But watching The Rings of Power (which, for the record, looks immaculate, sounds even better, and has a great cast to boot) dive back into this medieval fantasyland—one it populates alongside contemporaries like House of the Dragon (HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel)—is also a reminder of how lily white the medieval space continues to be imagined as. After both shows debuted more racially diverse casts than their predecessors, a vitriolic cry rang out from the corners of the internet where a fire-breathing dragon can exist, but a Black elf cannot. The torrent of racist hatred that’s followed is part of a longer-simmering problem that’s demanded a reckoning on the fictional (and real) stories we’re telling about Europe’s Middle Ages.

The roots of the medieval world that all these fantasy stories are pulling from was constructed in the mid-20th century by the so-called Oxford School or group. Writer Jessica Yates first coined the name for the group of fantasy writers 50 years after the release of The Hobbit, in a 1987 article for a popular British children’s book magazine. In the piece, she traces this literary and academic cradle back to Tolkien and his friend and colleague C.S. Lewis, who in the 1950s lectured future fantasy writers such as Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, and Alan Garner (the latter being the first to achieve fame with the 1960 publication of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen).

In Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century, author Maria Sachiko Cecire dates the origins of the Oxford School two decades further back, when Tolkien and Lewis pushed a reformed curriculum in 1931 that ensured that all English students at Oxford studied the Middle Ages and Anglo-Saxon literature. Cecire argues that this “medievalist and faerie-touched” pedagogy was part of a larger ideological battle. By reaching back to an idealized past—”not the past as England actually was in the Middle Ages,” she writes, “but even more ‘real’ in a spiritual-Platonic sense: as English (and proto-English) poets had imagined it to be”— Tolkien and Lewis were pushing back against the “cult of modernity,” something they viewed as not just estranged but hostile to their belief system. The mythology they created to combat this naturally reflected who they were, and she argues, should be understood through that lens. Their works, published as the British empire’s power began to sunset, can be seen as advancing the morals of the time they grew up in: A time, she writes, of “noble bloodlines carry[ing] magic and maintaining the social hierarchies of conservative tradition.” And as Tolkien and Lewis were both white, English, Christian men, their medieval fantasy was, in turn, populated by “implicitly white, English or broadly British, Christian or proto-Christian men.”

But this was a fantasy of the medieval world. The roughly 1,000-year period of the actual Middle Ages was, in fact, notable for its cultural, racial, linguistic, and religious diversity. As historians of medieval Europe Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry write in The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, however, the vibrant diversity of Europe’s Middle Ages that placed it within a wider global story was intentionally de-emphasized starting in the 18th and 19th centuries. The reason? “[I]mperialist European powers and their intellectuals (often the forerunners of, or scholars in medieval studies themselves!) sought a history for their new world order,” they write, which is what first established the myth of a racially and religiously uniform Middle Ages. It preserved a false history that lingers to this day, especially in the medieval fantasy space, which has long provided cover for nationalists who take the pseudo-medieval worlds as a confirmation of their ideology. The latest to seize Tolkien being Italy’s prospective future prime minister Giorgia Meloni, the far-right nationalist politician who was recently quoted by the New York Times calling The Lord of the Rings series “a sacred text.” “I don’t consider The Lord of the Rings fantasy,” she continued.

But if medieval fantasy helped to prop up that myth of the homogenous Middle Ages, the genre might also be the most poised to dismantle that story today.

As medievalist Andrew B. R. Elliott writes in Remaking the Middle Ages, which considers cinematic portrayals of the time period, our ideas of the medieval world are based on how we are used to seeing it reflected in the culture, which is why, he argues that “audiences and filmmakers both come to play a role in the construction of the authentic medieval past—perhaps far more than historians and medievalists ever can.”

We’re seeing this in action today as this new crop of medieval fantasy seeks to depict more historically accurate versions of the Middle Ages, and call out medieval misinformation, like earlier this month, when The Rings of Power denounced the racist ideology of the trolls waging a hate campaign against its cast. “Our world has never been all white, fantasy has never been all white, Middle-earth is not all white,” a statement posted on its official Twitter handle read.

A new age of medieval fantasy is possible, one that can offer us a wider notion of what, in all its contradictions and intricacies, the Middle Ages was—and can be. But this can only come to pass if we are committed to imagining it first.

The post Why Is Fantasy Stuck in the Middle Ages? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder, the titular protagonist sets out on a journey of self-discovery, trying to give new meaning to a life spent fighting errant gods, space elves, and other pseudo-mythological villains. After “saving planet Earth for the 500th time,” as the trailer for the film puts it, what is there left to do for Thor? The answer, the trailer suggests, will partly be more of the same. Love and Thunder will again have Thor face off with a nefarious antagonist, tussle with other gods, and punch out many monsters and henchmen in the process. At the same time, Love and Thunder also appears to claim new territory for future Marvel movies. It introduces a new female Thor portrayed by Natalie Portman and presents Chris Hemsworth’s version of the character going through a superheroic mid-life crisis and trying to stake out an existence beyond the established routine.

Thor’s attempts to reinvent himself (but not too much) mirror the challenges faced by the entire superhero blockbuster genre—as well as the reason why these films, much like Thor’s red cape, are not going anywhere. Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe is a 28-film franchise that has brought figures such as Iron Man, Black Panther, and Black Widow to the cinema. But it’s only a fraction of the roughly 100 superhero films to come to American theaters (and, more recently, streaming services) since the year 2000, including multiple big-screen incarnations of comic book favorites such as Batman, Wonder Woman, and Spider-Man, as well as lesser-known characters such as Valiant Comics’ Bloodshot. All of them play variations on similar themes and motifs, pitting more-or-less virtuous, more-than-human heroes against evil counterparts that threaten the fragile status quo of a social order that is not necessarily ideal, but that will be defended nonetheless.

Superhero blockbusters generally try to provide a well-calibrated mix of familiar pleasures and innovative ideas. The formula puts known characters into situations that are similar to what came before, but, ideally, even more spectacular—a task that is becoming more and more difficult as new entries are added to the genre. Against this backdrop, Thor’s mid-life crisis can be understood as a self-reflexive joke about a looming exhaustion of creative options and the fear that there might not be all that much left that’s worth telling stories about (not coincidentally, the specter of “superhero fatigue” among audiences has haunted coverage of the genre for some time now).

This challenge is not unique to the superhero blockbuster. Other film genres have faced it before—such as Westerns or “creature feature” horror movies, for example, both of which enjoyed significant popularity but eventually returned to the fringes of Hollywood production. Filmmaking trends like these are examples of an “aesthetics of seriality” that, as the semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco suggested, is more generally at work in modern mass media. Seriality here has a double meaning: On the one hand, it refers to cultural creators producing new material on the basis of established success formulas, stock scenarios, and character types, which are then invested with new meaning, combined with new ideas and interesting twists, or rearranged in unexpected ways. (Think the American Western being appropriated by Italian filmmakers like Sergio Leone, or Steven Spielberg’s Jaws inspiring Joe Dante’s horror comedy Piranha.) Eco understood trends, appropriations, and reinventions of this kind as the norm in commercial popular culture. These products, he wrote, would invariably be characterized by “a dialectic between order and novelty, … between scheme and innovation.” In other words, there’s nothing truly new under the sun (or multiple suns, as on Star Wars’ Tatooine—a setting that combines the Western’s frontier vibes with the desert planet aesthetics of Frank Herbert’s Dune, and thus presents itself as another example of Hollywood’s tendency to reuse and remix well-established ideas).

But seriality also refers to a mode of storytelling in which narrative information is doled out piece-by-piece and across multiple installments to engage audiences over extended periods of time. Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe and other contemporary superhero franchises embody this model of serial narration par excellence: A film like Love and Thunder, for example, might still have a relatively self-contained story at its core, but is clearly not meant to be watched outside of the larger context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Recent entries of the genre are furthermore riddled with in-jokes, callbacks, and other nods to earlier superhero properties and comic books—references which require more than a passing familiarity with the material to be understood.

The result can be a peculiar sense of narrative fragmentation—instances in which superhero blockbusters cease to tell self-contained and classically coherent stories altogether. In such moments, films appear to be constructed around conspicuous narrative gaps, as motivations for characters’ actions are implied rather than spelled out. In this year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, for example, one character’s transformation from hero to villain only makes sense if one also has seen preceding Avengers films and the 2021 Disney+ streaming series WandaVision (and even then it remains pretty implausible). This type of serial storytelling makes good sense for Marvel and parent Disney, who can use it to point consumers from one arm of their multifaceted entertainment offerings to the next. In fact, the superhero blockbuster’s strong reliance on serial narration is arguably a key reason why the genre has not yet gone the way of the Western or the “creature feature.” At the same time, such interconnectedness can also make it difficult to follow along if one does not want to invest the time. But in our contemporary media environment—thanks to sites such as Wikipedia, chatter on social media, and the ceaseless coverage of the genre on entertainment news fan websites—the necessary background information is usually just a quick Google query away.

The existence of lively surrounding discourse is another important reason for superhero blockbuster cinema’s enduring success. After all, serial storytelling thrives on the temporal gaps between installments, which offer audiences (including fans and journalists on the popular culture beat) ample time and opportunity to celebrate or criticize recent releases, pitch hot takes about films’ broader significance, trace references to source materials, share news about the production of upcoming features, and speculate about future plot developments. Ultimately, it is this multifaceted and ongoing public discourse about superhero movies that creates much of the genre’s cultural visibility, and thereby lays the groundwork for the continued profitability of this type of film (after all, audiences need to know about a film before they can go see it).

Like our celestial universe, the superhero universe continues to find ways to expand—it has, by now, grown so large that some of its entries deliberately position themselves against the humor, playfulness, and fragmentation of recent Marvel fare. This year’s The Batman, for example, offered gritty violence, corrupt cops, and civil unrest along with a 176-minute runtime that left enough room to flesh out even minor aspects of the backstory in great detail. In this tradition, we can expect that superhero movies will, in the coming years, continue to play through all possible variations of the underlying hero-vs.-villain theme—and, in the process, continue to combine the well-worn cliché with the unexpected twist.

Will audiences eventually tire of this continued reinvention of the already known? So far, superhero movie fatigue has not yet left a significant dent in the genre’s overall commercial success; likewise, the public discourse about the genre shows little signs of souring. Like Thor, the superhero movie probably will overcome whatever obstacles stand in its way.

The post Will the Superhero Blockbusters Just Keep Coming? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I recently learned that the world-making activity Jesús and I shared is known as paracosm. According to a study cited by the Wall Street Journal, about 17 percent of children tend to develop a detailed personal universe that they outgrow later in life, not unlike an imaginary friend. Nonetheless, while a make-believe friend might be a companion, the imaginary world is more about the joy of discovery and curiosity, from conjuring a forest in your mind and wondering what creatures are lurking over the next hill to dreaming up a city far more exciting than the one you live in and wondering who lives there, what drives their lives, if they love someone, or if they are happy. Before you know it, you’re doodling wondrous beasts and crude maps, trying to make sense of the world inside your head.

Interestingly enough, the kids who developed a paracosm didn’t score any better than their peers in terms of intelligence, vocabulary, memory, or creativity. The only reported major difference from other children was that those who created paracosms showed having more problems at filtering out irrelevant thoughts.

Some famous writers who have mentioned making paracosms in their youth are Stanislaw Lem, Oxford don C.S. Lewis—with the help of his brother Warren—and Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë (with the help of their brother Branwell). Some of these unreal realms, unsurprisingly, were influenced by the children’s perspectives on the adult world that surrounded them. In a 1984 essay, Lem points out the irony of how he amused himself as a child in interwar Poland by creating fictitious passports, permits, and government memos only to have his family survive the Nazi takeover with the aid of forged documents. He wonders if these games were a reflection of “some unconscious sense of danger.”

The imaginary worlds of the two sets of siblings, meanwhile, mirrors the British culture, politics, attitudes, and imperialism of the time: The Brontës’ world of Glass Town was set in an imaginary West Africa (later moved to the Pacific Ocean) with characters based on British explorers, Napoleon, and the Duke of Wellington. The sisters’ earliest writings are the extensive correspondence and poems of the inhabitants of Glass Town. The Lewis’s world, Boxen, was born out of Warren’s tales about India and his more famous brother’s love of stories involving talking animals, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

My own paracosm started when I was a weird, curious, and somewhat lonely tween growing up in Maracay, a mid-sized city in Venezuela, in the early 2000s. My source of fascination was not India or Africa, but the United States. Or at least a distorted version filled with everything I found mesmerizing about a place I only knew through media. The setting was not some hypothetical ancient era or an idealized version of the Middle Ages, but vaguely reminiscent of the mid to late 20th century—the height of the American empire, so to speak. I named this nation Urbania.

In Urbania, there’s an equivalent city to New York and places analogous to New Orleans, California, and Texas. There are enormous cities filled with skyscrapers and subways, endless suburbs and prisons with electric chairs. There are wealthy industrialist families bound through fraternities and clubs, immigrants on crowded ocean liners looking to start a new life, and reactionary militias boiling on the fringe. There’s a colorful past that carries the sins of colonialism and endless foreign wars, which ultimately seal the country’s fate.

Characters and places, although imaginary, had names taken from all sorts of sources: Bertolt Brecht plays, classic black and white movies, Saturday Night Live cast members. When you were a middle-class tween in Venezuela in the early 2000s, you either studied a musical instrument, played sports or learned English. I did the latter and, as soon as I could, I began working on my imaginary universe in the language I’m writing these words because it felt “right.”

The adults around me, though supportive, were irked that I didn’t try to write about something closer to my own culture and reality. On one hand, I was a child of globalization. Like many millennials around the globe, I had prefabricated childhood ideas from watching The Simpsons and playing Pokémon. The very first book I read in its entirety was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. When I was 7, I knew who Bill Clinton was but not the president of my own country.

On the other hand, I had a hard time connecting with other kids, didn’t have the best family situation, and tried to distance myself from a world that felt overwhelming. For me, Urbania offered an escape. It started out as a way to channel my creative impulses. I have always liked to tell stories. Urbania started out as a comic book, then a movie script and finally a book series with no clear beginning or end that has been started, abandoned, or lost dozens of times over 20 years. Despite working so many years on Urbania, I’ve never been able to even finish a short story set there.

However, I can’t say all those years I spent developing a universe in my head has been a waste of time. My protagonists were exploring their sexual orientation and gender performance way before I admitted to myself that I was attracted to men. Trying to flesh out my little realm of the unreal made me research history, geography, world cultures, mythology, religion, politics and linguistics, essentially turning it into a shorthand to try to understand the real world.

In my case, I started to write thanks to my paracosm, which is what eventually led me to become a journalist and to getting short stories published every now and then. There was a time when I was worried that I might pass on, like Jesús did, and felt concerned that the little scraps—the first chapters of novels that never had a follow-up, drawings of maps and flags in yellowish notebooks at my mother’s apartment—might end up as puzzle pieces for an image that was never fully completed. But now, if I never manage to publish a single word about the small world located in the back of my head I wouldn’t be upset.

Jesús, too, used his paracosm to relate to the world. He wasn’t a writer, he was a political scientist, but his life was defined by working hard and passionately on little things, always hoping something bigger and better was coming, and having an infinite love for humanity and what it has been able to achieve. That was one of the many things that made me relate to him. The make-believe country that was his own personal realm of the unreal was also an intellectual game where he could design and apply social and political ideas that appealed to him. The blue, white, and green flag he was buried with not only served as the symbol of his personal utopia, but also the banner that a better world was possible.

Talking with some friends and colleagues about my making worlds as a hobby, I realize it’s a far more common activity than I suspected for individuals with a natural passion, admiration, and curiosity about why people do what they do. Many of them aren’t writers like the Brontë sisters or Lewis. They are journalists, economists, historians, and many of them still continue to dream on. People might claim this activity is for a novel they are writing or for a tabletop game they play, but in all those cases I see the sign of the fellow traveler who enjoys more the endless journey to find out what’s over the next hill than hurrying to the purported destination.

I can’t help but think about the study cited by the Wall Street Journal and wonder: Maybe all those so-called irrelevant details that as children we were meant to filter out, really have helped us to gain a different, broader insight about the society we live in. Looking back, all that I have achieved, at least career-wise, has been indirectly derived from chronicling the rise and fall of Urbania, an imagined land that has given me so much in real life.

The post Now Entering Make-Believe Country appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But my teenage dreams have now come true in a time when I cannot enjoy them without guilt. It started in the last days of February, just after Carnival—our most famous festivity—when the National Department of Health confirmed the first case of coronavirus infection in the country. Twenty days later, all schools and stores were closed to prevent the spread of the disease. TV drama production and all cultural events were suspended because of this disease that spreads fast and could kill up to 200 thousand people by August here in Brazil.

Since then, I’ve been teaching my college classes online. I’ve managed to keep my job, which I find surprising, because the other industries I’ve worked in have all suffered recent disasters, leaving my friends out of work. For many years I had worked as a screenwriter, but I gave it up for an old dream of dedicating myself to the low-paid profession of novel writing. So I started to work part time as a college instructor, saving some free hours in the afternoon to write. Teaching proved to be a wise choice last year, when a far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, assumed office and suspended federal funding for films. Film festivals, new productions and even films in post-production were paralyzed in the president’s “culture war.”

Things were no better for the book industry. Publishers and bookstores were in deep financial crisis due to five years of poor national economic conditions. Even children’s books became targets in the trophy hunting of a president who declared school textbooks have “too much writing on them.” He chose an education minister“ready for battle” to “clean up” textbooks of the “filth” they see, for example, in the picture of a healthy and happy kid with LGBT parents. We were sure these problems were unbearable enough.

No one expected things to get even worse.

Just a week into quarantine it was clearer than ever that my steady job was a privilege. Newspapers reported that 13 million people lost their income overnight and didn’t have savings that would cover more than a week of food. In Brazil 40 million people work in the gray economy. I used to see some of them selling corn, pizza, beer, and brigadeiros (local chocolate sweets) on the sidewalk right in front of my college, at the end of the day. With the students at home and no one on the sidewalks, all these people lost their already meager earnings.

I also know my assured monthly salary won’t last long. College tuition is already too expensive for many families and students. With unemployment rising, many of them will quit studying. Almost every day, my department head sends emails asking teachers to be extra dedicated, sympathetic, and charming to avoid student dropout. We had to come up with homework they could do at home with their cellphone cameras. Acting teachers perform alone in front of the computer to show how well or badly a scene can be done. We cannot ask for too much work from students, otherwise they will get stressed. We cannot take attendance, because it would be unfair to students with internet connection problems. But as hard as we tried, two or three students dropped out every week—in a department with only 150 of them to begin with.

Worrying too much about tomorrow is of no help. For today I have a job, so the best I can do is to sit down and work. In the first week of the quarantine I was a bit nervous about handling a whole class of 30 students in an online platform. It turned out to be much easier than I expected. Screenwriting programs are about exchanging ideas, and that works online. I talk for 60 minutes, show my notes on slides, and ask them to watch short films and selected episodes of national web series. That’s how I try to prepare them to work in the entertainment industry that I quit.

My desk is in the TV room, the same room where my partner and I read, write and watch our favorite films and series. We both have indoor personalities. We both love to stay home and do exactly what I am doing in this quarantine. But I keep this contentment to myself, because I don’t want to sound like the fitness influencer who posted a video of her party, shouting “Screw life!” My comfort now comes with guilt.

Meanwhile, I am moved by the stories about poor neighborhoods that I read in online newspapers. A father buys hand sanitizer for his kids and is left with no money to eat. A mother works as a cleaner for a doctor and keeps going to work on a bus full of people; her employer won’t pay her if she doesn’t work.

Unemployment is a sensitive matter for me. The shadows of poverty still hover over my family, which reached the middle class not that long ago. My mother and father were the first generation in their families to finish high school. When I was a teenager, my mother made bread at home and sewed our sweaters herself to save money to pay for our English classes. The year I graduated from university, my father lost his job and could never find proper work again.

If not for my partner, Dani, maybe I wouldn’t even think about why all of this is happening. While the quarantine has secluded me, she works for a large university hospital that offers free, high-quality healthcare for everyone who needs it.

As a psychiatrist in the mental health institute, Dani is not on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. Appointments with regular patients have been suspended, but emergency cases still show up. In the first weeks, psychiatry patients suspected of COVID-19 infection were transferred to the “covidario,” a unit prepared for the illness. Now this unit has reached full capacity, so the mental health institute have to admit its own suspected cases. But short supplies and bureaucracy make it hard for psychiatrists to get protective wear—even though we live in the most prepared state to handle the outbreak. Some of Dani’s colleagues have become infected. “Doctors feel the anguish of knowing the danger, even when they can do nothing to prevent it,” she told me.

Dani comes home every evening with news from the hospital. I feel myself changing, as the world changes dramatically outside my apartment. I read with great sadness that many artists I admire are dead now from COVID-19: Naomi Munakata (64), Daniel Azulay (72), Rico Medeiros, Aldir Blanc (73), Abraham Palatnik (92), Sérgio Sant’Anna (78). Journalists warn us that young people can also have severe symptoms, but the unexpected death of old people strikes me more. It is terrifying to realize that our elected president is insensitive to all this danger and pain. He makes things worse by inciting people to “go back to normal” and forcing doctors to use some medicine that does not help and could even be harmful. He stated before the election that he had no sympathy for gays, women, black, and poor people. Now it is clear that he does not even care for old and sick people. Arnaldo Lichtenstein, technical director of the hospital where Dani works, declared in a live news broadcast that this cruel reasoning has a name: eugenics.

For Bolsonaro, “the rain is there” and “some people will drown.” He says families should put their “grandpas and grandmas in a corner of the house.” How do we react to that?

My mother is 72 now. My father is 76. My stepfather is 81. They all live in the city of Curitiba, where I was born, 250 miles south of where I live now. They are all healthy, smart, and funny as always. We talk on the phone every week, and from their voices I hardly notice they are getting older. In my mind they are still 50, and I easily forget that I am nearly 50 now myself.

When the quarantine began, in the third week of March, my mother was part of a group touring Brazil’s southern wine routes. She sent a photograph of herself and my stepfather smiling behind a fountain of red wine in Bento Gonçalves, Brazil’s “wine capital.” They were having dinners in large hotel restaurants with 200 or so other retired travelers.

I was suddenly worried. She had to come back and protect herself.

Dani’s parents live nearby, so she meets them every Saturday, at safe distance, when she brings them groceries. She is attentive to any sign of bad health: a hoarse voice, a complaint of fatigue. Since we’ve been together, I have become aware that parents may hide minor symptoms of weakness because they don’t want their children to worry. They don’t want to waste our time together talking about suspicions of diseases. It is we, the adult children, who must stay aware and offer help before being asked.

In my late 20s, I watched the serious illnesses of my grandparents in their last years. I saw how my mother and father were worried and stressed. Still absorbed by my youthful fantasies, I thought my parents were overreacting. Losing health and lucidity in your 80s is nothing but normal, I told myself. We should just accept that life will end someday.

Today I’m old enough to know how wrong I was then. I want my mom and dad alive and happy for our weekly phone calls and our holiday reunions, for as long as possible. I don’t even want to think that it could end someday, and the possibility that a sudden disease could take them away terrifies me.

The fear invades my silent and peaceful landscape. Inside the apartment, one day after another, I see the quiet city from my window. The air is cleaner and the sunsets are beautiful. The irony is that I was just beginning to write a fantasy novel about a future when the human population was drastically reduced. I have spent most of my adult life creating strategies to stay at home alone, with my books and my ideas—ideas such as a wish-fulfillment story of a more empty world.

Now there’s no need to fantasize. I gave up the fantasy novel and started a short story about a woman during the quarantine. She finds the courage to confess an old secret love for her closest friend. Declaring our deepest feelings is what matters for me now.

In a good story, the hero often goes after his goal only to find out he was wrong from the very beginning. That’s how I feel. I hope for my partner to come home by the end of the day. I call my parents to hear their voices. And I wonder what Patricia Highsmith would say about these days, if she were still there, in her stone house in Switzerland.

The post A Letter From São Paulo, Where the Definition of ‘Unbearable’ Has Shifted appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What’s more, whether through this medium or another, and whether you’ve realized it, you’ve been enjoying fanfiction for a long time. From John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (published in 1667) to Game of Thrones (and many more examples) in the present, fanfiction has formed a fundamental part of our creative experience, and will only do more so in the future.

In its simplest definition, contemporary fanfiction is the act of creating stories using the settings, plot elements, subtexts, and characters of a previously established fictional universe—from television, video games, movies, musicals, books, comics, or other sources. It can take the form of anything from brief imaginative snippets, to missing scenes of a TV episode, to standalone book-length works that are written as well as, or better than, many published novels—and all available for free.

It is posted and circulated on dedicated fanfiction sites such as Fanfiction.net, Archive of our Own (AO3), or blogging platforms like Tumblr. These places boast millions of users and entries in tens of thousands of categories—if you can think of it, fanfiction does it. I’ve been writing fanfiction since 2003 (and original fiction for longer), and it has been integral to my enjoyment of popular media, development as a writer, formation of a circle of friends, and imaginative engagement with the world.

Critics of fanfiction dismiss it as a niche subset of badly written porn (think 50 Shades of Grey) bordering on plagiarism—in short, a bunch of weirdoes on the internet who rip off other people’s stories because they lack the talent to create their own. Several noteworthy authors, Martin among them, believe that fanfiction is essentially derivative copycatting that doesn’t fill any need or perform any important work, and are uncomfortable with the idea of their characters being used outside the plots and situations they originally imagined. I understand this mindset, to an extent. But I strongly feel that those who ignore or deride fanfiction are missing something vitally important about the way in which we interact with our favorite media these days, and the power and creativity that these stories inspire.

A reader’s lineup of fanfiction. Photo courtesy of Merlin Alexander Cheng/Flickr.

While fanfiction in its current form is a recent invention—it’s generally accepted to have been started by Star Trek fans in the 1970s—it has a much longer history. Adaptations, illustrations, and reinterpretations of stories have existed as long as stories themselves. Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper is “Bible fanart,” and Milton’s Paradise Lost is “Bible fanfiction.” Shakespeare borrowed from countless other authors. J.R.R. Tolkien reworked old myths and legends (and a legion of imitators reworked Tolkien). Then movies, television, tentpole franchises, and the internet came along, and everything was up for grabs.

Nearly everything in popular media right now is somehow based on pre-existing work (how many reboots is Hollywood making?). ABC’s Once Upon a Time uses Disney/classic fairytale and literary characters, FOX’s Lucifer spins on Paradise Lost and the Bible, and Starz’s Black Sails is a prequel to Treasure Island—and this is to name only three shows that I have watched and written fanfiction about. Then there’s Still Star-Crossed, which had a brief run on ABC this summer. It’s a TV adaptation of a novel set after the end of Romeo and Juliet and, yes, it already has fanfiction. These young fan authors are re-writing Shakespeare’s characters (which he himself adapted) almost half a millennium later, reinventing and retelling them. I don’t know about you, but I find that absolutely delightful.

Indeed, the human appetite for stories is one of the most universal things about us. Fanfiction fills our insatiable need to know “what happened next,” and empowers us to take part in finding out. Every fanfiction author I know has a treasured review (or several) from readers explaining how they were engrossed by a story, how it helped them through a difficult place in life, or how much they enjoyed this new take on things. When we love characters and worlds, we want more, and since there is an obvious limit on how much can be produced from the source, we have to take it upon ourselves. Fanfiction lets readers move from passive reception to active creation.

Most importantly, it creates community. It is often given as a present between online friends, or used as a collaborative endeavor. After all, reading has only recently in human history become a private, silent act done by one person. Books were once rare and valuable, so stories belonged to an oral tradition, designed to be shared and passed down. We’re merely doing it in a modern context, in our own free time and for no money or fame, because we love the story and want more of it. Fanfiction is artistic democracy with a side of anarchy, turning traditional hierarchies of supply and demand on their heads. There is no one central or official authority, and no divide between author and audience. Everyone can be both creator and consumer of fanfiction, offer their own take and theories on the material, and all contributions have the chance to be considered equally. It is the ultimate in crowdsourced creativity.

So why is it so reviled?

In my experience, fanfiction is put down, stereotyped, and dismissed largely because it is such a female-dominated space. An overwhelming majority of fan authors are women, and you only need to be a conscious person in the world to know how it goes when we try to play with the boys’ toys, or have any assertive online presence at all. A mob of white men with Twitter accounts are ready to magically disprove the existence of sexism at the drop of a hat, and when you add racism, religion, queerness, and other factors, it becomes even more fraught. Consider the uproar over the all-female Ghostbusters, or the recent recasting of Doctor Who as a woman; the amount of reactionary male gatekeeping in many intellectual properties is both absurd and absurdly predictable. Women are often challenged on whether they’re “real fans,” despite being some of the most active and engaged members of fandom communities.

Fanfiction authors have dreamed up countless sequels, prequels, and re-imaginations, riffing on a previously established universe (such as that of Star Trek, shown here), often sharing in online forums. Image courtesy of Deviant Art.

Because fanfiction takes an interest in sex, gender, and politics—and because it critiques or reworks the source text, transforming characters and settings into different or minority iterations of themselves—it is by its very nature provocative, transgressive, and challenging. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that one of the first famous authors to openly talk about and accept it—Harry Potter’s J.K. Rowling—is a woman. Both Rowling and Twilight’s Stephenie Meyer have broken ground in encouraging their readers to write and share stories set in their worlds, and both franchises rank near the top of the list when it comes to the most fanfiction. For example, an increasingly popular fan re-interpretation visualizes Harry Potter himself, the Boy Who Lived, as a Desi/Indian man and Hermione Granger as a black woman (indeed as she was cast, with actor Noma Dumezweni, in the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child play in London’s West End). The act of allowing some of this generation’s most popular and ubiquitous fictional heroes to represent their fans of color is emblematic of the power that fanfiction and fanart can have for its creators.

I don’t want to paint the world of fandom as a postmodern utopia. The increasing recognition of fanworks, and the availability of social media, has led to toxic bullying campaigns and other backlash against authors, actors, and screenwriters for not conforming to popular fan interpretations. As well, white feminism and internalized misogyny are often present—in other words, while women are mostly doing the writing, women of color or characters of color, or female characters at all, can still suffer. But no one should reduce or dismiss the entire enterprise just because, like any collective cultural production, it has problems. I’m always wary of anyone who wants to stop a conversation or creation cold.

Perhaps the real issue isn’t with fan artists and authors, hungry to engage with stories they love, but with a mainstream media that gives an increasingly diverse, interested, creative, and thoughtful subculture of all ages and backgrounds so little opportunity to see itself well-represented, and that scoffs at our efforts to fill the space. Fanfiction offers both an escape from our often alarming current reality, and a critical reflection of it. It’s not at all shocking that we want to explore our new takes on old stories, and have them taken seriously. Until the zeitgeist finally catches up, we’ll have to tell them ourselves—and even when it does, we’ll still write fanfiction.

Have a favorite story, and want more of it?

How about you come on down.

The post From <I>Paradise Lost</I> to <I>Harry Potter</I>, Fanfiction Writers Reimagine the Classics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Anybody seeking to understand what war might look like in the cyber age should consider the disruptive force of air power and the revolution it wrought. One lasting lesson: War has the power to quickly transform our technological fantasies and anxieties into devastating, hard-to-control realities.

Even before the Wright Brothers launched at Kitty Hawk in 1903, fantasies about what the industrial revolution meant for the future of warfare became etched in Western culture. From Ignatius Donnelly’s 1890 Caesar’s Column to H.G. Wells’ 1897 The War of the Worlds to Mark Twain’s 1899 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, turn-of-the-century novelists imagined apocalyptic machines reaping vast destruction on dense urban populations. In 1898, one Polish military leader described how future war would involve balloons dropping “explosive substances” on unsuspecting people far removed from any front.

“Le Combat dans la riviere” (1906). Illustration by Alvim Corrêa (1876-1910) for a work by science fiction author H.G. (Herbert George) Wells (1866-1946). Image courtesy of the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library Digital Archive.

Michael Sherry, a leading historian of air power in the 20th century, has argued that while early aviation technologies had limited practical applications, those limitations were not always understood by military commanders and political leaders. Fantasies about air power’s destructive potential outstripped the reality of air power.

But before long, the experiences of war enabled military planners and national leaders to experiment with air power, giving the world an early taste of the terror. World War I introduced the practice of air raids on something approaching a mass scale, as dozens of German “Gotha” and “Zeppelin” raids on London killed an estimated 1,413 civilians.

The experimenting with air power in World War I led to a growing fascination with its destructive potential. In 1921, Italian military theorist Giulio Douhet published The Command of the Air. He argued that in any future wars air power would be decisive. Generals and statesmen would target civilian populations with heavy bombing, seeking to destroy the enemy’s military-industrial capacity and weaken the enemy’s civilian morale. Future battlefields, Douhet predicted, will no “longer be limited to actual combatants. On the contrary, the battlefield will be limited only by the boundaries of the nations at war, and all of their citizens will become combatants, since all of them will be exposed to the aerial offensives of the enemy.”

The world, he concluded, was entering an age of “total war,” with civilians the prime target of any offensive military operation. Similarly, cyberwarfare adds a whole other dimension to the concept of total war, using unseen tools almost anywhere on earth to cause mass civilian casualties and mass panic.

The coming of World War II put many of the post-WWI predictions to the test. And tragically, many proved prescient. Advanced aviation technologies coupled with fascist militarism helped warfare assume an unprecedented destructive scale. During Spain’s Civil War, Franco’s bombers killed thousands of civilians in attacks on Barcelona, Guernica, and other Spanish cities. In Canton, China, Japan’s air raids killed thousands of civilians in the mid-1930s.

Air power altered people’s conceptions about the constraints of time and space during military conflicts. Abraham Lincoln had once predicted that “the armies of Europe and Asia … could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.” The United States had long seen itself as immune from the military calamities that had befallen other nations, whose borders were in proximity to one another. The twin-ocean barriers on America’s coasts no longer appeared to protect the United States from the advances in air power. Fears of bombs falling on the continental United States soared in the 1930s and early 1940s.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I and had long admired sea power, concluded that modern aviation had upended military doctrine and put millions of U.S. civilians in harm’s way in their homes. The advances in aviation technologies meant that “so-called impregnable fortifications no longer exist,” FDR warned Americans in May 1940. (Cyberwarfare and online recruitment of potential terrorists have further lowered the protective walls of fortress America).

FDR’s repeated warnings did not prevent Pearl Harbor. But the war that ensued—which included the Allied firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, where hundreds of thousands of civilians died, followed by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—matched some of the most horrific nightmares of early fantasists about air power.

In the years since World War II, air power has not always proven decisive, of course. During the Vietnam War, the United States dropped more tonnage of bombs than had been dropped by all combatants in World War II. Yet the most powerful military on earth lost to a determined, fierce guerrilla army fighting to defend its native soil.

The Bush Administration’s “shock and awe” air campaign at the start of the 2003 Iraq War wrought so much destruction that it arguably set the stage for the Iraqi Civil War that ensued two years later.

This history should provide this cold reassurance: It is highly unlikely that any single technology—including cyberwarfare—will prove decisive in military campaigns of the future.

But the history of air power also strongly suggests that at some point in the future, fantasies about cyberwar and the actual practice of cyberwar will merge.

So human beings, in contemplating how cyberwar may change the character of warfare itself, will be better off if we allow our fears to inspire our thinking, and anticipate new perils and consequences before they show up at all of our doorsteps.

The post To Understand the Future of Cyber Power, Look to the Past of Air Power appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.