Hello all–my friends and I are big nerds. We were talking about how fanfic often gets a bad reputation for Mary-Sue/Self-Insert characters and for taking IP and running away with it instead of making ‘their own work’. However, there are a ton of books that we consider ‘classics’ that are guilty of all of that.
Two classic examples (and unfortunately all of our favorite Literary Characters…maybe this says too much about ourselves) are Jo March and Jane Eyre.
Something else we talked about how a lot of what we know about Socrates comes from what feels like fan-fiction from Plato. For example, most philosopher’s agree Plato wasn’t just transcribing Socrates, but used him as some kind of character or figure to project the lessons he learned while studying philosophy.
I found this discussion so amusing and wanted to know if there are any other “classics” that you realized were clear self-insertions/fanfictions now that you’re older/learned more about an author?
by FiddleandFickle