Real person fiction
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Real Person Fiction (RPF) is a type of fan fiction featuring celebrities or other real people. In the past, terms such as actorfic were used to distinguish these stories from those based on fictional characters in movie or television fandom such as Star Trek, or more recently X-Files or The Lord of the Rings. Other specific terms are also used before the fan fiction community found an overarching term for the phenomenon. These terms frequently connotate specific genres or cultural practices in the wider Real Person Fic community. They include musicfic, rockfic, popslash, RPHet, ActorFic, ActorSlash, Fan Girl RPF and feral fandom. The genre includes branches featuring actors, athletes, comedians, fellow fen, historical figures, musicians, newsworthy people, reality show contestants and other groups.
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[edit] Description
In general, the authors seem to adopt the public personas of the celebrities in question as their own characters, building a fictional universe based on the real-life histories of their idols. Information from interviews, documentaries, music videos and more are hungrily assimilated into the "canon" on which the stories are based. Communities of writers can reinforce each other, building collective archetypes based on those public personas. Communities also develop their own ethics on what sort of stories are acceptable -- some are uncomfortable with slash fiction, or with mention of the celebrity's real-life families, or with so-called darkfic (stories involving suicide, murder, rape). Like most fan fiction, the RPF genre has stories ranging from innocent to adult.
Unlike many of the writers who work with commercially-presented fictional characters (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.), a number of RPF authors began writing on their own, without any awareness of a larger fanfic community. A very common reaction among newcomers to an RPF community is "I thought I was the only one who wrote stories like this!" This reaction is common in the overarching fanfiction fandoms as well, both FPF and RPF. Many are completely unaware of the media fandom's taboo towards Real Person Fic, where it was acceptable to write about the characters, but not about the actors who portrayed them.
Portrayals of actors in RPF stories are often heavily influenced by characters the actors portray. This is particularly noticeable in The Lord of the Rings RPF, where Viggo Mortensen is frequently shown as taking an Aragorn-like leadership role, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan as lighthearted Hobbit-like pranksters, and Elijah Wood as more physically fragile and emotionally vulnerable than his colleagues.
Based on discussions on FanDomination.Net, between one fifth and one third of these stories may take the form of a "Mary Sue" story. This type of story features an original female character. The character may outshine the band, become a new member or be involved with a member of the band. Because of the focus on the original character and poorer writing that does not make these original female characters engaging, these stories are frequently labelled Mary Sues in some communities.
Additionally, a small number of people in some communities are under the belief that a celebrity is involved in a real relationship with another celebrity, and go as far as to spend large amounts of time searching for proof of this relationship. Writing RPF stories is one way to put forth a theory or "prove" that a particular pair of celebrities are in a relationship. A well-known example in fanfic circles is the "Dom-Elijah" complex of speculation and stories built around a supposed relationship between Dominic Monaghan and Elijah Wood, two actors from Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.
Politician fic is more often used as a form of satire, or to highlight the underlying biases or attitudes of the politician being portrayed.
[edit] History
The earliest known RPF was written by the Brontë children from 1826 to approximately 1844. Based on the children's roleplaying game about the Napoleonic Wars, the series featured the Duke of Wellington and his two sons Charles and Arthur, and their arch-nemesis Alexander Percy, partly based on Napoleon. Over the years, Arthur evolved into an amazingly charismatic and powerful figure, the Duke of Zamorna. These stories were not published until well over a hundred years later, but the children used them to polish their writing skills and eventually all became professional authors.
Modern fan stories may go back to Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, and Elvis Presley, but some of the earliest known published cases of RPF come from 1977, when fanzines of the band Led Zeppelin began to print some of the fan fiction being written. Due to the fact that these stories involved real Zeppelin bandmembers, most notably Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, names were changed to pseudonyms such as "Tris" and "Alex".
A number of authors of modern bandfic -- stories based on musical celebrities -- began writing in the early eighties, when MTV brought musicians into close focus for millions of adolescents. Some of these stories may have circulated in fanzine form, but there was little community and many authors remained unaware of others doing similar work.
During the 1980s, actorfics involving Paul Darrow (of the show Blake's 7) emerged. These were mostly humorous vignettes, and were mostly of minor importance.
It was not until the 1990s and the spread of the Internet that RPF began to take hold and fandoms emerge in full.
The RPF community was, for a period of time, centered around the FanFiction.Net website. When the RPF section was removed from Fanfiction.net, the community dispersed to smaller web archives and LiveJournal communities. RPF is generally totally absent from the various Usenet communities, especially in older and more established newsgroups.
[edit] Controversy
[edit] Morality and Legality
The morality of Real Person Fiction is debated.
RPF authors will point out, however, that there is usually no intent to claim these fictional portrayals reflect the real activities of the "source figure" in any way.
Some authors of traditional fan fiction view real person fiction with suspicion, disdain, or outright disgust. Some feel that fanfic based on fictional characters is on shaky enough legal ground, barely tolerated by "the powers that be" (authors, producers, copyright owners) and that RPF, especially real person slash, may turn corporate and public opinion against fan fiction as a whole.
The law, ironically, favors RPF. The often included disclaimer in story headers, stating the work as pure fiction, distances Real Person Fiction from slander and libel, while FPF stays copyright infringement.
To date, unlike traditional fan fiction, only one cease and desist letter is known to have been issued against RPF: FanDomination.Net received the letter on March 17, 2003 from a representative of one of the members of the Atlanta Braves baseball team.
[edit] Real Person Slash
Real Person Slash (RPS), also known in some circles as real-life slash (RLS), is a form of real person fiction involving relationships between two people of the same sex. (See slash fiction for more on the subtleties and variations in definition.) These are usually totally fictional relationships, not based on any real-life indications of the subject's sexual preference, but on the fantasies of the author and the desire to play with perceived or invented gay or lesbian subtext between the idols in question. Slash is roughly equal in popularity to less controversial types of real person fiction.
The content of the stories can range from the mildly romantic, involving deep friendships and innocent boyhood or girlhood crushes, to carefully written homosexual love stories, all the way to profoundly explicit erotica.
RPS began to become popular and accepted with the advent of boy bands, when fans wrote an explosion of fictional stories about male members being involved in romantic relations with another male member of the band (and sometimes more than one). In the 1990s, early online RPS communities were devoted to *NSYNC, 98 Degrees and Hanson, while on the website "Fanfiction Log" -- before it was closed due to financial issues in 2004 -- the largest categories were Linkin Park and Good Charlotte, much of which was slash. Older RPF communties such as Duran Duran also began to see a rise in slash content, in contrast to earlier stories which generally featured original (non-"canon") female characters as partners for band members.
After the barriers to slash itself fell, the amount of explicit sexual content in the stories also began to rise. Erotic fan stories have certainly been around for as long as other types of fanfic, but they were often a closed-door affair, circulated only in private among friends, and it is unclear whether homosexual content was a common theme. With the advent of the Internet (allowing easy distribution of stories and relative anonymity for authors), these sorts of stories suddenly became much more widespread. The acceptability and popularity of this form of fanfic has since grown into other areas of RPF -- actorfic, sportsfic, and more.
Due to the potentially libelous nature of some stories, and the knowledge or fear that some celebrities dislike slash fiction involving themselves, there has been extensive denunciation of RPS fiction among certain fan fiction communities. However, as of 2005, no legal action has been taken against archive sites or authors.
[edit] Reaction to Real Person Fic
For the most part, celebrities have had little problem with Real Person Fic and benign to its existence. Problems begin to develop when fans of the celebrities try to bring the celebrity into the community or show their adoration for that celebrity by giving them this material. This can lead to some uncomfortable moments as happened with Paul Darrow, Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, who were both given real person fic featuring them and their significant others in sexually explicit situations. Both Elijah Wood and Ian McKellan, as well as Karl Urban, have stated that they do not mind RPF being written about them[citation needed]. There are also some celebrities, like Franz Ferdinand or Apocalyptica, who like to act out on the gay part as soon as they recognize a writer of RPS centering around them[citation needed].
[edit] Timeline
The following is a timeline of events in the Real Person Fan fiction community:
[edit] 1970s - 1990s
- 1977 - the Star Trek fanfic anthology New Voyages 2 publishes the story "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited", in which members of the show's cast accidentally beam up to the Enterprise.
- From 1977 to 1983, Led Zeppelin fan fiction begins to circulate in fanzines. The early zines used the names Tris and Alex instead of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.
- During the 1980s, some ActorFic involving Paul Darrow (of Blake's 7) existed.
- Early 1980s - Star Wars stories are published in which Harrison Ford meets Han Solo.
- 1980s - numerous Duran Duran and other bandfic authors began to write in isolation, spurred by MTV
- 1991 - Duran Duran slash and het fic began to be circulated in fanzines. According to Sidewinder, Duran Duran zine people said that Duran Duran were aware of the fan fiction. Sidewinder also notes that the RPF people at the time did not seem to come from the same community as "traditional fan fiction fans" were coming from.
- March, 1993 - The Nifty Archive came on-line. It is well known in fan fiction fandoms as a repository of boy band and celebrity erotica.
- July 14, 1997 - The first Hanson fan fiction is written and posted to the Internet. It is titled "Hanson & Hugo" and was written by Ghostman 7 productions.
- October 15, 1998 - FanFiction.Net enacts a policy forbidding ActorSlash. The Musician and other real person fic categories continue.
- May 5, 1999 - The longest running Hanson fan fiction is written and posted to the Internet. It is titled "The Day the Earth Moved" and was written by Taylor W. Quest. Following stories in the series have continued to be published and the saga is current as of 2006.
[edit] 2000s
[edit] 2000
- In January, an influential RPS discussion takes place on Rareslash mailing list, the list run by Sofie Werkers. The discussion involved whether or not RPS should be allowed to be posted to the list.
- Between June and November, FFN-Slashers-Unites discussed the ethical implications of Real Person Slash.
- In July, alt.fan.david-duchovny debated actorfic, the ethics of it and why people felt compelled to write it.
- In December, Puppies in a Box, an *NSYNC fan fiction site, went live. This site was apparently very important in the history of the *NSYNC fan fiction community. The site is now defunct.
[edit] 2001
- Between December 19 and December 28, the tolkien_slash mailing list on Yahoo! discussed the perceived slashy subtext between the actors in the movie. Subsequently on December 28, LOTR_RPS was created. It was one of the first The Lord of the Rings real person fiction communities.
[edit] 2002
- September 12 - FanFiction.Net removes all Real Person Fic from the site and bans all Real Person Fic that does not tie in to other media directly. They remove Musicians as a top level category. During the same period that they ban Real Person Fic, they still allow for RPF in categories like Diaries of Anne Frank, Survivor and Celebrity Death Match.
[edit] 2003
- March, alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer.creative discusses the legalities of actorfic.
[edit] 2004
- April 26 - rockfic.com went live, a repository and community for het, gen, and slash fanfics involving rock stars.
- Between July and November, political slash involving John Kerry and John Edwards became popular.
