The cetaceanist was so gagged by how much my sisters and I knew about whales and anatomy that he asked: Are you guys nurses or scientists? Did you study medicine?
Me: We’re just giant Biology geeks. :)
Literally every question: What bone is this? HYOID! How does the sperm whale withstand the pressure of a deep dive? THEY COLLAPSE THEIR LUNGS! What is ambergues? SPERM WHALE PUKE AND SQUID BEAK THAT YOU CAN SELL FOR MILLIONS OF DOLLARS!
The cetaceanist: Sperm whales are the loudest mammals on the planet, with vocalizations reaching an astonishing 230 decibels. They stun their main prey, the giant squid, with their clicks. For reference, a jet engine from 100 feet away produces about 140 decibels. At around 150 decibels your eardrums will burst, and the threshold for death is estimated to be in the range of 180 to 200.
My sister: So it stuns the giant squid by yelling? *Pretends to shout and kill something*
Me: Those phasers aren’t set to stun. They’re set to KILL.
Mom: *Yelling excitedly* I THOUGHT OF PHASERS TOO! *Loud laughing*
Cetaceanist: You’re Trekkies too?! Did you see the humpback movie?
Mom: DID we. That’s our favourite!
Ceracionist: MINE TOO!
Me: We can tell.
*All laughing*
Nobody has any business being that rowdy and having this much fun at the whale museum.
The cetaceanist told us he had such a fun time that he tried not to let us pay the fee at the end. I love meeting Trekkies in the wild.
P.S: I cannot tell you how often the sentence “the one with the whales” got dropped.
P.P.S: Did you know that dolphins and sperm whales can understand each other?! I’m so gooped. Ok I’m going away to calm down now I’ve got zero chill about cetaceans.
Even good-faith non-haters of Discovery and Picard were like “enough with the grimdark already” after a couple of seasons—and look at the Star Trek slate now:
Discovery is an LGBTQ safe space where the computer’s your friend and everyone gets free therapy;
Picard S2 was a fever-dream mashup of “Tapestry” (TNG), “Past Tense” (DS9), the One with the Whales, and “Unimatrix Zero” (VOY), if you took all the lesbian subtext in “Unimatrix Zero” and made it actual, literal text;
Lower Decks, a whole-ass sitcom which also feels like a genuine sequel series to TNG, my ultimate comfort watch;
Prodigy is arguably the darkest series they’ve got going right now, and that’s literally an animated show for kids;
Strange New Worlds, which isn’t afraid to get dark, but which is even less afraid to get silly.
And… I think we won, y’all. We said “Star Trek, please lighten the fuck up”—and it did. At this point I’m almost willing to let Michelle Yeoh’s Section 31 series have a few war crimes—you know, as a treat. 😈️
no doubt in my mind this is what went through spock’s mind as soon as he met jim kirk
[alt image ID: jim kirk (star trek beyond survival suit) standing in the forests of the planet, altamid. a tumblr text post by user hiveswap overlays the image. the text post reads: “his slutty looks and abandonment issues have captivated me.” end alt ID]
I try to be pro freedom of fiction, but there's one genre I find hard to swallow where I find that the anti arguments often make more sense to me than the pro arguments, and that's RPF. It's fiction, I know that, but I wouldn't want anyone to write smut about me either, especially not me as a kid, so it sits wrong with me as a genre. It just feels repulsive and intrusive to treat real people as fictional characters. Any idea on where I can find more nuanced takes on this subject?
RPF anon, I’m not sending this in to admonish anyone for writing it or to tell them to stop doing it, and I’m never gonna interact with that content anyway, but it does elicit a reaction of “Ew, oh God why” in me and I was curious to know what makes this type of content fine to write about real people. Looking to learn, not change anyone’s mind.
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Well…
First of all, disgust is not a moral compass. Sometimes, what we find disgusting does line up well with things we think are logically unethical, but sometimes, it’s just a visceral reaction based on personal taste or learned hatred. So we’ll set that part aside for now.
Now, on to your real point, which is that RPF could upset its subjects. That does make logical sense on the surface. I can see why it’s an attractive argument.
Here is the problem I have with it:
1. Yes, you would not like RPF written about you, but how do you know that this applies to other people? Every time this topic comes up, somebody asks me “How would you like it if someone nonconsensually wrote RPF about you?” and my answer is that this has happened to me. I felt slightly weird about it, but I didn’t ask them to stop. We’re still friends 20 years later.
We have examples of celebrities who were flattered or amused. We have examples of celebrities who asked people not to do specific things like shipping them with their ex but who did not care if people wrote violent porn about them.
It is simply untrue that everyone objects to RPF, even pornographic and squicky RPF, about themselves. I am not a celeb, but I genuinely do not care if someone writes graphic pedo fic about me as a child. I don’t even care if they jerk it to photographs of me as a child. As long as they aren’t fucking actual kids or sending their fic to me, I don’t care what they do.
Your next point is going to be something like “Okay, but what about a celeb who has said they hate it?” My answer there is that many individual fans will not want to write fic under those circumstances, and I get why. However, the second problem I have with anti-RPF arguments is:
2. What makes RPF so special? Plenty of actors identify very closely with a character they play and object strenuously to fic about that character, especially anything they find gross or creepy… and yes, historically, this has meant m/m more than it has meant death or rapefic.
Why should an actor’s genuine feelings of disgust and hurt be invalid when a fic is about a character they play rather than their public persona? What gives them the right to tell fans how to fantasize in either case?
Authors are even more notorious for freaking out about fic of their work. They’ve thrown hissy fits likening it to cheating with their spouse, to rape, and to white slavery. (Fuck you, Diana Gabaldon. Never forget!) I know fans who think fanfic of books in general is an invasion and that only fic of tv/film is normal and okay.
Fic can cause genuine hurt feelings, yes, but all fic can do this.
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Those are my logical arguments for why all RPF is acceptable–or at least no different from other fic. But I also think it’s important to recognize how RPF operates in practice.
In this era of youtube celebrities, we are seeing a bit more RPF of people who are relatively accessible and maybe not that famous. However, most RPF is still about the public personas of famous people. It’s more likely that a rando will have a boundary-tresspassing friend write them into an original novel than that they’ll get RPF written about them in a fandom context.
Typical RPF looks more like some AU where fanon personalities and faces of BTS are grafted onto a bunch of wizards running a magic shop. This is so unbelievably fake I don’t even know where to start. Even if it isn’t an AU, idol groups are some of the fakest celebrities there are. Their images are heavily manufactured. The people being written about might as well be characters they play.
Moreover, their images are manufactured to make fans fantasize.
Music groups have always done this. It has been normal since way, way back to have fan magazines with stories about “You win a date with [guy]”. The only difference is that people now write a fair amount of m/m in addition to m/ofc.
I just don’t think it’s reasonable to tell fans how to fantasize or to ask your audience not to have an imagination. Fic on AO3 is far more boundary-respecting than people gushing over their crushes on twitter, a site plenty of celebs actually use, but they’re both okay as long as people aren’t rubbing the subject’s face in their fantasy life.
Even the favorite example of Dan and Phil is complicated. Yes, fans were pushy and obnoxious at them–directly at them–but they also stoked the fires of shipping because it was good for clicks. They rode that type of fan fantasy to stardom. People writing fic are at least engaging in overt fiction and fantasy, unlike the people harassing the actual dudes for info about their personal lives.
Anti-RPF rants tend to treat this as some innocent passerby minding their own business and then some pervert jumping out of the bushes to tell them about their wank fantasies, but that’s just not the reality of most RPF writing. It’s generally inspired by people who seek fame through encouraging that kind of fantasy. It’s not RPF that invades celebs’ space: it’s people demanding a stop to RPF who are invading fans’ space.
And there’s a special circle of hell for those pathetic suckups who show other people’s fic to their faves hoping to get their fandom enemies in trouble and curry favor with their idols. Those are the people with no boundaries who deserve our wrath.
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Original writing is full of RPF, from basically all historical novels to ripped from the headlines stuff speculating about celebrities. I find some of this tasteless or Too Soon, but it is seen as completely normal by society. Most ‘young woman meets her male celeb crush’ stuff is normalized.
The reason RPF comes under fire is that the less socially acceptable sexual fantasies of young women are always under fire.
I absolutely do think there are issues with teenagers seeking internet fame and finding it’s more than they bargained for. If you object to fanfic about teenage youtubers, you should object to there being teenage youtubers.
I also think there are issues with child stars. But is somebody’s Stranger Things fanfic on AO3 really more of a problem than all the things that went on on set? Than the epic quantities of creepy fanmail? Ultimately, if you’re bothered by RPF of underage actors, you should be against underage people being in movies at all. The biggest sources of harm aren’t coming from fic.
What I find genuinely funny is that like, celeb RPF is a lot more common than you think it is. “My mom sold me to one direction” was RPF. Every teenage girl that talked in class about which band member of whatever popular band they wanted to date was RPF. Hells, you could make an argument for half the Belieber craze being RPF, because all of them wanted to date him, and obviously it wasn’t going to ever happen, but they sure spent a lot of time obsessing over the what-if and fantasizing.
(Source: I was 11 and afab in 2011, and found the music grating at best.)
The difference between that and RPF, if you want to see a difference, is that RPF writes things down. You could also argue that RPF is more written by adults, but c'mon, either you forgive the old girls for liking the same hobbies they did as teenagers, or ‘fess up to the ageism there.
There used to be this very firm mentality of if a celeb wants to see the RPF, they can find it themselves, so for gods’ sake don’t show it to them. Dan and Phil (of which I was only really ever vaguely aware of) proved that it’s not as common a sentiment as it once was, but it should be.
I still stand by that: if they want to find it, they can do so all on their own, you don’t know their tastes so don’t give fic recs to strangers. Otherwise, I don’t give a damn.
Yeah, “If only I could date him! *swoon*” is the default form of fandom for 1D or Bieber or whomever. It’s not really different from RPF other than not being written down in narrative story form.
Re adults writing fic about underage real people: yeah, I see why it’s intensely squicky for many people. That’s legit. But in terms of whether it should be allowed, I see it similarly to other art: gross fiction =/= things people are trying to do IRL. Older people often like art about teenagers to relive their own teen years; there’s no correlation between consuming/producing that art and doing skeevy stuff to actual teens.
Trying to police underage fic online would involve asking the underage writers to state their ages publicly to prove they were ~allowed~ to write it and going after 18-year-olds for writing fic about 17-year-olds. Nothing good would come of this.
The pro argument isn’t about being in favor of the content. It’s part of the broader argument about fantasies not leading to crimes and permissive content policies leading to good labeling while banning content leads to unlabeled content.
