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Fan fic and Greek myths have a LOT in common...

Listening to an episode of epic poetry.

Hello, Myriatid reader!

Before we read about how fan fic Manacled and The Odyssey are brilliantly similar, I’d like to say a huge thanks to you for subscribing and reading my Myriatid newsletter. Around 650 of you are tuning in weekly, which is enough to make a tiny writer’s day.

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Recently, I asked a group of writers whether they had a recurring character who turned up in each novel. The responses were enjoyable: cats and magpies feature heavily (for my books, it’s the former), spies, and then, “Yes, there’s a character who turns up in all my stories somewhere, even if he is in the background or unnamed.” 

I loved this idea! The modern author space is so bombarded with advice about how to craft the “perfect” narrative arc that room for whimsical features, such as characters who turn up at leisure in different scenarios, is scant. 

As is often the case, this got me thinking about Margaret Atwood, in particular her books Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.

Snowman is the main character in Oryx and Crake, which is told from his perspective. His real name is Jimmy, but he takes on the name Snowman to distance himself from his past after his best friend Crake and love interest Oryx are killed in a plague. The novel is set in a future where Snowman may be the last human left alive.

Snowman/Jimmy appears in minor roles in The Year of the Flood, along with Oryx and Crake. This sequel is told from the perspective of two women, Ren and Toby, who are unaware that Snowman, Oryx, and Crake are responsible for a pandemic. 

The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood.

Snowman doesn’t serve much narrative purpose in The Year of the Flood; his presence really serves to deepen the reader’s connection to the MaddAddam trilogy, its world and its mythology. 

The same recurring-character device is, of course, what makes fan fiction so compelling. Manacled by SenLinYu, the breakout Harry Potter fan-fiction which is set to be traditionally published in 2025 (I’m sorry to mention HP, but it’s relevant to my point), is a great example of this. Here’s the synopsis:

“Harry Potter is dead. In the aftermath of the war, in order to strengthen the might of the magical world, Voldemort enacts a repopulation effort. Hermione Granger has an Order secret, lost but hidden in her mind, so she is sent as an enslaved surrogate to the High Reeve, to be bred and monitored until her mind can be cracked.”

Here, Draco and Hermione are given new leases of life in completely different narratives, situations and settings to those of the original books.

They’re what academia calls plurimedial: characters who are represented in numerous different narrations, in a variety of visual arts (fan fic art is almost as important as the writing), and in rituals (the evangelising of these characters on platforms like BookTok). 

Fan fic art for Manacled - spot The Handmaid’s Tale references!

Plurimedial characters – especially when told in a serialised form (like fan fiction) – are precisely what made ancient myths more than just stories, but the foundation of belief systems.

Just like how fan fic functions on online platforms, rhapsodes would recite different parts of mythological characters’ stories at given times. Audiences would listen to a take on the episode between Polyphemus and Odysseus, with a knowledge it was part of a wider collection of stories and narrative tradition. 

The gods, of course, turned up in many wild and wonderful ways throughout mythology – and the myths often deviated widely (the tale of how and why Ariadne ended up with Dionysus after being abandoned by Theseus, for example) – as new takes on well-known narrative-cycles developed.

Ariadne and Dionysus.

As Sarah Iles Johnston argues in her wonderful essay entitled Stories and Belief in Ancient Greece:

“Greek mythic characters… and other serialised characters, were served up to their audiences in small doses, a circumstance that (if the narrations were effective) inevitably whetted listeners’ appetites to hear more about them and encouraged them to think about those characters—even to develop parasocial relationships with those characters—during the intervals in between.”

Serialised, plurimedial characters create stronger relationships between the reader and the fictional world.

My commenter’s unnamed character is accumulating his own mythology, slowly, as readers recognise him time and time again. Snowman/Jimmy’s character is strengthened by being observed from a different perspective and time. 

Fan fiction and the Greek myths function in brilliantly similar ways – creating belief systems and worlds in which followers exist (at least temporarily) whole-heartedly. 

Randle recommends

Awake by Harald Voetman. 

This is historical fiction like you’ve never read before. It’s also a very, very short read at 108 pages:

In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed obsessively dictating new chapters of his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Fat, wheezing, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose: No—to be awake is to be alive. There’s no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world in a single work. 

By day Pliny the Elder carries out his many civic duties and gives the occasional disastrous public reading. But despite his astonishing ambition to catalogue everything from precious metals to the moon, as well as a collection of exotic plants sourced from the farthest reaches of the world, Pliny the Elder still takes immense pleasure in the common rose. After he rushes to an erupting Mount Vesuvius and perishes in the ash, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, becomes custodian of his life’s work. But where Pliny the Elder saw starlight, Pliny the Younger only sees fireflies.

Thank you so much for reading! Until next Monday’s Myriatid!