chapter 26

Create Your Own Mythology: Youngsters for Youngsters (and Oldsters) in Mythological Fan Fiction

Katarzyna Marciniak

Disclaimer: I do not own the mythological characters. They belong to the Greeks. I only borrow them, as the Romans did, for a little amusement.

Eris had not been invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. No one liked the goddess of strife. Yes, we know this from our various mythological read-ing experiences, whether from ancient sources or modern elaborations. But in the twenty-first century the reason for the omission of Eris on the guest list shall be searched for on the Internet. Angry with Hermes for one of his pranks, the goddess had blocked his Facebook account, so the announcement about the wedding skipped her. Though she had brought this on herself, Eris decided to take revenge. At the day of the wedding party, she “leapt out from behind the hedge and threw something. […] It was golden. It was a golden apple… a golden apple iPhone 4s” with the inscription: “To the hottest!” The honour to choose the happy owner of the golden Apple iPhone of the then newest generation fell to the bored Paris, who gladly exchanged the cell phone for Helen. “Hera and Athena scowled and disappeared in sparks, while Aphrodite plucked in the silver earphones and started bobbing to Beyonce.”

We have been used to many variants of ancient myths, though this ver-sion of the Judgment of Paris is rather odd, even in the opinion of its author, a fourteen-year-old1 from England named Jack who adds to the story a personal comment: “I know, it was weird…”2 However, his story, entitled “The Apple of Strife,” has every right to be weird. It is a piece of fan fiction, published on the biggest such Internet platform—FanFiction.net, gathering ca. 2.2 million

1 At the date of its publication: Aug. 5, 2012. Throughout this paper I keep the original spelling and grammar found in the fanfics here quoted.

2 The full story, from which I have quoted above, may be read at https://www.fanfiction .net/s/8396049/1/The-Apple-of-Strife (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

© Katarzyna Marciniak, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004335370_028 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Katarzyna Marciniak - 9789004335370

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users3 from all over the world4 under a banner encouraging unlimited creativ-ity: “Unleash Your Imagination.”

Fan fiction is a recent phenomenon—one of the most dynamically develop-ing realms of social media. It involves fans creating texts inspired by a pre-exist-ing work of culture.5 The birth of fan fiction is associated with American pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s and Star Trek fanzines of the 1960s, in which science fiction lovers could write, publish, and read stories set in their favourite imaginary world.6 However, some people trace the origins of this phenomenon

3 As of April 18, 2013, information source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

4 Interestingly enough, the platform FanFiction.net was initially available only in the West, and subsequently expanded globally (cf. ibid.).

5 Fan fiction has been a research subject since the 1990s, however, in the early stages legal issues were the most pressing (see also below, nn. 6 and 8). Soon its broader potential was noticed by experienced scholars of popular culture and, especially, by young faculty mem-bers—the first generation to grow up with the Internet (hence the many ma and Ph.D. theses that constitute the core bibliography of this topic). The most important studies from the per-spective of my research will be cited in the course of the present chapter (most of them are available online, too). For further reading see also: William Lewis Bolt, The Hidden Authors: A Study and Survey of Fan Fiction Writers (Senior Honors Project Thesis, University of Tennes-see, 2004), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014); Melissa J. Herzing, The Internet World of Fan Fiction (ma thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2005), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014); Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays (Jefferson, n.c.: McFarland, 2006); Rebecca W. Black, Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); Alice R. Bell, “The Anachronistic Fantastic: Science, Progress and the Child in ‘Post-nostalgic’ Culture,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 12.2 (2009): 5–22; Peter Güldenpfennig, Fandom, Fan Fiction and the Creative Mind (ma thesis, Tilburg University, 2011), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014); Ageliki Nicolopoulou, “Children’s Storytelling: Toward an Interpretive and Sociocultural Approach,” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 3 (2011): 25–48; Daniel Punday, “Narration, Intrigue, and Reader Positioning in Electronic Narratives,” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 4 (2012): 25–47; Kristin M. Barton and Jonathan Malcolm Lampley, eds., fan CULTure: Essays on Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century (Jefferson, n.c.: McFarland, 2013); Mark Duffet, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

6 See, e.g., Angela Thomas, “Blurring and Breaking through the Boundaries of Narrative, Liter-acy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction,” in Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, eds., A New Literacies Sampler (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 137. For the definition of fan fiction see, e.g.: Jessica Freya Kem, Cataloging the Whedonverse: Potential Roles for Librarians in Online Fan Fiction (ma thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014), 2–3; Alison Evans, The Global Playground: Fan Fiction in Cyberspace (ma the-sis, Roehampton University, 2006), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014), 6–15; Christina Z. Ranon, “Honor Among Thieves: Copyright Infringement in Internet Fandom,” Vanderbilt Journal

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many centuries back, to the tradition of writing parodies, continuations, or alternative endings to famous literary works, as was the case with the autho-rised and unauthorised sequels to Don Quixote or, closer to our time, Gone with the Wind.7 And if we think of the nostoi and the cyclic poets—not to mention the whole Athenian drama built from the crumbs from Homer’s table—we will easily, though half-jokingly, derive fan fiction directly from Antiquity.8 One witty Internet user from Italy even set up a profile on the FanFiction.net plat-form on behalf of Virgil himself, pasting Book One of the Aeneid in Latin there,

of Entertainment and Technology Law 8.2 (2006): 421–452; Steven A. Hetcher, “Using Social Norms to Regulate Fan Fiction and Remix Culture,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 157 (2008): 1869–1935; Meredith Cherland, “Harry’s Girls: Harry Potter and the Discourse of Gen-der,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52.4 (2008–2009): 279–280; Elizabeth Burns and Carlie Webber, “When Harry Met Bella: Fanfiction Is All the Rage. But Is It Plagiarism? Or the Perfect Thing to Encourage Young Writers?,” School Library Journal 55.8 (Aug. 2009), online (accessed May 15, 2013); Bronwen Thomas, “What Is Fanfiction and Why Are People Saying Such Nice Things about It?,” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 3 (2011): 1–24. See also various Internet discussions traceable on Wikipedia, etc. It is necessary to follow them, as the electronic media react in the most dynamic way, much faster than traditional scholarship, to the transformation within the fan-fiction community.

7 Burns and Webber, “When Harry Met Bella”; Newsweek Staff, “Star Trek: Spock, Kirk and Slash Fiction,” Newsweek, May 5, 2009, online at: http://www.newsweek.com/star-trek-spock-kirk-and-slash-fiction-79807 (accessed Dec. 11, 2015); Elizabeth F. Judge, “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters: Eighteenth-Century Fan Fiction, Copyright Law, and the Custody of Fictional Characters,” in Reginald McGinnis, ed., Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 2009), 27, 46–48, 67, online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014); Michael Choe, “The Problem of the Parody-Satire Distinction: Fair Use in Machinima and Other Fan Created Works,” Rutgers Computer & Technology Law Jour-nal 37 (2011), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014).

8 See Erica Christine Haugtvedt, Harry Potter and Fanfiction: Filling in the Gaps (Senior Honors Thesis, The Ohio State University, 2009), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014), 5: “Any parody can be considered fanfiction. Any story that draws upon history or oral tradition can be consid-ered fanfiction. Even Virgil’s The Aeneid can be considered fanfiction based on Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. What’s the difference that makes fanfiction, then? One difference that makes fanfiction special may be the way in which fanfiction relies upon the source narra-tive.” See also Ernest Chua, “Fan Fiction and Copyright; Mutually Exclusive, Coexistable or Something Else? Considering Fan Fiction in Relation to the Economic/Utilitarian Theory of Copyright,” eLaw Journal 14.2 (2007): 216, with a quotation from Rebecca Tushnet, “Legal Fic-tions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Journal 17 (1997): 651 and 655: “Fan fiction has been described as ‘any kind of written creativity that is based on an identifiable segment of popular culture, such as a television show, and not produced as «professional» writing’.” By the way, the term “professional” in the Internet era probably needs to be redefined.

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as if it were a piece of fan fiction, currently under construction.9 The piece attracted the attention of barely three readers (o tempora, o mores!), one of whom felt disappointed with the language choice (“Hmm, if only this wasn’t Latin”), but the remaining two were delighted and left for “P. Vergili Maronis [sic!]” the following comments: “A great start (check your word count though). You should think of publishing this when you finish” and “omg, this is so good fanfiction. Already in the first chapter I can see the clever crossreferences to the Odysee. I love your work now already, I bet it’ll be really popular in 2000 years! Keep up the good work :D.”10

Virgil, indeed, has passed the test for a classic, being widely read for over two millennia. For a long time, however, the circulation of amateur fanfics was limited to narrow groups of recipients of culture, and for a very prosaic reason: the difficulty in accessing these works, available as they were in but a few cop-ies. For only masterpieces like the Aeneid were worthy of the incredible effort that the transmission process required even after Gutenberg’s revolution. In-deed, as late as the twentieth century the demanding professional cooperation between authors, editors, and publishers made writing an elitist activity, re-served for a small circle within society. The Internet changed everything. It has been gathering fans of all kinds, inspiring the creation of fan works of bound-less scope, and providing the space to make them globally accessible. Besides FanFiction.net, set up in 1998, there are countless similar, though smaller plat-forms, ones based on a simple premise: you can read or write, or both, for free. There is no geographical, national, gender, or religiously motivated exclusion. Every fanfic author, whether a child or an adult—each having equal rights—may potentially count on millions of readers.11 And the statistics fail to grasp

9 See http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8631155/1/Aeneid-book-1-Carthage (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

10 Ibid. By the way, it is worth observing that this reader not only placed “P. Vergili Maronis” among his (or her) “favorite authors,” but he (or she) also returned to the Aeneid fanfic after three long (for Internet phenomena) years (Nov. 16, 2015!) and expressed his (or her) disappointment in the fact that “P. Vergili Maronis” had not published more chapters of his work since 2012: “Man, I was so stoked to read more of this thrilling story! It’s a shame you never posted another chapter. Now I’ll never get to know what happened to Aeneas:(.” Abbreviations and emoticons are very common among fanfic authors. Here we can also see how readers in their feedback support authors and suggest improvements to them—in this particular case, correction of the word number declared or encouragement to con-tinue literary activity.

11 One of the most popular platforms is archiveofourown.org. Of course, those who write in English stand a better chance of gaining a wide public. And we should not forget that there are still countries that censor access to the Internet and thus to fan fiction.

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the scale of this phenomenon. They are out-of-date at the very minute of their announcement, because every day, even now, at this moment, there are new fanfics appearing. It has been estimated that they are “equivalent to 8,200 nov-els, each of 50,000 words, being produced globally per annum.”12

Nonetheless, this phenomenon is still disregarded outside the fan-fiction community. One of the scholars even asks—provocatively, for in fact she stud-ies fan fiction in-depth—“Why on earth would anyone want to waste their time writing stories about a book that was already written and about char-acters they did not create?”13 Well, let the one among us who is without this sin raise their hand. When we reflect deeply on the essence of fan fiction, we may venture the hypothesis that it all begins with childhood. I remember a school assignment to describe the adventures of one of the heroes of Polish literature—The Knights of the Cross by the Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkie-wicz (1846–1916)—a mediaeval knight called Zbyszko transported through time straight to a school party. It was an obligatory composition,14 and today, browsing the FanFiction.net base, we may find a welter of texts of similar origin, made public by their young authors from the “digital” generation. As one of them remarks: “I love it when your English essay turns out to be writ-ing a fanfiction. Just makes my day.”15 However, such iuvenilia were and also are cropping up outside school, after hours. And some people continue their fanfic adventure into adulthood. The Internet fan-fiction platforms preserve such experiences and make it possible to share them across the boundaries of time, space, and generations. Furthermore, the authors can count on—an experience of revolutionary consequences for this phenomenon—the

12 Evans, The Global Playground, 27. On Harry Potter fan fiction, see Leila Green and Carmen Guinery, “Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon,” Journal of Media and Culture 7.5 (2004), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014); and the much-anticipated study by Jane Glaub-man, Reconstructing Harry: “Harry Potter” Fan Fiction on the World Wide Web (Durham, n.c.: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

13 Diane Lewis, “Understanding the Power of Fan Fiction for Young Authors,” Kliatt 38 (March 2004), http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Understanding+the+power+of+fan+fiction+for+young+authors.-a0114326743, 2004 (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

14 This particular assignment was not only a “speciality” of my school, as Jan Kwapisz attests in his review of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad—“Kiedy feministka spotyka muzę” [When a feminist meets a muse], Meander 60 (2005): 254.

15 See the story “Chimeria” by Padfoot7567 (by the way, this nickname reveals a fascina-tion with the Harry Potter heptalogy, which is also an attractive background for mytho-logical fanfics—see further sections of the present chapter) at https://www.fanfiction .net/s/8015320/1/Chimeria (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

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so-called “living audience,”16 that is, an unlimited17 response on the part of readers. This is a promising field of research for educators, psychologists, and sociologists, but also for classical scholars, as a good deal of fanfics refer to Graeco-Roman Antiquity, this being one of the most original cases of the new-est reception of ancient culture.18

Particularly interesting is the fanfic reception of myths. While fan stories based on the most recent works of culture still raise controversies in regard to the potential of copyright infringement (which is why many authors pre-cede their creations with appropriate disclaimers, like the one I imitated at the beginning of this chapter19), Graeco-Roman mythology, in turn, has been the object of various receptive processes and techniques since its birth somewhere

16 For more on this phenomenon see further sections of the present chapter.17 At least in theory, and the feedback is quite impressive in practice, too, though there are

cases like that of poor “P. Vergili Maronis” who has gained only three reader’s comments (blame it on Latin if you wish).

18 As for the Classics and Classical Reception, the role of fan fiction is a new research field. When I was submitting my chapter to the publisher I came across (thanks to the Liver-pool Classics Mailing List managed by Nick Lowe) a call for papers announced by Ika Willis for a special issue of the journal Transformative Works and Cultures dedicated to the phenomenon of fan fiction in regard to the Classics: The Classical Canon and/as Transfor-mative Work. I have yet to study the results of this interesting call, but I am pleased to be able to indicate the website of this issue in my last update of the relevant bibliography: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/issue/view/23 (accessed July 20, 2016). See also Willis’s thesis, presented on Oct. 22, 2010, Fanfiction Gets a Good Reception, “Public Engagement Stories,” University of Bristol, at: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/publicen-gagementstories/stories/2010/115.html (accessed Jan. 23, 2015).

19 In fact, the copyright issue (much discussed in the 1990s) is no longer a serious prob-lem as long as fanfic authors do not write for commercial use; see, e.g., Ranon, “Honor Among Thieves,” 421–452; Meredith McCardle, “Fan Fiction, Fandom, and Fanfare: What’s All the Fuss?,” Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law, online, 9.2 (2003): 434–468; Rachel L. Stroude, “Complimentary Creation: Protecting Fan Fiction as Fair Use,” Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review 14.1 (2010): 191–213; Catherine Tosenberg-er, “Mature Poets Steal: Children’s Literature and the Unpublishability of Fanfiction,” Chil-dren’s Literature Association Quarterly 39.1 (2014): 4–27. On the famous case of the Harry Potter Lexicon blocked by J.K. Rowling (who has otherwise exhibited a friendly attitude toward fan fiction), see Aaron Schwabach, “The Harry Potter Lexicon and the World of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, and Copyright,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 70 (2009): 387–434, online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014). The famous Marion Zimmer Bradley case is also discussed there. A piece of fan fiction embedded in one of her literary worlds blocked the publication of her own book, as the fanfic author claimed the ownership of certain motifs she was planning to use—independently, as she claimed. However, the court took the side of the fanfic author.

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at the dawn of our millennia-old civilisation. Thus, the retelling of mythical tales is purely natural and they constitute a generous base of inspiration, also because they have been circulating around us for what seems—and indeed, is—an eternity, in a variety of reinterpretations: whether in literature, paint-ing, sculpture, music, movies, and the growing body of popular culture works, including computer games, etc. Even if school curricula no longer give priority to the Graeco-Roman tradition, myths are still present there, as “school” fan-fics prove, and in our life as well, to a much greater extent than we might be aware. Moreover, their unique trait—i.e., their fixed fundamental structure yet universal flexibility in adapting to individual needs—permits authors to trans-mit peculiar cultural or personal issues via myths with the hope of being wide-ly understood. Thus, a community is coming into being between fanfic authors and readers: they exchange their knowledge about ancient myths and simulta-neously assimilate new experiences. This is a community in a state of constant metamorphosis, in a “process of becoming,” as is typical for popular culture,20 but nonetheless it strives for a solid identity to rely on.

Because the process of constructing an identity is especially important for young people, I propose we now take a quick glance at the universe of mytho-logical Internet fan fiction created by children and young adults to see how mythological fanfics are structured. While browsing and reviewing them, we will also try to discover if there is a canon of works about mythology referred to by fan-fiction authors. Finally, taking into consideration also the phenomenon of the living audience, we will try to face the crucial question from the perspec-tive of classical reception studies: what are the functions that mythological fan fiction fulfils for youngsters?

Research into fan fiction entails, however, numerous methodological chal-lenges. First of all, the number of works circulating on the Internet makes it difficult to carry out a comprehensive analysis. To keep a coherent picture of the phenomenon, I will focus on the materials gathered on the leading plat-form—the earlier mentioned FanFiction.net. Furthermore, while giving pref-erential attention to the most numerous group of texts, i.e., those written in English (also by non-native speakers), I will nevertheless take into consider-ation other languages and regional circles, as well, between East and West. The most thorny issue regards the age of the authors and readers. As the leading authority in studies into fan fiction, Henry Jenkins, states (and he has been observing it for more than two decades), the role of children is to be taken seriously:

20 See John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 1 (on culture as a con-stant succession of social practices).

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Ten years ago, published fan fiction came mostly from women in their twenties, thirties. Today, these older writers have been joined by a genera-tion of new contributors—kids who found fan fiction surfing the Inter-net and decided to see what they could produce.21

Some of the writers reveal their age, like the Jack of “the iPhone of Strife,” but the majority of them—with absolutely laudable caution—protect their per-sonal data. And of course, even if certain profiles offer a handful of informa-tion, there is no possibility to ascertain the authenticity of the provided details without intimacy-affecting questionnaires. To solve this problem (at least to a certain degree) with respect for the users’ privacy, I decided to base my conclu-sions both on the profiles and on all other available hints, such as mentions that the fanfic in question was homework. Meanwhile, as far as the age of the readers is concerned, we are not able to assess it, unless they are registered users with developed profiles or leave some hints in their comments to the stories (and as registration or leaving a comment is not an obligatory proce-dure, the material for in-depth analyses is strongly limited). The moderators of the FanFiction.net platform treat seriously the fact that all texts might be read by minor users—since 2002 it has been prohibited to publish stories there of a mature content.22 Moreover, all the stories are rated to protect youngsters (K for kids; K+ corresponding to pg—Parental Guidance—in the movie industry; T for teens). The authors often use the rating system with hyper- cautiousness (cf., the common formula: “T for I am paranoid”), adding also so-called “trigger warnings,” i.e., mentions of themes with the potential to disturb the public’s sensitivities (sexual motifs, self-harming, suicide, violence, etc.). Of course, such precautions apply not only to youth—older readers may be vulnerable, too. Thus, we can underline with full force that equality reigns in the universum of fan fiction.23 One might even posit the hypothesis that this phenomenon realises to the highest degree in the whole of popular culture the postulates of childist criticism (children writing and expressing their views),24

21 Henry Jenkins, “Why Heather Can Write,” mit Technology Review, Feb. 6, 2004, online ( accessed July 24, 2016); see also idem, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: nyu Press, 2006), 186 (in the context of the Harry Potter fanfics). See also Evans, The Global Playground, 17.

22 See, e.g., Chad Eric Littleton, The Role of Feedback in Two Fanfiction Writing Groups (Ph.D. Thesis, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, August 2011), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014), 33.

23 See also Sheenagh Pugh, “The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context,” Re-fractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media 5 (2004), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014).

24 See Peter Hunt, “Childist Criticism: The Subculture of the Child, the Book and the Critic,” Signal 43 (1984): 42–59.

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the practice of double address (when authors speak to various age groups of readers), and the dual audience experience (when the texts find recipi-ents at different generational levels).25 There are no borders,26 only the Word matters—as if to repudiate all the pessimists who prophesied its end. Indeed, one thing you immediately notice when entering a fanfic platform, is its maxi-mal simplicity: no illustrations, no pictures (the small ones are solely present in the authors’ avatars), no sophisticated fonts. A striking experience, especially in our times, which are dominated by visual culture. There are only storytellers and their audience(s), as in Homer’s time. So let’s check how Graeco-Roman mythology is entwined in the fabric of tales on the World Wide Web.

On the platform FanFiction.net, in the group “Misc”—that is, among texts inspired by miscellany—we can find ca. 2,600 stories (as of December 2015) based on Greek myths, and in various languages. English, of course, dominates, but there are also fanfics in German, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japa-nese, Modern Greek, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and one even in In-donesian. They all fit into the essential categories as determined by Jenkins in his fundamental study on fan fiction, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Par-ticipatory Culture (1992).27 Of course, it should be noted that there are no strict boundaries between them—constant change, category-crossing, and remixing are the main characteristics of fan fiction, which fact reflects the essence of the “community in process”28 and is generally a characteristic of contemporary youth culture. Donna E. Alvermann remarks:

Young people are tirelessly editing and remixing multimodal content they find online to share with others, using new tools to show and tell,

25 Emer O’Sullivan, Comparative Children’s Literature (New York–Oxon: Routledge, 2005), 15–19 (accessed via Google Books). See also the cross-writing and crossover phenomena, e.g., Sandra L. Beckett, Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives (New York–Oxon: Routledge, 2009), 271: “Children, teenagers, and adults become part of a commu-nity where age doesn’t matter.”

26 Helen Merrick, “‘We Was Cross-dressing ‘Afore You Were Born!’ Or, How sf Fans Invent-ed Virtual Community,” Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media 6 (2004), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014), 1 (on “a virtual community, formed of people who were geograph-ically dispersed, brought together by a common interest”).

27 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992).

28 See John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989) and Reading the Popular, esp. 3.

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and rewriting their social identities in an effort to become who they say they are.29

Fan fiction perfectly answers to this kind of demand. Thus, we have, for ex-ample, recontextualisations—stories with new (“missing”) scenes added to the basic narration, such as an additional adventure of Odysseus and his craft facing a fire-blazing chimera in the story “Chimeria,” originally a school assignment by an American student.30 We also have the so-called expanded timelines—sequels or prequels to well-known works, as in the fanfic “The Lost Book 13”—a continuation of the Aeneid. The author wrote it “for Extra credit for [her] Latin class,” apparently feeling the need to release some of the pres-sure from studying such a serious text. As a result, we get a story of a spelling mistake while reading the scrolls of destiny: after all the hardships endured, Aeneas comes to know that not he, but a certain Ieneas is to marry Lavinia, and she is only too willing for this change:

He [Ieneas] presented her with a large, diamond ring. “Lavinia, don’t mar-ry him, marry me. I’m the one you want, marry me.” “Ieneas, of course I’ll marry you.” She placed the ring on her finger and kissed Ieneas on the cheek, “Aeneas never gave me a ring.” She added bitterly, before walking off with Ieneas, holding hands.31

Next, we have refocalisations, where minor figures, such as Clytemnestra from the uk fanfic “Heavenly Deluge,” become the protagonists (such fanfics are often written from their points of view).32 Another popular category is that of character dislocation (also possible in the variant of Alternate Universe).

29 Donna E. Alvermann, “Why Bother Theorizing Adolescents’ Online Literacies for Class-room Practice and Research?,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52.1 (2008): 10. See also Wan Shun Eva Lam, “Culture and Learning in the Context of Globalization: Research Directions,” Review of Research in Education 30 (2006) (Special Issue: Rethinking Learn-ing: What Counts as Learning and What Learning Counts): 219: “[…] this kind of collec-tive identity is centered around shared practices of various sorts, there is a tendency to cross traditional lines of ‘race’/ethnicity, class, gender, ability, and other institutional classifications.”

30 See https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8015320/1/Chimeria (accessed Dec. 11, 2015), see also above, n. 15.

31 See http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6761443/1/The-Lost-Book-13 (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).32 See https://www.fanfiction.net/s/912187/1/Heavenly-Deluge (accessed Dec. 11, 2015), a

story, rated T, with the following summary: “Centering on Clytemnestra and her bitter,

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Here stories about well-known heroes are placed in new settings or circum-stances. They often contain the motif of a new ending to the known story or of time-travelling: the ancient gods may for example incarnate themselves as high school students.33 These stories are prone to be mixed with the category of personalisation, which involves a fanfic author inserting her/his own person into the narration, for example—on the wave of fascination with Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight—as a character a Greek god falls in love with. Such stories, usually mocked, if the author presents a far too idealised and romanticised version of herself/himself (so-called Mary Sue/Gary Stu34), are nonetheless an important testimony for classical reception studies, as they reflect the strong desire to live ancient myths in the twenty-first century.35

A similar practice of blending and remixing also applies to the “genres” typical for fan fiction: crime, fantasy, adventure, horror, humour, family, ro-mance, etc.36 While the aforementioned “The Lost Book 13” belongs to “Hu-mor/Parody,” a fifteen-year-old girl, in the story “Brotherly Bonding,” applies family and humour genres in a tale of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades going off for

vengeful thoughts as Agamemnon returns after the Trojan War, unknowingly to meet with his own death…”

33 See https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8580118/1/Oh-My-Gods-High-School (accessed Dec. 11, 2015); in this case, the author is a young(?) adult (she declares herself as “I am old enough to be here… Okay if you must know I’m legal but that’s as far as I’ll go”).

34 On the Mary Sue phenomenon, see, e.g., Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder, “Ev-eryone’s a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of Mary Sue Fan Fiction as Fair Use,” California Law Review 95.2 (2007): 597–626. See also Burns and Webber, “When Harry Met Bella…” (see above, n. 6); Kristi Lee, “Under the Waterfall: A Fanfiction Community’s Analysis of Their Self-Representation and Peer Review,” Refractory: Journal of Entertainment Media 5 (2004), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014); Judge, “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters,” 7, online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014).

35 The remaining categories proposed by Jenkins are—quoted after Judge, “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters,” 8: “[…] moral realignment (inverting or questioning the moral universe in the original text, for example by portraying villains as sympathetic protago-nists), genre shifting (often shifting toward relationship-centered narratives), crossovers with other texts (displacing generic and textual boundaries so characters from different series interact or characters are placed in a different environment), […] emotional in-tensification (emphasizing narrative crises, especially one character’s response to an-other character’s crisis, called “hurt-comfort” stories), and eroticization (transforming the merely suggestive to the explicitly sexual, which can include changing characters’ sexual identities and “slash” homoerotic fiction).”

36 The terminology applied in the fan-fiction universe is unique and does not necessarily correspond to traditional literary studies (e.g., see below on the use of the term “canon”).

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a weekend to Los Angeles.37 It is worth observing that in the practice of remix-ing, some young writers display an impressive knowledge of mythology, as is the case of the author of “The Enigma of the Victory Bringer” (again a school assignment), who blends the genres of fantasy and adventure in an Alternate Universe, proposing a new ending to Perseus’s myth on the basis of its lesser-known version, according to which Medusa was a victim of the gods.38

But what is at the base of such stories? Those who think there is no canon in the twenty-first century are mistaken. The canon in the fan-fiction universe is safe and sound, though it has a slightly different meaning from its use in rela-tion to high culture. It is “the body of information considered to be officially correct”39 about a given cultural text. Hence, for example, for the mythological stories embedded in the Percy Jackson world, the canon will be constituted not by a specific collection of Greek myths (and of course not by ancient sourc-es!), but precisely by Rick Riordan’s series—thus the fanfics about the growing pains of Athena’s teenage daughter are purely “canonical.”

However, Graeco-Roman myths belong to the common heritage of the ci-vilisation rooted in Mediterranean tradition, which—because of various his-torical trajectories strengthened recently by globalisation—has penetrated the most remote parts of the world. So the question arises about the sources of young authors’ knowledge of ancient mythology in general—a very important question, as it leads us to discovering the transmission channels of the classical tradition among youngsters.

The mythical canon in the fan-fiction community should be looked for not only where we—the bie (Before the Internet Era) generation—would expect to find it. The first reflex is to associate the canon of knowledge of classical mythology with ancient sources or later collections of myths. In fact, on the platform FanFiction.net, in the group “Books,” we find 179 stories based on the Odyssey,40 such as the fanfic “Just a Simple Love Story” on the warm relationship between Odysseus and Penelope, called Penny. This story was written—as its author reveals—“for Mrs. Nelson’s English class.” It is so charm-ing, or—to use a frequent fanfic term—fluffy, that we can easily understand

37 See https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6613007/1/Brotherly-Bonding (accessed Oct. 15, 2014; no longer available).

38 See http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7925183/1/The-Enigma-of-the-Victory-Bringer (accessed Oct. 15, 2014; no longer available), and indeed, the author manages to surprise the readers.

39 See, e.g., Phyllis M. Japp, Mark Meister, and Debra K. Japp, eds., Communication Ethics, Media & Popular Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 162–163 (accessed via Google Books). To define the reference base for a given set of fanfics, the terms: “mythology” (sic!) and “fanon” are also in use, see, e.g., Rebecca W. Black, “Online Fan Fiction and Critical Media Literacy,” Journal of Computing in Teacher Education 26.2 (2009–2010): 77.

40 As of December 2015.

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the comment by the author’s friend that the boys in their class “weren’t ma-ture enough to take it.”41 However, the appeal of the Iliad is about three times smaller. There are 76 fanfics based on this epic,42 among which we find mainly poetry, such as the poem Off To Troy, defined by its author as “one of the best works created for a class that I failed. Draw your own conclusions from that.”43 The author labels the poem as cynical, and indeed, it offers a dark picture of war. Let’s have a look at the final stanzas:

We sail on, both valiant and boldHeroes of many stories told

.A thousand ships for one girl’s faceTen thousand men die in disgrace

.

.

.Is it worth it?

As we can see, the author evokes not only the Iliad, but also the famous de-scription of Helen by Christopher Marlowe as “the face that launched a thou-sand ships.” However, that line is so popular in the English-speaking world, that we should not draw the conclusion that the one who evokes it knows The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Similarly, knowledge of the Iliad does not have to be firsthand among fanfic writers, as is shown in the case of a fifteen-year-old Brit who indicates that the “headcanon” for one of her stories— “A Flame that Never Dies”—is the highly appreciated novel Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller published in 2011.44 A similar situation occurs with the

41 The story in question was written by an American girl in her sophomore year, see https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9007939/1/Just-a-Simple-Love-Story (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

42 As of December 2015.43 See http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7398576/1/Off-To-Troy (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).44 See https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9093631/1/A-Flame-That-Never-Dies (accessed Dec. 11,

2015). The author places her story in the category “Books,” in regard to the Iliad, but with the following note: “Although this is under The Iliad, I am actually using The Song of Achilles for my headcanon, (by Madeline Miller) which is technically based on the Iliad, so…” See also the author’s half-joking disclaimer: “I am neither old nor dead, so I cannot be Virgil. Nor am I totally and amazingly brilliant like Madeline Miller, so I can’t be her either. Anyway, none of the canon characters belong to me, but Charis does, and if you steal her I will be angry! :).” See also two more recent stories, of November 2015 (it is im-possible to determine the age of their authors): https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11636461/1/

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Aeneid in regard to the equally appreciated novel Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin, of 2008, which is becoming a new canon for the fanfic stories taking place in the realms of Aeneas’ world.45 It is not difficult to understand the cause of such a shift: both books are written in compellingly vivid style, and are surely more accessible and appealing to young readers than many an old-fashioned trans-lation of the ancient epics. Thus, on the one hand, this makes us aware of the necessity to provide youngsters with a version of the classics that can speak to them. On the other hand, the fanfics referring to Classical Antiquity may result in encouraging young readers to reach for the works of ancient writers directly (in good translations, for the originals are, of course, beyond general reach to-day)—both to come to know them and to look for new inspirations therein. By the way, Le Guin’s novel also happens to be jokingly classified among fanfics.46

What seems odd here is the lack in English fanfics of explicit references to the collections of myths formative for English culture, such as Nathaniel Haw-thorne’s Tanglewood Tales.47 However, these books may be so “inborn” for fanfic authors that they do not feel the necessity to mention them as their sources. It seems sufficient to indicate simply, as was the case of the fanfic about the gold-en Apple–iPhone, the common title of the adapted myth. Curiously enough, among Polish fanfics we find a story based on Mitologia. Wierzenia i podania Greków i Rzymian [Mythology. Beliefs and legends of the Greeks and Romans] by Jan Parandowski (1895–1978), a great promoter of Classical Antiquity, whose collection of myths has been shaping generations of Poles since its publication in 1924.48 The fanfic in question, also dedicated to the quarrel over the famous

Polaris, summary: “USING CHARACTERS FROM MADELEINE MILLER’S ‘THE SONG OF ACHILLES’: Achilles doesn’t often take the time to reflect on what he has in Patroclus, but when he does, it both thrills and unnerves him,” and https://www.fan-fiction.net/s/11591416/1/What-Has-Hector-Ever-Done-To-Me, summary: “Patroclus’ death from Achille’s point of view. (The Song of Achilles, I don’t think it has a category on this site so I’ll post this here, I guess?)” (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

45 By the author of “A Flame that Never Dies,” https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8569044/1/The -Princess (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

46 See the comment by Orcuspay (“Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia is basically one of the best fanfic pieces I’ve ever read.”) at the blog http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero /2011/07/fan-fiction (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

47 However, there are many fanfics based on his Scarlet Letter, even one with Ginny Weas-ley (sic!) as the protagonist, see https://www.fanfiction.net/s/675385/1/The-Chartreuse-Letter (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

48 On Parandowski, see my chapter “(De)constructing Arcadia: Polish Struggles with His-tory and Differing Colours of Childhood in the Mirror of Classical Mythology,” in Lisa Maurice, ed., The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature: Heroes and Eagles (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 56–82, esp. 61–67. Parandowski’s Mythology turned out to be

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apple, is a parody written from the point of view of Athena, who decides to compete with Aphrodite and Hera for fun. The author quotes the promises of the goddesses to Paris directly from Parandowski’s book, mocking Hera’s over-wrought style. The whole judgment is compared to a horse market and Athena is sure that Paris will not choose her, because, as she states philosophically, what young man would be interested in wisdom?49

If we dare to be as open-minded as Athena and leave our illusions aside along with classical books, we will discover fascinating groups of “Movies,” “tv Shows,” or “Games,” from which a new canon is emerging for mythological fanfics. This category reflects most clearly constant change as the essence of the fan-fiction community50—for here are gathered remixes of ancient myths with different works of culture. Some of these works are rather obvious be-cause of their potential for triggering references to mythology, like the tv show Xena: Warrior Princess (ca. 2,300 stories)51 or the computer game God of War (205 stories52). Some fanfics, however, take us by surprise, like the story by a fifteen-year-old Spaniard who made the Little Mermaid fall in love with Achil-les, or by a girl using the pen name Modern Kassandra, who adapted a song from Disney’s Pocahontas to the romance of Achilles and Briseis, as presented by Wolfgang Petersen in the movie Troy.53

an important source for Israeli children also: see Lisa Maurice’s chapter, “Greek Mythol-ogy in Israeli Children’s Literature,” in the present volume

49 See http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8428424/1/Jab%C5%82ko-niezgody (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

50 See Fiske, Reading the Popular. See also B. Thomas, “What Is Fanfiction,” 6; Karen E. Wohl-wend, “A Is for Avatar: Young Children in Literacy 2.0 Worlds and Literacy 1.0 Schools,” Language Arts 88.2 (2010): 150.

51 See H.C.J.M. Spierings, Rewriting Xena: Warrior Princess. Resistance to Representations of Gender, Ethnicity, Class and Sexuality in Fanfiction (Utrecht University, 2007); and Nikki Stafford, ed., How Xena Changed Our Lives: True Stories By Fans For Fans (Ontario: ecw Press, 2002).

52 As of December 2015. By the way, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that this game of mature content is out of the reach of underage audiences, for fanfics prove otherwise.

53 The story, entitled “Little Marmaid” (sic!), was published on FanFiction.net on May 26, 2012. I read it in May 2013, but it is no longer available. As for Modern Kassandra—a Dis-ney fan (age impossible to determine)—see her story (in the category “Movies” in regard to Troy) at http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8945641/1/If-I-Never-Knew-You (accessed Dec. 11, 2015), with the following summary: “Hi my fans :) This fic is set during the sacking of Troy where Achilles falls. It’s kind of a crossover in that it has a song from the Walt Disney movie Pocahontas. The song is called If I Never Knew You and can be found on Youtube,

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As the bie generation, we will be happy to browse the category “crossovers.” Among a variety of sources we find many books there as well. They inspire authors to create fanfics set in their canonical (in the fan-fiction meaning of the term) realms, mixed with Greek mythology, for which no specific source is declared. The books in question are mostly parts of the Harry Potter series54 and they unleash the imagination both of young and adult fans. As the author of the fanfic “Harry Potter Meets Greek Mythology” remarks, the idea of mix-ing these two realms is very appealing: “I’m sorry but to me the books are just asking for it.”55 If we add to this canon the Percy Jackson series, we will discover that wizards and witches are “descendants of demigods” who transmit their gifts upon them.56 For example, Neville Longbottom, as a descendent of Deme-ter, is gifted with Herbology. All Hogwarts students learn Latin and Greek, and the gods, present at the Sorting Ceremony, seem quite at place there: Apollo in jeans, looking like a supermodel; Poseidon in a Hawaiian beach shirt; or Dionysus—a hippy in Ozzy Osbourne glasses.57

But is fan fiction a mere oddity or does it fulfil certain important functions? Well, one is evident at first sight, on the basis of the aforementioned examples. Many of them were school assignments and they helped the authors improve their writing skills. As a girl from Australia remarks:

I have matured greatly within the duration of the two years that I have passed as a member of this website. Evidently, my usage of grammar has also significantly improved, much to my relief.58

and I know it might seem out of character for Achilles and Briseis but this song is so them. Please review, and be brutally honest!”

54 Just as a curiosity, there are ca. 730,000 stories set in the Harry Potter world against, as we remember, 76 based on the Iliad; 218,000 based on the Twilight trilogy; and 4,000 based on the Bible (as of Dec. 11, 2015).

55 See http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6406331/1/Harry-Potter-meets-Greek-Mythology (accessed Dec. 11, 2015). The author is probably an adult (s/he does not reveal her/his exact age; how-ever, s/he mentions having studied mythology during her/his “Freshmen English class”).

56 Ibid. (the author’s note): “This story is basically with the same characters/place but not the same plot at all so I’m basically rewriting it Percy Jackson style. So just read and I hope you like it. If you have any questions or suggestions I’m always open.” It is worth adding that the author begins the existing two chapters with invocations to the Muse.

57 Ibid.58 See http://www.fanfiction.net/u/928759/artanisofavalon (accessed Dec. 11, 2015, at the

time of publishing her stories, the author was a young adult preparing for Tertiary Educa-tion). On fan fiction in the context of literacy, see Margaret Mackey, “Researching New Forms of Literacy,” Reading Research Quarterly 38.3 (2003): 403–407; Henry Jenkins, “Why Heather Can Write”; Fiona Carruthers, “Fanfic is Good for Two Things—Greasing Engines

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Of particular interest is the fact that education via fanfics takes place without or even against school authority, which in the eyes of some authors kills the imagination: “[…] since it was for school, i didn’t feel i could take that many creative liberties”—observes an author of a fanfic about Perseus and Androm-eda.59 The fanfic writers, even posting their school compositions on the web, do not await the help of teachers. They use the support of the so-called “beta-readers”—the community members who, non-profit, take upon themselves the role of editor to improve the stories—and they gain new skills, too. On the FanFiction.net platform it is possible to ask for such help even prior to publi-cation, thanks to a database of volunteer “betas.”60 And it is good manners to thank the beta-reader who has worked on your story and to acknowledge her/his effort—it is worth observing that such a practice develops young people’s social skills and their awareness of interpersonal collaboration.

Furthermore, there is also the opportunity to receive feedback any time af-ter posting a fanfic, not only from betas, but also from ordinary readers who

and Killing Brain Cells,” Particip@tions 1.2 (May 2004), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014); Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, eds., A New Literacies Sampler (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); Rebecca W. Black, “English-Language Learners, Fan Communities, and 21st-Century Skills,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52.8 (2009): 688–697; Diane Carver Sekeres, “The Market Child and Branded Fiction: A Synergism of Children’s Literature, Consumer Culture, and New Literacies,” Reading Research Quarterly 44.4 (2009): 399–414; Kerri L. Mathew and Devon Christopher Adams, “I Love Your Book, but I Love My Version More: Fanfiction in the English Language Arts Classroom,” The alan Review 36.3 (2009), online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014); Kathy A. Mills, “Shrek Meets Vygotsky: Rethinking Adoles-cents’ Multimodal Literacy Practices in Schools,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 54.1 (2010): 35–45.

59 See https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1004097/1/Perseus-and-Andromeda (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

60 See Littleton, The Role of Feedback, 35: “Another addition was added in February 2008 that allowed writers to post in a beta-reader section of the Fanfiction.net site, which allows for critical feedback prior to posting on the main area of the site. This feature is intended to help writers improve their stories through constructive feedback prior to publication, instead of after it has been disseminated to a wider audience […].” See also Angela Thom-as, “Children Online: Learning in a Virtual Community of Practice,” E-learning 2.1 (2005): 27–38; and Evans, The Global Playground, 7: “[…] because it exists outside the world of commerce and education, Internet fan fiction can be seen as a democratic field of experi-ment and play that is, on the face of it, exempt from outsider regulation and authority,” and 8: “‘Beta readers’ are often strongly recommended. These are readers who act as edi-tors, checking the work before it is posted for errors in spelling, grammar and punctua-tion, and even sometimes advising on characterisation and plot development”; Spierings, Rewriting Xena, 32.

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have the “Review & Reply” option to leave a comment.61 Thus does the living audience manifest itself—one of the most important and characteristic traits of the fan-fiction community, which is much more personal than that which usually arises between “traditional” authors and their readers. Everybody may get in direct and immediate contact with the chosen writer,62 whether to praise her/him or even to ask her/him for specific threads to be used in further chapters of a given fanfic. For example, the twelve-year-old American author of the story “What the Olympians Think of Christmas,” in which we meet the frustrated Hermes who is forced to deliver gifts instead of Santa (he does not exist, of course!), is asked by one of the readers to continue with a story about Ares as a god of war unhappy with the idea of a peaceful Christmas.63 In this community even the insufficient knowledge of languages is no barrier—one of the readers ends her comment with disarming sincerity:

I most likely made thousand of mistakes while writing this review. Sorry I’m french and not ashamed to use that as an excuse…64

Positive feedback on the part of reviewers motivates the authors and makes them strive to fulfil the desires of the living audience, though that is not always easy, especially when one writes a longer fanfic and the readers are impatiently awaiting further chapters. A Californian teen author of a story in which an-cient myths are mixed with Arthurian legends in the version taken from the recent bbc series Merlin (2008–201265), openly describes her writing problems, promising to overcome them:

[…] Chapter six is being difficult, but I’ll try to get that out soon. School shouldn’t interfere with my updating schedule too much but we’ll see about that. If it gets to that point, I’ll probably start writing chapters in the middle of geometry and hope that no one notices because that could be a little embarrassing.66

61 See, e.g., Spierings, Rewriting Xena, 32.62 Some authors also permit personal contact via private message.63 See https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4736876/1/What-the-Olympians-Think-of-Christmas

(accessed Dec. 11, 2015).64 In a review of “The Lost Book 13”: https://www.fanfiction.net/r/6761443/ (accessed Dec. 11,

2015, see also above, n. 31).65 And the end of a tv series does not mean the end of its fanfiction: on the contrary, the

number of fanfics often increases in such circumstances.66 See http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8838323/5/To-Speak-of-Grace (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).

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Subsequently, the dialogue with the public continues. The story is being fol-lowed by many readers who keep encouraging the author:

Oh, this’ll be great! Please update—I want to know more about what Ar-thur is thinking and how Typhon’s children (nesty [sic!] creatures, huh?) will factor in. Please update!67

The most striking thing, however, is the fact that the fan-fiction community is based on shifting roles. This means that each member can be a reader, an au-thor, or a beta-reader, and this hybrid identity makes them deeply understand other members.68 The importance of this becomes evident in the fanfics which touch on more serious themes. If we take a look at the favourite and the most popular stories, we find that the myth of Hades and Persephone is leading in the rankings. As one of the authors— nicknamed “persephone-goddess”— remarks: “As a child I most closely identified with Persephone. I’m not sure why. There are probably issues there that will be delved into more deeply in therapy at some point.”69 The point, however, is that this myth appeals to young

67 Ibid., in the “Reviews” section. Indeed, the realm of fan fiction is a unique platform, as the authors and their readers are in steady contact as a premise, not selectively, as in the case of other social media.

68 See Jenkins, Textual Poachers. On the notion of “hybrid identities” and mutual under-standing see, e.g., Rebecca W. Black, “Access and Affiliation: The Literacy and Composi-tion Practices of English-language Learners in an Online Fanfiction Community,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 49.2 (2005): 118–128, spec. 123: “Fan authors often construct hybridised identities that are enacted through their texts. It is not uncommon for authors to insert themselves into their fictions as characters that possess a mixture of idealised and authentic personality traits”; 124: “Through these hybrid characters, fanfiction authors are able to use literacy skills to articulate and to publicly enact concerns from their daily lives”; and 128: “In the new perspective, language, literacy, and text are seen as integral components of how adolescents construct and maintain their sense of place, identity, and value in the social and academic worlds.” See also Lam, “Culture and Learning,” 222: “First, these studies show that in the global transit of youth cultures, young people are developing affiliative identities and shared practices that cut across national, ethnic, and linguistic lines and simultaneously involve them in multiple attachments at the global and local levels. These identities and practices disrupt a one-to-one correspondence of culture and ethnicity and thrive on hybrid innovation to create new forms of competence and knowledge and to reach a wider audience.” See also Derek Foster, “Community and Identity in the Electronic Village,” in David Porter, ed., Internet Culture (New York: Rout-ledge, 1996), 23–37.

69 See http://www.fanfiction.net/u/470160/persephone-goddess (accessed Dec. 11, 2015). By the way, the author refers to Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths (1962)

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female authors as a story about initiation—the passage from a girl’s world into womanhood.70 Thus, it does not take us by surprise that the fanfic of a thirteen-year-old author about “Persephone’s 21st century incarnation” and “the prob-lems that come with being a teenage goddess,” triggered some vivid reactions and one particularly elaborated comment on the part of the readers.71 And many fanfics deal with even more serious problems, like abuse, alcoholism, and violence in the family.72 In such cases the number of comments increases. The living audience offers support and comfort to the victimised protagonists of the stories, and this permeates from the virtual to the real world. We become aware of the importance of this feedback once we notice how many fanfics speak about loneliness, such as the poem To Muse, by a thirteen-year-old au-thor, based on the Odyssey:

This is what the intro for an odyssey based on my life would have looked like. I wrote this when I was thirteen, so any critic would be appreciated.

O Muse of my heart, weave a song through me of the young woman of many places,

The girl who brought to the advanced world dreams of another land.Guilty only of memories of a better time was she.In Claremont in the New World she stared freshman year in the face,Scared of seeing former friends bygone, of classmates in whose minds

have forgot.

as her first source of inspiration.70 On this issue see, e.g., the study by Holly Virginia Blackford, The Myth of Persephone in

Girls’ Fantasy Literature (New York–Oxon: Routledge, 2012). For the popcultural context see also Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania, 1992); Sarah K. Day, Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013).

71 See https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6771972/1/Redemption (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).72 See Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 283 (quoted also by Spierings, Rewriting Xena, 8): “Fandom’s

very existence represents a critique of conventional forms of consumer culture. Yet fan-dom also provides a space within which fans may articulate their specific concerns about sexuality, gender, racism, colonialism, militarism, and forced conformity.” See also Black, “Access and Affiliation,” 124: “It is also significant to note that when authors publicly perform distress through their fictions, such as intimating suicide, they often receive an outpouring of community support (through reviews, e-mail, and instant messenger ser-vices). These hybrid texts represent communicative events, situated in specific contexts, that are intended for an audience of peer readers who have similar interests and may share many of the same concerns.”

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A schedule given and her path of life was written.A closed heart she kept with secrets buried in an unfathomable depth,Almost more introverted than in years gone by,The true feelings of the young woman of many places masked by an outer facade.Following what life set out for her: early mornings and overscheduled

days,Waking up before the rainbow colored dawn lit up the sky, time and time again,Almost shattering into little pieces: the tension mounting up incessantly.History made her who she is and using that she has stepped onto the path of life.An earthquake upsets the memories of a happy childhood,The fear of another and the pain of losing friends fastens her heart,Waiting until the day she can unlock it and face the world again.73

At the same time we should not forget one of the most important functions of mythological fan fiction—the joint fun of the authors and their living audi-ence. The ludic aspect is recalled even by “persephone-goddess”—the writer who is seriously(?) concerned about the ancient gods’ reaction to her fanfics:

I truly don’t believe I’m hurting anyone. If I am wrong, I will certainly pay for it in the Underworld when my life is over. I would like to apologise here for any immortals I may offend in my stories. […] Remember, this is all in fun!74

In the opinion of Jenkins, who focuses on stories based on tv shows, the phe-nomenon of fan fiction is a kind of revival of the oral community, where the members take up and process in electronic form the traditional communica-tion modes of storytelling, and, in addition, rebel against the modern man-agement of culture in which everything is for sale.75 The case of mythological

73 See https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9215065/1/O-Muse (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).74 See http://www.fanfiction.net/u/470160/persephone-goddess (accessed Dec. 11, 2015), see

also above, n. 69.75 See Jenkins, Textual Poachers; John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1987).

As I can tell from my last update of the relevant bibliography before the printing pro-cess, the aforementioned (n. 18) special issue of the journal Transformative Works and Cultures edited by Ika Willis is of importance in this regard (see, e.g., Willis’s introduction:

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449Create Your Own Mythology

fanfics is, however, even more complex. As we have learnt in the course of the present survey, no strict copyrights exist for myths, so the disclaimer I put at the opening of my paper has in fact no raison d’être here. We all do own them and the link to the ancient sense of community is stronger in “mythical” fan-fics than in stories with other cultural texts as background. At the same time, however, such mentions as “Odyssey (c) by Homer”76 testify to both the young authors’ knowledge of and respect for the ancient classics (and their sense of humour, too). All that in times when we incessantly hear about the crisis of education and the lack of authorities!

At this point, what becomes particularly interesting in fan fiction from the perspective of classicists is to observe the remarkable inversion in the process of initiation of today’s children and young adults into the realm of ancient myths. While mythology helped our ancestors and still helps those generations that grew up in the twentieth century to cope with and mentally tame new technologies (see, for example, the name Zeus for a robot used in heart sur-gery, Pegasus for a game-console, or the spacecraft Apollo), for young people the newest technologies and the references to popular culture help tame and make them familiar with ancient myths which are often exotic because of the changes in the educational system. Thanks to Internet fan fiction, Dionysus in Ozzy Osbourne glasses or Aphrodite immersed in Beyoncé’s song on her iPhone become surprisingly close to the modern audience that strives for more and grows up aware of the presence of mythology all around. As a fanfic author from Sweden remarks:

“The Classical Canon and/as Transformative Work” and her paper “Amateur Mythogra-phies,” and Tony Keen’s “Are Fan Fiction and Mythology Really the Same?,” at: http://jour-nal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/issue/view/23, accessed July 20, 2016). See also Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Cambridge, uk–Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2005), 64–66 (on the sense of belonging, a “Heimat”); Kem, Cataloging the Whedonverse, 45; Spierings, Rewriting Xena, 25: “Due to the aspect of community building, and the subordinate position of fans and fan culture, fan culture shares quite some simi-larities with oral and folk culture. The link with oral culture lies in the overlap between the medium of orality and the medium of television”; and 7: “‘Fanfiction’ is something to be taken seriously: a modern and relatively new form of resistance against undesired representations in cultural products.” See also Sonia K. Katyal, “Performance, Property, and the Slashing of Gender in Fan Fiction,” Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law 14.3 (2006): 482, online (accessed Oct. 15, 2014).

76 See https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8015320/1/Chimeria (accessed Dec. 11, 2015), see also above, n. 15.

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I see it here as well as in every art museum, in the movies, computer games, on the stages and the catwalks. The gods are still alive and vibrant around us in their own way.77

At the same time it is striking how perfectly the ancient myths adapt to mod-ern media and maintain their function of offering support and contributing to reciprocal understanding between ever-new generations. And we—the old-sters from Before the Internet Era—may profit from mythological fanfics, as well. We have a rare opportunity to know what interests and what is important for today’s youngsters, to be able to communicate with them and to draw them deeper into ancient culture. We do not have to prove its worth. It is enough to be open to the new to be able to share what is timeless. And the idea of shar-ing is one of the fundamental virtues of the fan-fiction community—a unique community, where strangers share stories,78 and thus create the identity of a group for which age, origins, and other differences are of no importance, where all can access the magic of the Word without the necessity to logging in, and where the cyber-aoidoi and their audiences are gathered by a com-mon passion: “[…] I love the story and I thought it was worth sharing”79—the teenage author of the fanfic “Perseus and Andromeda” states simply. With this opportunity we can discover thrilling stories embedded in the mythical frame, like the Harry Potter heptalogy, Susan Collins’s the “Hunger Games” trilogy, or the Percy Jackson series—those ever-new proofs that the classics pass the test of eternity.

The iPhone 4s is already an obsolete device, supplanted by newer models. And I am not sure whether in one thousand years our descendants will remem-ber much of Beyoncé and her impressive voice. However, I am pretty certain they will still know the face that launched a thousand ships and her blind bard Homer. What is more, if I am allowed to hazard a guess, I suspect they will con-tinue the dialogue with Graeco-Roman myths much as we do, reshaping the ancient tales to cope with their present challenges of initiation into adulthood, keeping the door open to our common mythical childhood.

77 See http://www.fanfiction.net/u/911222/Smiling-Eyes (accessed Dec. 11, 2015).78 Littleton, The Role of Feedback, 1, 70, 100.79 See https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1004097/1/Perseus-and-Andromeda (accessed Dec. 11,

2015), see also above, n. 59. See also Littleton, The Role of Feedback (with a reference to Jean Lave’s and Etienne Wenger’s term “communities of practice,” of 1998), 8: “In com-munities in practice individuals with a common interest participate in the activities of a community and continuously create a shared identity through contributing to the activi-ties and practices of the group.”

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