\nursulaklegun-deactivated2024122:
This is an extremely niche and nerdy thing, but \u201cThe Divine Comedy was fanfiction\u201d and similar takes are…Reductive? Like the cool thing about old literature is that it\u2019s from a world very different from the one we live in today, so I don\u2019t understand the motivation to retroactively label classics as fanfic, which is very modern. I\u2019m all for people joking and having fun, but I\u2019ve seen that sentiment repeated here and on twitter in complete seriousness and it\u2019s just a wacky framework with which to approach literature from a context centuries removed from the idea of fandom. Dante, a medieval Christian, did not think of himself as a \u201cfan\u201d of the Bible. Christianity isn\u2019t a fandom lol. Dante did not think of the Bible as a work of fiction, and the Divine Comedy was not viewed as fiction by his contemporaries, either. When he went and recited that shit, it was as testimony to something he claimed he witnessed.
Medieval European dream visions are an entire genre of literature; there are many examples of people using a \u201cvision from god\u201d seen in a dream (or so they claimed) to criticize political/religious figures that were otherwise untouchable to them. Thus all of those popes being punished in Dante\u2019s hell, for example. Vergil\u2019s presence in the Inferno functions as 1) a mouthpiece and 2) an appeal to the authority of a revered poet. Vergil was a device, not the canon character in a self-insert fic. Isn\u2019t that so much more interesting than \u201cit was fanfic about Dante and his pal Vergil\u201d? Imo it\u2019s so much funnier that the safest way to criticize, say, a king was to be like, \u201cI had a dream where Jesus himself called the king an ugly slut. Dreams come from god so it must be true\u201d.
On one hand this is very understandable and it\u2019s in a way true that it shouldn\u2019t be simplified that much… but on the other hand, a literary work of transformative character in which a writer expresses their views, opinions and reflexions on a previously existing piece and using it to expand, explore and explain previously unseen portions of the content and/or using it to understand themselves and reexamine the original work through his own lens is literally the definition of fanfic.
Monetizeyourcat used to make a good point that Joseph Smith and the origin of Mormonism make sense as the result of a clever, creative young man in a Western New York “Burned-Over District” where like, The Word of God was the basis of all popular culture
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