FanFic in Period
Mar. 15th, 2008 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
patgundThe Got Medieval blog has a very interesting post on Fan Fiction in the Middle Ages. And yep, there was Mary Sue-type characters then too.
Did They Have Fan Fiction in the Middle Ages? (GP)
"For those of you who don't troll the darker depths of the internet, "fan fiction" or "fanfic" is a term used to describe stories written in or about another author's world, primarily stories that involve two characters from said world having sex, especially if said characters were very unlikely to have had sex in the original work.* So, did they have fan fiction in the Middle Ages? The answer is "yes," though their tastes tended less towards slashfic (the improbable pairings mentioned above) and more toward self-insertion fanfic, the variety in which the author of the derivative work makes themselves a character in the original fictional world, usually a character who is so much better at everything that the characters in the original did, mostly those characters exist just to say things like, "Wow, Author of this Fanfic, you are so pretty and smart and good at riding dragons and fixing warp cores, I don't know why nobody will go to prom with you. They are fools, fools I say!"** John Lydgate is the worst medieval offender that I can think of off the top of my head. For the prologue to his Siege of Thebes, he wrote himself into Chaucer's Canterbury Tales."
And I agree with a comment. Galahad is so totally a Mary Sue!
Did They Have Fan Fiction in the Middle Ages? (GP)
"For those of you who don't troll the darker depths of the internet, "fan fiction" or "fanfic" is a term used to describe stories written in or about another author's world, primarily stories that involve two characters from said world having sex, especially if said characters were very unlikely to have had sex in the original work.* So, did they have fan fiction in the Middle Ages? The answer is "yes," though their tastes tended less towards slashfic (the improbable pairings mentioned above) and more toward self-insertion fanfic, the variety in which the author of the derivative work makes themselves a character in the original fictional world, usually a character who is so much better at everything that the characters in the original did, mostly those characters exist just to say things like, "Wow, Author of this Fanfic, you are so pretty and smart and good at riding dragons and fixing warp cores, I don't know why nobody will go to prom with you. They are fools, fools I say!"** John Lydgate is the worst medieval offender that I can think of off the top of my head. For the prologue to his Siege of Thebes, he wrote himself into Chaucer's Canterbury Tales."
And I agree with a comment. Galahad is so totally a Mary Sue!
