Absolutely love Geordi La Forge’s innate ability to become friends with his enemies. Some Romulan dude? Hugh the Borg? Five minutes with Geordi and they’re completely Team Human. Why even have a Federation when they can just unleash Geordi on their enemies and turn them into friends tbh.
a fun spock commission I did for @likeawesternwind recently! it’s on a 9x12 inch panel and is super glossy. I got the picture from an old star trek calendar! I also used scrapbook paper and acrylic paint.
my commission info is in my pinned post and if you’d like to see
everything I have up on etsy right now those links are in my bio!
Somewhere in my notes in the last few days I saw someone add some tags that I’ve been thinking about ever since. I wish I could find them again (or that I’d just saved their post at the time) because I think they made a lot of sense.
They were talking about how fanfic is becoming more and more mainstream while still remaining largely transgressive. It’s such an interesting dichotomy to think about!
On the one hand, you have sites like AO3 and realities like widespread high speed internet access being more and more accessible to larger and larger groups of people. This makes it incredibly easy for anyone at all to find and read fanfic.
On the other hand, you have the roots of fanfic. It was born out of marginalized groups such as women, people of colour, and members of the queer community deciding to take the stories that had been aimed at a largely male, white, heterosexual audience and inverting them into something they could enjoy and relate to. To this day, fanfic is a place where people write the kinds of stories that don’t get made into movies and TV shows. The kinds of stories that don’t get published or end up on the New York Times bestseller list.
Fanfic used to be written and shared in secret. People used to hide it. People still do hide the fact that they read or write it. But it’s becoming something that more and more people are becoming more and more aware of.
So now there’s a spotlight starting to shine on fanfic. People who aren’t looking for transgressive works are finding them where they always were. People who think the status quo is fine are getting upset when they enter a place where the status quo is constantly being upended.
The tags on that post that I can’t find made the point that popular media is curated and sanitized and stripped of most of its controversy in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. But that also makes that audience expect all media to be curated and sanitized in the same way. When they encounter the messy, controversial, ugly, radical, difficult things that people write in fanfic, they’re unprepared.
Fanfic isn’t big media. Fanfic authors aren’t being edited and filtered and polished - and nor are their works. The clash between the expectations of people new to fanfic and accustomed to popular media and the realities of what fanfic is and what it’s being written for - that’s part of this struggle that fandom is going through right now. It’s been going on since the beginning of course, but it’s getting louder every year.
I’m still thinking my way through this, but it really does make a lot of sense to me. If those were your tags, please let me know so I can credit you with the ideas at the core of this post.
And if you have any ideas for how we as fans can better introduce the newbies to the culture and expectations in fandom, I’d love to hear it. The better we can guide people into our space, the better they’ll fit in when they join it.
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.
