It's interesting to think how some pre-computer era writers would have related to the Internet -- Tolkien did enjoy free-wheeling literary discussions. H.P. Lovecraft would have taken to newsgroup discussion like a fish to water. The Bronte sisters (and brother) did RPF as their juvenalia, including the Duke of Wellington....

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wrod.

The Bronte sisters (and brother) did RPF as their juvenalia, including the Duke of Wellington

Heck, all their shared world fantasy stuff was Internetalicious. They were totally fictastic.

And this afternoon I wept my way through most of Shadowlands, and was very struck by "we read to know we are not alone". I think Lewis might have liked the Internet too. Possibly. Or not. But certainly that whole touching-somebody-else's-thoughts thing that you have with this style of discourse (without the same layers that tend to interfere with face to face interaction) is a lot closer to the intimacy of the printed page.

t /pretentious.

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Wrod sandwich on that, Fay.

The only thing I'd like to graft from Windows to my Mac is the startup sound bit.

Ooh, I'd love to have this RPF discussion again, but I'm bone tired. Let me just say:

However, I still stand in the corner of "subversive is more interesting" and "media images include fantasies about the performer sold as publicity."

And I see this point; but I still think that there must be an invisible line drawn between Alyson Hannigan the marketed image (object) and Alyson Hannigan the person; and I would be comfortable reading fiction about Alyson Hannigan the object, except for the part where they have the same exact name. That's really the problem, for me. And they wear the same clothes, most of the time; and they wear the same makeup. Alyson Hannigan the object and Alyson Hannigan the person are so closely related that sometimes it is impossible to say when it's AHtO and AHtP-- when the text you're travestying is a marketed image belonging to AH, her publicist, and her stylist; or the text is a mind just like your own.

I mean, when I dress up and go to a reading, I'm a professionalized object. I'm aware of that, and I know it's necessary for my profession (any profession!), and I like it. I like the feeling that I'm being looked at and measured up and listened to, just like every other writer in the room. I even use a professional name (my baptised name, but not how I think of myself, internally; Hec knows an embarassing amount about my name/identity ideas....) to mark my professional-object self and her work.

But I don't want people writing fic about Lauren Rile Smith. She's my creation, just the way Catharine (a character from a story I wrote) is. And just as Catharine did and does, she grew out of parts of my mind, and she lives in me. But she lives in me much more closely than Catharine does. We have the same face. To the majority of people that I know, she's all they know of me-- they don't know me at all; they know her and she speaks for me to them. How would they even distinguish between writing fic about *me* me, inner me, and Lauren Rile Smith me?

Do you see what I mean? I say that there is a distinction between the person and the marketed persona, just as (as I read him) Hec does; but I draw the line before it. It's okay to write fic about Joss Whedon's creations. It's not okay to write fic about Joss Whedon's inner self; and it's not okay to write fic about Joss Whedon's public self.

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I use a simple rule: how would I feel if it were me? I wouldn't care if someone wrote fiction about a character I play, or even a character I wrote. Or rather it might be more accurate to say that I wouldn't feel as proprietary about a character. But it would bother me a great deal if someone wrote a work of fiction in which I became a character she created. So that is where my boundary is set.

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... or, more briefly, who hasn't happened to know a famous person, and thereby become sort of protective of that person? I'm pretty parsimonious -- or, where parsimony is concerned, I err on the side of carefulness -- in my application of ethical rules; since I feel that way about a couple of people I went to school with, I feel that way about all famous people.

Of course, that wont' stop me from telling true stories about the famous people I went to school with. Heh heh heh.

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I'm with Nutty. I can't bear the idea of someone writing stories about me, but more viscerally, I'm appalled by the idea of someone ficcing Leslie Hope. And, by extension, Benjamin Bratt gets the same protection.

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I'm with Nutty too. And it's not only or always that I feel protective of these people -- it's that it's deeply squicky and even upsetting for me to hear someone talking about someone I've known like they were, well, an object. Something or someone not-real.

Rather than draw from my own annoyingly large repertoire of stories, I'll tell one that isn't mine. A friend of mine was friendly with John Kennedy Jr. and his wife. Not in any significant way -- they had one good friend in common, and they went to the same sports club, so they were "hi, how are you"-ers to one another. When Kennedy's plane went down, my friend was devastated -- for their mutual good friend, for the loss of two people who were part of her everyday scenery, and most of all by the psychic assault that the wall-to-wall coverage of their deaths constituted for people to whom Kennedy and the Bessettes were real people rather than media figures.

There's just way too much collateral damage for me ever to feel that real people fiction is OK. Historical fiction, where everyone involved with a personal stake in the people being fictionalized is dead? I'm OK with that. I'm even OK with contemporary stories that use real people as set dressing without pretending to show us their inner lives (some of David Foster Wallace's work, or Yahtzee's "Hoop Screams"). But there's a point at which I draw the line. Your fantasy about appearing on Jeopardy is one thing. Your fantasy of what Alex Trebek is really like is another.

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Historical fiction, where everyone involved with a personal stake in the people being fictionalized is dead? I'm OK with that.

Wrod, I'd say, because all that's left is the (an) object-self, the image that history recorded of them.

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What Burrell and Nutty said.

It's funny--I often daydream about what it would be like to meet various celebrities, but they're never sexual fantasies. It's all Michelle Kwan and Alexei Yagudin give me skating tips, or I get to talk writing with Joss while waiting for a plane. Stuff like that.

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I distinguish between RPS and fantasy. Sure, you play with the idea that John Travolta sweeps you off your feet in your mind. Perhaps you go into detail.

But writing it down and disseminating it? Makes me shiver.

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