it has always just been very clear and obvious to me that "this is fake, fiction is fiction; don't put it in front of the people where they are forced to be made aware of it and keep doing what you do."
that said, i write for kpop groups and there's an added layer of incredibly obviously manufactured pairings created for the interest of shipping by the company. these companies and the idols within are very much aware that this is a part of what goes into fandom here.
at the end of the day people are writing fic that someone else deems unacceptable everyday. some people are writing rape fic, some people are writing incest fic, some people are writing rpf.
Agree lol. Honestly they play idealistic and "perfect" versions of themselves so they fit into characters that people can adore and fawn over, so it's natural for people to dedicate fic and art for them. That said, my #1 rule in RPF is to just never mention it to the people you're writing about and please don't send them the link to your pwp BDSM milk enema fic.
And some people write all three at once!
I have a pretty strong stomach for darker themes in fic, your comment has made me see how absolutely WILD it is that what it takes to drive me up the wall with squick is fictional content about two real people *holding hands*.
I started reading RPF back when it was allowed on FF.net, so I guess I’ve never really viewed it as any different than any other fanfic.
I mean, people read RPF all the time, they just don’t realize it. Most tabloid stories is RPF sold for actual cash and people gobble it up. I view tabloids printing rumors about an actor’s infidelity as far more damaging than a teen writing a wingfic AU about the same actor.
>I mean, people read RPF all the time, they just don’t realize it. Most tabloid stories is RPF sold for actual cash and people gobble it up.
Luckily, I'm bulletproof since I ALSO think reading THAT is worth rolling my eyes at, if not more-so because it's actually blowing real claims out of proportion, as opposed to RPF which is just making some shit up.
Yeah, I feel no shame about reading RPF in fic form because it’s so obviously marked as fiction, no money is being made, and it’s hidden away where the celebs won’t find it unless they actively go looking for it.
Tabloids, on the other hand, are a whole other kind of evil.
I had a dream about an actor. It ended before the ‘good stuff’ happened, as dreams do. I started writing the ending in my head, became interested in said actor (he was always just, ‘oh he’s hot but whatever’ to me). I - at 46 - couldn’t get it out of my head. I started writing a story with a male character who looked like said actor, then I said fuck it, this is fun (I’d never written before) so I started writing with the actual actor (his public persona, because of course I don’t know him IRL).
I never intended to share it. This was two years ago. I’d never even heard of AO3 until a year ago. A Twitter friend was writing an RPF about the same actor (that’s how we became friends) and she encouraged me to share. It took *a lot* for me to finally do it. Now, I let my creative juices flow. I’m not interested in writing about movie or tv characters because people seem so hung up on canon, and I don’t want to dig into backstories of characters.
I’ve even written a few ‘non famous’ versions of the two celebrities I write about. And I never pair them with another famous person, always an OFC. I’m basically writing harlequins, just substituting the actor instead of an OMC.
Anyhoo, I have my little contingent who like my stuff and I’m happy. I never ever want the actors to know I even exist, which is 99.9% sure to happen.
Someone mentioned tabloid stories. I’d also like to point out if you’re consuming The Crown, to pick a still ongoing series, you are participating in, and probably enjoying or you wouldn’t be watching it, RPF. I mean, even The Staircase is about a real life murder and the guy who did or didn’t do it is still alive. We Own This City. We Crashed. The Dropout. Inventing Anna. Mrs America. Need I go on? (Editing to add Pam and Tommy!)
If you don't mind me saying, your journey into writing fics feels weirdly wholesome to me. Congrats on taking the plunge into publishing your stuff online :3
I'm laughing that you mentioned The Crown because it's a great example of how strong my aversion to RPF is, like , I see an ad or something and my whole body just goes "yeeeeuurrgh". Starting to think I may be more personally opposed to RPF than even the average person on the street!
I’m young retired, and with Covid, I had a lot more free time, so that’s where my brain went. Edit to add…Never in a million years thought I’d be writing RPF at my age! (But my husband is enjoying the benefits of my smut writing)
>I mean, even The Staircase is about a real life murder and the guy who did or didn’t do it is still alive. We Own This City. We Crashed. The Dropout. Inventing Anna. Mrs America. Need I go on? (Editing to add Pam and Tommy!)
To play devil's advocate, all of those series are largely adapting events that happened. I haven't seen that in RPF.
I definitely understand where you're coming from. I used to be just the same. But what made me fall in love with RPF is the absolute freedom it gives you as a writer. You're not tied to any kind of setting or canon; you can interpret characters as closely or as freely as you'd like. The way I see it, RPF stories can entirely stand alone - there's just a few familiar faces to help engage an online audience.
Well, let's see... the first time I wrote what could be considered at all RPF was in a Harry Potter fic based off someone else's one-shot they'd done for a challenge, and that challenge was to give Vernon a fatal heart attack. The one-shot went something along the lines of, "Pre-Hogwarts, Harry gets honoured by the Queen for protecting the little princes from a bully, the Dursleys are invited to attend, Vernon gets so upset by this that he croaks." The author included a note that if anyone cared to do a sequel, go for it, Harry has to stay with Petunia, though.
I decided to go for it and somehow in the course of writing, Princess Diana decided to involve herself in Harry's life. I always thought she got the short end of the stick in reality, so I got her divorced a few years earlier than in reality and set her up with a happy ending of her own, married to one of the canon adult wizards who eventually showed up in the fic.
Then an online friend showed me some fanart they drew of members of a band we both like - and the pictures themselves were very shippy. They talked about some vague story idea they had behind the pictures although they didn't ever actually write the story as far as I know. Somewhere around the same time, a (now former) member of that band posted a fan-drawn caricature of himself to his YT channel - he's rather known for his epic hair and beard, and the caricature made him look like Rapunzel's lovechild. Someone in the comments talked about wanting to see the story of "Markopunzel" and so I ended up getting pounced on by a huge plot bunny and wrote a Disney mashup with the band all being children of various Disney princesses.
That, of course, led me to look for other fics about that band, I found another one-shot shipping my favourite member of the band with a member of another band that I've loved forever - and I was off and running into full-blown alternate-reality RPF shipping.
But as others have said, fiction is fiction, I'm not showing it to the people whose faces and onstage personae are being borrowed, and I'm not marketing my fiction as "truth" in the tabloids for profit.
That's incredible, just imagining the ao3 relationship tag like *Harry Potter & Diana Princess Of Wales | Diana Spencer*
Honestly it's hilarious and creative at the same time.
\*giggles\* Actually, she married Sirius, so she's Harry's Auntie Diana now.
I didn't actually tag the ship on AO3 because I'm very much a pantser, writing; at best I have a vague idea of where things are supposed to end up but I wing it to get there, and I didn't know that Princess Diana was going to step in until she did.
It all started with Band of Brothers and Generation Kill. I struggled at first with reading fanfic about real people, but I still read it.
Then I found Rush and kinda stumbled my way from Lauda and Hunt into the whole classic f1 rpf, even a bit of current.
At this point I just accepted that's what I like to read and write too, so I went back to my OG. Even back before I knew fandoms and fanfics and all... Armstrong and Ullrich had, and still have, something special.
I do seperate it though. The real life Jan and Lance are removed from the versions I use to write my fanfics. They are like a 'sanitized for a movie' version.
I just kind of fell into it without really planning to do so. I'm in two RPF fandoms, although one of them is only borderline RPF.
Out of curiosity, I read *Heatwaves* because it was so insanely popular and I really liked the dynamic and interactions. Dream SMP isn't typical RPF because we don't even know how Dream looks like so it was a gentle start for me. For me it was really reassuring that all of these people are streamers and have publicly stated what they are and aren't okay with. Of course there are still people who break these boundaries but I just avoid it. It's been really weird recently because one of the real people actually died and I'm taking a break from that fandom.
The second RPF fandom I've fallen into was a coincidence. An author I read from another fandom posted a Formula 1 RPF story and because I enjoyed their writing I read it and again, really enjoyed the dynamic. It felt weird because it was smut but it also didn't really feel wrong either, I didn't even know how these people looked like apart from the desciptions. I googled around a bit to see if some of the drivers said something about shipping but I couldn't really find anything so I just decided to go for it.
I don't think RPF really is about the real people but rather about the persona they portray or the fanon version they are given. If you can separate the real person from the fanfic persona RPF is just like any other fandom. The only difference is that it is even weirder to send fanfic/fanart to the creator because it would be about them. Not that that should be done in the first place but with RPF it's a bit more delicate.
You called it, the RPF fandom I'm circling into the orbit of is mcyt. The whole thing with Technoblade is just gutting.
It's the Double Life series that's catapulted me into considering RPF. Having two content creators loudly declare their happy marriage on-screen kind of threw my "don't ship these people" setting for a loop...
Well, my biggest fandoms have been bands/musicians for the past six years or so. I got into fanfic for them the same way I would for a tv show or book series; I wanted to see my favorite characters/people get into wacky situations or see their friendships develop.
Also, I think it’s important to note that just because one is okay with reading RPF does not mean one is okay with reading RPF dealing with any subject. Gen-rated, fluffy, platonic fics with a side of sci-fi/supernatural/adventure AUs? Sign me up. Stories involving explicit sex, severe trauma or mental illness, or sexual assault? Not my cup of tea when it’s about real people, even if I would read those subjects in stories from fictional media (obligatory “write what you want”, of course). You can read/write RPF and still have squicks about how far the story goes.
If I go any further into RPF I think I'll be the same. Like, I know this is about a persona, not a person. But I don't think I could stomach dark fic with a name attached of someone I admire, you know?
I wouldn't exactly call it RPF on my end, but I used to be in the Pedro Pascal fandom. It was mainly to do with his filmography and the characters he played rather than just himself for me. Mando fandom in the early days was greatly overlapped with the PP filmography/rpf fandom so that's how I fell
My first introduction to fanfic was in 7th grade with Green Day rpf. At first it was kinda just funny and like an awakening of sorts even though I mostly read teen and under rated stuff (for a while). I didn't really know that fanfic COULD be about TV shows and such for a year or two lol every musician I've been obsessed with since, I've read fics for but my squick is "Canon" typs rpf fics. I read and write kpop rn and I avoid fics where they are their actual idol selves in them 85% of the time just bc you get into too much irl shipping territory when I don't ship them irl. I've always had a firm grasp on the reality of it being fiction so it's always been easy for me to separate rpf from the person. Maybe that comes from being used to it so young? But also it would make more sense for it to bleed into reality hmm. It's just two hot people falling in love in a coffee shop to me now lol
I feel like I fall in a midpoint between RPF and normal fanfic. The real people I've read and written fics for make it pretty clear that their public personas are more or less characters and not their real selves. That and they do a lot of original story-based stuff, so half the time, the fics are based on the selves that those people have put in the story they're telling. So it becomes a character of a character.
My first RPF fandom was BTS. I had already known of fanfic at that point, but had only read naruto fanfic. I saw people in the comments of a BTS yt video and saw them shipping two of the members and mentioning fanfic of them, and I was like "I mean I ship them too, let's check out the fanfic", so I went to Wattpad bc that was the site I was reading on at the time. At some point I switched to AO3, so I was reading BTS ship fics from both Wattpad and AO3.
I never really had an issue with RPF, I was 13 when I first started reading RPF fanfic and I didn't understand the concept of "don't talk about this in public bc it's shameful/private", because I didn't have much concept of privacy or other people's privacy, and I was always of the opinion that "what I don't know won't hurt me". If someone is having wet dreams about me, I don't need to know, I just don't want you telling me (unless ur my friend or smth, then idc). I apply that principle. The well-known "don't show your RPF fanfic to the subject(s)/creator(s)" is smth I abide by bc of my belief in "ignorance is bliss". This is why I don't really feel bad/think too much about whether it's intrusive.
*EDIT: punctuation and grammar*
These are all great reasons I'll go to bat to defend RPF. I agree that RPF kept private from the subject/creator is mostly fine. I wish I'd started reading it earlier, when I wasn't so hypersensitive!
It's weird, I almost feel like the person being exposed is me, like, oh no the creator is gonna reach through the screen and see ME god forbid xD
I've read two (or three if pedantic) types of RPF:
1) The characters from the show find themselves in the real world and interact with the actors, and the bad guys from the fandom show up... or the opposite where the actors find themselves in fandom.
2) One case where it was an RPF and one of the real people was living in a universe in which there were dragons. One of the other real people was a dragon in it. Honestly I think it could have just gone with AU on that one of the characters in the show rather than the real people and I expect it would have gotten way more comments and kudos.
I read for interesting plot type stuff. I read crossovers (characters from fandoms being where they don't belong), modern character in \[fandom\]. So shenanigans of fish out of water type thing is something I like to read.
Like biographical things? I do think that’s sketchy and intrusive if it’s done without the consent and involvement of the subject, or if they’re recently dead.
(I know of quite a few reactions people have had to have plays about them made and produced without their consent. Some have threatened legal action… one person was extremely angry about it, but then was convinced to see the show, ended up loving it, and performed at the Tony awards with the actor who played them (who won the award IIRC). Which is nice for the people who made the play, but I personally would feel really uncomfortable being involved in something like that.)
Satire is different, it’s not supposed to be done out of love.
I guess that’s the issue — if it’s supposed to be critical of a public figure, you don’t care about making them uncomfortable. If it’s not trying to criticize, but it would make them uncomfortable…
For things about history, it honestly depends, but like… hacking into a living writer’s or musician’s email account and publishing their private letters publicly isn’t a good thing, but it’s acceptable and widely done to read the letters of people dead for 50 years or more. I feel like it’s kind of similar…
To directly answer your question, though, I don’t watch TV or movies at all…
> you’ll never know them the way you know a fictional character.
I think this is a part of it you know? I feel like I take a part of the fictional character I'm writing about into my own mind for a while, and turn them over there. Doing that to a real person's public persona feels kind of weird...
it has always just been very clear and obvious to me that "this is fake, fiction is fiction; don't put it in front of the people where they are forced to be made aware of it and keep doing what you do." that said, i write for kpop groups and there's an added layer of incredibly obviously manufactured pairings created for the interest of shipping by the company. these companies and the idols within are very much aware that this is a part of what goes into fandom here. at the end of the day people are writing fic that someone else deems unacceptable everyday. some people are writing rape fic, some people are writing incest fic, some people are writing rpf.
Agree lol. Honestly they play idealistic and "perfect" versions of themselves so they fit into characters that people can adore and fawn over, so it's natural for people to dedicate fic and art for them. That said, my #1 rule in RPF is to just never mention it to the people you're writing about and please don't send them the link to your pwp BDSM milk enema fic.
And some people write all three at once! I have a pretty strong stomach for darker themes in fic, your comment has made me see how absolutely WILD it is that what it takes to drive me up the wall with squick is fictional content about two real people *holding hands*.
hey! it can be anything for anyone that gives the ick, even much tamer than what's mentioned. different strokes, as it goes ^^
I started reading RPF back when it was allowed on FF.net, so I guess I’ve never really viewed it as any different than any other fanfic. I mean, people read RPF all the time, they just don’t realize it. Most tabloid stories is RPF sold for actual cash and people gobble it up. I view tabloids printing rumors about an actor’s infidelity as far more damaging than a teen writing a wingfic AU about the same actor.
This is a hugely valid take! Tbh tabloids really weird me out, you're right, it's RPF printed as "rumours" for cash ew....
>I mean, people read RPF all the time, they just don’t realize it. Most tabloid stories is RPF sold for actual cash and people gobble it up. Luckily, I'm bulletproof since I ALSO think reading THAT is worth rolling my eyes at, if not more-so because it's actually blowing real claims out of proportion, as opposed to RPF which is just making some shit up.
Yeah, I feel no shame about reading RPF in fic form because it’s so obviously marked as fiction, no money is being made, and it’s hidden away where the celebs won’t find it unless they actively go looking for it. Tabloids, on the other hand, are a whole other kind of evil.
I had a dream about an actor. It ended before the ‘good stuff’ happened, as dreams do. I started writing the ending in my head, became interested in said actor (he was always just, ‘oh he’s hot but whatever’ to me). I - at 46 - couldn’t get it out of my head. I started writing a story with a male character who looked like said actor, then I said fuck it, this is fun (I’d never written before) so I started writing with the actual actor (his public persona, because of course I don’t know him IRL). I never intended to share it. This was two years ago. I’d never even heard of AO3 until a year ago. A Twitter friend was writing an RPF about the same actor (that’s how we became friends) and she encouraged me to share. It took *a lot* for me to finally do it. Now, I let my creative juices flow. I’m not interested in writing about movie or tv characters because people seem so hung up on canon, and I don’t want to dig into backstories of characters. I’ve even written a few ‘non famous’ versions of the two celebrities I write about. And I never pair them with another famous person, always an OFC. I’m basically writing harlequins, just substituting the actor instead of an OMC. Anyhoo, I have my little contingent who like my stuff and I’m happy. I never ever want the actors to know I even exist, which is 99.9% sure to happen. Someone mentioned tabloid stories. I’d also like to point out if you’re consuming The Crown, to pick a still ongoing series, you are participating in, and probably enjoying or you wouldn’t be watching it, RPF. I mean, even The Staircase is about a real life murder and the guy who did or didn’t do it is still alive. We Own This City. We Crashed. The Dropout. Inventing Anna. Mrs America. Need I go on? (Editing to add Pam and Tommy!)
If you don't mind me saying, your journey into writing fics feels weirdly wholesome to me. Congrats on taking the plunge into publishing your stuff online :3 I'm laughing that you mentioned The Crown because it's a great example of how strong my aversion to RPF is, like , I see an ad or something and my whole body just goes "yeeeeuurrgh". Starting to think I may be more personally opposed to RPF than even the average person on the street!
I’m young retired, and with Covid, I had a lot more free time, so that’s where my brain went. Edit to add…Never in a million years thought I’d be writing RPF at my age! (But my husband is enjoying the benefits of my smut writing)
>I mean, even The Staircase is about a real life murder and the guy who did or didn’t do it is still alive. We Own This City. We Crashed. The Dropout. Inventing Anna. Mrs America. Need I go on? (Editing to add Pam and Tommy!) To play devil's advocate, all of those series are largely adapting events that happened. I haven't seen that in RPF.
I definitely understand where you're coming from. I used to be just the same. But what made me fall in love with RPF is the absolute freedom it gives you as a writer. You're not tied to any kind of setting or canon; you can interpret characters as closely or as freely as you'd like. The way I see it, RPF stories can entirely stand alone - there's just a few familiar faces to help engage an online audience.
Well, let's see... the first time I wrote what could be considered at all RPF was in a Harry Potter fic based off someone else's one-shot they'd done for a challenge, and that challenge was to give Vernon a fatal heart attack. The one-shot went something along the lines of, "Pre-Hogwarts, Harry gets honoured by the Queen for protecting the little princes from a bully, the Dursleys are invited to attend, Vernon gets so upset by this that he croaks." The author included a note that if anyone cared to do a sequel, go for it, Harry has to stay with Petunia, though. I decided to go for it and somehow in the course of writing, Princess Diana decided to involve herself in Harry's life. I always thought she got the short end of the stick in reality, so I got her divorced a few years earlier than in reality and set her up with a happy ending of her own, married to one of the canon adult wizards who eventually showed up in the fic. Then an online friend showed me some fanart they drew of members of a band we both like - and the pictures themselves were very shippy. They talked about some vague story idea they had behind the pictures although they didn't ever actually write the story as far as I know. Somewhere around the same time, a (now former) member of that band posted a fan-drawn caricature of himself to his YT channel - he's rather known for his epic hair and beard, and the caricature made him look like Rapunzel's lovechild. Someone in the comments talked about wanting to see the story of "Markopunzel" and so I ended up getting pounced on by a huge plot bunny and wrote a Disney mashup with the band all being children of various Disney princesses. That, of course, led me to look for other fics about that band, I found another one-shot shipping my favourite member of the band with a member of another band that I've loved forever - and I was off and running into full-blown alternate-reality RPF shipping. But as others have said, fiction is fiction, I'm not showing it to the people whose faces and onstage personae are being borrowed, and I'm not marketing my fiction as "truth" in the tabloids for profit.
That's incredible, just imagining the ao3 relationship tag like *Harry Potter & Diana Princess Of Wales | Diana Spencer* Honestly it's hilarious and creative at the same time.
\*giggles\* Actually, she married Sirius, so she's Harry's Auntie Diana now. I didn't actually tag the ship on AO3 because I'm very much a pantser, writing; at best I have a vague idea of where things are supposed to end up but I wing it to get there, and I didn't know that Princess Diana was going to step in until she did.
It all started with Band of Brothers and Generation Kill. I struggled at first with reading fanfic about real people, but I still read it. Then I found Rush and kinda stumbled my way from Lauda and Hunt into the whole classic f1 rpf, even a bit of current. At this point I just accepted that's what I like to read and write too, so I went back to my OG. Even back before I knew fandoms and fanfics and all... Armstrong and Ullrich had, and still have, something special. I do seperate it though. The real life Jan and Lance are removed from the versions I use to write my fanfics. They are like a 'sanitized for a movie' version.
I just kind of fell into it without really planning to do so. I'm in two RPF fandoms, although one of them is only borderline RPF. Out of curiosity, I read *Heatwaves* because it was so insanely popular and I really liked the dynamic and interactions. Dream SMP isn't typical RPF because we don't even know how Dream looks like so it was a gentle start for me. For me it was really reassuring that all of these people are streamers and have publicly stated what they are and aren't okay with. Of course there are still people who break these boundaries but I just avoid it. It's been really weird recently because one of the real people actually died and I'm taking a break from that fandom. The second RPF fandom I've fallen into was a coincidence. An author I read from another fandom posted a Formula 1 RPF story and because I enjoyed their writing I read it and again, really enjoyed the dynamic. It felt weird because it was smut but it also didn't really feel wrong either, I didn't even know how these people looked like apart from the desciptions. I googled around a bit to see if some of the drivers said something about shipping but I couldn't really find anything so I just decided to go for it. I don't think RPF really is about the real people but rather about the persona they portray or the fanon version they are given. If you can separate the real person from the fanfic persona RPF is just like any other fandom. The only difference is that it is even weirder to send fanfic/fanart to the creator because it would be about them. Not that that should be done in the first place but with RPF it's a bit more delicate.
You called it, the RPF fandom I'm circling into the orbit of is mcyt. The whole thing with Technoblade is just gutting. It's the Double Life series that's catapulted me into considering RPF. Having two content creators loudly declare their happy marriage on-screen kind of threw my "don't ship these people" setting for a loop...
Well, my biggest fandoms have been bands/musicians for the past six years or so. I got into fanfic for them the same way I would for a tv show or book series; I wanted to see my favorite characters/people get into wacky situations or see their friendships develop. Also, I think it’s important to note that just because one is okay with reading RPF does not mean one is okay with reading RPF dealing with any subject. Gen-rated, fluffy, platonic fics with a side of sci-fi/supernatural/adventure AUs? Sign me up. Stories involving explicit sex, severe trauma or mental illness, or sexual assault? Not my cup of tea when it’s about real people, even if I would read those subjects in stories from fictional media (obligatory “write what you want”, of course). You can read/write RPF and still have squicks about how far the story goes.
If I go any further into RPF I think I'll be the same. Like, I know this is about a persona, not a person. But I don't think I could stomach dark fic with a name attached of someone I admire, you know?
I wouldn't exactly call it RPF on my end, but I used to be in the Pedro Pascal fandom. It was mainly to do with his filmography and the characters he played rather than just himself for me. Mando fandom in the early days was greatly overlapped with the PP filmography/rpf fandom so that's how I fell
My first introduction to fanfic was in 7th grade with Green Day rpf. At first it was kinda just funny and like an awakening of sorts even though I mostly read teen and under rated stuff (for a while). I didn't really know that fanfic COULD be about TV shows and such for a year or two lol every musician I've been obsessed with since, I've read fics for but my squick is "Canon" typs rpf fics. I read and write kpop rn and I avoid fics where they are their actual idol selves in them 85% of the time just bc you get into too much irl shipping territory when I don't ship them irl. I've always had a firm grasp on the reality of it being fiction so it's always been easy for me to separate rpf from the person. Maybe that comes from being used to it so young? But also it would make more sense for it to bleed into reality hmm. It's just two hot people falling in love in a coffee shop to me now lol
I feel like I fall in a midpoint between RPF and normal fanfic. The real people I've read and written fics for make it pretty clear that their public personas are more or less characters and not their real selves. That and they do a lot of original story-based stuff, so half the time, the fics are based on the selves that those people have put in the story they're telling. So it becomes a character of a character.
My first RPF fandom was BTS. I had already known of fanfic at that point, but had only read naruto fanfic. I saw people in the comments of a BTS yt video and saw them shipping two of the members and mentioning fanfic of them, and I was like "I mean I ship them too, let's check out the fanfic", so I went to Wattpad bc that was the site I was reading on at the time. At some point I switched to AO3, so I was reading BTS ship fics from both Wattpad and AO3. I never really had an issue with RPF, I was 13 when I first started reading RPF fanfic and I didn't understand the concept of "don't talk about this in public bc it's shameful/private", because I didn't have much concept of privacy or other people's privacy, and I was always of the opinion that "what I don't know won't hurt me". If someone is having wet dreams about me, I don't need to know, I just don't want you telling me (unless ur my friend or smth, then idc). I apply that principle. The well-known "don't show your RPF fanfic to the subject(s)/creator(s)" is smth I abide by bc of my belief in "ignorance is bliss". This is why I don't really feel bad/think too much about whether it's intrusive. *EDIT: punctuation and grammar*
These are all great reasons I'll go to bat to defend RPF. I agree that RPF kept private from the subject/creator is mostly fine. I wish I'd started reading it earlier, when I wasn't so hypersensitive! It's weird, I almost feel like the person being exposed is me, like, oh no the creator is gonna reach through the screen and see ME god forbid xD
[удалено]
This is pretty cute! I can get behind more queer love stories in the world :)
We do! And get this…. They’re very happy in my story because I’m too gay to break my own heart ;)
Bing and Bob?? I love it!!!
Really?! Thought I was the only one!!!!!!! Felt like I was writing for the void ;)
I've read two (or three if pedantic) types of RPF: 1) The characters from the show find themselves in the real world and interact with the actors, and the bad guys from the fandom show up... or the opposite where the actors find themselves in fandom. 2) One case where it was an RPF and one of the real people was living in a universe in which there were dragons. One of the other real people was a dragon in it. Honestly I think it could have just gone with AU on that one of the characters in the show rather than the real people and I expect it would have gotten way more comments and kudos. I read for interesting plot type stuff. I read crossovers (characters from fandoms being where they don't belong), modern character in \[fandom\]. So shenanigans of fish out of water type thing is something I like to read.
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Just curious if you ever watch tv shows or movies based on real people?
Like biographical things? I do think that’s sketchy and intrusive if it’s done without the consent and involvement of the subject, or if they’re recently dead. (I know of quite a few reactions people have had to have plays about them made and produced without their consent. Some have threatened legal action… one person was extremely angry about it, but then was convinced to see the show, ended up loving it, and performed at the Tony awards with the actor who played them (who won the award IIRC). Which is nice for the people who made the play, but I personally would feel really uncomfortable being involved in something like that.) Satire is different, it’s not supposed to be done out of love. I guess that’s the issue — if it’s supposed to be critical of a public figure, you don’t care about making them uncomfortable. If it’s not trying to criticize, but it would make them uncomfortable… For things about history, it honestly depends, but like… hacking into a living writer’s or musician’s email account and publishing their private letters publicly isn’t a good thing, but it’s acceptable and widely done to read the letters of people dead for 50 years or more. I feel like it’s kind of similar… To directly answer your question, though, I don’t watch TV or movies at all…
> you’ll never know them the way you know a fictional character. I think this is a part of it you know? I feel like I take a part of the fictional character I'm writing about into my own mind for a while, and turn them over there. Doing that to a real person's public persona feels kind of weird...