Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote

What Pottermore house are you?  Are you team Edward or Jacob?  What color is your lightsaber? Do you admit that the most pure lady Dulcinea is the most beautiful of all ladies on this Earth, or do you prefer to die by my hand this very instant?  Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart? I challenge you to find the difference between these questions.

In chronicling the adventures of The Knight of the Sad Countenance and his squire, Cervantes seems almost to be describing our modern version of fandom, so little has the human phenomenon changed in 400+ years.  The parallels are striking.  Surely there are in your circle those who obsessively devour all media related to their chosen fantasy world: the fans. And likely you also know those who have allowed their fandom to seep even further into their identities, learn Klingon, dress as Sailor Moon, and get tattoos of the Bat Signal: the cosplayers.

But what Cervantes is most interested in here are the most obsessive of fans, those who actually go out into the world in the guise of a their fantasy persona, The Society for Creative Anachronism, Vampire: the Masquerade, the LARPers.  Cervantes does not mock these characters; his affection for his main character is palpable, and those who view the book as a documentary of madness and futility miss the point entirely.  Don Quixote's break with reality is entirely voluntary, as he is early to point out: "'I know who I am,' replied Don Quixote, 'and I know, too, that I am capable of being not only the characters I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France and all the Nine Worthies as well, for my exploits are far greater than all the deed they have done, all together and each by himself."(54).  Quixote's supposed madness is divinest sense, both through Cervantes' lens, and a reasonable modern one.  Is that which somehow has earned the name "reality" so lovely and magnificent that it would be madness to escape it, or is it quite the other way around?  Is it not more rational to reject nature, red in tooth and claw, and to instead build a true-to-scale TARDIS in your den?  To choose your reality instead of suffering through it?

Which instinct is, of course far more prevalent than one might think at first.  The world is in fact full of LARPers.  Far more than half of all humans are following Don Quixote into the field, even as they vigorously deny it. Unable or unwilling to cope with the desolate waste of reality, they throw themselves into a half-conscious fantasy world created long ago by now dead authors, and have so convinced themselves that they pity those who don't do the same.  We sometimes don't recognize the prevalence of this instinct, because people doing largely don't call it fandom; they call it religion. It is this point that reveals Cervantes' most brilliant, though subtle, observation: the crux of the argument is that when Don Quixote adheres rabidly to the text of his stories, such as "when Carloto left Baldwin wounded on the mountain, a tale familiar to children, not unknown to youth, and even believed by old men, though for all that no truer than the miracles of Mahomet,"  the Don is doing something indistinguishable from religion (53).

It was perfectly safe, of course, for Cervantes to draw a connection between Quixotes' madness and that of the Muslims.  But the Catholics in his book, though they escape such direct comparison, are in no way painted differently from the supposed heathens.  In fact, they suffer from the increased attention, and their irrationally dogged adherence to ancient texts, when placed besides Quixote's, are revealed to be of the same nature.  Cervantes tacit observation is proven true by even casual contact with those ubiquitous LARPers of religion today.  Who is to say that the Bishop's mitre is not in fact a chamberpot that society has agreed not to notice?