pslasher

Posted by fanhackers-mods

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Continuing my desire to shout out literary scholars, I give you Anna Wilson’s 2016 TWC essay, “The role of affect in fan fiction.”   The essay is about the openness of love and other strong emotions about characters and texts in fandom – a strong contrast to academia, where experts often strive to be (or at least appear) unbiased, objective, and dispassionate.  Wilson quotes from a number of Yuletide asks that show great enthusiasm for characters and texts from classical history:

I have a thing to confess, and that thing is: I love Marcus Tullius Cicero. No, seriously, I adore him. I’m fascinated by his intelligence, his ambition, his—grandness, I suppose you could call it; he’s a historical figure who is genuinely larger than life. (Emilyenrose)

And 

I love Callicratidas!…I love him for his straightforwardness and integrity and honour, for his vigour without rashness (well, mostly) and obedience without obsequiousness, for being a man of principle in a morally bankrupt world undergoing rapid, profound social change, and I can’t help but adore his total lack of people skills. (tevildo)

But the particular parts of this essay I want to tease out are the ways these Yuletide asks invite the prospective fanfiction author not just to interpret and extend the canon, but to invent things, to make new things with these old texts.

So, for instance, Wilson discusses how Rumpleghost asks for a Yuletide story based on Demosthenes’s legal speech “Against Conon,” noting that Rumpleghost’s letter “takes a character-focused approach that opens up the speech to fannish imagination but likewise balances this with historical detail.”  Rumpleghost tells her Secret Santa that:

because the only information we have about Ctesias’s character is from the speech and most of that is slander, you can go totally wild in making him be whatever you want, though I would love it if you based him on details you found in the text.

Hence the title of my post: you can go totally wild in making him be whatever you want is actually the subtext of a lot of fanfiction, even though fans talk a lot about good fic seeming canonical and hewing closely to canon.  Wilson shows that fandom is doing something more complicated: while Rumpleghost would love it if the characterization is based on details from the texts, those details are the basis for going totally wild.  Wilson explains that:

The request fleshes out the bare bones of the story about these two men gleaned from the legal speech, suggesting a story about "the days they first meet at the army camp on garrison duty, where Ctesias and his friends are drunk every day and Ariston is a little:|:|:|-faced dude, follow flirtiness/hijinks/confrontation/sex there!” The request overall conveys deep affection for these characters and a profound affective investment in the antagonistic relationship that Rumpleghost imagines between them (“Ctesias being lazily charmed by Ariston’s snarky little existence”), while there is an unspoken shift away from the aspects of the speech typically studied in the classroom (such as its legal, ethical, political, and linguistic elements) onto its affective content: Ariston, the speaker, is “prickly” and “pompous” with “incredible self-righteousness,” while Ctesias is “a provocative douche,” and the speech shows “what grumpy, similar little guys they could be."  

Wilson thus argues that the letter “establishes the fannish discourse from which fan fiction can emerge.” The fanfiction writer is here being encouraged to fill up the dry details of canon with affective life as well as meaningful (and pleasurable) tropes and themes. 

–Francesca Coppa

https://fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/801056935586758656