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.

But once the performer markets themselves as a sex object then they've opened the door.

But then you have to define what it means to market yourself as a sex object. IMO, a lot of reasonably good-looking talented actors playing charismatic characters have had sex objectness thrust upon them, and never really wanted or dreamed of such a thing--in their minds, they're character actors lucky enough to get a well-paying gig.

(Again, not condemning anyone here--just thinking through the issues involved.)

(Jesus, I am so going to regret this. But.)

See, my problem - I agree with what has been said here by the 'RPS is invasive & of the bad' camp. I have said it myself.

Nevertheless, I feel obliged to be honest about the fact that I'm very fond of several pieces of Lord of the Rings Real Person Fic. In the following paragraphs I am in no way trying to persuade anyone else to become fond of it, nor am I disagreeing with the comments already made about RPF being intrusive or squicksome. In the following paragraphs I am simply looking at why I don't interact with the stories in the way that I thought one did interact with the stories.

I thought that liking RPF was something that developed out of an obsessive interest in the individuals concerned, in the way that fanfiction develops out of an obsessive interest in a given show or character. But it ain't necesarily so.

Let it be stated for the record - I didn't oost after the characters or the actors, much as I adored (adore) The Fellowship of the Ring and excited though I most certainly am about The Two Towers. I'm still not particularly interested in any of the actors*, beyond wishing them all well and feeling vaguely that they're probably all nice chaps. Still, generally speaking - not particularly interested in/oosting after any of the actors, not particularly knowledgable about any of them, wish them all well but wouldn't neccesarily call myself a fan.

But I'm still very fond of and intrigued by several pieces of LotR RPF. I don't remotely think of them as being true, nor do I want them to be true, nor am I interested in the love lives of any of the people whose names and appearances have been appropriated for the sake of the fanfiction. Frankly, it would be very much easier for my conscience if the LotR RPS writers had outright made up fictional characters, because in effect that's what they're doing. Effectively it's original character fiction. And as porn (and slash) I think it's interesting in a way that 'proper' fanfiction isn't precisely because it's fanfiction that exists outwith a narrative structure.

Morally, fwiw, I'm of the opinion that rps isn't immoral/unethical/whatever - but that it's discourteous, and as such A Bad Thing and unnecesary, and in practice something one pretty much shouldn't do. There's enough unkindness in the world already without making art out of intimate details (whether real or hypothetical) of someone else's life without their permission. It's not a terrible or wicked thing to do, but it's an unkind thing to do. (Or at least to do and publish in a public forum.)

Outwith the question of hurting someone's feelings, though, I do think that (based on my limited reading to date) RPS functions in a way that is genuinely interesting and distinct from proper fanfiction, and that as such it merits intelligent discussion of the writing - both in terms of literary merits and of feminist & psychological issues involved. Although I'm not proposing to engage in such a discussion here.

• Except for Sir Ian - I do have huge Sir Ian love based on his fabulous acting in umpty ump plays & films and the handful of times I've seen him appear on chat shows/game shows/whatever. He's up there with Dame Judy in my personal hall of Jolly Good Eggs who should have a splendid time and be plied with fine wines and sparkling conversation wherever they go. But this is a tangent, unrelated to the whole RPF thing. Still, Go Team McKellern. Bless.

(puts whip down. Steps cautiously away from dead horse. Whistles nonchalently. Saunters away)

I do think that (based on my limited reading to date) RPS functions in a way that is genuinely interesting and distinct from proper fanfiction, and that as such it merits intelligent discussion of the writing - both in terms of literary merits and of feminist & psychological issues involved. Although I'm not proposing to engage in such a discussion here.

Not so fast, missy. You don't owe me the whole discussion, but I think you need to articulate some of the issues worth discussing that you think RPS raises.

I'm all about flogging the dead animals. I want to keep talking until I understand everything. I'm a silly thing, as my sisters do inform me. But I'm going to keep talking-- not argumentatively, but trying to deal this all out.

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.

Not from my position.

I don't even really mark a difference between RPS and RPF. By my mind, it doesn't matter whether I'm writing a story about Elijah Woods helping his new neighbor down the hall move his dresser in, and then stay for tea and a chat about the neighbor's pet cats, or a story about Elijah Woods having hot monkey sex with the new neighbor in the service elevator on top of the dresser they're moving. When you appropriate Elijah Wood's point of view, you're committing an act that's invasive, by my boundaries.

I've been told that I'm a little insane about this, I freely admit. I squirm at the idea of going into journalism (the soft'n'friendly kind, I mean: stories, not just laid out as facts facts facts) because when I'm faced with the prospect of having to present someone else's argument and point of view in an article, I feel as though I have to do it in a way that they would exactly approve of-- it's an incredible burden. I feel as though I have them hovering over my shoulder disagreeing with my words. "I'd never say it that way!" I think about the queasy feeling I get every time someone misrepresents a point I've made.

And that's also what this is about.

Yahtzee's Hoop Screams doesn't really set off my uncomfortable-ness levels, because the actual people are kept to very flat, two-dimensional roles, and while a small, absolutist part of me says that there should be *no* inclusion of real, living people in your stories, I know that that's not possible. Even in "original" fiction I draw upon my real-life experiences and the people I know every day. And there are times when you deliberately, obviously, give Real People cameos or supporting or main (as long as they're not pov) parts in your story. I'm thinking of the lovely post FayJay wrote for me in Sang Sacre about stepping through the mirror-- and that's a very interesting example, because it came directly off of something I'd started but had had trouble on. Fay's piece even started off with direct quotes from my post that were, of course, not credited, because it was obviously taking up where I left off, and was all shared in the context of a group of friends who played with writing together.

t rereading it again God, I utterly adore Fay.

That little piece of writing had me in it, and Hec too, and its author was piloting us around as though she had control of us. But I know and love FayJay, and I knew what she was doing, and she was clearly writing-- it was a gift, really, among friends; and that's the only context where RPF doesn't annoy me, when you write Spike/Trudy porn to cheer her up when Trudy's had a bad day, or play a text-based RPG (hee! acronym similar) like Sang Sacre with your friend and surprise her for her birthday by crowning her queen of a neat little nation.

You see what I'm getting at. Within this context of a group of people who know each other and who have/treat writing as an everyday commodity between them-- there's a space for writing about one another, but you don't want to take it too far. It's friendly action, and a gift when someone includes you, but no matter how gorgeous Fay's prose is (for example) I wouldn't want her making me a POV character in her next Smallville story.

Or... okay, maybe I would, but that's just because I'm in love with Fay! And I'd still feel a little weird about it.

I'm very tired. I'm going to stop for now.

In completely different news, I just watched Who Framed Roger Rabbitt? again, and I want to read Toon-POV fic. Written by Livia, specially, I think. The bright, flat, rushing colors. It would be perfect in her mouth.

In other, other news, the dog just threw up on the rug again. I hate that animal.

[edited several times for content, typos, and formatting. yowza.]

I guess part of the reason I don't see RPF as shocking or bad is that there is a long literary history of slandering the people you hate in your literature. Or just using them. Dante does it, Joyce does it (and Stoppard riffs on that), Saul Bellow does it (Herzog is a big masterpiece about his best friend screwing his wife). Everybody in Pat Conroy's family cringes when they see his next book hit the shelves, wondering which therapy session he's chosen to fictionalize this time.

If you stand too close to a writer you'll get sucked into the airvent of their writing process pretty quick. As far as I'm concerned, anything in the writer's experience is fair game. But I think writer's frequently have to choose between betraying confidences and imperiling friendships to write something out of their emotional experience.

I think my opinion is largely shaped by the fact that for the most part, these are people who chose jobs that place them in the public realm. AFAIK no one forced Elijah Wood to become an actor, or to take work in major movies. Now if someone was writing about a private person who just happened to end up in the news, or about someone they knew, then I think I'd be more likely to consider that an invasion. If someone wrote an Elian Gonzalez RPF, I'd see it differently than an Eddie Izzard one.

A lot of writers cannibalize their lives - Anne Lamott is one of the best examples - one can trace events that she's written about that have happened to her and her friends to events that occur almost exactly the same way in her works of fiction. Some would consider that an invasion of privacy. Others would only consider it that if she gave out too many details.