help, ma, there's real people in my fanfic!

[thebeespatella]

I’m tired of this debate, frankly, of the moral doubt cast on RPF writers, as though what they write is circumscribed by different rules or standards than fandom at large. To begin with, the fiction you write or read is not an arrow on your moral compass. Your behavior is. Apparently, this needs saying in the year of our Lorde 2021. Stop ceding any ground to this argument by leveraging personal squicks as proof that we’re reasonable, thoughtful people, or whatever, because it just reads like blackmail to your friends and followers who might enjoy the content you abhor. The argument that you’re an irredeemable sinner incapable of complex critical thought if you read x or y is prima facie incorrect. The end.

So I get real fucking annoyed when I see the scolding and the finger-wagging, “But you have to remember to respect people’s boundaries!!” directed specifically at RPF writers, as though they’re a group of compulsive flashers who just can’t help whipping open their digital trenchcoats at unsuspecting celebrities.

This scolding seems specially reserved for RPF authors when really, not respecting boundaries is just bad behavior. If someone asks an inappropriate question of an actor at a con, we don’t sit around and debate whether cons are okay. That person behaved badly. The main offenders of showing RPF to public figures are, largely, journalists who get a kick out of embarrassing their interview subjects at the expense of some writer’s innocuous hobby. Fandom etiquette is broadly applicable to all fandoms, and when someone breaches the protocol, it’s the fault of the individual, not the fault of the medium. (There’s a tendency to frame individual faults as big questions of “discourse’ rather than asking for accountability, but that’s another topic).

Another point I see thrown around is something along the lines of, “But what if they find it?”

If they find it: Well, then, that might be embarrassing, especially if they choose to make it public, but that’s not a moral failing on the part of the writer. The public figure went looking for it on their own steam, same as, presumably, they could search their own names on Twitter, go through their mentions, and turn up thousands of thirst Tweets, which are not overlaid with the soft patina of fiction. Just unfettered horniness without narrative except raw want. Not that there’s anything wrong with a thirst Tweet. Buzzfeed’s made it a whole video series to have actors read thirst tweets about them out loud. They make money off it. So if your problem is access, I have bad news for you. Also, if you can't handle being embarrassed, I have even worse news for you, generally.

And hardly anyone chooses a life as a public figure by accident. Whether you become a public figure is up to the discretion of the fates, but choosing a career where that is possible is a choice. The term “public figure” isn’t an accident here, either. It’s a legal term with specific protections around what you can do and say about the person. (Limited purpose public figures are different in terms of the choice they have in the matter or publicity, but not in the choices they make online to seek out specific material).

Some creators choose to read fic of their own books or TV shows. That’s their choice. Public figures have a choice, too. And we have long held that a creator not wanting fanwork made of their IP is not enough reason to stop making it. See: Anne Rice. We have often used fanwork as a way to subvert a creator’s politics. We write satire and fictionalized accounts of real people’s lives all the time as a way to contend with real-life events. If a public figure says that fic about them makes them uncomfortable, that is up for the individual writer to adjudicate for themselves, and, as a personal opinion it is necessarily subjective. Ultimately, the public figure can only control whether or not they see this content, and that consent does remain a collaborative responsibility. You are not harassing someone or forcing them to participate in a subculture they want no part of if you write fic about them. It’s not a moral abrogation to continue to write it; you breach our collective pact when you show it to them.

In any case, from my own experience, RPF communities tend to be closely guarded; friend-locked on LiveJournal, locked on ao3. Yes, of course, there are bad actors. I’ve seen the tinhatters, the red-stringers, the absurd scrutiny of Instagram posts to see if an actor’s wife seems “distant” as evidence the ship is canon. Those people are not writing RPF. They are more akin to tabloid headlines promising some hot gossip in an imaginary land where multi-million dollar divorces roam free across the plains, devouring helpless actors in their wake. (People also publish bad-faith stories about people they know in real life with the sole intent to hurt them, discredit them, and malign their character. I would point out that these stories are using the veneer of fiction in order to perpetrate a malicious agenda, and while such stories could plausibly fall under a very large umbrella of “real person fiction,” they’re not what is being discussed at large. They also happen to fall under the umbrella of “harassment,” which is bad behavior.)

But it isn’t enough to dismiss this group of people wholesale. “What’s the difference” is a reasonable question. What is the difference between tinhatters and RPF writers picking apart an interview to look for details in the dynamic between the actors in their ship, canonizing interview moments, squeeing over the way they talk to each other? It can look similar, especially in a community format, talking to your fellow shippers about how “it’s so cute when…” or “omg the sexual tension!!” or “is this what date night is like?”.

The way to parse between the two is the end goal. An RPF writer’s end goal is primarily to create fiction. (I don’t know what the tinhatters’ end goal is, honestly). In community, of course, writers discuss the same things they would for other fiction: character dynamics, moments in canon, what it must have felt like when X or Y happened, even theories about what really happened at that moment in the character’s career.

There might be some overlap in that Venn diagram in discussions between RPF writers and tinhatters, sure, but I return to the point about bad behavior—there are no hard and fast rules, but, like Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it, and we can treat it as such. There’s a difference between publishing a fic on ao3 and tagging the actors into your Twitter thread about how they’re secretly fucking. There are some bright lines, and when they grow dimmer, people will disagree. That’s okay. Of course there will be edge cases, as with literally anything that necessitates delineation. That’s the nature of...things. I don’t know how else to explain it to you. But the spectrum of good behavior and bad behavior has two clear ends, and the existence of bad behavior in and of itself is not a reason to scrap the entire project. If that were the case we should set fire to fandom as a whole and dance while it burns.

The keyword here is “character.” Because here’s the thing: the third letter in the initialism is “fiction.” RPF writers are carrying a fictionalized version of these real people in their heads; furthermore, we’re aware of the distance between person and persona. Nobody believes that people exist in their nuanced entirety in interviews, or TV, or music videos. That’s the space where fiction lives.

As with other fanfiction, the joy is in imagining places left untouched by the “canon”; in building a place just for you, and sharing it with other people. The pleasure of telling canon “no”; the pleasure of asking it for more. That the bones of this architecture are predicated and aligned with the details a celebrity chooses to share with the public is of no object, because it’s fiction. Writing requires an ability to tell the signal from the noise, or, an ability to track a trajectory; to take magnetic moments and spin them out into a full-length story, from 1K PWPs to 100K omegaverse AUs. It resides in the framework of fiction.

Whether or not you respect this enterprise is irrelevant to its right to exist. As long as we pass through the hallway of narrative and construction on our way to this place, it has no bearing on these public figures’ lives any more than it would on fictional characters.

TL;DR, some shit might squick you but it’s not a moral failing, and it’s not your job to scold people who participate in it. Who defunded and made you the police? Mind your own fucking business and keep your busybody bullshit to yourself.

Comments

[mresundance]

Brava! Well said!

[thebeespatella]

Thank you, I appreciate it!

[road_rhythm]

Yes, of course, there are bad actors. I’ve seen the tinhatters, the red-stringers, the absurd scrutiny of Instagram posts to see if an actor’s wife seems “distant” as evidence the ship is canon. Those people are not writing RPF. They are more akin to tabloid headlines promising some hot gossip in an imaginary land where multi-million dollar divorces roam free across the plains, devouring helpless actors in their wake.

Tinhatters always get dredged up in arguments about RPF, as if breathtakingly poor boundaries around idols were a phenomenon that started with the first Larry PWP.

[thebeespatella]

Right, poor boundaries around celebrities have been around...forever! Of course there's probably overlap, the same way there are overlaps between a multitude of fandom communities.

[tei]

*applauds*

And actually-- I think an understanding of the basic reality that this post delineates is kind of necessary for having any of the stickier conversations about fan/creator interactions and boundaries. Because it seems like a lot of people who previously had never been involved in RPF drama, and respect its right to exist etc, were suddenly thrust into a "but wait, something Bad is happening here and we need to fix it!" moment by the way the boundaries are blurring on web 2.0-- both the boundaries between fans and creators, and the boundaries between public figures and not public figures.

I think it's reasonable, when a sixteen year old youtuber says "don't write porn about me," as a member of a fannish community, to sit up and ask "yikes, what the fuck is going on here?" (Probably relevant to this particular example: he specifically referenced "on the twitter or whatever," which seems to indicate that by and large things posted on AO3, often archive-locked and intentionally without relationship or character tags, are the modern equivalent of a locked LJ community and are basically functioning correctly as such.) But unless you've actually thought deeply about what RPF is, and what boundaries are and how to "enforce" them within a community (and the extent to which you can and can't enforce them, viz, sometimes someone is just going to post something real inappropriate on twitter and tag the person it's about, and you cannot show up at their house and confiscate their computer, unfortunately) then "well, everyone should just stop writing it and then we won't have this problem" might seem like a possible solution. It's not, of course, even if people stopped writing RPF, or stopped writing underage RPF, or stopped writing kinky RPF, or stopped writing RPF with ~unhealthy~ relationships portrayed, fans with no concept of boundary would still exist, and would still find ways to violate the boundaries of the objects of their affections. The material they choose to do it with is immaterial.

But I think it is worth having a conversation about the new landscape of RPF-- that fandom spaces are no longer entirely on separate platforms from non-fandom spaces, and that sometimes people do, I think, become "public figures"-- for a very debatable definition of "public figure" more or less by accident, because I'm not convinced that "putting a thing on the internet" is always an invitation or an expectation to become a public figure in the sense that the legal definition means, and some of the new RPF fandoms are of people who could, arguably, fall into the "limited" category or even no category of public figure at all. I think these things are worth thinking about: Is a youtube creator a public figure? At what point do they become one? If you're a high schooler and a classmate you dislike decides to try to become an influencer, does that make them a public figure even if they're not doing a very good job of it, and therefore fair game to write fanfiction that casts them in an unflattering light?

I don't think these are questions that someone has to have resolved in their minds in order to write RPF, because they're simply not relevant for the vast majority of writers who just want to write the thing and share it with a small group of people who might enjoy it. But I do think that everything you've written here is a prerequisite for anyone who wants to, or feels compelled to, do thinking or ~disk horse~ about any of the edge cases of RPF fandom.

[thebeespatella]

Love the formal citation of "on the twitter or whatever" haha.

There are legal scholars who like to scoff at international law because there's no enforcement, so how could it be "real" law? And the answer is that norms serve the interests of a large community with differing incentives fairly well. And as goes international law, so goes fandom, as the old saying goes. Of course norms can only go so far, but barring a fandom SWAT team coming down your chimney to slap a YA BANNED sticker on your forehead and rip out your router...this is what we have. And what I found difficult to stomach was the leap from "huh, this is kind of a shitty thing to do" to "so should we just bin the whole thing?" baby and the bathwater conclusion of action—because that could become a new community norm. Something I didn't address explicitly in the spiel was what I see as a clear differentiation between fan culture and "stan" culture, or, being interested in the work someone does and being interested in the person themselves as an object of fandom. Thirst tweets and the like can blur the line, and sometimes that Venn diagram feels like a circle, but I think it's an important distinction when it comes to RPF. People come to RPF for as many and as varied reasons as they do to other fanfiction, and it does us all a disservice to lump it all together.

I set out here to clarify some common misconceptions about the framework that RPF writers work from, in an attempt to make it so that reasonable people who can agree on facts can have a springboard from which to have discussions about more complex edge(lord) cases. Because on one hand—right. Does a viral tiktok or youtube video mean you're now a "public figure?" We can't parse intent to harbor fame (and therefore consent) as clearly now as we could before. On the other hand, social media has become a viable career for a young adult; I read somewhere that in the UK it's the 2nd or 3rd most-desired career among teenagers. Which. Whatever, I'm 90 inside, we knew that. But in your test case: when does RPF become harassment? Are these edge cases a cost we are willing to swallow in favor of the broader aims of making fanwork? These are complex questions! And you're right that I don't want to foreclose ethically nuanced conversations with this essay. By their very nature, individual fanworks will skew closer to accepted norms of behavior on both ends of the spectrum, and as our media and fandom landscape evolves, so should our conversations.

[tei]

But in your test case: when does RPF become harassment? Are these edge cases a cost we are willing to swallow in favor of the broader aims of making fanwork?

And to be clear, AFAIK (which is, hopefully, relatively far, at least as it relates to current enforceable policy!) the AO3's answer (which is if not the only relevant answer, at least a very significant one, since that's where most of the stuff intended to be or be understood as RPF gets posted) is "no"; there is no edge case we're willing to accept as being harassment just by existing. You can post "stacy the fake influencer from my math class is a slut who slept with the whole football team: the fanfiction" and-- well, I'm sure we'd have lots of discussions and arguments about it, and nobody would be happy about it, but as long as it's a) a fanwork and b) not targeted towards another archive user, that would probably be fine. (According to my personal perceptions of this made-up case, not speaking as a representative of the OTW, and all that jazz.)

So I think the discussions of the edge cases also have to come with the understanding that what there is to talk about here is standards within the community, and how we talk to and treat each other, and what we expect from each other, and what happens interpersonally when those expectations are broken. Because the consequence is no longer, and never again will be, "you won't have a protected venue to post this." Which makes it more complicated, in a way! It would be tidy if we could outsource out moral preferences to the terms of service of the place where we put our work. Except of course that wouldn't actually be tidy, that would be terrible, so we have to come up with some other way of perceiving the stakes of the conversation.

[stoopit]

i think the concept of the "persona" has become lost on people, especially in the social media landscape we're living in today. celebrities are now more connected to their fans than ever before and the resulting parasocial relationships are becoming a real problem as the divide between creator/fan grows more and more murky. as a marketing tactic it's brilliant, but it ultimately comes at the cost of the creator - and from my experience, they don't seem to realize it until it's too late.

i've always thought it strange that people like to stand on their soapbox about rpf and wax poetic about how not okay it is as if those who participate in rpf fandom is rubbing it in their faces. you're totally right that these communities are often insular and self-aware. i haven't dipped my toe in rpf in such a long time, but i do remember it being hush-hush and relegated to its own separate spaces as to be respectful of the celebrities/whoever in question. rpf content creators very much do not want their content to reach whoever it is they're writing about.

it makes me wonder if these people are familiar with the idea of love contracts between celebrities?

[thebeespatella]

For sure, and I think the increasingly parasocial nature of fandom and fandom activities is a contributing factor to a rise in "stan" culture, tinhatters, and the like—and, therefore, a pushback, an insistence on setting boundaries and norms around reasonable expectations of privacy. My issue is definitely the conflation between the two, and the assumption that RPF writers revel in violating these expectations for fun, essentially. (Not that you said that they do! Just on my own soapbox here, haha).

It's been over a decade since I actively participated in an RPF fandom, and I've never been in a fandom since that had such uniformly-followed, clear-cut expectations and norms for behavior. So much has changed, including, as you mentioned, our access to celebrities through social media, and the temptation to violate that boundary is always dangling over our heads. It's so much easier to make that choice to send someone you admire your fic or your art, and for that reason I think it's important to distinguish between what is run-of-the-mill fandom activity and bad behavior. It won't always be clear! There's plenty of stuff that happens on twitter (people @'ing creators to confirm that their headcanon is "right," for instance) that baffle my fandom sensibilities constantly. But it's essential to parse the question, "Am I just uncomfortable, or is this actually wrong?" in order to co-exist as fans.

[stoopit]

absolutely agree! it speaks to a problem with fandom at large, the lack of nuance when it comes to fiction and what is or isn't considered "okay" - and how to approach tackling the problem if it isn't. like you, i feel there are distinct differences between fan culture and stan culture, but these groups often overlap as the culture continues to evolve. it really doesn't help that fandom has migrated from community-based forums to sites like twitter that run off of numbers and are designed to let everyone see Everything. it makes it pretty much impossible to draw hard lines. no matter how hard you try to mitigate it, someone will get exposed to something they didn't want to see.

of course, you do have some level of freedom when it comes to accessibility, but it often comes at the cost of exposure and makes it more difficult for the people who want to be there to actually be there. (also, twitter's tagging system in general is a joke. it's so hard finding content there to begin with. moving to it was a Mistake.)

unfortunately the more new blood that comes in and learns about fandom etiquette through these platforms, the more we'll see this kind of mentality normalized. but the problem too is that how do we decide what is and isn't okay? on who's authority makes that decision? what offends one person might not be a big deal to another. should we stop doing things based off of the potential it could hurt someone? should we quantify hurt to allow for certain things to fly but not others?

i'm not sure there's a clear-cut answer here, but it's a necessary conversation to have nonetheless - and one that people should really start taking in good faith rather than usual shit flinging. (but that's just been my experience. good faith arguments, especially on twitter, are uh. rare form.)