how is it possible to love fictional characters this much and also have people always been this way?
like, did queen elizabeth lie in bed late sometimes thinking âVERILY I CANNOT EVEN FOR MERCUTIO HATH SLAIN ME WITH FEELSâÂ
was caesar like âET TU ODYSSEUSâÂ
sometimes i wonder
the answer is yes they did. thereâs a lot of research about the highly emotional reactions to the first novels widely available in print.Â
hereâs a thing; the printing press was invented in 1450 and whilst it was revolutionary it wasnât very good. but then it got better over time and by the 16th century there were publications, novels, scientific journals, folios, pamphlets and newspapers all over Europe. at first most were educational or theological, or reprints of classical works.
however, novels gained in popularity, as basically what most people wanted was to read for pleasure. they became salacious, extremely dramatic, with tragic heroines and doomed love and flawed heroes (see classical literature, only more extreme.) books in the form of letters were common. sensationalism was par the course and apparently used to teach moral lessons. there was also a lot of erotica floating around.Â
but hereâs the thing: due to the greater availability of literature and the rise of comfy furniture (i shit you not this is an actual historical fact, the 16th and 17th century was when beds and chairs got comfy) people started reading novels for pleasure, women especially. as these novels were highly emotional, they too becameâŚhighly emotional. there are loads of contemporary reports of young women especially fainting, having hysterics, or crying fits lasting for days due to the death of a character or their otpâs doomed love. they became insensible over books and characters, and were very vocal about it. men werenât immune-thereâs a long letter a middle-aged man wrote to the author of his favourite work basically saying that the novel is too sad, he canât handle all his feels, if they donât get together he wonât be able to go on, and his heart is already broken at the heroineâs tragic state (IIRC ehh).Â
conservatives at the time were seriously worried about the effects of literature on peopleâs mental health, and thought it damaging to both morals and society. so basically yes it is exactly like what happens on tumblr when we cry over attractive British men, only my historical theory (get me) is that their emotions were even more intense, as they hadnât had a life of sensationalist media to numb the pain for them beforehand in the same way we do, nor did they have the giant group therapy session that is tumblr.Â
(donât even get me started on the classical/early medieval dudes and their boners for the Iliad i will be here all week. suffice to say, the members of the Byzantine court used Homeric puns instead of talking normally to each other if someone who handât studied the classics was in the room. they had dickish fandom in-jokes. boom.)Â
I needed to know this.
See, weâre all just the current steps in a time-honored tradition! (And this post is good to read along with Affectinglyâs post this week about old-school-fandom-and-history-and-stuff.
Ancient Iliad fandom is intense
Alexander the Great and and his boyfriend totally RPed Achilles and Patroclus. Alexander shipped that hard. (Itâs possible that this story is apocryphal, but that would just mean that ancient historians were writing RPS about Alexander and Hephaestion RPing Iliad slash and honestly thatâs just as good).
And then thereâs this gem from Plato:
âVery different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus - his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far)â - Symposium
Thatâs right: 4th Century BCE arguments about who topped. Nihil novi sub sole my friends.
More on this glorious subject from people who know way more than I do
Man I love this post.
And to add my personal favourite story: after reading Samuel Richardsonâs Clarissa in the 18th century, Elizabeth Echlin decided that she was NOT HAPPY with the ending and basically wrote her own fix-it fic. No-one dies and Lovelace (the villain) was totally reformed and became a super nice guy. Itâs completely OOC and incredibly poorly written and itâs beautiful.Â
Also, so many women fell in love with the villain, Lovelace, and wrote to Richardson about it, that he kept adding new bits with each edition to highlight what a hideous person Lovelace was. So itâs almost unsurprising that reading novels in this period was actually considered dangerous because it gave women unrealistic ideas about men and made them easier prey for rakes.Â
Basically, âI want my own Christian Greyâ has been a thing for hundreds of years.Â
Also a thing with fix-it/everyone lives AUs: at various points in time but especially in the mid 1800s-early 1900s (aka roughly Victorian though there were periods of this earlier as well) a huge thing was to âfixâ Shakespeare (as well as most theater/novels) to be in line with current morality. Good characters live, bad characters are terribly punished â but not, you know, grusomely, because what would the ladies think? So you have like, productions of King Lear where Cordelia lives and so do Regan and Goneril, but theyâre VERY SORRY.
Aka all your problematic faves are redeemed and Everyone Lives! AUs for every protag.
Slightly tangential but I wanted to add my own favorite account of Chinese fandom to this~ I donât know how many people here have heard of the Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions (红漟梌), but it is, arguably, the most famous Chinese novel ever written (There are four Chinese novel classics and A Dream of Red Mansions is considered the top of that list). It was written during the Qing dynasty by ćšéŞčš, but became a banned book due to its critique of societal institutions and pro-democracy themes. As a result, the original ending of the book was lost and only the first 80 chapters remained. There are quite a few versions of how the current ending of the book came to be, but one of them is basically about how He Shen, one of Emperor Qian Longâs most powerful advisers, was such a super-fan of the book, he hired two writers to archive and reform the novel from the few remaining manuscripts there were. In order to convince the Emperor to remove the ban on the book, he had the writers essentially write a fanfiction ending to the book that would mitigate the anti-establishment themes. However, He Shen thought that the first version of the ending was too tragic (even though the whole book is basically a tragedy) so he had the writers go back and write a happier ending for him (the current final 40 chapters). He then presented the book to the Emperor and successfully convinced him to remove the ban on the book.
According to incomplete estimates, A Dream of Red Mansions spawned over 20 spin offs, retellings, and alternate versions (in the form of operas, plays, etc.) during the Qing Dynasty alone.Â
In 1979, fans (albeit academic ones) started publishing a bi-monthly journal dedicated to analysis (read: meta) on A Dream of Red Mansions. In fact, the novelâs fandom is so vast and qualified and rooted in academics of Chinese literature that there is an entire field of study (beginning in the Qing dynasty) of just this one novel, called 红ĺŚ. Think of it as Shakespearean studies, but only on one play. This field of study has schools of thought and specific specializations (as in: Psych analyses, Economics analyses, Historical analyses, etc.) that span pretty much every academic field anyone can think of.Â
(That being said, Iâve read A Dream of Red Mansions and can honestly say that Iâve never read its peer in either English or Chinese. If for nothing else, read it because you would never otherwise believe that a man from the Qing dynasty could write such a heart-breakingly feminist novel with such a diverse cast of female characters given all the bitching and moaning we hear from male content-creators nowadays)
the beauty of archival research *sigh*
Donât even get me started on the Don Quixote fandom. Long story short, the first volume was published 10 years before the second. What do you think happened between those years? There was fanfic. Duh.
I wouldnât find it hard to believe that there was a little more out there than weâre aware of, but one unofficial sequel pissed off Cervantes so much that it probably prompted him to write his own. At the very least, he spends a couple of chapters in volume two blasting the author. Itâs so meta. Especially since that sequel was written under a screename pseudonym and no one knows who was really behind it.
I want you to write more on this topic plz.
Iâm so glad someone wrote about Dream of Red Mansions / Story of the Stone because if they didnât, I would. For the record, those last forty chapters, essentially one of the most famous fanfics ever written, was only âdecanonizedâ by the Chinese government in the past few years, leaving the book tragically, if accurately, incomplete. (The story I heard about their history was very different than the above post, but they exist one way or another so Iâm not going to complain.)
The shipping for that book was absurd, too. The editor of my copy talks about records of men duelling on the street over their OTPs.
@sashayed
Nice to know itâs not just a current thing
