The issue of real-people fic, slash in particular

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Title:	The issue of real-people fic, slash in particular
Creator:	twilight
Date(s):	February 29, 2000
Medium:
Fandom:	RPF, RPS, Bandslash
Topic:
External Links:	The issue of real-people fic, slash in particular
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The issue of real-people fic, slash in particular is a 2000 essay by twilight.

NOTE: the essay does not officially have a title. The title uses here on Fanlore is from the first sentence of the the essay.

Excerpts

The issue of real-people fic, and slash in particular, has been rather heavily debated of late among slashers. Dunno why, since most of the people who write it, myself a rare exception, have little to do with mainstream fandoms and honestly do not think of their stories from a "is this 'moral' or not?" point of view, since, being far less visible - the idea of writing fanfic and sharing it with the net just occurs a lot less with fans of real people than with fans of TV shows; even band fandoms with rich creative histories like Duran Duran and Savage Garden tend to be drops in the bucket, consisting of a few dozen stories on a handful of small private archives and author's sites, most barely publicised outside that particular fandom, compared to thousands-of-stories-on-dozens-of-archives media-based obsessions like The X-Files and Star Wars - they do tend to have to spend a lot less time defending themselves from homophobic twits than "normal" slash writers. Until now, anyway. I bring this up because recently Leigh, moderator of M/K, posted (in response to a Mulder/original character fic) that "this list is for M/K, and slash involving any character portrayed by Nick Lea." I distinctly recall Leigh being firmly on the anti side in "is RPS 'okay' or not?" debates.

What the hell is that, then? Saying that any fic about any character played by NL is okay is thinly-disguised actorslash. It may not be the way she meant to say it, but it sure sounds like the list is not about Krycek because he's so intriguing and has such delicious chemistry with Mulder, but because he's played by that foxy Nick Lea fellow. The main focus is on Krycek, sure, but they'll settle for any guy, no matter how shallowly-written or minor a character, as long as he looks like Nick Lea. Why not just take the extra baby step and write about Nick Lea himself? Why obsess over the veneer of fiction? It's all fiction anyway, whether you write about a character a person played or the person themself; why can't people get their minds around that? Actorslash never really interested me (rockstarslash is another matter entirely, of course), but if you're going for characters based solely on the fact that they're played by a guy you have the hots for, why try to hide it with rationalisations that "it's not really him, it's just a character"? Why not just be honest about your desires? I'll never understand some people...

The slashers doing the arguing would probably say I'm not worried enough about how the people I write about would react, and they're probably right. I do tend to not think too hard about how my actions might affect others. And, as I write about Savage Garden and The Cure, I do tend to rationalise that, since the members of the bands in question are obviously pretty comfortable with their sexualities - they like to wear make-up and write gender-ambiguous lyrics and publically flirt with each other - they probably wouldn't mind, and I may very well be wrong. But really, does anyone seriously think someone is going to kill themselves because they found out that people on the net like to write stories about them? Of course not. The more homophobic of them might be bothered by the dodgier fics (there are plenty of arguments that no stories about real people, explicit or not, slashy or not, should be written, after all; I think this is incredibly silly, since I can't imagine anyone taking offence at, say, being written as the hero of a sci-fi epic), but really, why should anybody be expected to lose sleep at night over it? That's life. Lots of things happen that bother people. Should the world really be a magic fluffy place where no one is ever confronted with anything that might disturb them? The argument that people should not write what they want because someone reading it might be offended is one that conventional slashers have been battling against for decades; how are people who write stories about boybands any different from those who write about Mulder and Krycek?

(Actually, from a legal point of view, those who write "normal" fanfic are worse off; at least that 14-year-old writing stories about the Backstreet Boys isn't infringing on someone's copyright...)

Don't mind me; I'm just being a geen. Someday I will learn to stop obsessing over pointing out other people's little hypocrisies, I swear.