So I’ve noticed the last idk four years the book market is full of retellings or reimaginings. Iliad, odyssey, the beautiful and the damned, shakespeare plays, p&p, anna Karenina, dracula, classic fairytales, you name it it’s gonna have a retelling. (Classic fairytales aren’t as bad for me as the rest but i had to mention them)
Now i know this isn’t a new phenomenon. Wide sargasso sea changed the way a lot of ppl view jane eyre years ago. I wouldn’t mind it so much if it didn’t impact the way the original works of those retellings are viewed.
Like sure someone could argue Achilles’s and patroclus homosexual attraction/relationship is already implied on the iliad and I’ll tell you yeah. However after song of achilles ppl have come to view patroclus as a fem twink… Spoiler alert lol he wasn’t.
EDIT. bc some ppl love misunderstanding things my problem with patroclus is that when ppl talk about him in iliad they inset his song of achilles version in their arguments when they aren’t the same person.
If not for wide sargasso sea ppl wouldn’t think of rochest as the worst scum on earth. Don’t get me wrong Rochester isn’t perfect and certainly not a good or moral person but a good part of the hate towards him comes from ppl who read the unofficial prequel.
I find ppl say they make retellings to reclaim the misogyny the og works have but that just isn’t a good enough excuse for me.(like the author of lies we sing to the sea who wrote a odyssey retellings when she hadn’t even read odyssey herself bc she wanted to add a feminist touch to it).
I see so many new books coming out or books that have already been out that seem interesting like lady Macbeth or a dowry of blood but I can’t move past that these aren’t an original work. It’s like I will be reading fanfiction of an already existing book.
And that isn’t to say fanfiction is bad but they aren’t 100% original characters to analyze they’ll always exist within the realm of the original work.
Someone could argue that nothing is 100% original in fiction and while i agree it’s one thing to get inspired and a whole other to literally grab a character that already exists and give them a personality makeover to fit your fantasy.
And the thing is that I think many of these books may be actually good books. And I’m all for representation. But representation for me should come from new characters and stories not an old book getting a rebrand for a cashgrab.
Bc lets be real some books wouldn’t get half the attention they’re getting if they weren’t marketed as retellings of this or reimagining of that.
And at the end of the day what i dislike the most is that many of these characters could actually be very interesting on their own and the books they’re in may be considered classics one day. But no, bc now they’re tied for eternity to their predecessors.
Idk this is the end of the rant but my point is that i hate thw current trend of retellings.
Pls be kind in the comments and English isn’t my first language so if you see mistakes pretend you did not.
EDIT. The purpose of this post was to voice my opinion and start conversation with others who may agree or disagree with me. You can say your opinion respectfully without attacking me.
by baifengjiu
4 Comments
It’s like this all the time, the tone and target audience just shifts cyclically.
Don’t worry about publicity and marketing, that stuff disappears very quickly. If you’re not interested in a book, just ignore it and be amazed at how quickly the world moves on from it.
Historical fact: Patroclus was a fem twink.
Retellings will always change the way people look at the original because you have something to compare it against now. In my own experience, retellings often enhance the original.
For instance, Catherynne M. Valente does a lot of retellings of fairytales, myths, etc, my favorite is a retelling of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” called “The Sin of America”. Though none of her retellings seem to focus on gender, they’re just a different view or written in a modern setting.
To your point about how you don’t think misogyny is a good enough reason to do a retelling, I respectfully disagree. For thousands of years men were the focus and producers of literature, it’s more than reasonable to deconstruct a solely (or mainly) male-focused story to include women or PoC. Those people existed during the time that story was told and if they’d been allowed to write their own stories we wouldn’t be in the year 2024 having everything be retold, because it wouldn’t be necessary. But it IS necessary to think about women or PoC in ancient Mesopotamia or wherever, their lives were mostly ignored and our history is worse for their lives not being cataloged.
So what can be done now that thousands of years of literature have already been written while ignoring more than half the population? Feminist retellings, genderqueer retellings, intersectionality retellings. We cannot know how those or any stories would have been written if a woman had been allowed to do so, but we can honor who they were or could have been through a retelling.
You know what I’d like to see play absolutely straight?
Knight in shining armour, slays the dragon and rescues the princess.
Don’t subvert it, or transfer it, or parody it. Just play it stone cold straight.