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.

tsk. I can't argue with your instinctive responses. Though this is a highly refined instinct, not necessarily the kind you find in ferrets.

WHOA! Please don't use my argument for why Joyce wasn't writing RPF to strengthen your argument for RPF,

Bwahaha! Try and stop me.

because it doesn't work.

We'll see about that.

I was talking about borrowing material from life to build a new character.

Check.

You're talking about finding out everything you can about a real person's life,

Did not! That may be the RPF M.O., but I did not allude to this.

making up the parts you don't know,

Fiction, check. See above.

and calling it by the same name as that real person.

Yeah. See Pierre Menard, Kathy Acker blah blah post-modern cakes. Which is entirely the source of my glib - I don't really feel like defending the post-modern reading. Who does? But...

Different thing.

I don't think it is. Y'all see it as signficantly, ethically different and I don't. Because writers use whatever's handy, whatever fires up their imaginations. Where people decide to draw their own lines is their own business, but I don't think it's essentially different. In essence it isn't.

I do not consider it essentially different in the sense that they are different types of fiction. But I do find one essentially reprehensible and ethically problematic, and the other not.

Bwahaha! Try and stop me.

Hee. I love Evil Hec.

Hee. I love Evil Hec.

Speaking of which, I let Emmett watch Fellowship of the Ring tonight. During the fight against the cave troll? (and ita will like this) Emmett was chanting with great animation: "War! War! War!"

It doesn't quite have the exceedingly glib quotient of "Violence is cool" but I think the bloodlust is there. Also, true to form, Emmett thought Sauron (as glimpsed in the early flashbacks) was cool.

That reminds me of my cousin, who one day as a little kid announced to his mother, "I want to watch some violins." She was delighted, and helped him flip through channels until they found an orchestra, or something; but he started to twist with impatience again. No, not that; he said. Turns out he'd said he wanted to watch some violence.

Nevermind. t /Emily Littella

Man, I miss Gilda.

Heh. Sax and violins.

Also, Emmett tried to do Gimli's accent as the troll attacked and heaped all kinds of pseudo Dwarvish abuse at the troll.

Sax and violins.

BWAH!

Did you make that up?

I need that on a T-shirt. Or something.

Did you make that up?

Awww, kid, that's older than vaudeville. Which is itself so old as to be dead.

And just so Nutty doesn't think I am merely glib, and before Misha beats me about the head with 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannia (the scholar's edition!) - I want to say that I don't think there is a clear bright line. Everybody fudged at one point or another with exceptions to the No Real People Rule. But they were different exceptions at different places.

Once you have crossed the line to appropriating the characters then you have already entered the ethically tricky place and it gets slippery. Fic is subversive. Once you've allowed that, then you've moved away from one of the clear boundaries: authorship. Gut instinct is a useless indicator, because YGMV.

Really I don't have much to say about RPF. But I do have something to say about James Joyce. Bear with me, or hey, go ahead and skip it.

The James Joyce comparison really really doesn't work, on many many levels. First, he wasn't writing RPF, he was doing the very in vogue thing at the time, mining his own life for his writing. There was no one more exposed on that page than he. Second, as Michele (I think) said, he didn't write fictional tales about real people, he did the opposite, incorporating real, often very private, moments and reinventing them as fiction. Moreover the exceptions to that, the moments when he included "characters" that shared the same name as real historical people who did the same things those real people were well known to have done, he got his ass nailed to the fucking wall. The libel charges brought against him were at least partly to blame for why the book was banned in Ireland for so long. Third, the fact that he wrote great art doesn't mean that his methods weren't unethical. They are entirely separate issues in my book.

Now like I said, I don't have much to say about RPF. Go ahead and write it, don't write it, read it, don't read it, read it but feel dirty, whatever. No skin off my nose. Just don't compare it to Joyce, please.