#like tbh I think this is where the differences between brits and americans come out tbh

[gaytobymeres]

Hmm watched the interview of hugh grant at the Oscar’s and I don’t think he was rude? He just wasn’t pretending to be excited. He answered the questions and some of the questions were stupid, but I don’t think he was rude. Just a bit blunt perhaps but that’s how he seems in every interview I’ve seen of him (which isn’t many tbf)

[tadpolesonalgae]

Hey Tabby! how was your day?

So this isn't exactly ACOTAR related but I also hope it's nothing personal?

I'm guessing you're from England as you often time your posts to England time and I'm terribly curious about all things around the world and I find it soo soo interesting how easy it is—in this day and age—to sort of just communicate with all kinds of people around the world? and I love seeing the confusion between Americans and Brits when it comes to a lot of things, especially food(I really like those videos on yt where some British students try American food, albeit I'm not on yt much and have only watched like 2 or 3 of those) and I saw a short today about this dish called 'beans on toast' I believe? and someone in the comment section genuinely thought beans on toast meant plain beans on plain bread for some reason and so many Americans in the replies were kinda surprised that's not what it was? and it was kinda hilarious tbh ngl. and out of nowhere, you popped up in my mind fsr?

however, I really like learning about all these foods and dishes that are so commonplace for one set of people and never even touched by another? (in 2 decades of my life, I've never had pancakes😭 I've only ever read about them as one of the greatest breakfasts on Wattpad)

I was wondering if you have a comfort food that you like eating when you're down? do you enjoy certain cuisines? Are you ever astonished that someone in the world hasn't tasted a certain food and that they simply must? do you like beans on toast? fish and chips?(I'm sorry these are the only English dishes Ik TT)

—🫀

‘I'm guessing you're from England as you often time your posts to England’

I am indeed from England 🫢

‘and I love seeing the confusion between Americans and Brits when it comes to a lot of things, especially food’

I haven’t seen those videos, but I’ve seen ones where people compare English and American for other words like pavement vs. sidewalk, courgette vs. zucchini, aubergine vs. eggplant, and some others I can’t remember at the moment! I think I’ve also seen some where Americans react to Cockney rhyming slang, as well as some expressions/idioms which was pretty entertaining 🤭

‘and I saw a short today about this dish called 'beans on toast' I believe?’

GIRL I'VE JUST MADE DINNER AND IT'S BEANS ON TOAST

I fully squawked and had to put my phone down when l read that 😭

‘and someone in the comment section genuinely thought beans on toast meant plain beans on plain bread’

I mean, everyone has different ways, but I know one of my friends freaked out when they found out I put the cheese on top of the butter but beneath the beans so it melts and becomes soft and stringy 🫢

‘(in 2 decades of my life, I've never had pancakes😭 I've only ever read about them as one of the greatest breakfasts on Wattpad)’

Honestly I think it’s one of those things relating to association? Idk what it’s like outside of England, but in primary school (roughly ages 4-11) we always had pancake races on pancake day, and during assembly we would have pancake flipping challenges too (to be fair, it was a C of E school, so maybe that affected it a little) so there are a lot of good memories surrounding pancakes which probably adds to the flavour enhancement :)

You also aren’t supposed to have them that often because they’re unhealthy to have all the time without balance, but that made them super special since once a year you’d get to have pancakes for breakfast! 🥞 (<- I’d call these American Pancakes)

And I’d like to specify, not American pancakes that are more stout and thicker, but ones that are thin that you can roll up with lemon and sugar or maple syrup 🤤

‘I was wondering if you have a comfort food that you like eating when you're down?’

Honestly in summer probably tomatoes on bread with salt and pepper, in the autumn winter it’s definitely soup, and spring probably beans on toast because they’re just so easy to make and don’t cause a hassle 😭

‘do you enjoy certain cuisines?’

I have to admit, my palette is not particularly extensive, but because of certain choices I’ve made for what I’m willing to eat, Italian probably suits me best :)

‘Are you ever astonished that someone in the world hasn't tasted a certain food and that they simply must?’

No, because one of my friends was such a picky eater. And I mean picky.

Anyway, having grown up with that, I’m more astonished when people have no limits at all—no allergies or spice tolerance, open to trying new things—basically someone who’ll eat absolutely anything amazes me.

‘fish and chips?’

Okay I’d say I’m pretty good at trying new foods and not turning my nose up at them, but anything with fish in I physically am unable to hold down 😭 (aside from tuna 🤔) I’m okay being around fish in supermarkets and that, or if people are eating it around me, but it’s not pleasant :/

Although, I LOVE vinegar. I used to put it in my water as a child and to this day have it with pasta 🫢

Honestly I’d like to learn more meals to cook. Someone I know recently learned how to make a sauce(?)/dip(?) called baba ganoush/baba ghanouj and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever had and would love to have it more frequently if I had the time to make it because honestly it’s 🤌🤌🤌 (my mouth is currently watering)

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

re. people fanoning Izzy as Super Working Class I think they’re often making a (patronising, inaccurate) generalisation about (English) Northern accents. That’s never been a one-to-one mapping for class and income and is DOUBLY misrepresentative of the 1700s, but I think it was a springboard for people who wanted it to be true

interesting! im USAmerican and i literally cant tell the difference between british and australian accents so like, i REALLY have no context for this. i do remember ppl talking abt accents from back in my tma days, but all i can recall was just "people get classist towards people with Northern accents" and "the RP accent is the Posh Fuckhead accent" (and i could very easily be remembering those wrong, it's been a while)

i guess it makes sense that accents aren't always that neatly categorized. but because this is a topic i am INCREDIBLY ignorant about, i don't personally feel comfortable dismissing the "con's accent means he's poor" argument because you, an anonymous stranger on the internet, have told me that generalizing northern accents as working-class is patronizing and inaccurate, no offense

(i mean genuinely, please dont be offended by that, anon. like tbh when i write it out like that im like "yknow what anon, youre probably right" bc i feel like generalizing ANY aesthetic marker like that can get pretty dicey, but i would have to do more research on the cultural significance of UK accents before im ready to fully agree with your statement)

what i do feel comfortable saying is that the accents in ofmd are literally all over the place and for THAT reason the "izzy has a northern english accent so CANONICALLY he HAS to be working class" take seems like a pretty big reach, imo. if someones gonna choose to cling to con's accent specifically as proof of something in canon then i want to hear their explanations for ed and stede's kiwi's accents, for ed's british accents in the backstory, for doug's american accent. there are SOME instances in ofmd where character accents do have deeper implications, but it's mostly subtle, character-specific things, and i can easily see that those instances dont necessarily indicate that con o'neill's accent is one of them:

so disclaimer again that im VERY bad at telling UK accents apart (british accents especially), but im pretty sure the british characters who have dialogue and hold positions of power all have Rich Douchebag british accents?? (please correct me if im wrong lol). im talking abt the king, stede's two prisoners, and the badmintons, specifically. and it makes sense that they'd want to get the accents right for those guys, bc ofmd is VERY clear in making sure we know that The British Are The Enemy. giving them a stereotypical Rich Jerk accent just emphasizes that

(also the only reason im specific abt brits who have positions of power is bc i know there's at least 2 random british soldiers who have lines in e9, but i have no FUCKING idea what their accents are. if theyre ALSO douchebag richman accents, that further proves me point. if they DONT have posh fucker accents, that also kinda makes sense bc theyre like, cannon fodder to the british navy. theyre still bad racist ppl, but theyre dont hold power the way the other 5 characters i mentioned above are)

i might not be super informed abt all the details abt what accents signify in the UK, but i know enough abt history to know that ewen bremner going ham on the scottish accent in a show where the british are all portrayed as irredeemable colonizers is Based As Fuck. and this doesnt rlly apply to con/izzy bc con's accent is still english and izzy literally aligns w the british navy to achieve his goals, something that ofmd explicitly condemns

i know samba schutte personally chose to have roach's accent say something about the Roach Backstory he made up as part of the show's encouragement to have the actors for some of the side characters come up with backstories for their characters, but idk if all the actors chose to have their accents mean something. also, coming up with backstories obviously wasnt something that actors playing characters with more importance to the plot were asked to do. rhys, taika, and vico were given their characters' backstories. izzy is more important to the plot than roach (and wee john and fang, two other characters whose actors' have talked abt the backstories they came up with for their characters), and while we dont have a backstory for him yet, i wouldnt be surprised if con didn't get to come up with one. basically, samba deciding to have roach's accent mean something doesn't inherently mean izzy's accent means izzy is poor

[malyen0retsev]

i saw that ask you reblogged about the us system vs the uk system and now i just feel really sad that your entire spectrum is mostly our left wing. you have CHOICES in a way we don't and :( out of interest, how does the uk voting break down then? because ours is basically 'vote for actual humans' vs 'demons in human skin'.. so if all of yours are 'actual humans' where are the lines between them? sorry if this is too much to answer!!!

Yeah anon, it’s fucking wild. And I’ve generally tried to stay out of posting about the US election because fundamentally I can’t alter things, I’m British; but I have discovered tonight that a lot of Americans on here are unaware of how right wing their system is compared with Europeans, and why it confuses us so much tbh. Because yes. The Democrat party is pretty much the entire UK political spectrum. Your ‘moderate’ Democrats are our Conservatives. Your ‘left wing’ Democrats are probably a mix of Lib Dem and Labour. Your ‘socialist’ Democrats are our Labour.

To clarify - this is just my opinion on the way it breaks down in the UK, and other Brits on here may disagree and that’s totally chill. It’s just the way I see it from the experiences and upbringing I’ve had etc etc

A really simple way of summarising it is if your priorities are around the economy and business (so economy, so I’ve essentially typed economy twice lol), then you tend to vote right wing - so for the Conservatives. If your priorities are around social issues and mobility in that regard, you tend to vote left wing - so for Labour. If you sort of sit somewhere in the middle with those priorities (eg believe in higher tax than what the Conservatives offer, but disagree with the level of tax Labour suggest - and this is a really basic example, I’m trying to break it down as easily as I can) then you tend to vote for our slap bang in the centre party, the Lib Dems. 

We also have smaller parties - the SNP (Scottish National Party) which fundamentally want Scottish Independence but also are sort of Scotland’s left wing party (I have two friends who vote SNP - one wants Scottish independence, one doesn’t, but both believe the SNP give the best voice for Scotland in Parliament), the Greens (so if you prioritise green issues), Plaid Cymru (similar to SNP but for Wales), and UKIP (honestly highly irrelevant now, they wanted the UK to leave the EU so now that’s happened they’re just the racist party - basically the equivalent of the US Republicans lol)

That’s not to say that if you vote left wing you care shit all about the economy, nor if you vote right wing you care shit all about social issues - for example, all manifestos have to be fully costed and checked over by economists (it just comes down to where you believe the money should come from) and every party bar bloody UKIP support free healthcare (it’s just they have disagreements over the best way to go about it/sustain the free healthcare system we have in the UK). There’s a lot of crossover, but because we have a hell of a lot of the safety nets in place that America’s still arguing about whether to implement, people can prioritise other things.

I think that’s probably why as a Brit I’m able to (easily) sustain friendships with people who vote for all the parties except UKIP but then I don’t know anyone who votes UKIP so whatevs because here at least you can understand what leads somebody to vote differently to you. There’s enough common ground between the parties, and enough things that won’t be compromised. The best way I can describe it is a Labour-Conservative friendship would be equivalent to a Bernie supporter v Biden supporter friendship. Yep, you disagree on a bunch of stuff. But there’s also stuff that you agree on; you aren’t stood on completely different fucking planets. 

But yeah, it does make me feel sorry for the US because Joe Biden would be a Conservative on our political spectrum whilst Bernie Sanders would be Labour. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. What sucks is somehow Americans who want a Democrat in the White House are frequently forced to back someone who would be in a completely different party if they were British. The Democratic nomination coming down to between Bernie and Biden is literally like asking a UK Conservative to vote for a UK Labour politician, or a Labour voter to vote for a Conservative politician - which, I obviously can’t make clear enough, makes zero fucking sense to me. It sucks and all I can say is I’m so sorry that that’s the system you’re stuck with :/

[darpok]

Blog Post: On Fan Fiction and Other Storytelling Traditions

When I was twelve or thirteen years old, and even our family finally had DSL internet, I discovered the joys of fan fiction. In case you haven’t been living under the same rock as I have, allow me to explain. “Fan fiction” refers to stories written by enthusiasts of a particular book, TV show, or other creative work. While most “fics” – as my friends and I would call them – take place within the particular universe of the original story, others take known characters and put them in an entirely new setting. (That’s how 50 Shades of Grey was born.) There’s also fan fiction that doesn’t deliberately draw on any work but revolves around real, famous people in imagined situations. (See Graham Norton and Daniel Radcliffe discuss this type on the former’s show.)

The stories that interested me ranged from shorter “one shots” to multi-chapter epics, but most were placed in the Harry Potter universe and nearly all were tales of romance – if you could call it that.

The pairings I read about (and often ‘shipped’ – a verb that comes from the ‘ship’ in ‘relationship’ and means “hoped would bang”) – whether true to canon (i.e. the original books), such as Lily and James Potter, or wildly inventive, such as Hermione and a Tom Riddle to whom she has traveled back in time – usually engaged in the kind of love/hate banter that sends real couples to therapy. The pair would glare at and insult each other (often employing strangely American turns of phrase for a pair of ostensible Brits), their apparent mutual disgust hiding a deeper attraction. For my friends and I, it was riveting stuff.

While I was mainly a Lily/James shipper myself, you can’t talk about Harry Potter fan fiction and not mention Dramione. The fan-invented romance between Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger was a tale of forbidden passion, a defiance of Hogwarts housing norms and the mandates of Potter canon itself. Draco did need to be less of a whiny loser to be a deserving match for Hermione, but this could be arranged without too much trouble. In the fan fiction world, Draco was dark and brooding, and he didn’t bring his dad up in conversation quite as often as in the books. Hermione was clever and empathetic, and although she was rarely depicted with less than Yule Ball-level beauty, her looks were not her main characteristic.

Sometimes fan fiction Draco and Hermione fell for each other while at Hogwarts. In other fics, they met again under changed circumstances years after the fall of Voldemort. Then there were the AU fics in which a brilliant young paralegal named Hermione Granger begins work at the firm where successful lawyer Draco Malfoy practices. You get the idea.

Photoshop creations starring Tom Felton and Emma Watson (no credit belongs to me). The purple one in particular has stayed in my memory for years, and brings on a familiar feeling of excitement at all the great content to peruse in the world. It was the banner for a website that allowed fans to nominate and vote for their favorite Dramione fics.

A particularly sexy iteration of the Draco/Hermione story was called Water by kissherdraco. In it, Draco and Hermione are Head Boy and Girl at Hogwarts. Of course, this means that they must live sequestered in their own dormitory, with its own entrance, common room and adjoining bathroom that ensure they see each other in a state of partial undress when the story demands it.

Water was held by many to be the pinnacle of the genre. It had lust and angst in equal measure, executed with a liberal dose of swear words and aggression. Moreover, Water took the common flaws of the Dramione world’s characters and actually explored them, allowing character to drive plot. In the story, Draco is brooding and cruel as ever, but these traits are linked to vicious abuse at the hands of Lucius. This backstory is not seen as an excuse for Draco’s behavior and he is forced to grow and change as the story progresses (although not quite enough, tbh).

I never finished the story, perhaps because my young brain was alarmed by all the hate-sex, but I revisited it with curiosity for this piece. Here is a relatively benign excerpt from the text, although please skip if you’d rather avoid themes of physical dominance:

“You’re crying,” growled Draco, leaning in and flicking his tongue onto her cheek. He tasted salt.

She struggled then, and he brought his hands to her shoulders to hold her still. “Don’t, Granger,” he warned. “I fucking need this. I can’t fucking…” He trailed off.

He never would have noticed before. Not like he did now, at least. Her lips were wet. They were red and moist and magnificently ripened for him. So full of blood. Hot, heated, sullied blood. He couldn’t take his eyes off them.

Other fics situated romance within a larger plot about the politics of the wizarding world. Prelude to Destiny by AnotherDreamer took place in the Marauder era (i.e. the time of Harry’s parents) and focused on the coming-of-age of Lily Evans and her role in the battle against evil. It begins, “Two cultures and a thousand miles from you, there is a castle on a hill…”

Another fave began life under the title Ancient and Most Noble and is now called Druella Black’s Guide to Womanhood. It is about the diverging lives of the three Black sisters — Bellatrix, Andromeda, and Narcissa — in the early years of Voldemort’s power. The sisters confront the crumbling of the their easy closeness as they make different choices in a changing world.

”It’ll be a laugh, you’ll see,” Bellatrix whispered into her ear, her breath sweet and thick from wine. They were curled in the cool grass, tangled in the layers upon layers of lace and satin that were their dress robes; it had taken them an hour to get them on right and just ten minutes to unsettle them. Andromeda’s head was spinning: from the liquor, from the heat, from far too much dancing. “It’ll all be just like this,” Bella was murmuring, her lips brushing against her ear. Stars whirled by overhead, maybe close enough to touch. Close enough to try.

“Always just like this.”

—

Andromeda swore as she stepped off the train. From inside the nicely cool travel car, summer had looked so charming, green and bright and gloriously school-free…

I was most interested in these fics, the ones that revolved around the generations before Harry’s. There was something compelling about the knowledge of forthcoming tragedy for many of the characters…Plucked away from the happy ending of the books, these fics became an exploration of why life is meaningful even in its flawed and finite scope.

I look back on my fan fiction experiences as belonging to a beautiful time when the internet was less like Janet from The Good Place* (if Janet were selling everything she knew about us to profit-hungry corporations and belligerent, militarized governments), and more like a library you went to when you felt like checking out a book. Nobody knew what I ate and where I went every minute of the day, because I didn’t put that stuff online, nor did I (to my knowledge) carry a tracking device with me when I went downstairs to play with my friends. At 5 pm, our moms would have to call each friend’s landline to reach us and remind us to stop home for our daily glass of milk or what-have-you.

*Janet is a humanoid presence in the afterlife who holds all knowledge in the universe and can create objects out of the void.

Fan fiction was a commerce-free creative space – devoid of ad revenue and the quick accumulation of likes. Since there was neither money nor social capital to be gained, everyone who participated did so out of pure interest. One did have the hope of raking in reviews from other community members, but these were about more than validation; reviews allowed people to have conversations about a shared passion and often included constructive criticism along with praise. There was little need for bitterness – if a fic was well-written, everybody won, since it meant they got to read it.

Below are some examples from the reviews section of Prelude to Destiny. It’s certainly no Twitter.

Written by rach on chapter #13. (March 28th 2009, 5am) Hey,

So I’ve read your whole story before, and now I’m reading it again, because I saw it spotlighted on the site. And this chapter is amazing. I love the end…I’ve never (well, before I read this the first time) compared Lily to Mrs Crouch. But it’s so true. They both gave their lives for their sons and…this chapter is phenomenal. Just thought I’d let you know

Rach

Written by Smith on chapter #26. (April 29th 2008, 11am)

…If I am to find any fault in the story, then I should say that Remus was rather dull. Not that it was completely out of character, but I imagine him being funnier and also good Lily’s friend. Their friendship is mentioned by Lupin in the third film and, I should think, in the book as well, though I don’t have a copy right now and thus can’t provide a quote. Pity, that. [Given my extensive knowledge of canon, I can tell you that the reviewer is mistaken on this last point.]

Thank you very much for writing this story. Reading it was an enjoyable experience that I might repeat in the future. You’re brilliant, to put it short.

Author Response: Thanks for the review!Yeah, Remus was a bit dull. Actually, I didn’t intend for Lily to be friends with any of the marauders besides James. I just wanted them out of the way. But I know what you mean. After Sirius entered the story, Remus was even duller in comparison. Plus, I wanted to make Peter seem like he fit in, and Remus just fell by the wayside, you know?I’m enjoying writing Gertrude again after taking over a story from my friend who used my characters. Anyway, thanks again!Miranda

For me, too, fandom was a more than a casual hobby. Since I was only allowed an hour of internet use a day, I would spend the time copying and pasting chapter after chapter of fan fiction onto Microsoft Word, allowing me to read all I wanted later. (As you might imagine, Water was not stored on the family computer.) I remember scouring for new fics on fanfiction.net and clicking through page after page of fan art on deviantart.com (both of which retain their early-2000s layouts, unlike Mugglenet or JK Rowling’s official site), very differently from how I scroll through Instagram today. I admired works of fandom the way one appreciates springtime’s first flower, or the décor of a friend’s bedroom – I admired the stamp of individuality they bore and that inspired me to create something myself, to express my joys and sorrows, to be a part of the world.

RIP old websites

When I did put Harry Potter-inspired art out there, somewhere around age fourteen, it was of course in the form of fan fiction, writing being my weapon of choice. I wrote two one-shot pieces, one funny and the other sad — or such were my intentions, though perhaps the results were inverted. While some friends wrote longer stories, I never felt talented or inspired enough to commit, which is a typical self-doubting move of the kind I am trying to leave behind. (I now plan to write no matter how untalented and uninspired I may be.)

One piece was about a character of my own invention, a Slytherin guy with the requisite pure-blood, Dark magic-loving family, and a perky, ponytailed Huffelpuff girl on whom he develops an obsessive crush. It was intended to be a BBC-inspired mockery of the character, taking all the gloomy sexiness of the Dramione universe and making it ridiculous. It was also a thorough exploration of really wanting to make out with somebody sitting in the same classroom as you, not that I’d know anything about that myself.

The other short story was a sincere ode to the books and an exploration of some of their core questions on death and loss. It followed Harry in an imagined scene that takes place (SPOILER ALERT lol) after Dumbledore’s death in the Half-Blood Prince. Harry is climbing the steps to the Owlery with a package in his hand, thinking over his relationship with Dumbledore. As I wrote, I found that I absolutely had to include excerpts from a fairly unexpected source, a chapter in the first and most overlooked of the Harry Potter books. The chapter is “The Mirror of Erised,” whose titular object reveals to the onlooker their deepest desire.

“Professor Dumbledore. Can I ask you something?”

“Obviously, you’ve just done so,” Dumbledore smiled. “You may ask me one more thing, however.”

“What do you see when you look in the mirror?”

“I? I see myself holding a pair of thick, woolen socks.” Harry stared. “One can never have enough socks,” said Dumbledore. “Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn’t get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.”

It was only when he was back in bed that it struck Harry that Dumbledore might not have been quite truthful.

In my story, Harry gazes out at the Forbidden Forest for a little while, wondering who Dumbledore had been behind the mask of calm wisdom and pondering the burden of those left alive and grieving. Harry then ties the package he’s been holding to Hedwig’s arm and sends her off, chuckling a little through tears. In the last line it is revealed that – OMG – he has just sent off a pair of thick, woolen SOCKS. To DUMBLEDORE. Even though Dumbledore is DEAD. Isn’t that profound?

Two years later, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released, and to my complete surprise, it delved deep into some of the questions about Dumbledore that had tumbled out of me, stream-of-consciousness-like, in the story I wrote. The text even includes part of the above excerpt from “The Mirror of Erised”. At the outset of Deathly Hallows, Harry learns that Dumbledore’s childhood was a difficult one, the true details of which remain murky and contested by his admirers and critics. Harry regrets never having asked Dumbledore about his past, but recalls that, after all, the one personal question he had asked Dumbledore was not answered honestly…

While writing my story, I had imagined Harry’s pain and longing to know Dumbledore better. Because fan fiction allowed me to externalize my interpretation of the text, the questions in my mind took on concrete form. Their answers, when the next book presented them, became all the more striking and emotionally impactful. It was as though I had written a letter to the series of books that had shaped me and received, in a way, a gentle but meaningful response.

In 2004, JK Rowling released a statement about the phenomenon of fan fiction. She was flattered by fans’ desire to write about her characters, and her only caveats were that fan fiction should remain suitable for children (unfortunately that ship had already sailed, and Water was truly the least of it), as well as a non-commercial activity so that fans’ creative pursuits would remain unexploited. Other authors have not been as accepting, and have asked for fan fiction based on their work to be removed from popular websites. After all, in our current world, a story is classified as property. A sentence, a verse, a character’s name, can belong to someone the same way as the furniture in their house and the dollar figure in their bank account.

In the long history of storytelling, however, ownership is a relatively recent idea. Bear with me while I make an analogy – in pre-industrial Britain, every town had a commons, an area of land where anyone could gather firewood, take their cattle to graze, or hunt and fish to supplement a year of poor harvest. Storytelling has historically functioned as a kind of commons of ideas, one that anyone could pull from when the time came to tell a tale. Want to warn your kid against going near a well? Tell them about the hungry demon that lives in it. Were you hired to entertain a crowd at a wedding? Maybe you dust off an old poem about a prince and princess who meet one evening in the forest but spend years apart, not knowing each others’ true identity until it turns out they were betrothed all along.

Nobody invented well-dwelling monsters or estranged lovers for the first time – they simply existed in a shared cultural space, available when needed (or when it was particularly enjoyable to use them), ready to be shaped into something new and old at the same time. Even today, no one questions the use of familiar tropes in books and movies; we know that all storytelling involves a certain amount of borrowing and repetition, and we deem this acceptable as long as the storyteller has put an adequately original spin on the themes they utilize. The legal line is drawn once you get to the particulars – character names, or sentences and dialogue. These must be brand spanking new if you want to avoid a lawsuit and getting dropped by your publishers. (Does anyone else remember How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life?)

But for thousands of years, people told and re-told stories of beloved and familiar characters, not just unnamed archetypes – characters like Odysseus and Arjuna, Gilgamesh and King Arthur. The Sanskrit Mahabharata (Maha-BHA-rata) an epicly long, genre-defying story from South Asia, especially challenges the idea of a single, canonical text (much like other ancient story traditions from the subcontinent). It was told so many times by so many people that modern-day folks are not always able to agree on what the Mahabharata even is. The story is like a vast ocean — recognizable to all, but appears different depending on where you happen to be standing.

In the 20th century, some scholars collected Mahabharata manuscripts from all over the subcontinent, extracted the most commonly occurring parts to form a text, and detailed the many variations of each verse in footnotes that turned out longer than the text itself. No one can quite agree whether to treat this resulting (multi-volume) “Critical Edition” as the essential Sanskrit Mahabharata tradition, or as some kind of strange, post-colonial Mahabharata scrapbook. All this so that whenever somebody wrote an essay about the story, there was a single text, pieced together as it was, to use as a point of reference. (My Bachelor’s thesis was one of the lesser works of this scholarly genre.)

The plot of the Mahabharata goes like this: The five Pandava brothers, namely the prone-to-gambling leader Yudhishthira, morally-conflicted archer Arjuna, lovable beefcake Bhima, and something-to-do-with-horses twins Nakula and Sachdeva, along with their badass wife Draupadi, are exiled from their kingdom and forced into a year of disguise after a rigged dice game that Yudhishthira loses, and in which Draupadi is stripped and humiliated before a hall full of men. Eventually the Pandavas regain what they lost through a bloody war that leaves both sides devastated and questioning the point of all this conflict. The End.

Does my summary reflect my biases a little bit? For somebody else, the Pandavas might be perfect heroes, Draupadi a whiny ungrateful shrew who won’t stop yelling at them. To me, she is the moral backbone of the Pandavas, unafraid to call for what she feels is right even as everyone around her takes the coward’s way out of trouble.

Interpretations of Draupadi from various traditions

But it’s not just me who has a take on the story: the Mahabharata itself reflects a range of interacting and conflicting views, which might indicate that people from various backgrounds heard it and were able, in some way, to influence it. For example, although the text generally upholds hierarchies of caste and gender, it also pulls at the listener’s heartstrings with stories of characters who must confront these oppressive norms.

There’s Amba, who is stolen from her future-husband at her wedding and rejected by him when she manages to return; she later chooses to be re-born as a man in order to kill her kidnapper in battle. There’s Ekalavya, the talented archer from a forest tribe who trains with the Pandavas in youth and asks to prove his devotion to his archery guru any way he can; the guru, who favors the upper-caste prince Arjuna, asks Ekalavya to cut off his right thumb. There’s Kunti, who finds herself pregnant after an illicit affair with a god and places her baby, Karna, in a river; Karna is adopted by a lower-caste charioteer couple and goes on to fight against Kunti’s legitimate sons in the great battle that destroys the universe. And there’s Satyavati, whose husband/baby daddy pretends not to recognize her in front of his kingly court but gets completely schooled on how not to be an asshole.

“You know very well [who I am], your majesty; why do you say that you don’t, lying like a common man? Your heart knows the truth, and knows your lie. A man who does something wrong thinks, ‘No one knows me,’ but the gods know. If you do not do what I ask, your head will burst into a hundred pieces.” She discoursed at length on the reasons why a man should honor his wife, quoting the dharma texts.

(from The Ring of Truth: And Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry by Wendy Doniger)

Perhaps, among the traveling bards and indulgent grandmas who told the Mahabharata over centuries, there were some who identified or empathized with the pain of oppression and through whom otherwise-marginalized voices could ring out into the millennia.

The many Mahabharatas, along with the many conversations inside the Mahabharata, illustrate how the human imagination is prolific and messy, not content with merely absorbing information but impelled to remake, to take inspiration, to create, create, create. Isn’t that what happens when we read? We see the world we are reading about in our own way. We make up something in our own head as we go along, and that’s where the entertainment lies. The book itself is but a wonderful tool.

Perhaps if I had a right-wing patron who paid me to tell stories, I would tell the Mahabharata a little differently from how I do here, focusing on how the Pandavas were self-made men or how the ethnic minorities they killed were thieving encroachers. Or if I were telling the story to children, I might leave out anything particularly frightening. In the telling of a story, the will and whims of the teller have influence, as do those of the listener (or reader) and the financial benefactor (or publishing house).

What remains inevitable, however, is that rarely is a story told the same way twice. Even in our post-printing press, post-internet world, where stories are replicated identically again and again, we continue to dissect, analyze, and change them, whether it be through everyday conversations, online forums, or the prestige lens of a critic’s review. (A perfect example is the adaptation of works from one medium into another, be it from literature to film or from film to theater.) Sometimes the authors themselves continue to tweak and interpret their work – Virginia Wolf was known to make changes to her books prior to reprinting, and we all know that JK Rowling can’t leave the Potter universe well enough alone (love you Jo!).

For me, fan fiction is a grand storytelling and textual tradition not entirely unlike the Mahabharata. Fan fiction not only illustrates the malleable, generative nature of stories, it also provides a rare space, in our capitalist global economy, for storytelling to be that malleable, generative thing it has always been. It allows for democratic engagement in the storytelling traditions of our time, free from the boxes of profit and ownership. It lets us expand the possibilities of our collective imagination. Importantly, it allows voices from the margins into the story, where our canonical texts routinely fail us.

I’m also thankful to fan fiction for being a rare space, outside overpriced college English classes, where literary discussion can thrive. When I say discussion, I don’t mean mere binary criticism – like book reviews, or the Goodreads star rating-aggregates that help determine book sales. I mean questions about how a text makes you feel, what it reflects or critiques about our world, the things that literary characters, beloved and abhorred, may teach us about our shared humanity and flawed choices. And yes, some of these conversations involve Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy as co-Heads of Hogwarts, using the same bathroom.

Are you a reader or writer of fan fiction? Have you you dabbled in fan art? Or do you engage in a non-online form of fandom, like a book club? Please share!

Thanks for reading.