"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.

I guess I plain old don't see the subversiveness. And I'm quite uninterested in hypothetical celebrity.

As a wish-fulfillment, as a manipulation, I can see the urge to write. Some. I just don't have the urge to consume.

I'm amusing myself by contemplating Viggo's neighbors in New Zealand chatting to each other about that nice young man down the hall who carries a sword around.

Well, for one 'the past is a different country' -- sf fans who read alternative history are often well-versed in actual history details and get lots of pleasure from picking out where the author has included such details accurately and where they're deliberately departing from the verifiable historical record. But there's also the understanding that if you get into the head of, say, Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, you're dealing with a worldview that basically makes many different assumptions about the world and how it is. He's not a 2002 guy in 1906 clothing, he's a 2002 conception of what a 1906 guy would have thought and felt and acted.