There’s a line that’s been bouncing around my head ever since I picked up
String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis. Wallace writes with this breathless, analytical intensity about watching players - their movements, their psychology, their impossible skill rendered into language so sharp it almost cuts. And what struck me is: this feels so much like reading fandom meta.
Not just match reports, not just journalism, but long-form meta. You know the kind: 3,000 words on how one player adjusts their stance under pressure, or how their rivalry with another player has this Shakespearean weight to it. The kind of thing that slides between gifsets and headcanons and actual technical breakdowns because all of it feels necessary to capture what you love.
And the thing is - this isn’t new.
In ancient Rome, fans used to carve their favourite charioteer’s name on their gravestone. They literally wanted to be remembered through their fandom. They bought vials of gladiator sweat (no, really) to keep like holy relics. They painted graffiti in stadiums, catalogued stats in painstaking detail, and shouted themselves hoarse for their team colours. The only difference between then and now is the medium: from stone walls to Tumblr dashboards, from sweat vials to match-worn shirts.
What Wallace is doing in String Theory isn’t so different either. His essays are part analysis, part poetry, part love letter to the sport - the same impulses that drive people to write sprawling livejournal posts about Aragorn’s arc in Lord of the Rings or to make 50-slide PowerPoints about why their ship dynamic works. He’s putting language around awe. Around obsession. Around the feeling of watching someone do something unbelievably human and larger-than-human at the same time.
So when I read him going deep on Federer or Michael Joyce, I don’t just see a writer explaining tennis. I see fandom-as-practice. I see continuity: from Roman sweat vials to Wallace’s reverent adjectives to that one gifset you keep reblogging because it perfectly captures the way your fave moves like liquid light across the court.
Sports fandom has always been fandom. And String Theory is just another text in the endless library of people trying to make sense of love and skill and spectacle with whatever tools we have to hand. Sometimes it’s chisels. Sometimes it’s gifs. Sometimes it’s a writer with a dictionary in one hand and an obsession burning in the other.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisbluespirit) wrote2025-08-31 08:26 pm
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic posting up to date, so here's the last one I wrote before summer:
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
