september's coming soon

I swear to god I did not get out of bed this morning with any plans to write 3K words on Cat Blanc and authorial intent, but here we are, I guess. Might post to tumblr later. ( ho boy )

(if you’re at all intersted, check out pages 84-95 in the second edition of The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, where you can learn all about how we construct authorial intent, underread and overread as we fill in gaps, and how all of this is just part of human nature)

I'm really really really not religious, but a post-grad degree in literature teaches you things.

Writing a fic full of of Biblical allusions isn't particularly pretentious. That Hetalia fic that was just Finland and Norway hanging around and making commentary on pieces of history that probably most people even in the countries wouldn't catch? That was pretentious. The only reader I trust to have understood what it was about was the kudos left by a Scandinavia word who turned out to be Swedish when I checked the profile. The rest, presumably lacking the background knowledge the fic was discussing between the lines, would probably just read a kinda weird and kinda sinister NorFin friendship fic.

But mythological allegories in a fandom where canon is not particularly subtle about the mythological allusions?

Not pretentious, unless allegory is per definition pretentious.

But fandom isn't as deep as you all think and when I see allusions discussed at all, it's mostly just to point them out, much rarer in attempts to read them as narrative devices. We love fairy-tale crossovers or maybe artsy fic citing fairy-tales as blunt metaphors, but I yet to find fic where the meaning relies on allegory.

So of course that was what I went and did.

Said fic curently has three different reviews explaining that it left the reader crying in the middle of the night, which I guess says something about its length as a one-shot, but also that I really didn't need to worry about my clusmy use of litterary devices. Because even as I EXPLICITLY POINTED AT THEM IN THE NOTES, at least the audience that liked it enough to bother leaving comments was completely blind to the fact that a fic open to be read as a Christ allegory miiiiiiiight just also suggest a return from symbolic death. (alternatively: my writing simply isn't that great and the readers clever enough to have picked up on that had long since noped out or didn't think I needed encouragement to write more)

I don't fancy being the judge of my own writing, but I've sat through enough lectures to know that what I wrote would be blatantly obvious to any literary scholar worth their salt. I quoted the scripture verbatim twice and the Notre Dame was damn near omnipresent, and that put together with the canon connection to Mary and Joan of Arc would make it clear that yeah no, the references to Christianity in this fic are not incidental.

So I don't know which it is. In an age where faith is strictly personal, is it that people just don't expect to see a living religion used for purposes other than proselytising? Is it truly that foreign to see Christianity treated just like any other mythology? I mean, based on real, honest to god Christians I know, it's just very likely that even believers reading the fic completely missed out on the part where I turned Adrien into John the Baptist because god only knows I've had to discuss the Bible with enough people who believe a lot in a text that my atheist-raised-on-an-illustrated-children's-bible ass knows better than them.

Or just as likely: Fanfic Is Trash And That's Why You Should Read Novels That Aren't Genre Fiction. Yes there is really good fanfic out there no genre fiction isn't per definition bad but if you fancy yourself a writer then you should read good books too and I say this as a person who unabashedly read fic and loves fantasy most of all. I still won't shut up about the fact that almost all fanfic and most genre fiction I read do not aspire for subtlety.

Or allegory is just per definition pretentious, I guess.

Today I spent all my free time at work writing a piece of fairly irritated analysis exploring what annoys me with the NO. 6 novels/manga contra the anime, after an off-hand comment on someone's tumblr that made me go "oh good god, of course, of course that's it". Since I was at work, there was no way for me to go back and check the details, and I'm pretty sure I should re-read the novels to see how annoyed I should be with this in the first place. But there is definitely a difference between how the novels/manga deal with the West Block contra how the anime does it, and that's just anoter tally on the list of reasons why the anime ending is better, so there.

So that was what I did at work today. Marking essays, pffft, that's for Easter break, I guess.

Oh you know you've reached some level of extraordinary nerdery when you google karlsruhe katholisch oder evangelisch even though FFS, what are the chances of some seventies shoujo artist knowing the goddamn difference and the implications of the ending are pretty goddamn clear. I mean. The genre draws back to a (widely assumed autobiographical) novel set in a French boarding school and we all know which version of Christianity belongs there.

( The break with traditional western Christian narrative has left me confused )

If you're actually curious: Contemporary statistics say there are about equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics in Karlsruhe. Although Baden in the nineteenth century saw Catholics outweighting Protestants two to one, Karlsruhe was one of the few districts with a Protestant majority. But of course, Schlotterbach isn't actually in Karlsruhe but somewhere unspecified north of it, so who the hell even knows what things would be like a hundred and thirty years later. 2017 stats say Baden-Württemberg has 30% Protestants, 33% Catholics.

I also spent some quality wiki time trying to figure out if their giving their location as "Baden" rather than Baden-Württemberg could somehow be an indication of period, but the only post-WWII entity known as Baden only was further south (and ceased to exist when BaWü was founded in 1952, anyway). So the best indication of "when is this even happening" seems to be Siegfried's groovy sunglasses and flower power hair, unless someone can actually get something useful out of Julius' friend's car.

2020 ETA: According to our lord and saviors Google and Wikipedia, the only thing named "Schlotterbach" in Germany is a tributary to the the tributary to the tributary to some river in the district of Ravensburg, which is in fact in BaWü. On the opposite end of Bawû from Karlsruhe, though, so the real question remains how Hagio even found the name in the first place.

I called Heart of Thomas the grandfather of mothern BL, and the father is, in our context, Maki Murakami's Gravitation.

( a comparison of their glaringly obviuos common points )