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.

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, there are gray areas. There are the celebrities who have created characters that they are in public that are completely different from who they actually are. And there are some things, like Whose Line Is It Anyway? fanfic, which uses the idea that the actors are essentially playing characters who just have the same names. Still, there is a major difference between just imagining what that person might have done in a certain situation, and writing some wish-fulfillment that has more to do with the writer's crush than anything else. (As I may have mentioned before, I read one wonderful piece by a Xena fan who imagine that she'd won a contest for a date with Lucy Lawless, and the story was largely about her trying to interact with LL as her own person, and not just a strangely modernly dressed lesbian love goddess.)

Just to be clear, I'm not saying my personal habit of not fantasizing about real people is something I'm advocating as a hard-and-fast Moral Rule of any kind. Just my own admittedly vanilla comfort zone in action.

People can draw their ethical lines where ever they're comfortable, and I understand that. Nobody's obliged to oost after AD anymore than they're obliged to oost after scruffy Wes.

But once the performer markets themselves as a sex object then they've opened the door. They are specifically trading on their appeal as the actor - not just the character - to people's sexual fantasies.

You don't have to go through that door, but they are the ones that opened it.

I don't think the do-unto-others rule applies since I'm not in the same position as a celebrity who has made (in my mind) an implicit contract to sell their image.

Part of this is a certain cynicism on my part about media culture, appropriation and a bunch of other stuff which wouldn't make sense in the ethics between two people. But writing RPF doesn't feel like an act against the performer, but appropriating the media image which they sell as a career function.

To me, the objections here are like applying Newtonian physics to sub-atomic particles. Our time and culture are fundamentally different than (for example) 19th century or even early 20th century notions of propriety. The media culture is not an element that we sample at will, but rather the saturated environment we inhale and exhale daily, shaping us and our experiences beyond our conscious choices.

I'm saying Fic writing, textual appropriation, illegal sampling etc. are necessary defensive responses to an invasive media culture. If you apply the morals of a different era to this situation you are essentially participating passively in a culture that will twist and turn you until it's shaken all the money out of your pocket. I guess I'm saying that taking the high road makes you vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation in our culture.

This raises all kinds of troubling ethical questions, of course (particularly about authorship and intellectual property), but the ethical dilemma is implicit in the culture itself. If you just swim downstream with the current, you're a perfect consumer.

edit: Sorry, I didn't mean that to sound like I'm calling all of you with scruples against RPF to be tight-ass Victorian media illiterates. I know you're not. I'm just throwing darts at the argument.