Talk:RPF

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• RPS (2006 meta)

Old content moved to Talk:RPF/Archive1; new content should be put here.

Should we mention this sort of inbetween thing, where fans pick one or two actors that appeared together and then fixate on several of the characters and put on the fictional level random pairings and fandoms together because of actors? Like Kiefer/Lou?--RatCreature 08:35, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I remember that in the real people fic discussions in 2001 people often mentioned in defense of RPF examples like Nick Lea fic where the only reason that fanfic about random minor characters existed was that they were played by a certain actor, so the RPF opposition couldn't claim it was all that different from actorfic. --Doro 09:10, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I remember a similar point being made wrt the 6 degree fandoms like One West Waikiki fic existing because of TS and crossovers between these sources, also that these triggered an RPF squick for some because of the attention this brought to the actor's presence.

Unrelated, another thing I noticed in this article is that the section called "The Happy Ending" which does not exactly encourage PPOVs to be added. Obviously the pro-RPF side in media fandom has decisively carried the day in this conflict, but not everyone is happy with the outcome. I mean, even though I don't have moral objections to RPF, I still would have been happier had RPF not become so visible everywhere and intermingled with the FPF fandom and its infratructures (all the mixed comms, fests and newsletters for example).--RatCreature 10:01, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm not happy with the section title either. Same situation as with the K/S page. --Doro 10:20, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Do you have any ideas what could be used as a more neutral header? Maybe "RPF becomes widely accepted"? Or maybe "RPF taboo falls"? to describe the current situation.--RatCreature 11:20, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I went with "The Tipping Point" because it's still a taboo for some. What do you think? --Doro 11:56, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

That works for me.--RatCreature 12:05, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

SW Prequel RPS

While during in the first prequel movie fandom RPS was maybe small (I a clueless, at that time you could avoid encountering it in any case), it was my impression that soon with the second and particular the third movie it became much larger. At least in 2005 I was annoyed[1] at the time that the comms weren't separate and I had trouble finding the SW FPS at first, what with me not even remembering the Anakin actor's name so it never occured to me to look at the Ewan/Hayden comm to find Obi-Wan/Anakin slash which I wanted, but at that point the SW slash used the RPS infrastructure, what with Obi-Wan/Anakin having never quite taken off as much as Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon in the first movie. --RatCreature 22:43, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Phrasing

In the intro part it says "Specifically homosexual stories". Is this the right phrasing? It sounds weird to me but I don't know why and I don't want to change it just because. --Doro 02:46, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm not into the fandom, but I agree that "homosexual stories" sounds strange, mostly I think because "homosexual" in place of "gay" doesn't get used all that often to describe things rather than just label only people or relationships. And with "gay" you'd get the whole "but is slash gay?" quagmire, so I'd suggest either outsourcing the problem by just pointing at the slash article and leave it at that, i.e. put in a sentence like "The term slash is used for RPF as well, e.g. terms like Actor Slash, Real People Slash (RPS) or Real People Femslash (RPFS)." or turn "homosexual stories" into "stories with same sex pairings are often referred to..."--RatCreature 06:39, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

move Non-Fandom RPF to right after summary?

The non-fandom section is awkward everywhere, moving it to the top after the summary would give context to the fandom issues later on. --msilverstar 17:09, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm good with that. --facetofcathy 17:15, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

I like what you've done here, that flows much better.--facetofcathy 13:15, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Oh yay! Glad it works --msilverstar 15:34, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Kpop and Jpop

should be mentioned somewhere, but I don't know enough about them.--æþel (talk) 22:05, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Real Person Horror

Unclefossil inserted a paragraph that is rather incoherent, but google reveals is actually self-promotion. When I google the phrase, the top result is Wikipedia (don't know why), the second result is a Facebook post by unclefossil[2], and the third is this Fanlore page.--aethel (talk) 00:45, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

IT GETS BETTER. Unclefossil is Nickolaus A. Pacione (see blog), who also inserted a rant into the Professional Author Fanfic Policies page here (I reverted it). Should we ban this person? He does appear to have published a long list of things on Amazon, though all of them are either not rated or have an average rating of 1/5 stars. suspicioussssss.--aethel (talk) 00:56, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Category

Is a RPF category in order? It would be a way to gather all the related pages together. --MPH (talk) 22:18, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

I remember asking this question before, and getting the answer that it would duplicate Category:Celebrities & Real People. So I've been making RPF subcategories to gather this stuff.--aethel (talk) 01:30, 6 November 2015 (UTC) On the other hand, we do have both a television category and a media fandom category.--aethel (talk) 01:31, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

The fiction/fanwork part of RPF is very overwhelming, and I don't think that comes through with Category:Celebrities & Real People. Celebrities & Real People isn't very intuitive, at least not for me. --MPH (talk) 02:10, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Do we want to just rename the category RPF Fandom? That cluster of categories always confused me, because all the subcategories are RPF this and RPF that, but not the main category. RPF doesn't fit too well in the FPF category structure.--aethel (talk) 00:20, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

I think it was originally named thinking of people not familiar with fandom abbreviations, and RPF by itself is pretty opaque. Maybe RPF (Real People Fiction) as covering both bets? --msilverstar (talk) 01:45, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

I second Category:RPF Fandom. RPF stands for both Real People Fiction and Real Person Fiction so neither of those is a good choice as a category name because it can be seen as a declaratory statement regarding the true meaning of RPF. --Doro (talk) 10:38, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Just to keep things confusing, I started a discussion thread on the dreamwidth comm about this. See the comments here. Ruuger provided a non-RPF celebrity fan perspective, and it occurs to me that we do have actor fandoms documented on Fanlore that are not RPF fandoms, but those fandoms are not in this category. However we end up naming/parsing this, we should add a note telling people where to find the fandoms they're looking for.--aethel (talk) 01:36, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Are we ok to change this category to Category:RPF Fandom now?--aethel (talk) 23:10, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I vote yes. --MPH (talk) 00:14, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

I vote no, still on basis that it would be completely baffling to everyone not in our corner of fandom, especially if AO3 is going toward "Real Person Fiction". --msilverstar (talk) 03:24, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't see AO3 actually adopting "Real Person Fiction"--cat change is dead in the water as far as I can see--and a major source of concern in AO3 tag debates is that users tag their own works, so the canonical tags have to be clear to newbies (witness the perennial gnashing of teeth over users choosing "Ambiguous Fandom" tags or tagging X/Y ship fic with X & Y); this is less of a concern for Fanlore pages, because gardeners are allowed recategorize pages. Fanlore's original category strategy seems to have been to make generic-sounding categories, but more and more we've adopted fandom-specific terminology. The generic categories confused a lot of people, though Real Person Fandom seems a lot clearer to me than some of the alternatives. But maybe it should be Real Person Fandoms, Real People Fandom, or Real People Fandoms? Would we include non-RPF celebrity fandoms in this category? Would we rename "Actor RPF" to "Actor Fandoms"?--aethel (talk) 14:06, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

tldr; I think the most important question is whether or not the scope of the category is RPF or something broader. If RPF, it should be called RPF; if something broader, it obviously should not be called RPF.--aethel (talk) 14:17, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

I vote yes. AO3 categories are of no concern to Fanlore. Our cats have evolved independently from AO3 tags/cats and are meant to reflect fandom-specific use. That's why we have for example slash cats and yaoi cats instead of just male homoerotic fiction cats or whatever. If we need another cat for something else, we can just make it. --Doro (talk) 14:20, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

organization issues

This page is getting long, and there's more meta topics I want to add. I think it might be better to move "RPF Debate Points: Pro and Con" to another page: RPF Controversies (to match Slash Controversies) or Attitudes Toward RPF (to match Attitudes Toward Fanfiction)?--aethel (talk) 18:31, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

Now disagreeing with myself on this since so much of the page is about attitudes toward RPF. The "RPF Debate Points" section might just be in the wrong place. Perhaps the meta section could be its own page? Timeline of RPF Meta?--aethel (talk) 03:33, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

I like this second idea better. And if we move the meta section to its own page, we should also look at moving other big meta sections, such as the ones on Fanfiction and Slash to their own pages as well. --MPH (talk) 12:15, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

I've moved all three to their own pages: Timeline of RPF Meta, Timeline of Slash Meta, Timeline of Fanfiction Meta.--aethel (talk) 22:52, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

Disjointed Edits Group 1

Some recent edits don't make much sense. This entire section has just been tacked on at the start. What does "this fandom" mean? and who or what "of this being artful"?

The facts behind the claim Stephen Glass is "Journalistic fraud" are not supported. Who is "the author?" Who is "a key member of Fandom Wank."? Who is "this one came to the aid pf Cassandra Claire?" And last, " Journalfen's host tossed him because he did challenge them to a fist fight as another pulled vile allegations of child abuse on them" is something where I'd actually want to see the source. All of "this" takes place in only the first paragraph. MeeDee (talk) 13:09, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Based on "this", I am reverting the edits until we can look into them deeper.

"This fandom always bangs heads with creative nonfiction writers as they point out, "There's rules to follow." Lee of Creative Nonfiction has coined the terms Creative Nonfiction as Literature of Fact as an anthology named with a controversial horror author does this at his own expense, Wes Craven's New Nightmare is a high profile example of this being artful. Little known fact the original film had nonfiction sources. Those who are in this fandom are called something extremely insulting on par to being compared to the journalistic fraud, Stephen Glass, who fabricated his sources. The term fannish fabulist comes to mind when a real person fiction (a slash version) has a blog on livejournal, wordpress, or dreamwidth; this term was coined by the author who fired back at a key member of Fandom Wank. This one came to the aid of Cassandra Clare because he caught one of the Carnivorous Wolves violating his copyrights and confronted two of them; he pointed out the real hypocrisy of what they did in Pretty Penny during the era. Journalfen's host tossed him because he did challenge them to a fist fight as another pulled vile allegations of child abuse on them.

Creative Nonfiction and Citizen Journalism where real reporting is involved will borrow some transformative elements such as fair use for the purpose of reporting; just don't piss them off or they will out a fanwriter if caught screwing with a publication. Especially when they didn't speak up when it got plagiarized. The Gothic Horror story called Wandering In Darkness was based on the author's original research of Wes Craven's academia and a report he did when he was 16; but didn't have the information he had until he was 20. This is a Gothic Horror example of real person fiction; but done in a way where it's treated like Creative Nonfiction as his creative nonfictional outings were all referenced where the 26 year old version hands the 16 year old one the first true crime outing. This story took a personality all its own when his classmate from the era passed in 2010 at age 34."

Disjointed Edits Group 2

The following section was tacked into the Pro RPF section and again seems to have no connection or coherence. MeeDee (talk) 13:13, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

"When it's done in satire, hence fodder when one sees The Duggars, Hovind, God's Not Dead (as often the group Newsboys are the real people in the works.) or the Independent Baptist Sect because this one is prone to Internet Backdraft in some circles. When one sees a blog entry such as King James Only Examined or the article Digital Wasteland. Noted subjects of these type of journalistic outings are often researched and showing their own media sources as an observation and academia. Not only researching Forbes, USA Today or other major sources then add The Babylon Bee and The Onion into the mix -- there will be a lot of feelings hurt if they're not in on the joke. Stryper was teased as everyone was in on the joke including them as the lead singer was buttmonkeying some of the fans. The Babylon Bee caught flack for taking aim at TBN as FoxNews.com caught wind of it; they need to be properly defined by someone who understands them. They're often screaming this at the top of their lungs when someone uses 'piss' or 'bastard.' When Evangelicals are published along side secular authors, there's backdraft as they get flack for not being churchy or having strong language in the pages," various observations around the web speaking of the fodder of Duggar, Hovind and Young Earth Creationists. This came from more than one source but one of the observations came from the Tampa blog Stuff Fundies Like.

Disjointed Edits Group 3

The following section was added to the series of Anti-RPF quotes. However, the last sentence "as this shows the similar attitudes. A horror author who has tapped......" has no connection to the article's quote and should be removed. MeeDee (talk) 13:21, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

* "It’s true that there’s no shortage of internet clips where celebrities faced with RPF cringe in response, and most naysayers say writing about living people without their permission is a violation of consent. But a form of RPF about contemporary figures happens all the time in mainstream literature and film. For example, The Social Network, which won dozens of awards, portrayed the inner personal life of Mark Zuckerberg without his permission. For as much as we tend to enshrine the idea of the “rights” to someone’s life, legally there’s not much we can do when they’re violated." - via Darkish-Web Via Medium.com relating of a story on Ao3.org as this shows the similar attitudes. A horror author who has tapped The Edgar Allan Poe fandom in 2007.

Also, though the article is critical of RPF, this one quote seems to be less "anti" and more "hey the commercials studios create RPF, so why not the fans?" Given the overall tone of the article, I'd probably leave it where it is, but wanted to point out another layer of disconnect in the recent edits.MeeDee (talk) 17:29, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

terms in other language communities?

There's a sentence near the top about the Japanese term for RPF, namamono, and I just found a few sources abbreviating it to nmmn.[3][4] It would be interesting to have a section on what RPF is called in other languages if people know of more terms. (I don't know what RPF is called in other languages.)--aethel (talk) 00:03, 22 February 2022 (UTC)