“Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

            Fitzgerald, of all novelists, would know how to make a hero tragic. Though I did not like Fitzgerald’s ending to the “The Great Gatsby”, it was an interesting book in not only the plot but of the underlining messages that Fitzgerald was trying to release. One of the underlining messages was simple: can anybody be a hero and not be tragic? “Of course they can!” Some writers would say, before they write an amateur novel that isn’t half as good as anything with Fitzgerald’s name on it.  Obviously, there are writers who can write a half-decent novel and let the hero have a good life, but 99.8% of the great novels we read in school and trade with our friends at lunch are not happy-go-lucky novels. The hero is typically somebody that appears weaker than the rest of the characters in the beginning of the novel (or at least somebody that has not appeared as extraordinary as the rest).  So why do we need to read about somebody weak, rather than the cliché hero that is naturally strong and fearless and brave? Shane Koyczan, a new age poet, answers beautifully: “Because we see ourselves in them”.

            Analyzing the ‘hero must be weak to become strong’ is just another piece of The Hero’s Journey, but the affect it has on modern culture is more extraordinary than ever. Every movie we see, every book we read, that actually makes an imprint in our lives are focused on weaknesses. Joseph Campbell, the “father” of The Hero’s Journey, explains that our need to have a weak character as the hero is because we see ourselves as heroes. We have the desire, naturally, to want to give our life a meaning, which generally means to be selfless. Martin Luther King Jr, Mother Theresa, Gandhi, and so on, have portrayed the perfect hero we want to be. Sadly, most of us are either too ordinary to make it to that moment in being a true hero or we do not gain enough courage in enough time to prove it.

            But, back to F. Scott Fitzgerald, every good book has a weak main character because we have to be able to see ourselves in the book. Whether it is a messed up billionaire in The Great Gatsby or a “young sport” who thinks he is perfect, we need somebody that we can hope for when we lack the ability to give hope toward ourselves. The entire point of reading a fictional book is to live a life that is not ours, and how can we do that if the character is already brave and strong and perfect? Why can we not find a character better than ourselves to look at as a role model? Simple: we are flawed creatures, which is why we need flawed heroes.

Fan Fiction

                Most of everybody I know over the age of fourteen (and claim to have mastered the elements of fictional writing) say that “Fan fiction” is a load of potatoes. In other words, they think taking a piece of entertainment (a book/movie/show/etc) and molding it into a different shape and form so deeply that everything about this piece of entertainment (other than the characters and the main “magical” sense of the entertainment) is different, is absolutely disgusting. But they are wrong. See, fan fiction is really just a synonym for inspiration of a plot or theme. What these critics are really basing their opinions off of (whether they know it or not), are twelve year olds taking the entire theme, plot, and characters and rewriting it. That’s not the only type of fan fiction. Real fan fiction is taking the inner depths and the idea of the piece of entertainment and using it to create their own. The truth is, fan fiction is probably the most overrated yet misunderstood genre, and critics do not even acknowledge that.

                If people really want to get inside the depths of fan fiction, they need to look at literature as a whole. What inspired Suzanne Collins to write a book about a group of youths trying to kill each other over a simple reward? She said much of her novel was based upon Theseus, a tale in Greek Mythology. And do people think it is a coincidence that all science-fiction hold ties to Orson Scott Card and Ray Bradberry? If so, they need to reread books from the 20^th century. Too many books have common themes taken from people like Shakespeare and Mary Shelley. If people can take characters from legends, change their names, possibly add a few quirks to their main conflicts, is that not the same thing as fan fiction? I have read way too many books lately about an abused main character that “suddenly” realized that they are just a magical creature born in the wrong world. Surely that idea originated from somewhere. And what about when authors name their characters off of different characters? Like Hermione from “The Winter’s Tale” (Shakespeare). Most people do not even know that connection because “The Winter’s Tale” is overshadowed by other works of Shakespeare like “Romeo & Juliet” and “Julius Caesar”. Maybe if they did, they would realize that even the most powerful writers of this generation are basing their “oh so original” works on classics that people have forgotten about.

                Fan fiction is not necessarily bad. Whether it is published, unpublished, hidden inside other famous works, tucked into the cracks of overrated internet sites, it is just a genre that has been picked on and abused. If we did not have fan fiction, a lot of the works that make up our life today would be gone. If anything, fan fiction is needed. Even a critic in The New York Times can manage to defend the classical, new age fan fiction written by twelve year olds on sketchy websites:

“Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”

—	The Boy Who Lived Forever | Time Magazine (via bergusia)

                So yeah, maybe fan fiction can be collection of paragraphs consisting of trash that are practically insults toward the original works, but in the end everything is a piece of fan fiction. We all want to base our pieces off works from people like Oscar Wilde, Homer, and Charlotte Bronte; not because we are not creative enough to write as well as them, but because we see them as the true masters of fiction. And who knows, maybe we are not reading about Sherlock Holmes dealing with his secret crush on John Watson three hundred years earlier than the true story is set, but two men fighting the social prejudices in the Elizabethan Era while at the same time being forced under a injustice monarchy to save the English community so that their nation will not collapse. 

                Before I read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, I did not understand the loopholes female authors in the 19^th century had to create. Of course, the hardships strong female woman (even up to this day) have to go through are evident in society, and the clever things that Mary Shelley had to do to get her opinions out there were also clever and ingenious. I read an article last night (one of the many I printed off in hope to find a good article that would be appropriate for Frankenstein) that explained how many people believed Mary Shelley was a male after reading her extraordinary novel and, if she had not gone anonymous, her extraordinary work would not have been seen as “extraordinary” because people would know she was a female. But keeping her name anonymous is only the tip of the iceberg compared to the deeper tactics she had to put in the novel to avoid sexism.

                In an interview many years ago, an interviewer asked J.K. Rowling (who, coincidentally, went by ‘J.K’ to avoid sexism and judgment for being a female as well) why she made the main character, Harry Potter, a male. Many authors make the main character their own gender because they like to live through their own main character and put a piece of themselves in the main character. She said, simply, that people would only see the “female” in the main character, instead of the deeper themes that she was trying to get out toward the world. For instance, instead of seeing the dark evils of the wizarding world and the prejudice themes that came along with it, they would only see a girl and connect all of the themes with her gender instead of the soul of the character (which, no matter what gender, the themes she wanted to create had nothing to do with the gender of her main character). I believe Mary Shelley was thinking the same exact way. She did not just make a male character as the scientist so that people would take the character seriously (though I am sure it was also a reason), but because any theme or message she would put into it would be automatically connected to the main character’s sex. Coincidentally, I had an argument about this exact topic with my cousin the other day. My cousin (a girl) thought it was because all female characters are weak and a writer cannot possibly make a strong female character when it comes to fiction because of “media”, but I think my cousin is wrong. I think it is because writers are afraid that people will not see the true messages that they are trying to bring out if the make the main character a female. Instead of seeing the romanticism in Shelley’s work, they would assume “it’s just a girl who admires nature because it appeals to females more than it does to males. It’s not a symbol. End of the story”. The messages would be ruined.

                The feminism in Shelley’s work is not seen inside of it, but in the construction of it. We, as feminists and fighters for equality, wait for the day that somebody can write a female character and not have every reader assuming that everything has to do with the main character’s struggles as a female and that all themes have to do with the gender. Instead, they can see the light and dark themes; romanticism, individuality, friendship, selfless sacrifice, and a thousand more topics that deserve to be discussed which, I promise you, have nothing to do with the character’s gender.