The Prison of His Days

Possibly my Latin teacher will not be expecting a chapter of my future thesis on fanfiction. Too bad. Even if it is not as devoted to the Aeneid as it should be, and is mostly about the Lavinia novel (which is awesomesocks, bee tee dubs).

I feel the desperate need to write fanfic. Possibly to cover my shame at being completely unable to remember how to do citations.

I feel that the High School AU That Never Was or some similar hilarity is calling me. At 2:30 in the morning why.

Because I do. Kind of a lot.

I just finished reading her Lavinia, on which I'm writing my final Latin paper -- as a prologue, or a first chapter perhaps, to that book in my mind on the study of modern fandom, particularly fanfic, as a smooth continuation of a literary tradition as old and as august as story itself.

Because Lavinia is a work of fandom, perfectly so, without a single solitary difference. Oh, it's brilliant, serious, thought-provoking -- but so, as any actual member of fandom will tell you, is the best of fanfic. It quotes the text, works against the text, rearranges the text, gives voice to the voiceless, revisions the text, discusses and resolves the text, interacts with the text, continues the text...it does what fanfic is meant to do. I have the better part of a pack of post-it notes marking places where this is particularly true. This reminds me of a femgenficathon story, taking a woman out of the background (a girl, an omen, a blush) and into the foreground, where people walk into and out of her life, rather than the reverse. Where she is the window rather than the curtains.

Perhaps that book will be my thesis, after all. The more I read, the more I find that these words need to be said, because they are true and yet it has never occurred to anyone to say them until now.

I have no trouble finding a conversation about Ursula LeGuin's comment on Virgil understanding women which segues quickly into whether or not Virgil really does *characters* at all, as compared particularly to Homer. And I can talk about this to other people who will be interested and have different perspectives! One of whom is writing a paper about classical mythology vis-a-vis the YA series Perry (?Percy?) Jackson and the Olympians!

Sometimes I forget that one can have rewarding conversations in meatspace too.

My opinion, of course, is that I find the Aeneid entirely too Because Destiny Says So. The Iliad has a fair amount of destiny, yes, but it's rarely something known explicitly by the people bringing it about. Aeneas knows a great deal about his destiny, and when he is informed what Fate says he should do next, he goes off and does it, Because Destiny Says So. Whereas fate in the Iliad tends to be something discussed only in narration, shared by the audience but not by the characters--except, notably, for Achilles, who is aware...that he has two equally likely destinies. He could always have gone home. He didn't, and after a certain point he couldn't without being horrifically OOC, but he could have. The Iliad is driven by characters: Agamemnon takes Chryseis as a slave, so her dad calls on Apollo, so Apollo send plague, so the Akhaians ask how they can lift the plague, so Calchas says Chryseis must go home, so Agamemnon says... The Aeneid on the other hand is driven by prophecies and divine intervention almost exclusively. It's the ultimate in plot-driven storytelling. Me, I am all about the character-driven.