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It's just funny that it took me this long to realize this
Browsing through the unfilled Yuletide requests from last year, I hit the Mythology section going full tilt with my brain in "fanficcing" mode -- that is, thinking about pairing and canonicity and thinking "How would I write this? What would need to change to make this work? Is this in character as I see it?" ... etc.
Mythology? EVERYTHING is "canon". Just about every imaginable pairing along with power dynamics of all sorts, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, mpreg, people turning into animals and having sex, people eating their kids, people lopping off sexual organs and then having sex with those ... it's a not just a literal orgy, but an orgy of taboo-breaking as well, in belief systems around the world. It might be couched in delicate, flowery language or euphemisms, but this stuff is weird.
Which means that we haven't really changed much in 10,000 years, and the evidence is all around us, in stories about Loki turning into a mare and giving birth to a horse, or Isis tracking down her dead and dismembered brother's penis for sexy funtimes, or English folk songs in which most of the characters end up raped, destitute and dead. It's not just that humans, as a species, are obsessed with sex; everyone knows that, and the reasons are kind of obvious. But we're not obsessed, specifically, with vanilla, PIV, procreative sex, which at least makes some evolutionary sense. No ... judging by the kind of stories we've been telling each other for 10,000 years (and probably longer), we're obsessed with unusual sex, kinky sex, socially transgressive sex, and the whole act of telling culturally-inappropriate and mutually contradictory stories about familiar characters. Stories about John and Rodney as socks or walls look downright normal next to some of the older stuff we've got.
In other words, then, it's ALL perfectly normal. Normal and commonplace as religion, and just as variable (in its specifics) from place to place, pivoting around the central theme that almost anything goes when the human subconscious gets involved. Obviously it's fairly common knowledge that motifs from mythology show up over and over again in storytelling from folk tales to the NYT best-seller list and the latest movies (the trickster archetype is still going strong, for example) but I don't think I had ever related it quite so specifically to fanfic before -- and not just fanfic in general, but the more transgressive and taboo-breaking and ribald fanfic as well.
Even if a lot of that is not quite my cup of tea, I actually find it really cool that when you take away considerations of marketability and copyright and turn people loose with their imaginations, the sort of things they come up with are not terribly different from the sort of things people were contemplating in Greek pavilions or standing on ziggurats or circled around herders' campfires. And, back then as now, it runs the gamut from gen actiony stuff and sweet romance to what basically amounts to Neolithic snuff porn. I'm sure there were individuals in 5000 BC who preferred to tell the stories about Folk Hero X slaying monsters rather than the stories where, say, he impregnates his grandmother, and I'm equally sure there were some who preferred the other sort.
Just musing out loud, really ... and I'm half asleep so I haven't a clue if this is going to be one of those "revelations" that seems either completely self-evident or utterly WTF when I've slept.
Mythology? EVERYTHING is "canon". Just about every imaginable pairing along with power dynamics of all sorts, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, mpreg, people turning into animals and having sex, people eating their kids, people lopping off sexual organs and then having sex with those ... it's a not just a literal orgy, but an orgy of taboo-breaking as well, in belief systems around the world. It might be couched in delicate, flowery language or euphemisms, but this stuff is weird.
Which means that we haven't really changed much in 10,000 years, and the evidence is all around us, in stories about Loki turning into a mare and giving birth to a horse, or Isis tracking down her dead and dismembered brother's penis for sexy funtimes, or English folk songs in which most of the characters end up raped, destitute and dead. It's not just that humans, as a species, are obsessed with sex; everyone knows that, and the reasons are kind of obvious. But we're not obsessed, specifically, with vanilla, PIV, procreative sex, which at least makes some evolutionary sense. No ... judging by the kind of stories we've been telling each other for 10,000 years (and probably longer), we're obsessed with unusual sex, kinky sex, socially transgressive sex, and the whole act of telling culturally-inappropriate and mutually contradictory stories about familiar characters. Stories about John and Rodney as socks or walls look downright normal next to some of the older stuff we've got.
In other words, then, it's ALL perfectly normal. Normal and commonplace as religion, and just as variable (in its specifics) from place to place, pivoting around the central theme that almost anything goes when the human subconscious gets involved. Obviously it's fairly common knowledge that motifs from mythology show up over and over again in storytelling from folk tales to the NYT best-seller list and the latest movies (the trickster archetype is still going strong, for example) but I don't think I had ever related it quite so specifically to fanfic before -- and not just fanfic in general, but the more transgressive and taboo-breaking and ribald fanfic as well.
Even if a lot of that is not quite my cup of tea, I actually find it really cool that when you take away considerations of marketability and copyright and turn people loose with their imaginations, the sort of things they come up with are not terribly different from the sort of things people were contemplating in Greek pavilions or standing on ziggurats or circled around herders' campfires. And, back then as now, it runs the gamut from gen actiony stuff and sweet romance to what basically amounts to Neolithic snuff porn. I'm sure there were individuals in 5000 BC who preferred to tell the stories about Folk Hero X slaying monsters rather than the stories where, say, he impregnates his grandmother, and I'm equally sure there were some who preferred the other sort.
Just musing out loud, really ... and I'm half asleep so I haven't a clue if this is going to be one of those "revelations" that seems either completely self-evident or utterly WTF when I've slept.
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Also, slash fangirls in ancient Greece must have been a bunch of happy campers. XD
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Oh, but can you imagine the 'ship wars in ancient Greece? The Zeus/Hera shippers constantly having to defend their OTP from all comers, including the slashers with their canon pairings!
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And say, what happens when your characters are slashed in the source text but not (overtly) in the modern remake, like the original mythological versions of Hercules and Iolaus? What's canonical NOW?! :D
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Not to mention the story of how the Minotaur was conceived: his mother Pasiphae dressed up in a cow costume (a costume made by Daedalus) in order to have sex with her husband's most-prized bull.
Or Zeus, who turned himself into a pile of coins and impregnated Danae when he (as the coins) fell into her lap.
I love Greek mythology.
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And that's not even taking into account all the paintings and the frescoes and the tapestries... and of course where did they get their references from? Mythology! ;-P
We're not just fangirls... we're part of humanity!
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I think it fluctuates, and that you have times where morals are all the rage (not to say there aren't sexual shinanigans going on, but probably... how do I put this... in such excess?, and frowned on if anyone talks about it, let alone writes about it), easing into anything and everything of a sexual nature being embraced, easing back to morals, easing into all things sexual being embraced, etc.
Sort of like how fanfic and fandom is - a new fandom starts out with a mix of genres, then slowly, gradually, a single genre dominates - mostly het or slash or porn (as in het and slash with lots of sex).
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In all honesty, comparing "then" to "now" on any axis is a bit spurious, considering that things don't shift in the same directions at the same speed. Calling ancient Greece sexually liberal is fun as a lark but in reality the social and sexual roles of men and women were at least as rigid as the 1950s if not more so, just different. (The Athenians were scandalized that the Spartans allowed women to speak at public meetings! And worse, men listened to them! :D ) Things changed a great deal over time, as you said, but it's awfully hard to box up ancient societies using our modern categories. Not to mention that we're largely drawing from a handful of accounts in trying to reconstruct them -- like I said to hubby after watching (and laughing at) "300", imagine trying to reconstruct 20th-century U.S. society from Russian propaganda and Jerry Springer! Which is pretty much what we've got to go on with Sparta.
You know what's interesting about SGA fanfic is that, in my experience, it's gotten a whole lot more diverse over the last couple of years -- it used to be that stories were almost monolithically about John and/or Rodney, but I'm seeing a much wider range of pairings, more "team" stuff (as opposed to "team" stories that are actually about John+Rodney) and more spotlights on minor characters. Granted, since my favorite thing about the fandom is reading stories about John and Rodney, this means there's less for me to read, but I'm happy for fans of other characters to be a bit less marginalized.
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"You know what's interesting about SGA fanfic is that, in my experience, it's gotten a whole lot more diverse over the last couple of years -- it used to be that stories were almost monolithically about John and/or Rodney, but I'm seeing a much wider range of pairings, more "team" stuff."
Very true. There's been a lot more team stuff, as well as stories more focused on either different friendship pairings, romantic pairings, as well as a single character. But when it comes to genres, it seems like there's been a major increase in porn stories, lately.
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post your fic to a communitytell your story around the fire, and your audience has instant emotional connection andwrite loads of commentsgarland you with laurels and ply you with wine and oxen.In fact, I almost wrote a mock-scholarly article that would persuade all other mythology scholars to tear up their life's work and bow to the superiority of my theory. But then I got a bit distracted by atttributing the decline of Ancient Greece to awful flame wars between the many different factions of Zeus-shipping, and charting the evolution of the archaic Nymphy-Sue...
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(Also, omg, does someone actually impregnate their grandmother?)
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And it's nice to know that I'm not totally crazy for thinking this. :D
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