“I DON’T THINK WE’VE BEEN FORMALLY INTRODUCED?” Re-contextualising a Literary Model for First Meetings through Adaptation Theory and Fan Fiction

Abstract

(Re-)contextualising narratology in today’s world of rapid technological development and widespread access to the internet serves as the basis of this essay, which explores what happens when narratology, adaptation theory and fan fiction theory intersect and interact. It combines a surface level quantitative study with qualitative text analysis, using Rousset’s literary model from 1981 on first meetings between lovers-to-be as the narratological reference, and the first meeting between the characters Alec Lightwood and Magnus Bane as the text subject (using a corpus consisting of a novel, its official film and TV-show adaptations, and thirty fan fictions). The study found expected patterns of simplification and short-cuts, in the material studied, as well as partial convergence of fan fictions with Rousset’s model, dependent on the level of compliance of the source adapted. It also found that fan fictions and adaptations generally follow Rousset’s postulated structure of first meetings, with a few notable exceptions regarding the focal points of these scenes.