\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nnarwhalsareunderwaterunicorns:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nhow is it possible to love fictional characters this much and also have people always been this way?
\nlike, did queen elizabeth lie in bed late sometimes thinking \u2018VERILY I CANNOT EVEN FOR MERCUTIO HATH SLAIN ME WITH FEELS\u2019\u00a0
\nwas caesar like \u2018ET TU ODYSSEUS\u2019\u00a0
\nsometimes i wonder
\n\n
oh my GOD
\nthe answer is yes they did.\u00a0there\u2019s a lot of research about the highly emotional reactions to the first novels widely available in print.\u00a0
\nhere\u2019s a thing; the printing press was invented in 1450 and whilst it was revolutionary it wasn\u2019t 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.
\nhowever, 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.\u00a0
\nbut here\u2019s 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 became\u2026highly 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 otp\u2019s doomed love. they became insensible over books and characters, and were very vocal about it. men weren\u2019t immune-there\u2019s a long letter a middle-aged man wrote to the author of his favourite work basically saying that the novel is too sad, he can\u2019t handle all his feels, if they don\u2019t get together he won\u2019t be able to go on, and his heart is already broken at the heroine\u2019s tragic state (IIRC ehh).\u00a0
\nconservatives at the time were seriously worried about the effects of literature on people\u2019s 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 hadn\u2019t 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.\u00a0
\n(don\u2019t 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 hand\u2019t studied the classics was in the room. they had dickish fandom in-jokes. boom.)\u00a0
\nI needed to know this.
\nSee, we\u2019re all just the current steps in a time-honored tradition! (And this post is good to read along with Affectingly\u2019s post this week about old-school-fandom-and-history-and-stuff.
\nAncient Iliad fandom is intense
\nAlexander the Great and and his boyfriend totally RPed Achilles and Patroclus. Alexander shipped that hard. (It\u2019s 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 that\u2019s just as good).
\nAnd then there\u2019s this gem from Plato:
\n\u201cVery 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)\u201d - Symposium
\nThat\u2019s right: 4th Century BCE arguments about who topped. Nihil novi sub sole my friends.
\nMore on this glorious subject from people who know way more than I do
\nMan I love this post.
And to add my personal favourite story: after reading Samuel Richardson\u2019s 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. It\u2019s completely OOC and incredibly poorly written and it\u2019s beautiful.\u00a0
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 it\u2019s 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.\u00a0
Basically,\u00a0\u201cI want my own Christian Grey\u201d has been a thing for hundreds of years.\u00a0
\nAlso 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 \u201cfix\u201d Shakespeare (as well as most theater/novels) to be in line with current morality. Good characters live, bad characters are terribly punished \u2013 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 they\u2019re VERY SORRY.
Aka all your problematic faves are redeemed and Everyone Lives! AUs for every protag.
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Slightly tangential but I wanted to add my own favorite account of Chinese fandom to this~ I don\u2019t know how many people here have heard of the Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions (\u7ea2\u697c\u68a6), 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 \u66f9\u96ea\u82b9, 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 Long\u2019s 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\u00a0(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.\u00a0
In 1979, fans (albeit academic ones) started publishing a bi-monthly journal\u00a0dedicated to analysis (read: meta) on A Dream of Red Mansions. In fact, the novel\u2019s fandom is so vast and qualified and rooted in academics of Chinese literature that there is an entire field of\u00a0study\u00a0(beginning in the Qing dynasty) of just this one novel, called \u7ea2\u5b66. 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.\u00a0
(That being said, I\u2019ve read A Dream of Red Mansions and can honestly say that I\u2019ve 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\u00a0could 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)
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