RPF - Fanlore

RPF

(Redirected from RPS)
Synonyms: Actor Slash, Actorfic, Real People Stories, Real Person Slash, RPS, RPF, RPFS
See also: FPF, Category:Real People
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Contents

RPF, short for Real People Fiction, is fanfiction written about actual people, rather than characters in a book, movie, or TV show.

RPF has been around since at least the late 1960s, growing alongside media fandom in conjunction with stories about fictional characters. While some of it is non-sexual, a great deal is more or less explicit gay erotica slash, specified as Real People Slash (RPS), and Real People Femslash (RPFS) These are more commonly used in many fandoms than the more inclusive term, RPF. It is possible that the term RPS predates RPF.

Fiction About Famous People

There have always been stories about "real people" and their sex lives, from Homer to Shakespeare, Murasaki Shikibu (The Tale of Genjii), Sir Walter Scott, and Thomas Pynchon. Most published historical fiction include real people as main and/or secondary characters.

In Commercial Celebrity Materials

In the 1970s, teen magazines were known to contain stories of popular teen celebrities in fictionalized adventures. These stories, almost certainly written with the co-operation of the celebrities themselves and their agents and publicists, included romantic and adventure plots that would be familiar to fanfic writers everywhere. Blogger Mike Sterling describes one such story in his own collection, and includes an excerpt and a drawing from the original source. In the story, a Mary Sue named Cindi and Donny Osmond are involved in a scenario with hypothermia and huddling for warmth that fannish readers might see as Hurt/Comfort.[1]

Published Works of Celebrity Erotica

Commercial works depicting famous people in sexual situations are fairly common, especially in purported memoirs such as Casanova's Story of My Life. It may also be done for shock effect, as in Paul Krassner's 1964 surreal fantasy of Lyndon Johnson molesting John F. Kennedy's dead body [2]. In 2000, the horror writer Poppy Z. Brite published Plastic Jesus is a thinly-disguised Alternate Universe in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney fall in love and come out as gay[3]. Starf*cker is an 2001 anthology in which, Carol Queen does Marilyn Monroe, Bill Brent does Elvis, Cecilia Tan does Ziggy Stardust, Michelle Tea does Motley Crue (all of 'em!), M. Christian does Whoopi Goldberg, and Susie Bright does Dan Quayle[4]. Rockfic Press's novels about musician's sex lives, (a form of Band Fic) in trade paperback format [5].

The Virtuoso, a novel by Sonia Orchard tells a story about an Australian pianist, Noel Mewton-Wood, from the point of view of a fictional obsessed fan: in form and content, this story reflects the experiences of the fannish RPF reader.[6]

The First Fannish RPF

One of the first published pieces of fan fic was RPF -- "Visit to a Weird Planet", written by Jean Lorrah and Willard F.H. (in Spockanalia 3, ed. by Devra Langsam and published in 1968) where we follow the characters from Star Trek when they are swapped with their real life actor counterparts; as Kathy L. remembers, "There were also cameos by "Gene" (Roddenberry) and "Fred" (Phillips, the make-up man.)" A sequel, "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" by Ruth Berman, took place at the same time, but followed the actors, who suddenly find themselves on the real Enterprise. This story was later reprinted in the professional anthology Star Trek: The New Voyages #1 (Bantam, 1976). Kathy L. notes: "As was the case with many early ST zines, the issues of Spockanalia were sent to Gene Roddenberry's office, to be shared with cast and crew (some of who sent back LoCs). Plus, since Ruth's story was approved for printing in a professional anthology (with a foreword by Roddenberry and a story intro by Majel), it's reasonable to assume that this early version of RPF was not looked at askance by TPTB. What Shatner and company thought is not known, but I'd be surprised if they cared, as the story was quite harmless."

Blake's 7 soon followed with a similar series of stories, The Totally Imaginary Cheeseboard, The Cost of the Cheeseboard and The Other Side of the Coin. Very few people had any trouble with these stories -- they were gen and humorous. Serious RPF, het or slash, was a different matter. Kathy L. notes that these zines "included disclaimers that made it very clear they were written with the full knowledge and permission of all parties (actors and fans)."[7]

The RPF Underground

By the late '70s, RPS existed for Star Trek actors, and it quickly showed up in the upcoming Blake's 7 and The Professionals fandoms, but it rarely appeared in zines, or the circuit, except (for some reason) in cases where the characters and actors were meeting. (There is more than one Pros story where Martin Shaw acted as an actor-yenta to Bodie and Doyle.)

By this time, there were Moody Blues fan communities and Beatles fan communities, only tangentially connected to media and slash fandom at the time. Led Zeppelin fandom took hold among women who already were media fans and had internalized media fandom's strictures against RPS, and was reborn as Tris/Alex or Allyn Sterling/Derek Quinn. Everyone in the fandom was clear who those names stood for, and yet giving them new names (and a slightly adjusted backstory for each pairing) normalized the pairing -- Tris/Alex stories appeared in media fanzines without outcry; the Allyn Sterling/Derek Quinn novel was advertized in media fandom adzines. A Metallica fannish community started in the 80s, but their fanworks, for some reason, didn't make it into mainstream slash fandom.

Ethical and Legal Issues

Some people have ethical and moral qualms about writing fan fiction about real people, even when those people have very public personas. There have been heated and intense discussions about this topic in fandom, that occasionally crop up again, even though overall the pro-RPF position has become dominant in media fandom. Other fans were convinced that RPF was more legally actionable than FPF. For these reasons and others, RPF remained underground in media fandom.

One basis for it staying underground may have been the reaction of Tori Spelling and her lawyers to a piece of Forever Knight fanfiction that included her in the mid-1990s. The story supposedly portrayed her according to her public persona at the time, but she took offense and threatened to sue the university that hosted the ForKNI-L and FKFIC-L mailing lists. The lawsuit was averted, but the result was very strict rules forbidding the inclusion of any real people in stories posted to lists hosted on the psu.edu server (which included the main Highlander lists as well), without specific written permission from the person in question. A lot of fans remembered what a near-miss that was for a long time, and many new lists forbade RPF of any sort as a precaution, keeping "actor fic" largely underground for several more years.[8]

Pro/Con RPF

These are a few examples of the pro/con discussion around RPF, 1992 to 2004.

Pro-RPF:

  • "I've talked about a "transparent veil" that separates fantasy from reality in SDB fandom - 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."[9]
  • "I guess 95% of my enchantment with fandom went swirling during the first go-round of RPS wars, back in, oh, 1999 or so. (Damn, that long ago?) Suddenly all kinds of people whom I thought were cool and open-minded were acting like judgemental, homophobic, hypocritical holier-than-thou jerks."[10]
  • "It could be argued that celebrity is the contemporary (or postmodern, heh) 'fictional character'. Just as boybands are generally (obviously) comprised of a group of created personalities, so too are any celebrity you see reported in the papers - Jennifer Lopez, Tom & Nicole, Elijah Wood. These celebrities are creating a character - performing a fictional character in a way, to (and via) the media and general public. Just as the record labels create personalities and characters for members of pop groups, so too are publicists, editors, lawyers, etc. creating a personality for celebrities."[11]

Anti-RPF:

  • "I am genuinely amazed that a fandom made up of women can really truly believe that their right to write actor slash is more important than an actor's right to privacy." (anonymous conversation on private list, archived by sherrold)
  • "I do not want to see person slash and i certainly don't want to afford it the same ethical status as character slash because i think ultimately it will only damage the character slash community. If "real name" slash is written, it shouldn't be circulated." (anonymous conversation on private list, archived by sherrold)
  • "When you create a universe, with characters and situations, you get to play god. The universe, the characters, the situations are all objects that a writer manipulates to her heart's content. When you write about real people, regardless of situation, you have turned them into objects. Maybe this is neither good nor bad, but I feel that much of what past and current women's (and minorities) struggles are about, is a passion to NOT be objectified; to be viewed as individuals, as human beings, not things." (Nicole V, post to Virgule-L, 1992 -- quoted with permission.)

The Tipping Point

Logo of the RealPeopleSlash WebRing (ca. 2000/2001)
Logo of the RealPeopleSlash WebRing (ca. 2000/2001)

Although RPS was on the rise, most pairings were rare without a huge fandom and infrastructure in place. That made the RareSlash mailing list a place that was destined for clashes between RPS fans and opponents. After a discussion about 'Tallislash and Musicianslash and how to rationalize it', starting on January 17, 2000, the list owner announced on January 24 that "I will from now on allow realpeopleslash on the list, IF and only IF it is properly labelled."[12] That resulted in a heated discussion on the mailing list with several members threatening to leave the list and to pull all their fic from the archive if RPS was allowed. In the end the list owner revoked the new rules, RPS remained forbidden and a new list was created on January 26, 2000: RS-X [RareSlash-X] is a spinoff-list of RareSlash, where the 'RealPeopleSlash' rule doesn't apply. You have been warned.[13] The RareSlashX Archive was one of the early RPS resources in media fandom, the RealPeopleSlash WebRing connected sites with RPS content[14], and The Fan Fiction Directory opened up a short-lived spin-off for RPF[15] to make it easier for fans to find what they were looking for.

By the middle of 2001, the visibility of RPF and the ever increasing number of traditional media slash writers who participated in RPF-based fandoms such as popslash reached a tipping point and fannish articles such as RPS on the Net and Frequently Made Objections against RPS v. 2.0 discussed RPF in spaces formerly reserved for fanfic about fictional characters. As the number of RPF fans grew, and Livejournal allowed fans to move away from moderated mailing lists, major fandom opposition to the existence of RPF ebbed. Meta discussions shifted more to the form and content of the genre.

What is an RPF Character?

A frequent question around RPF is, "who are we writing?" Most fans agree that the characters we're writing about are the public personas of real people, not the real people themselves. (In fact, some people feel strongly that only big stars, the types who can afford to have their personas rigorously shaped and fashioned, should be used as RPF characters.)

In "RPS characters are empty signifiers", Lobelia321 says that RPF characters are less real than FPF characters. "Rps characters, by contrast, are total chimaerae. They are wraiths (and not of the SGA variety). They are insubstantial; they are surface; they are the ultimate screens for our projections."

In "RPS: Another Perspective", Hederahelix claims that the lines between FPF and RPF are often quite thin. There are plenty of FPF Phantom Menace stories that don't "make sense unless you’d seen the other roles Ewan McGregor had played," a clear case that "the actor’s body (and the other roles that actor has played) does in fact inform character slash."

See also: Canon in Real Person Fiction.

Major RPF Fandoms

A probably incomplete listing per decade. When sizes are given, they are approximations of the amount of fiction written about the pairings in question, not the even-harder-to-gauge total amount of fanac (fannish activity) in the fandoms.

NOTE: This desperately needs information about Sports and other non-media RPS fandoms.

1980s

  • Music: Beatles, Moody Blues, Metallica, Led Zep;
  • Media: smatterings of Trek, Pros, Blake's 7 and Starsky & Hutch actor fic existed, but no one called themselves a fan of, say, Shatner/Nimoy. RPS was rare, and completely integrated into the connected FPF fandom.

1990s

  • Phantom Menace creates an "all but RPS" fandom, as media (i.e., non-music fandoms) inch their way into full-bore RPS. There are a few Ewan/Liam stories, but there are many many thinly veiled AUs that now read more like RPS than like media AUs.
  • Popslash -- first truly major-sized RPF/S fandom; Six major characters, plus a host of side characters. The first fanfiction mailing lists were started in 1999[16]; the fandom's most active years were 2000 - 2003.
  • Figure Skating RPF -- around since at least the 90s, the 2010 winter Olympics led to an upsurge in interest in the fandom. Works focused on Johnny Weir, Evan Lysacek, Stéphane Lambiel, and Evgeni Plushenko began to appear in larger numbers. Small
  • Hanson -- Fan fiction about the band began to appear quite soon after their first hit in 1997. The fandom's most active years were from 1997 to 2000, with fansites and fanfic sites numbering in the thousands, and a small and dedicated fandom remains today.

2000s

  • LoTRiPS -- pairings between all of the prettiest actors in the LOTR movies. First true media source with a correlated but separate RPS fandom. Renowned for the percentage of tinhats in the fandom. Medium
  • SGA RPS -- Joe Flanigan/David Hewlett (RPS version of the major SGA pairing); Small
  • CWRPS/J2 -- Mostly Jensen Ackles/Jared Padalecki (RPS version of the major Supernatural pairing, and actors they've worked with, including the Smallville actors); Huge. Probably because many fans had objections to writing slash about brothers or wanted to write in a lighter tone than the canon of Supernatural provided. Many months there were more Jared/Jensen stories than Dean/Sam stories in the Supernatural Newsletter, but overall RPF makes up just over 20% of the fiction posted to the newsletter.[17]
  • John Barrowman/anyone -- Out gay star of Torchwood is paired with everyone, but mostly actors from his show, or Dr Who. Small
  • AI7 -- David Cook/David Archuleta; winner and runner-up for season 7 of American Idol, and other Idol contestants. Small
  • Star Trek Reboot RPS -- Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto (aka "Pinto") (RPS version of one of the major reboot pairings) Medium, and in one year, is already far bigger than all TOS RPS combined.[18]
  • AI8 -- Adam Lambert/Kris Allen; runner-up and winner for season 8 of American Idol, and other Idol contestants. Built on fans who had started to think of AI as a possible fandom the season before, and then expanded quickly when Adam Lambert came out, and was shown to be close friends with his straight competitor. Medium

2010s

  • The winter Olympics in February, 2010 brought an upsurge in Figure Skating RPF, which had been around since at least the 1990s, with many new fans drawn in by the popularity and notoriety of Johnny Weir.

Multifandom RPF Communities

  • RPF Big Bang - a challenge for RPF stories over 15,000 words. Began in 2009, continued for a second round in 2010.

References

  1. ↑ Mike Sterling, This is the most I have ever written about tampons posted November 12, 2009, accessed March 25, 2010
  2. ↑ Slaughtering Cows and Popping Cherries by Paul Krassner, (originally published in The Realist, 1967)
  3. ↑ [http://www.amazon.com/Plastic-Jesus-Poppy-Z-Brite/dp/1892284642/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t Plastic Jesus on Amazon.com
  4. ↑ Starf*cker on Amazon.com ISBN 978-1555835163, 2001, accessed May 13, 2010
  5. ↑ press release, June 10, 2005
  6. ↑ Interview with Sonia Orchard accessed May 7, 2010
  7. ↑ Kathy L. in an email to Speranza, Feb 27, 2010
  8. ↑ Personal memory, and "ADMIN: Thinly disguised real names", accessed October 3, 2008
  9. ↑ Marythefan, 2002-11-23, accessed April 27, 2010
  10. ↑ Dara Sue's LJ, 2003-07-30
  11. ↑ angstslashhope, 2004-10-14, accessed April 27, 2010
  12. ↑ ADMIN: Real People slash et al, in: RareSlash (Yahoo!Groups), 24 January 2000, accessed 28 March 2010
  13. ↑ RareSlash-X (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RS-X/) created 26 January 2000, accessed 28 March 2010
  14. ↑ RealPeopleSlash WebRing, earliest known Wayback version 29 March 2001, accessed 28 March 2010
  15. ↑ Old index page of The Real People Fan Fiction Directory via Wayback, archived version from 07 November 2001, accessed 01 October 2009
  16. ↑ See Yahoo group NSYNC_FAN_FIC, founded March 28, 1999. Last accessed January, 2010
  17. ↑ Tagging the Supernatural Newsletter – Ed 1110 posted by Black Samvara on May 6, 2009, accessed January 10, 2010
  18. ↑ LJ's pinto_fic community has over 1600 members, and 1200 stories posted as of July 2010 compared to the TOS actors equivalent, LJ's Nimoy/Shatner RPF community (aka "Shatnoy") which has less than 500 members
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