hell.
the difference is that people are WRITING these stories down, they have always told them, and the small percentage of people in history who could write did this - why because it was easier to sell a book of stories about King Arthur than someone no one had heard of.
You say it exists only as mass culture but that shows a massive misunderstanding of what fanfiction is, fanfiction is a way of taking an existing work and making it your own, you do not need to be part of the huge mass of fandom to do this, the page of prose written by a six year old about Bob the Builder has no less worth than that 2m epic about Smash Bros.
Dante sat down to write himself going on an amazing journey through a world other people had created getting to meet his favourite authors and pillory people he despised - that’s self insert fanfiction 101
Milton took the story of someone he wanted to understand from an existing work and told it from their point of view.
Fandom doesn’t have to be about shipping, but de Troyes added a gary stu and gave him the fascination of all the ladies in the story and created the love triangle in fiction as we know it
Marlowe wrote out Dr Faustus, who inspired Gonoud’s opera which later inspired Goethe, each of them transforming the story for the audience and that’s only three variants of that form.
what I’m taking form this is you have no understanding of what transformative fanfiction is, and you’re determined to undermine what is done, whilst not understanding that these books were simply fanfiction that existed because those people could write, I’m pretty sure the other storytellers, the bards and the balladeers would have written them down if they could, but they transformed those existing stories.
And fanfic was around LONG before the Internet. Hell, it was around long before anybody even remotely conceived of DARPA.
Just ask the Sherlock Holmes fandom; they’ve been at it for more than a century.
The fact this conversation exists, and that people are throwing academic weight onto to fan fiction as a whole enough to compare it to legion of literature that came “before?” The fact people are getting passionate about the definition of what is and isn’t fanfiction and defending various classics from either ‘being sullied by the reputation of fanfiction’ or using known and accepted history in order to demand validity in the modern world? The fact that this is an actual conversation that’s happening…
Fanfiction is part of that legion of literature already. Literature is constantly compared to itself. Dante - among others - does not exist in vacuums. You cannot divorce the time and tropes that existed when a “classic” was written from a conversation any more than you can divorce the time and tropes that exists in modern day from it… Because it exists now with what we know and believe and understand and create ~now.~
Yes, it is a building block, but we are constantly defining the materials with which we are building with in order to be better builders. That’s not a bad thing.
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