everyone’s talking about how unhinged fans are nowadays about their blorbos. well let me tell you that when the polish writer henryk sienkiewicz first published his novel ‘with fire and sword’ in parts between 1883 and 1884, and killed off the beloved character longinus podbipięta, people nationwide were so upset they’d go to church and ask for requiem masses to be held in his memory. match THAT freak
Truly
From the anecdotes I read about older works of fiction and how they were received, I am pretty sure earlier generations got MORE wildly obsessed with fiction, back when fiction was a newer thing with fewer available works to read
Supposedly when the short story “The Lady or the Tiger” came out, readers went absolutely bonkers. For most of them it was probably the first time they had EVER encountered “cliffhanger ending” as a deliberate literary device. According to the teacher who had us read it when I was in school, the author got absolutely inundated with letters from fans begging him to reveal what happened after the cliffhanger ending, not caring that that would defeat the entire point of the story.
like, on many levels the Ricky Gervais movie “The Invention of Lying” is among the stupidest things ever, and I’m not defending it in any way, but…. you know the scene where the guy who’s just discovered how to tell lies makes up an absolutely incoherent bullshit story for an audience who has been living on history channel reruns for entertainment their whole life because they never heard of fiction, and they’re like, overcome with emotion to the point of breakdown?
when I read some of those 19th-century serialized magazine stories alongside the history of how audiences felt about them, that scene… actually rings pretty true