What do fan fic. and Greek myths have in common?

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

This is an excerpt from my Substack, named Myriatid. Have a look here, if you're interested...

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

Ariadne and Dionysus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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