“You can go totally wild in making him be whatever you want”: Anna Wilson on affect
Continuing my desire to shout out literary scholars, I give you Anna Wilson’s 2016 TWC essay, “The role of affect in fan fiction.” The essay is about the openness of love and other strong emotions about characters and texts in fandom – a strong contrast to academia, where experts often strive to be (or at least appear) unbiased, objective, and dispassionate. Wilson quotes from a number of Yuletide asks that show great enthusiasm for characters and texts from classical history:
I have a thing to confess, and that thing is: I love Marcus Tullius Cicero. No, seriously, I adore him. I'm fascinated by his intelligence, his ambition, his—grandness, I suppose you could call it; he's a historical figure who is genuinely larger than life. (Emilyenrose)
And
I love Callicratidas!…I love him for his straightforwardness and integrity and honour, for his vigour without rashness (well, mostly) and obedience without obsequiousness, for being a man of principle in a morally bankrupt world undergoing rapid, profound social change, and I can't help but adore his total lack of people skills. (tevildo)
But the particular parts of this essay I want to tease out are the ways these Yuletide asks invite the prospective fanfiction author not just to interpret and extend the canon, but to invent things, to make new things with these old texts.
So, for instance, Wilson discusses how Rumpleghost asks for a Yuletide story based on Demosthenes's legal speech "Against Conon,” noting that Rumpleghost’s letter “takes a character-focused approach that opens up the speech to fannish imagination but likewise balances this with historical detail.” Rumpleghost tells her Secret Santa that:
because the only information we have about Ctesias's character is from the speech and most of that is slander, you can go totally wild in making him be whatever you want, though I would love it if you based him on details you found in the text.
Hence the title of my post: you can go totally wild in making him be whatever you want is actually the subtext of a lot of fanfiction, even though fans talk a lot about good fic seeming canonical and hewing closely to canon. Wilson shows that fandom is doing something more complicated: while Rumpleghost would love it if the characterization is based on details from the texts, those details are the basis for going totally wild. Wilson explains that:
The request fleshes out the bare bones of the story about these two men gleaned from the legal speech, suggesting a story about "the days they first meet at the army camp on garrison duty, where Ctesias and his friends are drunk every day and Ariston is a little:|:|:|-faced dude, follow flirtiness/hijinks/confrontation/sex there!" The request overall conveys deep affection for these characters and a profound affective investment in the antagonistic relationship that Rumpleghost imagines between them ("Ctesias being lazily charmed by Ariston's snarky little existence"), while there is an unspoken shift away from the aspects of the speech typically studied in the classroom (such as its legal, ethical, political, and linguistic elements) onto its affective content: Ariston, the speaker, is "prickly" and "pompous" with "incredible self-righteousness," while Ctesias is "a provocative douche," and the speech shows "what grumpy, similar little guys they could be."
Wilson thus argues that the letter “establishes the fannish discourse from which fan fiction can emerge.” The fanfiction writer is here being encouraged to fill up the dry details of canon with affective life as well as meaningful (and pleasurable) tropes and themes.
For two decades, fans have been waking up on Christmas morning to custom, obsession-feeding gifts from strangers.
For my second fan culture column for Atlas Obscura, I wrote about Yuletide! (The first was on 18th-century sentiment albums as proto-Tumblrs.) This piece features several longtime Yuletide participants, including Dr. Anna Wilson, who wrote this great TWC article (partly) about Yuletide, and fic writers Sandrine and Petronia:
“What I really love about Yuletide is the potential for kismet,” says Petronia, “the story that, as a recipient, I always wished existed, [and] turns out to be the story someone else always wanted to write. The idea that I always had percolating as a writer, that was too niche to put energy into, turns out to have an audience after all—even an audience of one, which is all I need.”
Sandrine echoes that love of serendipitous connections. “It’s great when there’s an obscure fandom of your heart which you thought was something only you cared for, and then someone else offers it—or requests it!—and you realize it wasn’t actually a fandom of one after all.”
(Also a note: I'm aware of the irony of a fandom juggernaut being the lead image for a piece on a rare-fandom exchange. 😭 While I did not choose the image myself, I do mention it in the piece—The Untamed was a Yuletide fandom its first year!)
Anna Wilson! @Awilly03 You inspire me. You are a WARRIOR! Your relentless preparation. Your desire. Your dedication. You are the definition of a Champion!!! Congrats kid. Bro Loves you. WE ALL LOVE YOU. Grateful God made you my sister. Keep Winning
