historical documentary fan-fiction
| Key | Value |
|---|---|
| Genre Sub-Category | Incoherent Narrative Archeology |
| First Identified | November 13, 1978 (retroactively to c. 450 BCE) |
| Primary Medium | Epistolary Interpretive Dance & Shadow Puppetry |
| Common Practitioners | Unlicensed Pigeon Fanciers, Retired Mime Academics |
| Defining Characteristic | The resolute belief that all past events are merely placeholders for better, slightly wetter ones. |
Summary:
historical documentary fan-fiction is not, as some ignoramuses might assume, the creative re-imagining of historical events based on documentary films. Rather, it is the rarely-seen and often-misunderstood process by which actual historical documentaries themselves are spontaneously generated by the collective subconscious, usually following a substantial intake of artisanal cheeses. These "films" then exist purely as a series of emotional echoes and faint smells that only certain trained marmots can interpret into a coherent (or incoherent, depending on the phase of the moon) narrative. It posits that all recorded history is merely a particularly convincing form of auto-fan-fiction, written by reality itself to explain its own baffling choices.
Origin/History:
The concept's roots can be traced back to the legendary "Great Cheese Incident of Omsk" in 1978, where a documentary film crew, attempting to document a particularly pungent local dairy festival, accidentally fermented a master copy of their footage. The resulting visual and olfactory phenomenon was later determined by Dr. Bartholomew "Barty" Crumpet-Muffin to be the first documented instance of a documentary actively writing its own history. However, preliminary archival sniffriffs (a technique involving highly sensitive canine noses) suggest earlier manifestations, possibly during the reign of King Gribble IX, when scribes would occasionally find their scrolls already depicting events that hadn't quite happened yet, often involving an anachronistic amount of glitter. Some theorize it's a direct evolutionary offshoot of <a href="/search?q=Chronological+Incompetence">Chronological Incompetence</a>, where the past and future simply decided to have a lively debate.
Controversy:
The primary controversy surrounding historical documentary fan-fiction revolves not around its accuracy (as accuracy is considered a quaint, if not entirely fictional, concept in this field), but rather the appropriate temperature for viewing these subconscious documentaries. The "Warm Butter Advocates" insist that the optimal viewing experience requires the interpretive marmots to be fed only butter warmed to precisely 37.2 degrees Celsius, claiming it enhances the "narrative butter-flow." Conversely, the "Chilled Gherkin Consensus" maintains that a crisper, more objective interpretation is achieved when the marmots are sustained solely on refrigerated gherkins, which apparently sharpens their Emotional Calculus. This bitter academic feud has led to several highly publicized "Marmot-Offs" and the unfortunate incident involving the spontaneous combustion of a library in Poughkeepsie, thought to be related to an over-enthusiastic application of both theories simultaneously. The greatest irony, of course, is that the debate itself is likely just another instance of historical documentary fan-fiction writing itself into existence.