Hurt, Comfort, and Mary Sues: Examining Arthur Through Fanfiction
Well, here it is, as promised! Try to keep in mind that I originally wrote this essay for class; that is to say, for an audience with a lot of pre-existing knowledge about the Arthurian legends, but NO pre-existing knowledge about fandom. Hence the gross oversimplifications and carefull definitions. On the other end of things, some Arthurian references might be unfamiliar to those who didn't have to memorise all this stuff for their final exam. If something proves confusing, I'd be happy to clarify it in the comments.
It seems an unlikely idea, that a largely internet-based modern phenomenon and the venerable canon of Arthurian works could have much in common. In many ways, however, the transformative work of fanfiction and the Arthurian writings are in fact one and the same. When viewed from this perspective, it becomes apparent that any and all Arthurian works have equal legitimacy. Further, it is possible to gain new insight into the Arthurian writings, and Troyes’s “Knight of the Cart” in particular, when they are examined through the lens of fanfiction’s tropes and clichés.
Any story or series of stories, from the Bible to “Star Trek”, has a canon: the group of works accepted to as the official works of that story. The internet community colloquially refers to the devotees or enthusiasts of these works as fans. When fans find themselves dissatisfied with the canon they sometimes create transformative works, which serve as additions or addendums to the canon story. When these works take the form of the written word, they are known as fanfiction; that is, fiction written by fans. The creators of fanworks, their activities, their discussions, and the works themselves, are collectively known as a fandom. Except in very rare cases, fanworks will never be accepted into the story’s canon. Given sufficient time and volume of contributions, however, they form a conglomerate fanon, a term describing elements that never occurred in canon, but which are widely accepted within fandom, such that people unfamiliar with the canon may even believe these fanon elements to be canonical fact.
What we traditionally think of as the Arthurian canon is, in fact, a fanon: a series of fanfictions which have gained sufficient respect to be inducted into the genre’s core works. There is no such thing as the original Arthur story; rather, the first Arthurian works are short, somewhat dubious histories. In years to come, readers of these histories found themselves dissatisfied with the canon in some way. Perhaps they didn’t care for its depth, or its message; its length, or its themes. These fans took it upon themselves to write new fictions based on these original works, and later authors took these new Arthurian fanfictions as a fanon upon which to base their own writings. The only practical difference between Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and Jerry Zucker’s “First Knight” is that Monmouth had less fanon to draw on.
Like any genre, fanfiction has familiar patterns that repeat again and again. There are entire websites, such as LiveJournal’s “Cliché Bingo” community, dedicated to poking fun at the prevalence of these tropes. Many of these patterns can also been found in the Arthurian fanon.
For example, the very core of the Arthurian fanon is RPF, or “real person fic”. RPF is fiction based on the canon of public knowledge about a real person’s life. In internet fanfiction, RPF is traditionally written about musicians, politicians, or actors, and deals with subject matter ranging from explicitly sexual to light-heartedly comedic. (FanLore) ETA: Here my professor scrawled in the margin, ‘Really? How awful!’. *grin* The original Arthurian works, as discussed above, are RPF in its most traditional form: made-up stories of things people thought, or hoped, could have happened to historical characters.
Similarly, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s merger of the Welsh and Latin materials falls neatly into the fandom trope of crossover fanfiction, where an author takes two canons that interest them, and, playing off their similarities, writes a story that spans both of them. In a fusion-style fanfiction, a subset of crossover fanfiction, the author often treats the two separate canons as if they had been one and the same the entire time. (FanLore) Monmouth’s work constitutes fusion fanfiction.
Despite these immediate parallels, it would be true to say that any comparison of the tropes of Arthur works and the tropes of the internet fanfiction genre is inherently flawed. The Arthurian writers have very different motivations than a modern fanfiction writer and, in the case of the pre-modern writers, lived in a very different world. This essay, however, continues in the Arthurian fanon’s long-standing tradition of interpreting the stories in light of the author’s own time period, from Monmouth’s portrayal of Arthur as a Norman King in a pseudo-Saxon setting, to the portrayal of the TV show “Merlin” of Arthur as a 21st century boy in a pseudo-medieval setting. By looking at the fanon through the perspective of a modern fan, new insight and approaches into the work can be gained.
This most obvious candidate for analysis through the tropes of modern fandom is Chrétien de Troyes’s “The Knight of the Cart”, a self-acknowledged work of fanfiction. In his introduction to the work, Troyes explicitly states that the sense of the story was given to him by Marie de Champagne, his patroness. (The Romance of Arthur 123) The story makes no pretension to being part of the perceived Arthurian canon, but rather acknowledges itself as a fan work. This makes it much easier to identify and analyse this work through fandom clichés, particularly through the tropes of H/C and Mary Sues, which here form the core of Troyes’s interpretation of courtly love.
H/C, the first trope, stands for “Hurt and Comfort”, a genre of fanfiction in which immense amounts of physical pain and/or emotional distress are invoked in a character for the literary purpose of allowing another character to comfort them.
H/C is easy to find in the Arthurian genre. Consider Gawain who, seeking the Green Knight, fights dragons, wolves, trolls, bulls, bears, boars, ogres, and the bitter winter weather. The story tells us that were he not such a skilled fighter, these experiences would surely have killed him. He journeys in “. . .peril and pain and hardship” (Medieval Romances, 345) until he reaches the castle, where he is comforted by the residents of the castle, and his host’s wife in particular. Similarly, Tristan is almost dead of his wounds when Isolt and her mother take him in.
The question of why people enjoy reading and writing H/C is something of a challenge. Some fans will talk about how the extremes highs and lows of H/C reveal a characters true nature. Others will say H/C is ideal for creating character growth. Still others enjoy the emotional connection between characters that H/C can create. (Friendshipper) ETA: Yes, I totally cited one of frienshipper’s posts. Did I mention this was the most fun I’ve had writing an essay in my entire university career? But a certain subset of fans will cheerfully admit that for them, the most important part of H/C is not the growth, or the revelations, or the emotional connection, but rather the hurt.
At first, this seems confusing. Why would a reader enjoy seeing a character, often a character they care greatly for, so badly hurt? The answer may lie in the realisation that the majority of fanwriters are female, while the majority of H/C victim characters are male. ETA: I figured this wasn’t exactly the appropriate context to discuss kink. I pushed my prof far enough with this essay as it was. Besides, the gender dynamic theory served my thesis better. :)
Consider “The Knight of the Cart”. Although Troyes was male, he was writing to please Marie de Champagne, a woman, and in the course of his tale subjects Lancelot, his male lead, to the most quintessential H/C. From the moment he steps into the cart, Lancelot’s story is one long sequence of humiliation, physical pain, and emotional agony. He is driven as far as attempting suicide, before finally finding comfort in Guinevere’s arms.
In her essay, “Women Reading Men”, Christine Gledhill discusses this male H/C victim as the archetype of the “Wounded Man”. The act of wounding the man, physically or mentally, can serve to “. . .force the male into the position of the woman” (Me Jane 87), making him “. . .accessible to the female imagination.” (Me Jane 87) The Wound Man is thus able on some levels to equalise the balance of power between male and female.
We know that Troyes’s patroness, Marie, was fascinated with the courtly love trope. At its most basic, courtly love is all about the equalisation of power between men and women. Men must suffer and bleed for the whims of their ladies, and think themselves lucky for the privilege. Marie might in reality have had very little power over the men in her life - but in the story Troyes wrote her, the hero Lancelot is brought down to the level of a woman, subject to the whims of his lover. He is wounded and humiliated by her and by the world, and when at last he is all but completely broken, he is given the reward of her comfort.
This idea leads into our second trope, that of the Mary Sue. Within the context of fandom, the phrase “Mary Sue” can refer to two different types of characters. These Mary Sues can be either gender, but are traditionally female.
The first is a character whose perfection is taken to impossible levels. She’s stunningly beautiful, and the story may linger in particular on her eyes and hair. All the other characters love her almost unconditionally - even those who are otherwise hard-hearted or indifferent. Only the antagonist is permitted not to adore the Mary Sue, although even he may be entranced by her beauty or talent. (Fanlore)
The second type of Mary Sue is an author self-insert, wherein a fanfiction writer inserts herself into the story under the guise of a character. (Fanlore) When done with care, and an honest approach to flaws, this can actually create some very intriguing characters. Unfortunately, this type of Mary Sue is often combined with the first type of Mary Sue, becoming the author’s idealised vision of herself.
It is this combined-type Mary Sue that we find in Troyes’s “Knight of the Cart”, in the form of Guinevere. This version of Guinevere is a quintessential Mary Sue: perfect in her beauty, and loved by all. She even succumbs to the traditional Mary Sue trait of having impossibly attractive hair, which both the author and characters obsess over: “If you took gold that had been refined a hundred thousand times and melted down as many, and if you put it beside these strands of hair, the gold would appear, to one who saw them together, as dull as the darkest knight compared to the brightest summer day of all this year” (The Romance of Arthur 139), the text rhapsodises.
Troyes is, of course, not writing Guinevere as a reflection of himself. He could, however, be writing her as a version of his patroness, Marie, who asked him to write a romance and gave him the “subject matter and meaning”. (The Romance of Arthur 123). This is Marie’s fanfiction, being written through the medium of Troyes. Her continued patronage surely depended on her enjoyment of the story - and what better way to guarantee her enjoyment than to discreetly cast her as the perfect and powerful Guinevere? His introduction to the work certainly establishes his willingness to portray Marie as a woman who “surpasses all women who are alive” (The Romance of Arthur 123), all the while claiming to be doing no such thing.
Guinevere-the-Mary-Sue fits into Marie’s fondness for courtly love, just as Lancelot’s H/C plotline did. It is the interaction between the victimised Lancelot, reduced to the female position in the interplay of power between genders, and Guinevere the Mary Sue, that enables the presence of courtly love in this story - perhaps in any courtly love story. To devote himself to a woman so utterly, Lancelot must first be somehow made lower than a woman - and to be so worthy of devotion, Guinevere must be elevated to almost laughable heights.
Although Troyes’s “Knight of the Cart” is the most blatantly fanfiction-like of the Arthurian works, virtually every text studied in this class can be approached from the perspective of fandom clichés. Despite the inherent illogic of subjecting ancient texts to modern perspectives, this approach provides a new way of looking at old subject matter, continuing in the finest tradition of the Arthurian legends as they have existed since almost their earliest days.
Biblophraphy
Most of the information in this essay that would be considered general knowledge for a member of internet fandom was located on fanlore.org. It has proven difficult, however, to locate sources to confirm this essay’s assertion that there are more women fanwriters than men. The closest sources available are essays like Dira Sudis’s “Book Review, Of Sorts, Again”, which are based on the underlying assumption that fanwriters are primarily female. It will have to be sufficient simply to state that almost any member of internet fandom would, if asked about the gender balance of writers, assert that in their experience most fanwriters are female.
MLA citations for atypical webpages (such a committee-edited wikis, blog profiles, and blog posts) are difficult to find a standard for, and as such may be somewhat irregular. Several authors are cited by their internet pseudonyms only, as they have not made their real names available.
Authors Unknown. Fanlore. The Organisation for Transformative Works. http://fanlore.org/
Eruthros, and ThingsWithWings. “Cliche Bingo”. Livejournal. 6 Jun. 2009 - 21 Sep. 2009. 29 Oct. 2009. http://community.livejournal.com/cliche_bingo/profile
Friendshipper. "Meta of +2 Happiness (H/C)" Essay, comments. 30 Mar.2007-29 Apr.2007. Dreamwidth. 29 Oct. 2009. http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/51043.html
Gledhill, Christine. "Women Reading Men," Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies, and Women. Ed. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumen. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. 86-7.
Loomis, Laura Hibbard, and Roger Sherman Loomis, ed. Medieval Romances. New York: McGraw-Hill
“Organisation for Transformative Works”. The Organisation for Transformative Works. 7 Nov. 2009. Accessed 29 Oct. 2007. http://transformativeworks.org/
Sudis, Dira. “Book Review, Of Sorts, Again” 20 Sep. 2009. Dreamwidth. 09 Nov. 2009. http://dira.dreamwidth.org/508422.html
Wilhelm, James J., ed. The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation, New Expanded Edition. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1994.
It seems an unlikely idea, that a largely internet-based modern phenomenon and the venerable canon of Arthurian works could have much in common. In many ways, however, the transformative work of fanfiction and the Arthurian writings are in fact one and the same. When viewed from this perspective, it becomes apparent that any and all Arthurian works have equal legitimacy. Further, it is possible to gain new insight into the Arthurian writings, and Troyes’s “Knight of the Cart” in particular, when they are examined through the lens of fanfiction’s tropes and clichés.
Any story or series of stories, from the Bible to “Star Trek”, has a canon: the group of works accepted to as the official works of that story. The internet community colloquially refers to the devotees or enthusiasts of these works as fans. When fans find themselves dissatisfied with the canon they sometimes create transformative works, which serve as additions or addendums to the canon story. When these works take the form of the written word, they are known as fanfiction; that is, fiction written by fans. The creators of fanworks, their activities, their discussions, and the works themselves, are collectively known as a fandom. Except in very rare cases, fanworks will never be accepted into the story’s canon. Given sufficient time and volume of contributions, however, they form a conglomerate fanon, a term describing elements that never occurred in canon, but which are widely accepted within fandom, such that people unfamiliar with the canon may even believe these fanon elements to be canonical fact.
What we traditionally think of as the Arthurian canon is, in fact, a fanon: a series of fanfictions which have gained sufficient respect to be inducted into the genre’s core works. There is no such thing as the original Arthur story; rather, the first Arthurian works are short, somewhat dubious histories. In years to come, readers of these histories found themselves dissatisfied with the canon in some way. Perhaps they didn’t care for its depth, or its message; its length, or its themes. These fans took it upon themselves to write new fictions based on these original works, and later authors took these new Arthurian fanfictions as a fanon upon which to base their own writings. The only practical difference between Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and Jerry Zucker’s “First Knight” is that Monmouth had less fanon to draw on.
Like any genre, fanfiction has familiar patterns that repeat again and again. There are entire websites, such as LiveJournal’s “Cliché Bingo” community, dedicated to poking fun at the prevalence of these tropes. Many of these patterns can also been found in the Arthurian fanon.
For example, the very core of the Arthurian fanon is RPF, or “real person fic”. RPF is fiction based on the canon of public knowledge about a real person’s life. In internet fanfiction, RPF is traditionally written about musicians, politicians, or actors, and deals with subject matter ranging from explicitly sexual to light-heartedly comedic. (FanLore) ETA: Here my professor scrawled in the margin, ‘Really? How awful!’. *grin* The original Arthurian works, as discussed above, are RPF in its most traditional form: made-up stories of things people thought, or hoped, could have happened to historical characters.
Similarly, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s merger of the Welsh and Latin materials falls neatly into the fandom trope of crossover fanfiction, where an author takes two canons that interest them, and, playing off their similarities, writes a story that spans both of them. In a fusion-style fanfiction, a subset of crossover fanfiction, the author often treats the two separate canons as if they had been one and the same the entire time. (FanLore) Monmouth’s work constitutes fusion fanfiction.
Despite these immediate parallels, it would be true to say that any comparison of the tropes of Arthur works and the tropes of the internet fanfiction genre is inherently flawed. The Arthurian writers have very different motivations than a modern fanfiction writer and, in the case of the pre-modern writers, lived in a very different world. This essay, however, continues in the Arthurian fanon’s long-standing tradition of interpreting the stories in light of the author’s own time period, from Monmouth’s portrayal of Arthur as a Norman King in a pseudo-Saxon setting, to the portrayal of the TV show “Merlin” of Arthur as a 21st century boy in a pseudo-medieval setting. By looking at the fanon through the perspective of a modern fan, new insight and approaches into the work can be gained.
This most obvious candidate for analysis through the tropes of modern fandom is Chrétien de Troyes’s “The Knight of the Cart”, a self-acknowledged work of fanfiction. In his introduction to the work, Troyes explicitly states that the sense of the story was given to him by Marie de Champagne, his patroness. (The Romance of Arthur 123) The story makes no pretension to being part of the perceived Arthurian canon, but rather acknowledges itself as a fan work. This makes it much easier to identify and analyse this work through fandom clichés, particularly through the tropes of H/C and Mary Sues, which here form the core of Troyes’s interpretation of courtly love.
H/C, the first trope, stands for “Hurt and Comfort”, a genre of fanfiction in which immense amounts of physical pain and/or emotional distress are invoked in a character for the literary purpose of allowing another character to comfort them.
H/C is easy to find in the Arthurian genre. Consider Gawain who, seeking the Green Knight, fights dragons, wolves, trolls, bulls, bears, boars, ogres, and the bitter winter weather. The story tells us that were he not such a skilled fighter, these experiences would surely have killed him. He journeys in “. . .peril and pain and hardship” (Medieval Romances, 345) until he reaches the castle, where he is comforted by the residents of the castle, and his host’s wife in particular. Similarly, Tristan is almost dead of his wounds when Isolt and her mother take him in.
The question of why people enjoy reading and writing H/C is something of a challenge. Some fans will talk about how the extremes highs and lows of H/C reveal a characters true nature. Others will say H/C is ideal for creating character growth. Still others enjoy the emotional connection between characters that H/C can create. (Friendshipper) ETA: Yes, I totally cited one of frienshipper’s posts. Did I mention this was the most fun I’ve had writing an essay in my entire university career? But a certain subset of fans will cheerfully admit that for them, the most important part of H/C is not the growth, or the revelations, or the emotional connection, but rather the hurt.
At first, this seems confusing. Why would a reader enjoy seeing a character, often a character they care greatly for, so badly hurt? The answer may lie in the realisation that the majority of fanwriters are female, while the majority of H/C victim characters are male. ETA: I figured this wasn’t exactly the appropriate context to discuss kink. I pushed my prof far enough with this essay as it was. Besides, the gender dynamic theory served my thesis better. :)
Consider “The Knight of the Cart”. Although Troyes was male, he was writing to please Marie de Champagne, a woman, and in the course of his tale subjects Lancelot, his male lead, to the most quintessential H/C. From the moment he steps into the cart, Lancelot’s story is one long sequence of humiliation, physical pain, and emotional agony. He is driven as far as attempting suicide, before finally finding comfort in Guinevere’s arms.
In her essay, “Women Reading Men”, Christine Gledhill discusses this male H/C victim as the archetype of the “Wounded Man”. The act of wounding the man, physically or mentally, can serve to “. . .force the male into the position of the woman” (Me Jane 87), making him “. . .accessible to the female imagination.” (Me Jane 87) The Wound Man is thus able on some levels to equalise the balance of power between male and female.
We know that Troyes’s patroness, Marie, was fascinated with the courtly love trope. At its most basic, courtly love is all about the equalisation of power between men and women. Men must suffer and bleed for the whims of their ladies, and think themselves lucky for the privilege. Marie might in reality have had very little power over the men in her life - but in the story Troyes wrote her, the hero Lancelot is brought down to the level of a woman, subject to the whims of his lover. He is wounded and humiliated by her and by the world, and when at last he is all but completely broken, he is given the reward of her comfort.
This idea leads into our second trope, that of the Mary Sue. Within the context of fandom, the phrase “Mary Sue” can refer to two different types of characters. These Mary Sues can be either gender, but are traditionally female.
The first is a character whose perfection is taken to impossible levels. She’s stunningly beautiful, and the story may linger in particular on her eyes and hair. All the other characters love her almost unconditionally - even those who are otherwise hard-hearted or indifferent. Only the antagonist is permitted not to adore the Mary Sue, although even he may be entranced by her beauty or talent. (Fanlore)
The second type of Mary Sue is an author self-insert, wherein a fanfiction writer inserts herself into the story under the guise of a character. (Fanlore) When done with care, and an honest approach to flaws, this can actually create some very intriguing characters. Unfortunately, this type of Mary Sue is often combined with the first type of Mary Sue, becoming the author’s idealised vision of herself.
It is this combined-type Mary Sue that we find in Troyes’s “Knight of the Cart”, in the form of Guinevere. This version of Guinevere is a quintessential Mary Sue: perfect in her beauty, and loved by all. She even succumbs to the traditional Mary Sue trait of having impossibly attractive hair, which both the author and characters obsess over: “If you took gold that had been refined a hundred thousand times and melted down as many, and if you put it beside these strands of hair, the gold would appear, to one who saw them together, as dull as the darkest knight compared to the brightest summer day of all this year” (The Romance of Arthur 139), the text rhapsodises.
Troyes is, of course, not writing Guinevere as a reflection of himself. He could, however, be writing her as a version of his patroness, Marie, who asked him to write a romance and gave him the “subject matter and meaning”. (The Romance of Arthur 123). This is Marie’s fanfiction, being written through the medium of Troyes. Her continued patronage surely depended on her enjoyment of the story - and what better way to guarantee her enjoyment than to discreetly cast her as the perfect and powerful Guinevere? His introduction to the work certainly establishes his willingness to portray Marie as a woman who “surpasses all women who are alive” (The Romance of Arthur 123), all the while claiming to be doing no such thing.
Guinevere-the-Mary-Sue fits into Marie’s fondness for courtly love, just as Lancelot’s H/C plotline did. It is the interaction between the victimised Lancelot, reduced to the female position in the interplay of power between genders, and Guinevere the Mary Sue, that enables the presence of courtly love in this story - perhaps in any courtly love story. To devote himself to a woman so utterly, Lancelot must first be somehow made lower than a woman - and to be so worthy of devotion, Guinevere must be elevated to almost laughable heights.
Although Troyes’s “Knight of the Cart” is the most blatantly fanfiction-like of the Arthurian works, virtually every text studied in this class can be approached from the perspective of fandom clichés. Despite the inherent illogic of subjecting ancient texts to modern perspectives, this approach provides a new way of looking at old subject matter, continuing in the finest tradition of the Arthurian legends as they have existed since almost their earliest days.
Biblophraphy
Most of the information in this essay that would be considered general knowledge for a member of internet fandom was located on fanlore.org. It has proven difficult, however, to locate sources to confirm this essay’s assertion that there are more women fanwriters than men. The closest sources available are essays like Dira Sudis’s “Book Review, Of Sorts, Again”, which are based on the underlying assumption that fanwriters are primarily female. It will have to be sufficient simply to state that almost any member of internet fandom would, if asked about the gender balance of writers, assert that in their experience most fanwriters are female.
MLA citations for atypical webpages (such a committee-edited wikis, blog profiles, and blog posts) are difficult to find a standard for, and as such may be somewhat irregular. Several authors are cited by their internet pseudonyms only, as they have not made their real names available.
Authors Unknown. Fanlore. The Organisation for Transformative Works. http://fanlore.org/
Eruthros, and ThingsWithWings. “Cliche Bingo”. Livejournal. 6 Jun. 2009 - 21 Sep. 2009. 29 Oct. 2009. http://community.livejournal.com/cliche_bingo/profile
Friendshipper. "Meta of +2 Happiness (H/C)" Essay, comments. 30 Mar.2007-29 Apr.2007. Dreamwidth. 29 Oct. 2009. http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/51043.html
Gledhill, Christine. "Women Reading Men," Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies, and Women. Ed. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumen. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. 86-7.
Loomis, Laura Hibbard, and Roger Sherman Loomis, ed. Medieval Romances. New York: McGraw-Hill
“Organisation for Transformative Works”. The Organisation for Transformative Works. 7 Nov. 2009. Accessed 29 Oct. 2007. http://transformativeworks.org/
Sudis, Dira. “Book Review, Of Sorts, Again” 20 Sep. 2009. Dreamwidth. 09 Nov. 2009. http://dira.dreamwidth.org/508422.html
Wilhelm, James J., ed. The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation, New Expanded Edition. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1994.