#i know ppl say dante is fanfic. and technically yes

[tomwambsmilk]

Television and movies are such an insane storytelling medium because of the finality of them. You write a book, anyone who reads that book can make the images look like whatever they want in their head, can hear the dialogue however it makes sense to them, can imagine the characters and the settings however they want. You write a play, every actor who performs it will look different and move different and play the character with their own unique spin. It's the same story, in all these cases, but it's constantly being filtered through the imagination and creative life of someone who is not the original author, and that's a crucial part of the way the recipient of the story understands it.

With movies and TV, you write a story, and then one singular person is cast as that character. And their performance is definitive. Sure, the audience can still interpret it a variety of ways. But the gestures they make and the inflections in their line delivery are an irrevocable part of the canon of that character. A character says a line and that is the way they say that line, definitively and forever. And that doesn't even get into things like costumes and setting - in a book, usually most of that is left up to the imagination of the reader, because the author will focus on whatever elements are crucial to the story. A play will have a different set each time its performed. Not only are movie sets permanent, but they feature a level of detail that isn't in the reader imagination or the theatrical production, and again, that detail is definitive.

I'm not saying this as a criticism - I love TV and film, because I think the medium gives us lots of new interesting ways to tell stories. But I think the way an audience relates to storytelling in that medium is so different, and I think maybe the prevalence of movies and TV in modern culture has changed the way we relate to stories in general. I don't think its a coincidence that modern fandom culture really didn't exist before the 60s, about the same time when televisions became exceedingly common in most Western homes. I wonder if the elimination of some of the creative engagement with storytelling - more and more people becoming used to consuming a visual, unchanging story somewhat passively, rather than engaging imaginatively with the written word - directly fed the growth of things like fanfic and fanart, which do allow the audience to engage creatively with a story. Stories with this kind of finality are such a recent thing in the history of storytelling, and I think maybe we don't always appreciate that enough.