The List #69: Fan Lit

The difference is quality.

There is now a huge market for fanfiction—spinoffs and re-imaginings of beloved books, movies, and T.V. shows. Often the genre is sci-fi or fantasy, and often the theme of the story ranges from light romance to “Bella and Darcy’s findom adventures” (I didn’t look up whether that one really exists and I advise you not to as well).

Not all fanfic readers are looking for porn by another name, but almost all of them seem titillated by the idea that they are reading forbidden samizdat. This week some poor urchin went viral for posting that she just read “the most devastatingly beautiful sentence in literature,” but she “can’t talk about it because it was in a fanfic.”

Ma’am, this is the internet—who’s stopping you from talking about anything, unless it’s Hunter Biden’s laptop? The girl’s rhetorical gesture (she would probably be surprised to learn) has a name: it’s called “praeteritio,” which is when you claim you’re not going to talk about something to disguise the fact that you can’t shut up about it. What she means is that if she quotes the sentence in front of literate people they will look down on her. She thinks that because they will.

But then, that’s exactly what she wants. When you take the bait, fanficcionados universally and without fail make indignant comments to the effect that some of the world’s greatest authors—Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare—took plot and characters from previously existing works. This is the argument they want to be having and the reason they are constantly daring you to disapprove of their little entertainments. Then they can act aggrieved and call you a snob.

“Just let people enjoy things,” they will say, and again, no one is actually stopping them. What some people are doing is contesting their repeated assertion that there is no difference between their Tumblr bodice rippers and, say, the tragedies of Aeschylus. There is a difference, and it comes down to this: Aeschylus is good, and most fanfiction is not.