Real People Fiction
by Kristina
Caveat: While this essay is supposed to
encompass het and gen real people fiction as well as slash, most of my
personal experience has been with slash as has most discussion I have
encountered. Also, all of these opinions are clearly my own.
History
In their 1992 article "Beatlemania" (Ed. Lisa A. Lewis. The Adoring Audience
[1992]), Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs explore
young female Beatles fans and the erotics and power relations of their
libidinal investment in the band. Beatles fandom lacks the sustained
documentation or the clearly traceable history of such a fandom as Star
Trek; still, anecdotal evidence suggests that many girls wrote stories
featuring themselves and their favorite Beatle or possibly even their
two favorite Beatles together. In many ways, it can be argued that Real
People Fiction (RPF) is much more easily accepted by non-fans than
Fictional People Fiction (FPF), since it mimics fannish behavior shared
by many adolescents--at least for a time (see marythefan).
What teenager hasn't adored a movie, sports, or pop star, hasn't
decorated their room with their pictures and fantasized potential
romantic encounters? It's only a small step from that to writing these
fantasies down, to creating what is, in effect, RPF.
At the same time, however, the trajectory of media fandom coming out of Star Trek
zines and quickly expanding to include a variety of sf/f and cop buddy
shows and, with the rise of the Internet, any conceivable number of
media texts, has long considered the fantasizing about real people
taboo. Most fans entering traditional media fandom before 2000 were
initiated by learning that RPF was not to be done, that the stories
would only feature characters, not actors. Of course, the boundaries
between actors and characters were often fluid; after all, what but the
body of the actor was used as the visual on which to pin fantasies of
the characters? Moreover, as the case of Blake's 7's Paul Darrow showed, even the erotic same-sex portrayal of the characters could upset the actors (see Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women [1992] 35-6) and that, made the taboo all the more important.
The little RPS that appeared often originated from extremely
small fandoms (such as rock band slash like Duran Duran or Metallica
[see, sidewinder]);
likewise, wrestling fic had firmly established its own fandom, separate
and mostly independently from media fandom. In media fandom, there
occurred the simple collapse between actors and their characters, often
importing the actors into the mediaverse or the fictional characters
into our reality in order to bring together both the fictional romantic
pairing as well as their real life counterparts. These collapses of
reality and fictional universe were rare, usually frowned upon in the
fandom at large, and often seemed to be accompanied by conspiracy
theories that posited real life relationships between the actors (for
example, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson of The X-Files or David Boreanaz and Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and rumors actually describe early Shatner/Nimoy stories).
In media fandom, the lines tended to remain clear, however:
while most media lists and archives placed few limitations on violence
and graphic sex, allowing torture, heavy BDSM, and often even underage
and incest, they usually tended to forbid RPS. Looking over several
central archives of bigger slash fandoms before the mainstreaming of
RPF (The X-Files, The Sentinel, Due South, The Phantom Menace, Smallville),
none of them archive actor slash and three of the five prohibited RPS
explicitly in their guidelines (TS’s “852 Prospect,” TPM’s “Jedi Master
and Apprentice,” and the “Smallville Slash Archive”). Moreover,
www.fanfiction.net, the largest and most comprehensive fan fiction
archive which initially allowed various forms of RPF, removed all Real
People Fiction in 2002 (where it previously apparently had prohibited
actorfic but allowed other forms of RPF). As late as 2003, Noy
Thrupkaew--in her otherwise unbiased account of slash for Bitch
magazine--calls RPS slash’s “latest offshoots” and immediately comforts
her readers that “[m]any writers of fictional-people slash, however,
frown on the morally dubious rps genre” (Bitch 20 [2003]).
Things changed around 2001. Early in the year, a number of
multifannish mediafic writers suddenly started writing *NSYNC stories. Puppies in a Box,
one of the early popslash websites, forced many mediafic writers to
confront the issue of RPF, since it was their own friends and fannish
acquaintances moving into the taboo area. At the same time, with the
release and success of the Lord of the Rings movies in December 2001,
fans began to imagine the intense filming experiences and the
relationships between the cast members. Lotrips (LOTR RPS) was born,
often drawing its members from fans not previously exposed to media fic
and its rules or from LOTR fans who often moved effortlessly between
actors and characters. Beyond an increasing influx of new writers who
enter these fandoms through their interest in the actors, singers, or
performers, a large segment of fan fiction writers have migrated from
media to Real People Fiction, in the process erasing some of the moral
prohibition on RPS and eroding the traditional ban on fictionally
playing with real people’s lives.
Since then RPF has expanded everywhere to include everything
and everyone. Whether the 2004 Olympics or the US elections, fan
writers will pair any real person with any other, at times encouraged
by the material (like Britney/Madonna after the 2003 VMA kiss; JohnxJohn", aka Kerry/Edwards; the inseparable and engagement-proof damonaffelck; or Gerard_emmy, the central actors of Phantom of the Opera);
other times less so (like the most recent spread of Ratzinger stories).
RPF has become a new way to comment on world politics and pop cultural
events, often easily crossing the fictional barrier by inserting
fictional characters in "our" world and vice versa.
In other words, RPF is everywhere and the ficced and slashed
objects are often aware and not necessarily upset about it. Franz
Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos, for example, comments "There’s absolutely
nothing wrong with fictionalizing a genuine character as long as you
make it clear that you are fictionalizing" [source]
and Harry Potter actor Chris Rankin answers an interview question about
fanfiction with " Ahh, it's fantastic, I love it all" [source].
Other celebrities have responded in a similar vein, possibly bemused
but none too upset. After all, considering that many of them clearly
are marketed as sexual objects, it begs the question as to whether
there really is such a big difference between more traditional private
fantasies about the celebrity's body or writing and sharing similar fan
fantasies.
Ethical and Legal Objections
With its increased visibility, passionate debates have sprung
up, condemning as well as defending RPF. Detractors usually focus on
moral and ethical objections as they accuse RPF of being: (1) open to
libel in its disrespectful invasion of the celebrity’s privacy; (2)
disgusting in its sharing of one’s (especially sexual) fantasies about
real people; and (3) deeply immoral in its potential to hurt or disturb
the celebrity or—even worse—their friends or families who may not have
chosen the spotlight (see, for example, gloriana, unanon, damned_colonial, lexin, and neadods).
While regularly debated, RPF’s legality is still uncertain. Both RPS
and FPF have a tenuous legal hold (for libel and copyright infringement
respectively) and mostly seem to function in a grey zone. Without a
legal precedent, however, and given the international character of the
internet and the pronounced differences among the legal systems and
procedures of different countries, predicting the outcome of a
potential lawsuit is impossible.
Defenders of RPF counter the privacy and morality claim by
arguing that a celebrity in part gives up his or her right to privacy
as they often expose their private lives to the public. After all, the
more pronounced fandoms tend to gather around celebrities who provide
much canon in forms of extensive media footage. Moreover, RPF questions
the actual reality of celebrities, arguing that rather than
fictionalizing a real person, RPF takes a prefabricated persona and
creates depth and character in its fiction. The issue, then, is not
actually whether pop stars or other celebrities are less “real” than
normal people. Instead, RPF criticizes the way celebrities have become
objects for a public that invades their privacy and expects them to act
in particular ways. One of the central concerns of RPF is the question
of reality, both in the sense of how real events enter and shape the
stories as well as the impact these stories can have on the real lives
of fans.
Unlike much of the tabloid press, which purports to tell the
truth, RPFers consciously declare their writing to be fictional. RPF
writers clearly separate their stories from rumors, even when their
stories are immediate responses to real-life events. At the same time,
however, they refuse to follow the cliché of declaring the public
performances of pop stars a fiction and the band members fake and
fabricated; instead, their stories often reveal deep empathy and
sympathy for the stars they depict. Writing stories about celebrities
often requires immersion in the available material. RPFers, far from
objectifying them, deeply care about the stars and frequently defend
them against accusations of falsity or lack of talent. Rather than
dehumanizing the real people by making them a character in their
fiction, RPF writers re-humanize the personas artificially constructed
for and by the media by giving them inner lives, often making them
question their fame and struggle with their constant visibility.
Rather than reducing celebrities to their favorite color and
animal as many teen magazines do or completely dismissing them as
artificial and unauthentic as most their critics are wont to do, RPF
writers create fully formed, intricate and interesting characters with
flaws and vices, doubts and insecurities. Moreover, I'd argue, they
ultimately extrapolate and create a version of the character they (and
their readers) find attractive; they shape and alter the celebrity to
their own specifications, making him more interesting, intelligent, or
vulnerable, and thus more desirable, identifiable, and available. Often
the characters are more literate, more sensitive, or simply more
self-aware than we might extrapolate from the media portrayal, and the
particular aspects the writer chooses to foreground are indicative of
the personality she wants to create or explore, the characters she want
to understand, care for, maybe even identify with. BettyP describes this as follows:I'm
supposed to admire these children? I'm supposed to *love* them, to
cherish the way that Lance lets his secret boyfriend carry his moppy
little dogs from gig to gig for him, and then votes for the same party
that wants to amend the US Constitution to make sure we don't ever get
around to thinking about maybe giving gay people their civil rights?
But I do, some of the time, love them. While I'm writing
about them, I do, because I write them in a certain way, a little more
thoughtful than they probably are, a little more genuine, a little more
confused. I write them trying harder to get through life than I think
they really are. Even when I'm feeling the Gritty Realism (tm), I
romanticize their problems, their struggles, to give them greater
weight and depth than just some fucking rich kid who's all woe is me,
my life is so hard. I do that because I don't want to read about their
bloated, competitive, soulless, consumptive, defensive little lives. I
want, in one sense or another, a romance, a story about one or another
kind of love. [source]
Fiction, Reality, and Collaborative Fantasy Spaces
For most RPF writers and readers, it is pretty clear that what
we are dealing with is a performance, that the source text from which
we draw is similarly created (albeit by concert footage or interviews
or other media events) to the way movies, books, and TV shows are.
Some, of course, will clearly declare that they are not interested in
the characters and only write their own fantasies, thus creating
something similar to mediafic writers who take the characters (or
simply their bodies) and tell their own stories--canon be damned. Not
only is the canon broader and more contradictory to allow for more
varied portrayals, just like mediafic, writers choose to comply with
canon or not, try to extrapolate character and behavior from the
material provided--or spin their own stories regardless of canon. Almostnever describes such an approach to RPF and suggests that the term casting fic would be more appropriate (kind of like some FPF moves into bodyfic):
I kind of like the idea of calling it "casting"... "casting fiction",
"casting slash". We're not really writing about Orlando, or Viggo or
Ian or Billy or Dom or Elijah. We're casting them in roles in our
stories. We just use their names to evoke the appearance and presence
of the actor we're casting in the story. [source]
The problem I see with such an approach is that it willfully
ignores the ethical issues inherent in RPF by simply ignoring its
reality aspect (however codified or fictionalized they may be). It is
similar to the defense some popslash fans started with by perceiving
boybands as artificially constructed and therefore less "real" than
normal people, so that it would be OK to fictionalize them but not
others. Whether the repeatedly voiced reproach of boy bands’ fakeness
is true or relevant, the bands’ success in large parts relies on their
ability to satisfy clearly defined—and manufactured—desires by enacting
certain roles that may or may not be who they “really” are. This is
where RPF picks up. Acknowledging the artificiality of their
construction, the fanfic writers buy into this construction to a
certain extent at the same time as they try to move beyond it. In other
words, while we have to believe in the media representations, because
they, in effect, constitute canon, we simultaneously want to
extrapolate the persona we are given to create a complex and real human
being beyond the media spectacle. This duality is what RPF thrives on:
the writer and reader must simultaneously believe and disavow the
“reality” presented by the media. In other words, we purposefully 'buy'
the image we are given as real yet, at the same time, are constantly
looking for the gaps in the performance in order to glimpse the 'real'
person underneath.
Most RPFers thus work under a certain cognitive dissonance
where we simultaneously know footage to possibly be false yet have it
be true for the basis of our canon, where we simultaneously deconstruct
this very canon in order to create and "prove" relationships that we
very well know not to be true. Marythefan calls this
fannish space where we collectively agree to pretend to see reality
through our particular lenses all the while knowing that this is not
reality, the "collaborative fantasy space." She describes:
I've
talked about a "transparent veil" that separates fantasy from reality
in SDB fandom [Sparkly Dancing Boys] - it's transparent, but it's still
a veil, and it's tacitly understood to be there by the people who are
playing together. It means there's not the need for constant
disclaimers that "Joey and Lance are SO doing it, and I mean that in a
fantasy, in-my-head way." The default mode of discussion is "through
the veil" and if I'm going to talk about, gun to my head, what I
ACTUALLY think is going on between Joey and Lance, generally I'm going
to explicitly state, somehow, that I've shifted over into talking about
"reality." [source]
While most of us blend the two so that we can sometimes look at a
photo or footage and have a moment where we truly believe that our
stories are, in fact, "the truth," it mostly does not matter, because
we tend to be aware of and enforce for ourselves that separation. There
are fans, however, often in a small yet vocal minority, who are
invested in believing in the truth of the relationship as reality, who
do not separate fiction and reality. They do not regard themselves as
making up stories from the material provided in media footage but
rather believe that they are teasing out and uncovering the truth
underneath the--often purposefully--concealing media coverage. Fans who
believe that the romantic couple really is together, that their
on-screen romance extends off-screen or that their clearly displayed
affection indicates a romantic relationship exist in many fandoms.
Canon and Its Consensual Creation
Most fans, however, assert the fictional status of their
stories; they emphasize the collective fantasy space in which they
operate and agree on a set of assumptions, of "facts," that constitute
the canon for their respective fandoms. Non-RPF fandoms include a
variety of source texts that function to varying degrees as canonical,
from the most limited source of a single or serialized literary text
through TV shows and movies with their clearly defined canon up to
comic books with their varied and competing yet still author-dominated
source texts. In many cases, multiple sources must be accounted for
(such as cut footage, spin off series, tie-in novels, or unfilmed
scripts) that may offer differing or even self-contradictory plot and
characterization. Most TV shows also have a variety of creators, from
writers to directors to actors, who may offer contradictory
interpretations of characters and events. Still, even when we are faced
with competing or even opposing source texts (like Smallville and the
entire DC comicverse), there is still a well-defined source text.
RPS, on the other hand, is constituted by a wealth of
different sources so that its canon must be understood as a loosely
agreed-on set of information. For popslash, for example, it not only
includes the songs, concerts, public appearances, interviews, and print
media, but even more personal experiences (such as concert experiences,
sound check parties, personal photographs,…). As a result, the RPF
writer is constantly faced with an enormous influx of, often
contradictory, material. Fans privilege one appearance over another,
choose one facet from a contradictory field of information, or dismiss
certain facts entirely. Moreover, the very nature of the celebrity
discourse makes it impossible to ever truly believe any public account
(i.e., unlike fictional characters who rarely are shown to purposefully
lie to the audience, any statement by a celebrity is much more suspect:
they could tell the truth or purposefully lie from disinterest or
ignorance, for publicity reasons or to keep their privacy, etc.) As
they try to establish what exactly constitutes the canon, RPF writers
constantly confront questions about how much of any given footage is
authentic, how many candid moments are, in fact, premeditated or
rehearsed, and whether the question of authenticity ultimately matters.
In a way, then, the canon-formation in RPS is a lot like fan fiction in
general (and the fan-created consensus any interpretive fan community
shares): RPS canon tries to fill in the gaps and make the contradictory
information cohere.
This canon formation, this construction of narratives occurs
by juxtaposing and selecting from the “official” material (which may be
as varied as the celebrity’s interviews or publicity statements or any
level of more or less supported rumors) as well as the “personal”
material that enters the canon. After all, as the fan’s personal
experiences are shared with the fan community they become public
property and thereby co-create the canon. It is at that point that a
distinction between canon and fanon does not make any sense in RPF.
Since there exists no true author(ity), no true owner of the source
text, no single canon source can be claimed; as a result, the “canon”
gets created simultaneously by the celebrities, the media, and the fans
alike. In other words, the fans actually help create the source text,
though at that point the lines between facts and interpretation become
ever more fluid. It is important to realize, however, that RPF's source
text and “reality” need not coincide: obviously there are real events
that are not part of the canon because fans are not privy to them;
equally, rumors can easily create parts of the canon even though they
are, in fact, untrue.
Interestingly, looking at this very clear role of the fans
in the creation of the canon allows us to reinvestigate canon creation
in FPF: there, fans also select and dismiss informational pieces, thus
helping to create what is then considered canon. Julad argues
Now, I'd argue from this point that media slash canon is subject to a
similar kind of filtering: it would be impossible for every single
reader and writer of, say, Highlander slash, to have watched every
single HL episode and remembered every detail in them (let alone all
the supplementary HL canon). So HL canon, for all that they're a bunch
of canon freaks *g*, is a rough consensus on what parts of All That Was
Written In Highlander are significant, even if some of the significant
parts are debated and debatable. Again, the parallel to literary
canon-- those of us who are from Certain Theoretical Backgrounds
recognise that literary canon is a product of history, politics,
economics and such, a rough consensus among the literary Powers That Be
(Or Were) on what is (or was) significant. There are some things that
are definitely In and some things that are definitely Maybe In and many
things which never registered as significant (quick, tell me: does
Duncan MacLeod drink apple juice?). I've long argued (though not often
in public) that media slash canon isn't half as clear or absolute as we
pretend it is (and we don't often get the luxury of pretending it's
even remotely clear and absolute). More frequently, I think, we are
satisficing, sticking to the unspoken agreement on what's significant,
which masks just how problematic even media slash canon really is. [source]
Bodies--Virtual, Real, Imaginary
Rather than trying to clearly separate RPF from FPF it might
be useful to use RPF as a test case of at times more clearly
delineating issues that are effectively operating in FPF as well.
Julad's description of fannish canon consensus is one such example;
fans' relationship to the bodies of our objects of affection is
another. The similarities between casting and bodyfic mentioned above
is one such instance, but in general we tend to elide the realities of
the actor's body in FPF while focusing on that actor's sensibilities
when confronting his body in RPF. After all, there is also a
relationship between the real body of the actor and the fictional body
who tends to get quite naked and active in the fic. At the same time,
we co-create the body in what we choose to single out and embellish,
what aspects of the body we foreground and the way we invent the rest.
So both in RPF and FPF we tend to draw from the celebrity/actor's body
in order to create the bodies in our stories (though in mediafic the
character's body is yet another aspect). Is it Chris Keller's tattoo
we're describing or Meloni's? Rosenbaum's hairlessness or Lex's?
Mediafic certainly is more complicated but most writers still use the
actor's body as a point of reference. (The issue is yet again different
in book fandoms where often the written description can jar with
actors' bodies).
One indication that the underlying real person and his body are not utterly irrelevant can be seen in the bleedover effect. describes: The
bleedover effect is what I call it, though the Ewan McGregor effect
would probably be a good name for it, too, since he seems to be behind
at least 50% of the occurrences. It's when elements from other parts an
actor have played bleed over into the fanfic portrayal of character X,
played by that same actor. Because that actor looked so cute doing
whatever as character Y in that other tv series or movie, so he can do
it over here, too! Except over here it's supposed to be character X,
who has nothing in common with character Y except for the actor. I
mean, I don't have an RPF squick (no, really?), but I don't
particularly care for an X/Y hybrid who is pretty much an OMC who looks
like the actor. It fails totally for me both as X fanfic and as Y
fanfic, and as RPF, for that matter. I want warnings! I'm scarred for
life! [source]
In other words, we draw from multiple sources when extrapolating the
fic character from canon--and some of these parts and sources may be
affected by what we know about the actor, his other shows, etc.
So, with characters where we have real bodies that represent
them somewhere, we are always constructing imaginary bodies at the same
time as we go back to the actual real life actor's body. Obviously,
part of the character's body is based on the actor's body and it is
this template that we are undressing; there *is* this connection
between our object of lust and the actual actor where we do fantasize
about a real body (at least in part). So there is a real body which
offers a basis and then there are our fantasies, our embellishments and
alterations. That goes for body and other characteristics. There is
always a remainder and reminder of the real body in the imagined one.
At the same time, we use our fantasies to make the guys become more
appealing to us, readers and writers. I think that happens in behavior
but also in body descriptions. In turn, even though RPF may have a
clearer body blueprint, it still gets altered for the fiction to serve
our fantasies better.
Alternate Universes, Casting Fic, and Playing Roles
With the increased popularity of RPF has also come an
increased interest in RPF AUs (Alternate Universes). Part of this might
be versions of casting fic where the bodies of actors and celebrities
become blueprints to create new and interesting characters with which
to populate one's stories or Role Playing Games (RPGs). Ithiliana
describes the way RPF can indeed move far away from any traditional
(i.e., FPF) sense of canon and still interact with the Real People as
characters:
I think that in some ways at least some
of the RPS I've read and written featuring the actors from LOTR at
times has the actors' performances as characters (past and present) in
it as well. So there's what I want to call a triangulation between the
actors as "real" people and the roles they've created in the past
(certainly in the FPS, a lot of the writers enjoy mixing characters
from the various actors' pasts in some amazing ways). By triangulation,
I mean a character can be based on many/multiple sources of
inspiration: "factual" information about the actors, elements of their
roles/characters as well as their characters in LOTR; and, also, many
fics show the writers' own experiences and knowledge about some element
of the story (easier to write what one knows, fun too). So most writers
(I'd bet) are well aware they're not trying to create the "real"
people. So it's a bummer that the name of the genre has "real people"
in it. And that outsiders get all weirded out by it, some to the point
of what I'd consider a different kind of insanity... [source]
Similarly, many RPGs that use actual celebrities but cast them in
clearly non-canonical settings seem to play with the fluid boundaries
of actor in fictional role; actor in RL role; and fictional character
created by the writer.
At the same time, AUs can also serve a different function,
namely they can validate and focus community-agreed upon canon. Writers
invested in RPF canon do not have the ease of canonical surrounding to
signal to their readers where and who their characters are but instead
must make them recognizable in their new shapes or settings. One way to
signpost the character's ("authentic") identity is with well-known
idiosyncrasies or specific facts well-known within the fan community.
However, since the aspects that make the character recognizable to the
reader are often the very elements that the media uses to create an
easy shorthand, these same characterizations also tend to become
overused and clichéd when they are the only thing connecting the
fictional character to his “real” counterpart. The most successful
approach seems to come about when the writer extrapolates the
character’s underlying identity and which aspects would remain the same
and how. So Justin Timberlake’s tennis shoe collection may not
translate into a past or future scenario, but the underlying obsessive
sorting and collecting tendencies might.
The very act of writing RPF requires the writers to attain
an understanding of the immutable aspects of someone’s character.
Fantastic narratives simply make visible the process all Real People
fan writing must perform: the act of teasing out underlying
characteristics to make the characters recognizable to the readers
while creating a world that is by agreement not the real one is very
much the same. As such, fantastic RPF not only illuminates and
highlights certain aspects of identity construction within the
fictional world, but also ultimately exemplifies the very process and
difficulties of maintaining recognizable characters in fan writing.
Moreover, in condensing a character into his/her central and
thus recognizable parts, writers address issues of identity. In
particular, they investigate how individuals become the persons they
are (i.e., how much any given individual's characteristics are
hardwired and how much his/her identity is created by
surrounding/environment). When juxtaposing two versions of the same
character separated by times or realities, when altering the
character’s body, gender, or species, or when placing the character in
an unfamiliar setting, the writer ultimately explores his or her
reactions and possible changes and implicitly or explicitly compares
this created character to the one we know as "canonical."
LJ, Slashing the Slasher, and Performing Identities
One of the repeated objections most RPFer have encountered is
"What if someone did that to *you*?" Most will not care, of course, and
to some of us it has happened before. At this point, however, the
question becomes crucial as to whether the ficced object wants to or
ought to hear about it, which is why most RPFers draw the line at
confronting celebrities with their fantasies (both of their "real" and
their fictional selves) [see idlerat].
Of course, there is a difference between celebrities in the
public eye and everyday folks. While all of us create a variety of
identities to present to the world, celebrities tend to do so more
clearly. In his study Celebrity
(2001), Chris Rojec argues that "celebrity status always implies a
split between a private and a public self. . . . For the celebrity, the
split . . . is often disturbing" (11). As such, we could argue that
even though celebrities are just like us, their more clearly pronounced
public persona makes them a particularly apt object to address
questions of identity, which is a topic often explored in RPF.
Moreover, in a way the more clearly defined public self is, of course,
all fans ever get to use; the public persona is the entirety of RPF's
canon.
This mostly clear separation between public and private
became very clear in the aftermath of the October '04 discovery of
personal photos of the LOTR cast. The responses clearly indicated the
anxiety among RPF fans about wanting to maintain a separation and the
fears of not doing so. Angstslashhope
wrote an excellent post in which she looked at the various issues that
influenced the debates surrounding these pictures that were just "too
real," that opened up the private selves that RPF may imagine but does
not want to actually encounter. Her post clearly suggested how the
fans' own anxieties about RPF got projected onto the celebrities, how
their own sense of intrusion became a protective gesture for the stars'
privacies:
there probably isn't any direct effect on
the guys of having a bunch of fans see their personal photos. i think
people chose to see it as that, though, because of the way it made
*them* feel to see them - I know that when i was looking at them i was
like "hee, these are great!" but the more i looked the more i could see
they were personal, and that made me uncomfortable. because like a lot
of fans, after following these guys for about 3 years now i feel a
degree of closeness to them (which is, of course, false), and so
there's the warring feelings of glee at being able to get close to
them, and also a kind of shame because you *know* that you're not
really personally close to them, you're just very familiar with the
persona - and whether they feel direct results or not, the people
viewing the photos with that investment feel almost like they're
exploiting the guys who are in a vulnerable position by having these
photos of them - without their personas in play - in a public place. [source]
Moreover, angstslashhope connects issues of public and private selves to us fans as well:And
on top of the public/private issues that come with celebrity,
fictionalising and fanning celebrity, is our own practice and existence
within fandom. Up until quite recently the mini-universe of fandom
existed much like a public sphere within which fans discussed issues of
fanfiction, fanon, canon… basically anything fandom-related, via
mailing lists, message boards, and earlier still - paper zines. With
the massive influx of Livejournal as the community medium for fans to
communicate, suddenly public and private issues are being aired and
discussed in virtually the same forums; even 'friends lock' is creating
micro-public spheres for fans to share aspects of their private life in
a public environment. More conflict arises as we face a similar
public/private split as celebrities face, and yet fans (BNFs included!)
are not figureheads standing out of our reach but people within a
digital arm's reach, who we communicate with regularly, and who can
read what we say about them. [source]
In fact, I would argue that on some level, the way fans interact with
one another closely resembles the way we imagine celebrities.
Obviously, we do not and cannot ever know the true (veridical) self of
any celebrity--in the very process of allowing the media into their
private lives, the 'trueness' gets erased. So all we pretty much have
to go by are the performances we are offered, the footage, the behind
the scenes, etc. Some of that may be real; other parts may be
consciously constructed and performed. We do not and cannot know how
much of what we see is performed and how much is real--all we have is
the public persona. When we write the celebrity, however, we imagine
what the "true" version underneath could look like; in other words, we
create a fictional real self, extrapolated from the public persona we
see. That creation is not quite like the public persona (for one thing,
if we slash him, we certainly have changed his "official" sexual
orientation :-) and he may or may not be like the "real" person
(depending on our ability to extrapolate and just pure chance).
Similarly, I would argue, we ourselves exist on multiple
layers of identity so that a character who is defined by these layers
of hiding and secrecy resonates with us. How many of us are "out" as
slashers? How many are "out" as boyband (or whatever other celebrity)
fans? How much of what we show to others is the "real" us (both in RL
and online)? So it seems to me that much of the fannish online
interaction is a modified version of RPF (mostly clearly visible in
things like lust threads or challenges like ).
In other words, just like there is real!celebrity; performance
public!celebrity, and the extrapolated fictionallyreal!celebrity, there
is real!me, LJ!me, and whatever "real" persona one might extrapolate
from the information, tone, ethos, they have picked up in my LJ. So in
Slashing the Slasher the writer doesn't necessarily take people she
knows in RL and write them getting down and dirty...but takes personas
and expands a fictional universe for them.
And while LJ and fandom offer a particularly perfect version
of these personas, effectively we do this every time we interact. After
all, while an online acquaintance is clearly a fictional product
extrapolated from the source material of her LJ and/or other
interactions, any real person I meet is similarly an extrapolation of
the information she discloses and the face to meet the faces that she
meets, a creation of their (fictionally "real") persona. We all play
roles; we all interact with versions of our interlocutors. So, while
RPF may work particularly well as an identificatory space for online
fannish folks, it seems to move toward a much larger truth about who we
are, who we think we are, how we present ourselves, and how others see
us. |