“Which I feel speaks to a certain level of undeserved arrogance”
You know what, I didn’t want to participate in this discussion because this site taught me that discussing about other cultures on this platform is as useless as tilting at windmills, but the sheer irony in this sentence was too much.
Talk about arrogance! You are discussing a literature work from a culture you do not share, a work you barely understood the surface of, and, when explained why you are wrong, your reply is implying the people from that culture were being arrogant and not listening to criticism. Criticism is a sound argument, yours is a ridiculous puerile false syllogism.
You are starting by equating a fan fiction to the mere pre-existence of some characters into “popular” culture (which already is, hm, laughable, because Medieval Italy popular culture is in no way comparable to modern concepts of media usage and, even if they were, the type of knowledge Dante had access to was in no way popular or fannish in nature) and ignore the fact that those characters were partly there symbolically and as allegories of complex theological concepts which would have sounded quite boring to insert in a poetic text. Not to add, those characters are not there for our Poet to merely interact with (which is ultimately the goal of the self-insert fic: the characters meeting the author and, usually, share with them some kind of self-consolatory bond) while they are there to be symbols of specifical theological and political situations of contemporary history which you clearly have absolutely no knowledge of, not even a “infarinatura”.
Furthermore, you seem under the assumption that what Dante does is self-indulgent in nature, while it is quite the opposite. Dante also isn’t in any way celebrated by the narrative for its merits, if anything, his own travel is the symbol of his ultimate failure as a worshipper, which contributes to the high contrast with instead his unfaltering political faith. The whole Commedia is actually quite based on the thing you have no awareness of: the political conflict inside the city of Firenze and how it echoes and ripples through the whole Penisula, concerning the different powers of the Pope and the Emperor, which, guess what, has been a conflict for our Country until our Unification in the 1861 and the consequences of each we actually still pay through a state that is often reeking of repugnantly catholic influences in the daily life of citizens on modern battles like LGBTAQ+ rights and women’s rights. Dante is in no way your amazing self-insert character with peculiar eye colour and unheard of set of skills who gets to fuck Dean Winchester, he is there because he is a man who lost his faith in a world where his faith and his political beliefs clash continuously, forcing a man to continuously pick between a battle he knows it’s right and protecting one’s immortal soul, given one of the sides of the conflict was the “god’s shepard on earth”. BUT, SURE, tell me how him meeting Virgil makes this a fanfic despite the fact he is not there because SENPAI but because he was considered the maximum example of the Poet at the service of a Secular Power bringer of peace and therefore there to signify all Dante would have hoped his role to be before he got exiled from his city due to political opinions and all he FAILS to be both for his own shortcomings and for the political situation that befell the country.
What a shallow way to read you have.
You barely scratch the surface and talk about arrogance to others.
Also Dante’s INFERNO? Paradise and Purgatory got lost along the way home from the library? Did you even read all of the work you’re criticizing so vehemently?
Scratch that, did you actually read any of it, because I am quite confident unless you were handled the summary, if you had to actually read some of the verses, you would have anyway noticed that the work is in a very unusual metre, with a specific quite complex system of rhymes that nobody dared to use after exactly for how complicated it was… Also did your edition in any way cover the huge amount of neologistical innovations the Commedia gave to the Italian language? Because, well, while I am fairly used to the education in some countries being ghastly, I have to say when we studied anything in middle school or high school from any foreigner language we also had some sort of explanation of the impact on the language itself, if not downright reading in the original language without any kind of translation that may have impacted our perception of the author. Hell, 14 to 18 years old students in Italy are required to read original literature works in Greek, Latin, and English, and often also from Spanish, German, and French… and they daily work on reading ancient Italian of course. And, sure, our education system has tons of flaws, but I have to say I never heard of any of us claiming that a German or French author was unimportant and put on a pedestral for a fanfic. Perhaps, because knowing a language and a culture before speaking out of turn gives some insight on an actual understanding of the work.
So, forgive my bluntness, again, why do you think you know a work better than people who a) studied it for years in school, b) studied it in its original language, c) studied it in its entirety and not just “the Inferno”, d) have the historical background to understand it? Because…?
Oh, because you didn’t like the themes which you have no understanding of and because you confused a need for political purpose with a Chosen One trope! That explains it, surely.
“I do not think it is an example of a good self-insert or revenge fic as in my opinion, those elements are the books biggest flaws and a good example of how NOT to use those tropes. “ … whoa, maybe because IT IS NOT a revenge fic or a fanfic in general? You stated something wrong, proceeded to insist it was a fanfic, despite being repeteadly told it is a ridiculous and puerile statement and then you say “oh it doesn’t do it well”? That is like going to a monkey, say “this lion is not very good at being a feline”, duh.
Imagine if Italians went around saying “yeah well Shakespeare stole Romeo and Juliet, it’s just a fanfic and doesn’t even do justice to the story because Romeo does really stupidly at the end” or “oh duh sure Marlowe should be signalled to the mods for plagiarism over the Lord Faustus! And Goethe plagiarized the plagiarist!”. Do you see Italians telling you Shakespeare was uncreative because his poetry is HEAVILY dependent on Petrarca’s sonetti, their structure and his use of stylistic devices and metaphors which basically revolutionarized how modern poetry uses them? One thing is saying “hey notice this comes from here” or “hey notice this may be not the strong feature of this work” and one thing is reducing a milestone of literature to a “fanfic” due to… what? some desperate need of self-importance about your own works?
You are being willfully obtuse in order to defend as a serious literary statement what should exist only as a joking hyperbole. I am not sure if you are paying money for your education but I sure hope not because I’ve seen free elementary school requiring more complex analysis and more intellectual honesty from their 8 years old students than what you are giving here; and you hiding under the foglia di fico of a false equivalence between calling a literary masterpiece of the middle ages to the exercize media of amateurs and actual criticism is not doing much.
Do you want to criticize Dante? What about actually informing yourself on the background of the work, on a good original-text edition with some commentary on the original language, perhaps some kind of research on the used metre and the Medieval symbology and allegorical organic basis behind it? Because, you see, that’s what actual art criticism is like.
You sound like those people who, being absolutely ignorant of Middle Ages art, claim that the figures are all ugly and odd because they walk on each others’ feet or the expressivity tends to emotional distance.
You didn’t even put yourself into what it would have meant in the Middle Ages for a man to write such an organic and complex three-part work with theological criticism, political analysis, ethical arguments and what actively was contemporary commentary IN POETRY with that complex scheme around it. And, above all, doing this making it in a NEW language, while developing it actively, because il volgare fiorentino was not before Dante what it was after him and then evolved in the base of our whole language; and a language with a difficult poetical history, mostly based on courteous poetry and love themes rather than epic poetry, and that was still seen as some kind of working class thing. You read the work without inquisitive spirit and without any historical perspective.
You want to call it a fanfic? Do, then. You are saying something wrong. Go on and insist in your mistake.
People have proved you and other ignorant people like you wrong so so long before this same thread - here there is one in thousand examples you can find.
There is always room to criticize a work, when you do it with cognizione di causa .
I also need to laugh at the “Greek plays created some of the most influential figures in global culture.They also gave us one of the WORST plot devices in history, the Deus Ex Machina.” because not only it proves you barely can think historically but you have no concept of difference between a novel, epic poetry, a theatre piece… you treat it all the same. Just out of curiosity, by your logic, why would Greek myths not count as fanfic given they all work on the same “canon”? Maybe because that canon is not an authorial work, but their actual culture and system of belief filtered through an allegorical and symbolical narrative construct? Exactly like Dante is working with his own culture and his own history filtered through that?
Frankly, as a fic writer, I need y’all people to stop blabbering and speaking about things you are ignorant about. This is cringy at best, at worst it becomes reeeeeally racist and it betrays quite the colonialist forma mentis. You keep belittling something people explained over and over to you be an essential piece of culture just because you don’t have the cultural instruments to fully understand it.
I am not sure why you hold the belief that a work in which a LANGUAGE finds its origin is somehow comparable to a fanfic written by a 13 yo to get to fuck Draco Malfoy, but such a statement clearly shows a deeply rooted idea that the given culture is somehow a play thing. I am not sure if you’d dare to say this on this site over a piece of Japanese or Iranian or Congolese literature, but I highly doubt, because you’d get rightfully crucifixed in the pile of escrements you typed.
People was kind to you, they were nice, explaining something, they even had enough manners to say “oh don’t worry, we can all exaggerate at times” and what did you do? You insisted on it.
If any of the people above you had been poc, you would have already a call out post with a thousand notes and a racist label above your head for belittling a cultural masterpiece so strenously.
And do you want to know the best part? I am not Dante’s biggest lover, I find the Commedia has its set of flaws (none of which you named, while listing stuff that was utterly ridiculous), I was the little queer atheist kid that in high school didn’t really fancy the idea of hearing for one hour about how people like me went to hell, and yet I stand here and tell you you did Dante so much wrong with your joke. Because room for criticism doesn’t mean ignore a work’s merits and it doesn’t mean belittle it or redefine it with a label that didn’t exist when he was writing and doesn’t apply to his own concept of culture.
Fanfic in itself doesn’t make sense as a label before the diffusion of novels, ammesso e non concesso, if we really really really want to stretch it before the actual event of “fandoms” and creating rewritings of modern media.
Oh, since la Commedia is just a fanfiction and therefore something easily accessible to any person with a good knowledge of canon and some basic writing skills, I am sure you could write your reply in terzine incatenate di endecasillabi inserting in depth commentary of theological and political events through symbolism, and I would LOVE to read that, but I am not going to read anything you reply to me or others, because I don’t care about opinions based on thin air.
Actually, I’d invite other Italians to also drop this thread, because someone who says “oh my statement was shallow” when people seem rightfully upset and then “oh well it still is a fanfic” when people seem nicer just deserves the photo of the definition of coda di paglia as a reply.
pixelskylines
2087
tangentwithtanner
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
blakekathryn
