Italians Gianmarco Tamberi (high jump) and Marcel Jacobs (100m race) celebrate their gold medals together🇮🇹

another one for the 🤌 cinematic universe

im sending you all back to summer school until you learn to analyze the world around you through literally ANY lens other than fanfiction

History is fanfiction??? That doesn’t even make sense!!!

Well.  Okay look.  Maybe not “history itself”. But a lot of what was considered “history” not all that long ago, was anything but. (Geoffrey of Monmouth anyone?)  And some of the uh.... stories... are a bit tropey when you study them.  History is fanfiction? No, that doesn’t really hold up. Grain of salt though, if you’re honest.

But the religious stuff? That’s ALL fanfiction. One religion is built off the ones before it, and the ones before those.  Moses is a rewrite of Osiris IIRC.

And WITHIN a religion too. Anyone who knows anything about the construction of the New Testament  knows that the gospel we call “Mark” was written from the elusive “Q source.”  “Matthew” and “Luke” were written off of the Mark material with additions to the “canon,” as they saw fit, and possibly additional stuff from Q. The book we call “Acts” (The Acts of The Apostles) is just STRAIGHT UP FANFICTION, most likely written by the person who wrote out the second part of “Luke.” And the book we call “John” was a fanfiction version of the gospels written from a Gnostic or Marcionite perspective.

The Bible - considered one of the world’s greatest works of literature (by some) - mostly fanfiction.

fanfiction does not just mean "influenced by another thing" good fucking lord

do yall really hear yourself saying this shit, making the definition so broad it applies to basically all storytelling ever, and not for a second think how monumentally stupid that is?

do you not hear yourselves saying all religion is fanfiction and not realize how disrespectful and annoying you all sound?

As someone who professionally studies esoteric religion, and who spent two years of my academic life studying Dante specifically, I am begging you to consider that your opinion on the Divine Comedy, and the historical and theological circumstances in which it was written, may be incomplete.

I'm trying to be polite here, but I don't think y'all realize what the implications of this take are.

This isn't a dig at fanfiction. But please understand that there is a galaxy of difference between christian epic poetry in medieval italy, and fanfiction.

The only real difference between “Christian epic poetry in medieval Italy, and fanfiction” is that religious people then and now don’t think their religion is fiction, but guess what? RPF - real person fanfic - is a thing.

The Divine Comedy is just self-insert RPF based on the Bible and people Dante knew. A much bigger difference between then and now is copyright; you could sell all the fanfic you wanted back then, but now that’s illegal.

Aphrodite goddess of love debuted in ancient Sparta as Aphrodite Areia, who was at her core a palette swap of Ishtar goddess of love and war, much like how 50 Shades of Gray began as Twilight fanfiction, but changed the names for publication.

Voi che parlate così di Dante a 700 anni dalla sua morte vi meritate un governo populista di destra per cent’anni

Luca Marinelli aka il tipo bello che va sempre ai presidi per le case popolari, che beve birre artigianali e che il primo album de I Cani era il migliore

What irritates me about some of the art complaints is that it’s clear that Leandro Fernández’s art takes equal inspiration from the Anglo-American style and the Franco-Belgian style. And on the French/BD side, the art shorthands just aren’t the same as the US ones (or the same as the Japanese ones that manga readers are familiar with, for that matter).  When people say that Joe or Noriko look like racist caricatures, I can see where that’s coming from if they’ve only ever read Anglo-American comics (or that plus manga). But if you look at it as a mixture of French and American influence, it’s clearly just a different set of visual markers.  I mean look at Riad Sattouf’s or Marcelino Troung’s autobiographical work - they draw *their own families* using some of the same styles.

Obviously Fernández is drawing this book primarily for the Anglophone market, so I understand that that’s the framework people are using to evaluate the art, but it’s so short-sighted - and frankly US-centric, as though that’s the only global comics tradition.

I was going to write the same thing!

My first reaction when I saw the male characters was that they looked like a modern version of Albert Uderzo characters. I see more Franco-Belgian influence in his characters than racially stereotyping.

La guerra di Piero è perfetta per JoeNicky~ 👌

I’d like to add Crêuza de mä (as the whole homonymous album).

The song is in genovese, and aven if it’s about Genoa it’s more like an hymn to the Mediterrenean Sea and its people, streets, merchants, sailors, flavors and colors.

Fabrizio de Andrè said he used a dream-like language for this song, a language that could unify all the people in the Mediterrenean into a single population.

He truly was special.

a lot of you hate historians and archaeologists, and i think that’s a problem

look, i fully recognize that there are reasons to be skeptical of history and archaeology. i am very on board with criticizing academia as an oppressive institution, and the way that researchers take their bigotry and bias with them to their work. i also recognize that academia does a pretty bad job of communicating what it does to the public, and that’s a part of why people’s hostility to it is able to flourish.

but i am disturbed by the pervasive narrative in online leftist spaces that people who research the human past are ignorant and bigoted, and i think we need to do more to combat that narrative.

historians being homophobic has become a whole meme, and it feels like people are just using historians as a homophobia scapegoat, when in reality the humanities are overwhelmingly left-leaning. people also keep blaming historians for erasing the homoeroticism of fictional literary characters, which is just… not what historians do. homophobic biases and erasures in the interpretation of history over the past few hundred years are a very real thing that’s important to learn about, but scholars have radically shifted away from that approach in recent generations, and these memes are not helping people outside the field to understand history and reception. instead, a lot of people are coming away with the impression that…

(source… really? nobody?)

this thread gets bonus points for the comments claiming that modern historians argue about whether achilles was a top or a bottom using homophobic stereotypes, which i can only guess is a misunderstanding of the erastes/eromenos model (a relationship schema in classical greece; i think people have debated whether achilles and patroclus represent an early version of it). also a commenter claims that the movie troy invented the idea of achilles and patroclus being cousins when no, they were also cousins in lots of ancient sources.

there’s this post about roman dodecahedra (link includes explanation of why the original post is misleading).

there’s this thread about how some thin gold spirals from ancient denmark look exactly like materials used in gold embroidery to this day but archaeologists are stupid and don’t know that because they dont talk to embroiderers enough. in fact, the article says they were most likely used for decorating clothing, whether as a fringe, braided into hair, or embroidered. so the archaeologists in the article basically agree with the post, theyre just less certain about it, because an artifact looking similar to a modern device doesn’t necessarily mean they have identical uses.

this thread has a lot of people interpreting academic nuance as erasure. the museum label literally says that this kind of statue typically depicts a married couple, giving you the factual evidence so you can interpret it. it would be false to say “these two women are married” because there was no gay marriage in ancient egypt. (interpreting nuance as erasure or ignorance is a running theme here, and it points to a disconnect, a public ignorance of how history is studied, that we can very much remedy)

lots of other conspiracy theory-ish stuff about ancient egypt is common in social justice communities, which egyptologists on this site have done a good job of debunking

oh, and this kind of thing has been going around. the problem with it is that there are loads of marginalized academics who research things related to their own lives, and lived experience and rigorous research are different forms of expertise that are both valuable.

so why does this matter?

none of these are isolated incidents. for everything i’ve linked here, there are examples i havent linked. anti-intellectualism, especially against the humanities, is rampant lately across the political spectrum, and it’s very dangerous. it’s not the same as wanting to see and understand evidence for yourself, it’s not the same as criticizing institutions of academic research. it’s the assumption that scholars are out to get you and the perception that there is no knowledge to be gained from thorough study. that mindset is closely connected to the denial of (political, scientific, and yes historical) facts that we’ve been seeing all around us in recent years.

on a personal note, so many marginalized scholars are trying to survive the dumpster fire of academia because we care that much about making sure the stories that are too often unheard don’t get left out of history… and when that’s the entire focus of my life right now, it’s disheartening to see how many of my political allies are just going to assume the worst about the entire field

This is a good post and i can understand your frustration.

My perception is that anti-intellectualism derives from these, and probably more, factors:

1. People distrust academics mostly because they misunderstand how scientific research works and what the scientific community is. I’ve personally met people who genuinely believe scholars can write whatever they want on papers without any sort of external examination.They don’t realise how important evidence is to formulate an interpretation, and how many evidence we need before we can actually see a pattern and write a conclusion.

Most importantly, when writing a paper scholars put tremendously effort into choosing the right words, so as to not create misunderstandings and confusion about the interpretation of data and evidence, and peer review exists exactly to analyze evidence, prevent the publication of wrong data and ensure that conclusions have been drawn accurately. Besides that, without enough evidence (and I said that as someone who does research in prehistory) we cannot make assumptions but can only theorise what social dynamics were like in the past, and since most of them are just speculations, this uncertainty is seen as erasure because for some reasons there’s this idea that the past was identical to the present.

2. The past was not identical to the present. This is such an important topic to me. I see people interpreting ancient social behaviors like they were the same as ours today, and the same can be said for art/sculpture/objects/etc. as you also pointed out.

While it might be true in some circumstances, this erroneous view of the past is a dangerous mindset to have because it can lead to surface interpretation and to ignore all the many nuances that should be taken into consideration instead. Another thing that as a european I find really upsetting, is how often european ancient past is interpreted by applying modern american social dynamics to it, as if it’s the standard and only correct way to analise the world.

3. In addition to that, there’s a serious lack of critical thinking, to the point where I honestly believe some people have never learnt how to develop critical thinking and seem to take everything way too literally, which is why we read stuff like "the reason why Homer described the sea as red is because the ancient Greeks couldn’t see the colour blue”.

4. Modern society is hyper individualistic, to the point where people only care about their own experiences (or the ones they deem valuable), and dismiss anybody who might provide a different explanation.

Finally, by accusing the scientific community of being a “bunch of white men” they are erasing all the women who contribute to science and work in any humanistic fields. Congrats.

Tl,dr: This is how academic research work: do I believe there was homosexuality among Neanderthals? Yes. Do I have evidence to support this? No. Can I therefore write it down on a paper? No. Am I erasing Neanderthal sexuality? No. The end.

a few posts made me think…the amount of vicious rhetoric about Italy being such a sinisterly promiscuous place the air itself was sick thrived well into the xix century in part also because the land was, like France, less hysterically puritanical than Britain is insane.

the association with Italy as a sordid place almost by nature was such that malaria, which is endemic in the Mediterranean and in Italy was defeated only in the first half of the 20th century, was frequently used as a metaphor for this sort of ethnical & moral malaise in works by anglophone writers.

(you can find it shown exemplarily in James’ Daisy Miller; but mentions of Italians being sexually promiscuous, improper, possessing a dangerous, dark sort of sexuality can be found in a lot of works of the same time period, and similar jabs abound even in fun, pop culture-loved books by Christie and other ‘fun’ British authors)

I’ve noticed this before… but RECENTLY. 

I’m Canadian, and have travelled a lot for work. I was in Italy for a few weeks, and immediately afterwards went to a more Northern European country. I had multiple people ask me about “lazy Italians” and if “I was hit on constantly because they (Italians) will always hit on foreigners”. This wasn’t a one time thing. It happened multiple times, and I heard this type of rhetoric by multiple people who were educated and good people otherwise. But they spouted this without a second thought, because they thought what they were saying was true. 

And honestly… I had no issue travelling in Italy. None at all. When I was hit on is was usually by USAmerican tourists lol. The most cliched Italian thing I experienced was having a family I met feed me and be scandalized when I told them I don’t eat meat. That was it. 

So yeah… xenophobia is REAL and a huge issue.  

Not exactly related to promiscuousness, but

If anybody wants to understand 20th century British snobbish and condescending attitude towards italians should simply read A Room with a View. Bunch of spoiled upper class british cunts on a holiday in Florence, think they’re better than any italians they meet and apparently are the only ones capable of truly appreciate italian art.

Forster explicity wrote those characters to criticize british society and the assumption of English cultural superiority. At the same time, even if he had good intention, he depicted Italy in a primitivist way, often patronizing italians and our culture.

it’s fun being on tumblr.com because everyone here thinks they’re the most progressive woke bitch on the whole site but as soon as someone tells them “reading books is good because it lets you explore other people’s experiences and get out of your comfort zone” everyone’s suddenly like “why would i get out of my comfort zone though. this seems classist and also ableist”

I’ve just read a post that said exactly this, you shouldn't read anything that makes you uncomfortable and fanfics are as good as any other literature, if you disagree you’re an elitist.

Like according to some people reading a 100k ship fanfic is genuinely the same thing as reading about the torment of human existence by Dostoevskij.

There’s also a moment in life in which adults should feel the need to stop reading their oh-so-comfortable-Young Adult fantasy novels, and start searching for more meaningful stories, if you haven’t reach that point then you haven’t matured yet. Making new experiences, challenging yourself into reading something different and more complex, is the bare minimum of growing up.

I’m so glad this mindset doesn’t exist in my country. 

Ringraziamo i nostri insegnanti di lettere che ci hanno spronato fin da giovani a leggere autori seri e da tutto il mondo e non ci hanno mai raccontato la storiella che va bene continuare a leggere libri per ragazzi per tutta la vita. 

People say that self inserts are cringy but remember that famous poet Dante Alighieri, who wrote one of the most important works in Italian literature, straight up made a giant three part fan fiction where he and his idol/mancrush, the famous poet Virgil, journey through Hell on behalf of his dead girlfriend and everyone who he didn’t like was there and suffered punishment for all eternity and then he blames three whole popes and the entire fucking city of Florence, Italy for the shitty state of the Church and over seven hundred years later it’s played a major influence in Western culture people are still praising it and analyzing it so honestly who gives a fuck lmfao

Yeah, but… these days we look at Dante’s inferno and laugh at what silly, self-indulgent nonsense it is. Old doesn’t equal good.

Then again I use self inserts all the time, so what do I know.

I can assure you are very mistaken on the subject.  Maybe that is because you neither read the Divina Commedia in its original language (poetry translations is a nightmare, especially in this case) nor seriously studied this work in its context, which is paramount to gaining any understanding of it. If you indeed have done the above I will apologise for these assumption, but still strongly insist you are might have not done it very well. 

First point could easily be that the concept of “fanfiction”, or of an author “owning” some characters and their stories, is fairly modern: thus making the idea of a medieval “fanfiction” itself anachronistic. Still: that is not the point. 

The point is that, while students all over the world like to parody the subjects they are engaged with, in Italy you would be hard pressed to find someone that considers the Divina Commedia, a beautiful, allegoric work of art that helped make the basis for the very language we speak now (in fact the first GREAT work not written in Latin, but in the volgare that would become Italian in time), “silly nonsense”. 

In fact, as we say: “time is a gentleman” and tends, as a rule to preserve the best of the literature produced in the past (with notable exceptions). 

So: no, you are just wrong.  The Divina Commedia is about politics, is about Italy itself (and the project of making it whole and independent), is about language, culture, cultural history (while I will laugh and make jokes about Virgilio-sempai I also know there are several very deep reasons why Dante has him as a guide through the Inferno and Purgatorio, there are reasons why he makes Vergil behave like he does), the nature of man, homesickness, rage, mathematics, history and so many other subjects to be almost unbelievably deep. 

I can assure that here in Italy the Divine Comedy is loved and appreciated by many and even its worst critics would never be so superficial to call it “silly nonsense”. Reading, studying it is an integral part of our school system.  These days we LOVE the Divina Commedia! So much that one of our best actors made a series of dramatic readings of it which were always full. 

P.S. Beatrice was never Dante’s girlfriend, her role in the poem is complex, she is more a symbol than the poor woman that died young in childbirth (she was married to another man). Dante was married to Gemma Donati and seems to have appreciated her very much (even wrote poems for her, something that at the time was usually not done!). 

I would suggest not to be as hasty to say how ‘people now’ feel about a poem you might not even have read.  Or, maybe, add that the people you know of feel that way about it. 

That said: keep having fun with fanfictions, they can be a beautiful and rewarding writing exercise! My intent was not to disparage them, in fact I love them, they are just… not the Divine Comedy XD

Okay. Not everyone feels that way about the Divine Comedy and my statement may have been hasty.

But from my personal experience, whenever I’ve heard people discuss the Divine Comedy, it’s been with a mocking eyeroll.

Also, I’d add that just because someone can be inspired by a work doesn’t mean that work itself is liked.

I love the IDEA of Lovecraftian Horror, but The Call of Cthulhu did nothing for me.

I have huge admiration for Tolkien’s world-building and storytelling. But his pacing is awful.

Greek plays created some of the most influential figures in global culture.

They also gave us one of the WORST plot devices in history, the Deus Ex Machina.

I appreciate a lot of the imagery from Dante’s Inferno. But I dislike much of the themes and I find the self-aggrandizing childish.

My point being: A work being historic doesn’t make it flawless, and there IS still room to criticise.

No offense but the people you’ve been discussing the Divine Comedy with probably don’t understand why it’s so important. Or if they do, they disregard it because it never affected their culture as much as ours (if they’re not Italian. If in case they actually are… well). Which wouldn’t be the first time to happen, honestly.

Now, of course you’re entitled to your opinion! I dislike many famous Italian writers and I’m always down to bash them, but I would still never call their works “silly, self-indulgent nonsense.”

I disliked studying Le Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis (which by OP’s standards would also be fanfic) because of the themes, of the style, of the plot generally speaking but… It’s not silly nonsense.

I can assure you Italians are always ready to criticise our works. Whether it’s Dante’s or any other writer. We would still do so by keeping in mind how influential and important these works have been.

You’d be right.

For me personally, I there ARE elements to the story that I find silly and self indulgent, but that also doesn’t cancel out the importance it has to others and definitely not to Italian culture.

I agree my original statement was far too shallow and ignorant.

Di not worry, it happens to everybody, from time to time, to exaggerate a statement. Thank you for having listened to us and for having been polite in your answers. I did not answer the fist reblog only because @myhamsterisademon pretty much said what I wanted to. XD

Ultimately tastes in literature are, and must remain, personal. Still there are books that, while being maybe un appealing to us, cannot be easily dismissed (a harsh lesson I learnt from an il professor of mine XD ).

I’m happy we could amicably agree to disagree.

Right. So with the education you and @myhamsterisademon provided , I’d like to alter my original statement and tie it back to the original topic:

I do feel people have an unfortunate tendency to put older classics on a pedestal and treat them as above criticism. Which I feel speaks to a certain level of undeserved arrogance (though that’s another discussion).

While Dante’s Inferno is an exceptional work, I do not think it is an example of a good self-insert or revenge fic as in my opinion, those elements are the books biggest flaws and a good example of how NOT to use those tropes.

Though admittedly, I am more critical of the revenge fic aspect than the self insert aspect.

“Which I feel speaks to a certain level of undeserved arrogance”

You know what, I didn’t want to participate in this discussion because this site taught me that discussing about other cultures on this platform is as useless as  tilting at windmills, but the sheer irony in this sentence was too much.

Talk about arrogance! You are discussing a literature work from a culture you do not share, a work you barely understood the surface of, and, when explained why you are wrong, your reply is implying the people from that culture were being arrogant and not listening to criticism. Criticism is a sound argument, yours is a ridiculous puerile false syllogism.

You are starting by equating a fan fiction to the mere pre-existence of some characters into “popular” culture (which already is, hm, laughable, because Medieval Italy popular culture is in no way comparable to modern concepts of media usage and, even if they were, the type of knowledge Dante had access to was in no way popular or fannish in nature) and ignore the fact that those characters were partly there symbolically and as allegories of complex theological concepts which would have sounded quite boring to insert in a poetic text. Not to add, those characters are not there for our Poet to merely interact with (which is ultimately the goal of the self-insert fic: the characters meeting the author and, usually, share with them some kind of self-consolatory bond) while they are there to be symbols of specifical theological and political situations of contemporary history which you clearly have absolutely no knowledge of, not even a “infarinatura”. 

Furthermore, you seem under the assumption that what Dante does is self-indulgent in nature, while it is quite the opposite. Dante also isn’t in any way celebrated by the narrative for its merits, if anything, his own travel is the symbol of his ultimate failure as a worshipper, which contributes to the high contrast with instead his unfaltering political faith. The whole Commedia is actually quite based on the thing you have no awareness of: the political conflict inside the city of Firenze and how it echoes and ripples through the whole Penisula, concerning the different powers of the Pope and the Emperor, which, guess what, has been a conflict for our Country until our Unification in the 1861 and the consequences of each we actually still pay through a state that is often reeking of repugnantly catholic influences in the daily life of citizens on modern battles like LGBTAQ+ rights and women’s rights. Dante is in no way your amazing self-insert character with peculiar eye colour and unheard of set of skills who gets to fuck Dean Winchester, he is there because he is a man who lost his faith in a world where his faith and his political beliefs clash continuously, forcing a man to continuously pick between a battle he knows it’s right and protecting one’s immortal soul, given one of the sides of the conflict was the “god’s shepard on earth”. BUT, SURE, tell me how him meeting Virgil makes this a fanfic despite the fact he is not there because SENPAI but because he was considered the maximum example of the Poet at the service of a Secular Power bringer of peace and therefore there to signify all Dante would have hoped his role to be before he got exiled from his city due to political opinions and all he FAILS to be both for his own shortcomings and for the political situation that befell the country.

What a shallow way to read you have.

You barely scratch the surface and talk about arrogance to others.

Also Dante’s INFERNO? Paradise and Purgatory got lost along the way home from the library? Did you even read all of the work you’re criticizing so vehemently? 

Scratch that, did you actually read any of it, because I am quite confident unless you were handled the summary, if you had to actually read some of the verses, you would have anyway noticed that the work is in a very unusual metre, with a specific quite complex system of rhymes that nobody dared to use after exactly for how complicated it was… Also did your edition in any way cover the huge amount of neologistical innovations the Commedia gave to the Italian language? Because, well, while I am fairly used to the education in some countries being ghastly, I have to say when we studied anything in middle school or high school from any foreigner language we also had some sort of explanation of the impact on the language itself, if not downright reading in the original language without any kind of translation that may have impacted our perception of the author. Hell, 14 to 18 years old students in Italy are required to read original literature works in Greek, Latin, and English, and often also from Spanish, German, and French… and they daily work on reading ancient Italian of course. And, sure, our education system has tons of flaws, but I have to say I never heard of any of us claiming that a German or French author was unimportant and put on a pedestral for a fanfic. Perhaps, because knowing a language and a culture before speaking out of turn gives some insight on an actual understanding of the work.

So, forgive my bluntness, again, why do you think you know a work better than people who a) studied it for years in school, b) studied it in its original language, c) studied it in its entirety and not just “the Inferno”, d) have the historical background to understand it? Because…? 

Oh, because you didn’t like the themes which you have no understanding of and because you confused a need for political purpose with a Chosen One trope! That explains it, surely.

“I do not think it is an example of a good self-insert or revenge fic as in my opinion, those elements are the books biggest flaws and a good example of how NOT to use those tropes. “ … whoa, maybe because IT IS NOT a revenge fic or a fanfic in general? You stated something wrong, proceeded to insist it was a fanfic, despite being repeteadly told it is a ridiculous and puerile statement and then you say “oh it doesn’t do it well”? That is like going to a monkey, say “this lion is not very good at being a feline”, duh.

Imagine if Italians went around saying “yeah well Shakespeare stole Romeo and Juliet, it’s just a fanfic and doesn’t even do justice to the story because Romeo does really stupidly at the end” or “oh duh sure Marlowe should be signalled to the mods for plagiarism over the Lord Faustus! And Goethe plagiarized the plagiarist!”. Do you see Italians telling you Shakespeare was uncreative because his poetry is HEAVILY dependent on Petrarca’s sonetti, their structure and his use of stylistic devices and metaphors which basically revolutionarized how modern poetry uses them? One thing is saying “hey notice this comes from here” or “hey notice this may be not the strong feature of this work” and one thing is reducing a milestone of literature to a “fanfic” due to… what? some desperate need of self-importance about your own works?

You are being willfully obtuse in order to defend as a serious literary statement what should exist only as a joking hyperbole. I am not sure if you are paying money for your education but I sure hope not because I’ve seen free elementary school requiring more complex analysis and more intellectual honesty from their 8 years old students than what you are giving here; and you hiding under the foglia di fico of a false equivalence between calling a literary masterpiece of the middle ages to the exercize media of amateurs and actual criticism is not doing much.

Do you want to criticize Dante? What about actually informing yourself on the background of the work, on a good original-text edition with some commentary on the original language, perhaps some kind of research on the used metre and the Medieval symbology and allegorical organic basis behind it? Because, you see, that’s what actual art criticism is like.

You sound like those people who, being absolutely ignorant of Middle Ages art, claim that the figures are all ugly and odd because they walk on each others’ feet or the expressivity tends to emotional distance. 

You didn’t even put yourself into what it would have meant in the Middle Ages for a man to write such an organic and complex three-part work with theological criticism, political analysis, ethical arguments and what actively was contemporary commentary IN POETRY with that complex scheme around it. And, above all, doing this making it in a NEW language, while developing it actively, because il volgare fiorentino was not before Dante what it was after him and then evolved in the base of our whole language; and a language with a difficult poetical history, mostly based on courteous poetry and love themes rather than epic poetry, and that was still seen as some kind of working class thing. You read the work without inquisitive spirit and without any historical perspective.

You want to call it a fanfic? Do, then. You are saying something wrong. Go on and insist in your mistake. 

People have proved you and other ignorant people like you wrong so so long before this same thread - here there is one in thousand examples you can find. 

There is always room to criticize a work, when you do it with cognizione di causa . 

I also need to laugh at the “Greek plays created some of the most influential figures in global culture.They also gave us one of the WORST plot devices in history, the Deus Ex Machina.” because not only it proves you barely can think historically but you have no concept of difference between a novel, epic poetry, a theatre piece… you treat it all the same. Just out of curiosity, by your logic, why would Greek myths not count as fanfic given they all work on the same “canon”? Maybe because that canon is not an authorial work, but their actual culture and system of belief filtered through an allegorical and symbolical narrative construct? Exactly like Dante is working with his own culture and his own history filtered through that? 

Frankly, as a fic writer, I need y’all people to stop blabbering and speaking about things you are ignorant about. This is cringy at best, at worst it becomes reeeeeally racist and it betrays quite the colonialist forma mentis. You keep belittling something people explained over and over to you be an essential piece of culture just because you don’t have the cultural instruments to fully understand it.

I am not sure why you hold the belief that a work in which a LANGUAGE finds its origin is somehow comparable to a fanfic written by a 13 yo to get to fuck Draco Malfoy, but such a statement clearly shows a deeply rooted idea that the given culture is somehow a play thing. I am not sure if you’d dare to say this on this site over a piece of Japanese or Iranian or Congolese literature, but I highly doubt, because you’d get rightfully crucifixed in the pile of escrements you typed.

People was kind to you, they were nice, explaining something, they even had enough manners to say “oh don’t worry, we can all exaggerate at times” and what did you do? You insisted on it. 

If any of the people above you had been poc, you would have already a call out post with a thousand notes and a racist label above your head for belittling a cultural masterpiece so strenously.

And do you want to know the best part? I am not Dante’s biggest lover, I find the Commedia has its set of flaws (none of which you named, while listing stuff that was utterly ridiculous), I was the little queer atheist kid that in high school didn’t really fancy the idea of hearing for one hour about how people like me went to hell, and yet I stand here and tell you you did Dante so much wrong with your joke. Because room for criticism doesn’t mean ignore a work’s merits and it doesn’t mean belittle it or redefine it with a label that didn’t exist when he was writing and doesn’t apply to his own concept of culture.

Fanfic in itself doesn’t make sense as a label before the diffusion of novels, ammesso e non concesso, if we really really really want to stretch it before the actual event of “fandoms” and creating rewritings of modern media.

Oh, since la Commedia is just a fanfiction and therefore something easily accessible to any person with a good knowledge of canon and some basic writing skills, I am sure you could write your reply in terzine incatenate di endecasillabi inserting in depth commentary of theological and political events through symbolism, and I would LOVE to read that, but I am not going to read anything you reply to me or others, because I don’t care about opinions based on thin air. 

Actually, I’d invite other Italians to also drop this thread, because someone who says “oh my statement was shallow” when people seem rightfully upset and then “oh well it still is a fanfic” when people seem nicer just deserves the photo of the definition of coda di paglia as a reply.

#imagine if people spoke about YOUR culture like this#it’s also true most of the people saying ITS FANFIC are just jealous of many authors tbh and want to feel their fic is better than it is#there i said it come at me idgaf#i am a fic writer so i am not hating but really this is just as ridiculous as the time y'all insiste symbolism didn’t exist#oh authors do things by chance oh they dont notice-no janet you are a poor writer who doesn’t know how to construct a narrative#and that’s why you are writing still only klance fanfics while other authors are studied#and i don’t mean PUBLISHED because yeah we publish a bunch of trash even actual fanfics#but saying OH THIS OLD WORK AT THE BASE OF A CULTURE IS A *MODERN CONCEPT THAT DOESN’T APPLY HISTORICALLY* is like#i mean…. it’s beyond ridiculous lmao#god i need to return to work but really#the 4 year olds i work with have more idea how to analyze a work of art#because they know when to say *i don’t get it please explain*#i would like to see all of you criticizing mishima this way#yeah bold of me to think any of you actually read ONE thing by an actual foreign poc author then again :/

I had sworn to myself I was never gonna touch this topic again because I’m tired of screaming into the void when it comes to dante alighieri but this watered my crops, cleared my skin, gave me fifty years of life and that’s everything I’ll ever have to say on this topic. jfc thank you.

also if you have no idea of what it means that a catholic dude puts a bunch of popes in hell it means you don’t know shit about anything and I honestly can’t with this bullshit of reading shit written in the fourteenth century as it was written yesterday. good grief get off your high horses where you’ll dumb down anything to make yourself look good and read a fucking book that’s not the only one y’all always read. jfc.

I’m not an Italian, just an Italianist, but I am so glad @robb-greyjoy got here first because @lunacorva you clearly have all the understanding and appreciation of Dante’s Inferno that I did when I first read it at 14 years old. You are not only being incredibly obtuse, but your sheer ignorance about what you’re saying is astonishing.

Scholars neither roll their eyes at Dante, nor do they place him above criticism. I receive emails nearly every month notifying me about a new conference on Dante. I have read so many critical analyses of Dante’s opera that it’d make your head spin, and I still have barely made a dent in the sheer number of literary historians who’ve written on him.

Like. You’re not just shitting on Dante when you make these sad excuses for hot takes, you’re shitting on an entire field, not to mention 800 years of people who have done painstaking work on Dante, myself included, and I’m not even a fucking Dantologist. 

Tell you what, once you’ve read the entirety of the Divina Commedia in its original Tuscan, like I and hundreds of thousands of others have done, you can come back here and talk about Dante’s pedestal and his cringe factor.

Anti-intellectualism doesn’t make you cool, it only makes you look like an ignoramus to everyone even slightly more well-read than you.