It surprises me how many people I've read talking about RPF don't seem to think that. Or to have thought of that.

I guess I just don't see the danger.

I read The Alienist a few weeks ago. It's got some RPF in it. Every time the real character showed up, I was distracted wondering "Did he? Would he? Is this fact?" Him being whoever-the-fuck-he-was didn't help me enjoy the story at all. Broke me out of the fourth wall every time. Now, if he'd been Joe Bloggs instead of Roosevelt would have let me enjoy the story *more* not less.

And that's a core component of how I feel about RPF. I don't want to be able to have my own wondering. I don't want to be able to think "Well, you didn't read that article where he said he was afraid of chickens, did you?"

I'd be as guilty as the next person of reading reportage about celebs. It's fun, up to a point. If it's true. If there's no wondering (by me) and manipulation (by the author). Once it's not true, it's more like a trip into the author's head (more so than with an OC or a fictional character), and it's a trip with embarassing (to me) scenery. Because of the invasion of privacy.

So I don't think it daring or naughty or anything. It's another exercise, is all.

It never occured to me to be concerned about RPF being intrusive on someone else's life. If someone's sitting at home imagining my day, I'm more likely to snicker than anything else. "I, Claudius" by Robert Graves is RPF, and that's one of the great literary works.

I'm not trying to be snippy or anything, but the major reason I don't read RPF is that I don't have time to read all the fic out there, and the show plots are generally more interesting than real life. If an actor were musing about his character, that could be fun to read.

"I, Claudius" by Robert Graves is RPF, and that's one of the great literary works.

I don't feel that's either here nor there. I don't think anyone's saying it can't be extremely well done, just that some of us don't want to read it.

And the minute someone writes about me doing anything I didn't do, and publishes it for others to read, my privacy has been violated. I do play my space close to my chest, but not exceptionally so, and I do know other people (some marginally exposed to the public eye) who feel the same way.

But even if someone stood up and said "Write about me! Read about things I never did!" I'd still not be interested. It's not all about privacy for me. While I might slightly be interested in Viggo's offscreen adventures (but I'm not), I'm even less interested in someone else's ideas about what he does when he's not being someone else. I see absolutely no pull there. If I were a Viggo fan, I'd be looking for the real deal.

The difference between historical fiction like The Alienist and RPF-fanfic may be that in the first case, the writer and the audience are in tacit agreement that the story and depicted characters are based on real people and real events to a greater or lesser extent, but are clearly speculation-based. Also, historical fiction tends to be about 'safely dead' protagonists, enough removed so that even their direct descendants aren't likely to be reading about their parents doing X when clearly the real parents would have done Y instead.

But surely RPF consumers also agree about the speculation-basis, right? And I never for a moment assumed anything in The Alienist was based on real events, but I did spend too much time wondering about it, and it was one of the factors that prevented me from immersing as I prefer to do.

It doesn't matter to me if X would really have behaved in such a way, the story is just someone's supposition about X. I think a series of stories of Viggo Mortenson wandering around New Zealand getting used to his sword would be funny.

I'm sure most RPF consumers have a good 'this is not really real' filter working, though I think you're more likely to run across people with slender grasps of reality in fandom than elsewhere (based on my extensive experience, not a wildass slam), but I think it's also that RPF consumers/producers may have more unexamined assumptions that doesn't lead them to reminding themselves before writing and/or reading that they are concerning themselves with the not-real activities of real people.

may have more unexamined assumptions

Such as what?

I think there are insane, bad RPF writers out there; just as there are insane, bad gen, het, and slash plain-old-fic writers out there. But I know there are at least a *bunch* of actually-very-clever people who write with the attitude that RPF is media subversion and their opportunity to take an authorial hand to the hegemonically-controlled pop-culture 'scape presented to them.

IJS.