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.

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.

Two different things. I have very much used friends' lives in stories, in ways that are intentionally recognizable (as joke or homage) and in ways that I'm not even aware of till after I've finished. But I would never use my friends' names and details in the story -- the story may draw on what I see in the lives of the people around me, but the only people whose inner lives I can say I really know anything about are the ones I create for myself.

James Joyce used all sorts of stuff about Nora Barnacle to create Molly Bloom. But in the end Molly is a different woman than Nora was, and living a different life. Her emotional and physical and psychological foundations may be built on what Joyce saw in Nora, but she is not herself Nora (and in fact Brenda Maddox's biography of Nora embarrasses itself in how far it stretches to find parallelisms between the fictional and the real at times). She's something new that Joyce created from the material of his life -- which included his love for Nora.

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 strikes me as exceedingly glib, and, um, silly. If I don't take up active participation in every aspect of a famous person's life/image, I'm a victim? If I decide something's not for me, and shun that thing, I'm passive? No, I'm choosy and try to make choices based on what doesn't make me feel bad about myself. (Well, and besides, a fair amount of pop culture gets an irritated, bored snort from me, and nothing more. Like, to be culturally competent, or even self-determiningly aware, am I required now to take seriously every idiot pronouncement I see or hear? I sure hope not.)

One of the greater theses of media culture literacy is the consumer's ability -- necessity, given the available volume to consume -- to choose, to pick this and that, to cobble together and pull into pieces and generally make my own sense of the glut I'm offered. Can't I make my own sense, and have that sense not cross certain lines? Can't I apply my own, self-derived ethical rules, to my own menu of possible entertainment? And can't everyone else, by extension, do the same and choose to consume or not consume, produce and not produce, as they see fit?

As far as I can tell, famous people are still human. None of the actors I know consider their real lives fair game for complete strangers.

Sure, it's a possible side effect, but I consider it more like carpal tunnel for someone who types a lot in their day job. So not the point, and although they're voluntarily increasing the likelihood of it happening, it's still to be avoided.

Just that there's less control.

The actors I know are trying to make a living doing something they love. Being seen by the public is very helpful.

This strikes me as exceedingly glib, and, um, silly. If I don't take up active participation in every aspect of a famous person's life/image, I'm a victim?

Exactly. Without puppyslash you're almost certainly doomed. Quick, innoculate yourself against the viral imagery now. See, now that's exceedingly glib. Previously was merely glib.

James Joyce used all sorts of stuff about Nora Barnacle to create Molly Bloom. But in the end Molly is a different woman than Nora was, and living a different life.

Sure. So is my fictive version of AH. Not that there is one, but the point remains. So is a biographer's version of AH.

As far as I can tell, famous people are still human.

Sucker!

None of the actors I know consider their real lives fair game for complete strangers.

It's not their "real life." Making up stories about somebody isn't real - it's fiction. Using the details that you glean from EW is just foraging for material. As Misha notes, it comes out your creation. Whether you want it to or not - every writer does that

Making up stories about somebody isn't real - it's fiction

Well, I was assuming we were using that definition of fiction. The real life is the direct and palpable input.

But how can I rationalize an instinctual protective response? Not easily. Just that it would be invasive if it happened to me (I don't even let myself be porned here), and I know enough people that do consider it invasive that I'm going to extend the benefit of the doubt to the people I haven't checked with.

I'm not running around shutting down sites, or telling other people how to feel about it. I'm saying I'll neither consume nor produce it. 'Tis all.

I completely fail to see how it's a necessary response to anything, though.

Using the details that you glean from EW is just foraging for material. As Misha notes, it comes out your creation. Whether you want it to or not - every writer does that.

WHOA! Please don't use my argument for why Joyce wasn't writing RPF to strengthen your argument for RPF, because it doesn't work. I was talking about borrowing material from life to build a new character. You're talking about finding out everything you can about a real person's life, making up the parts you don't know, and calling it by the same name as that real person. Different thing.

I'm with ita. I have a complete instinctive response to RPF in almost any form (unless it's clearly parody), and RPS makes my belly clench in bad ways. I'm a cheerful ficcer and that's one of the ways in which I can assert my ownership of the corporate myth, if you will, but I assert no ownership over other human beings.

Others may do as they will but I don't have to read it. And yes, I'm also uncomfortable with fic based on literary works by living authors. Yes, I'm aware that's not entirely logical, but there it is.