RPF
| Name(s): | Actor Slash, Actorfic, Real People Fiction, Real Person Slash, RPS, RPF, RPFS | |
| Scope/Focus: | actors, musicians, pundits, politicians, general celebrities, other fans, historical figures, etc. | |
| Date(s): | beginning date unknowable (Homer?) - present. | |
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Subpages for RPF: Click here for articles related to this fandom on Fanlore. | ||
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Real Person Fiction aka Real People Fiction aka RPF is fan fiction, often sexually explicit, written about actual people, rather than characters in a book, movie, or TV show.[1] Specifically homosexual stories are often referred to as Actor Slash, Real People Slash (RPS) or Real People Femslash (RPFS).
The First RPF
One of the first published pieces of fan fic was RPF -- "Visit to a Weird Planet" (in Spockanalia 3, published in 1968) where we follow the characters from Star Trek when they are swapped with their real life actor counterparts (and the sequel, which followed the actors who suddenly find themselves on the real Enterprise). 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.
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 personae. 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.[2]
Examples of the pro/con discussion around RPF, '92 to '03
A Pro-RPFer:
- "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."[3]
Anti-RPFers:
- "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
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 charactes. As the number of RPF fans grew, major fandom opposition ebbed.
There seems to be legal protection in the United States for Real People Fiction when it includes clear and specific statements that the story is fiction, rather than purporting to be fact. Many published works include fictitous erotic stories of real people, including Starf*cker [4], Rockfic Press started offering Band Fic in trade paperback format [5], and as far back as 1964, Paul Krassner wrote a surreal fantasy of Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy's body [6].
What is a RPF character?
A frequent question around RPF is, "who are we writing?" Most fans agree that the character we're using is the public personae of a real person, not the real person himself. (In fact, some people feel strongly that only big stars, the types who can afford to have their personae 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."
Major RPS 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.
'80s
- 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.
'90s
- Phantom Menace creates an "all but RPS" fandom, as media (i.e., non-music fandoms) inch their way into full-bore RPS. There are few, if any 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[7]; the fandom's most active years were 2000 - 2003.
'00s
- LoTRiPS -- pairings between all of the prettiest actors in the LOTRs movies. First true media source with a correlated but separate RPS fandom. Reknowned 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.[8]
- John Barrowman/anyone -- Out gay star of Torchwood is paired with everyone, but mostly actors from his show, or Dr Who. Small
- Bandom -- members of a group of bands that interacted together, especially My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco. Medium
- AI7 -- David Cook/David Archuleta; winner and runner-up for season 7 of American Idol, and other Idol contestants. Small
- Merlin RPS -- 99% Bradley/Colin (RPS version of the major Merlin pairing); Small, still growing.
- Star Trek Reboot RPS -- Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto (RPS version of one of the major reboot pairings) Small, but in one year, probably already bigger than all TOS RPS combined.
- 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
- Pundit RPS -- Various pairings drawn from news parody shows, The Daily Show and the The Colbert Report as well as more traditional news programs. Small
'10s
| Needs Citation | This article needs more citations. See Fanlore:Citation for more information on why. |
References
- ↑ Wikipedia Real person fiction entry (Accessed September 2008)]
- ↑ Personal memory, and "ADMIN: Thinly disguised real names", accessed October 3, 2008
- ↑ Dara Sue's LJ, 2003-07-30
- ↑ Starf*cker on Amazon.com ISBN 978-1555835163, 2001 (accessed September 29, 2008)
- ↑ press release, June 10, 2005
- ↑ Slaughtering Cows and Popping Cherries by Paul Krassner, (originally published in The Realist, 1967)
- ↑ See Yahoo group NSYNC_FAN_FIC, founded March 28, 1999. Last accessed January, 2010.
- ↑ Tagging the Supernatural Newsletter – Ed 1110 posted by Black Samvara on May 6, 2009, accessed January 10, 2010
