But do find the way that (I understand) it functions as a form of fanfiction without any narrative structure an interesting question, and that's all I was addressing.

That's how I took your comments, FayJay.

In Fantasy Football, aren't the players paid for the use of their likeness? Or am I smoking monkey crack?

gulp.

...okay, my first hand knowledge of Fantasy Football is even smaller than my first hand knowledge of RPS, but in the UK I very much doubt that the players are paid for the use of their likeness. I was under the impression that it was very much an informal thing - I mean, I know friends who play, and whose offices have their own fantasy football leagues, and how the hell footballers or managers are supposed to know that Fred Bloggs in the accounts department has a virtual football team comprising X, Y and Z player, whilst Lucy Jenkins in Personnel has a virtual football team comprising A, B and C is beyond me.

But I too may be smoking monkey crack. Space monkey crack.

FayJay, I was thinking of the X-Box, etc, retail games, not RPGs. So my bad.

it functions as a form of fanfiction without any narrative structure an interesting question

My experience with fantasy sports isn't close to that. It's so narrative free that a computer can do it, and the PEOPLE are nigh irrelevant. It's based on algorithm A, scenario B would have turned out this way, aren't I clever for having assembled team C, all hail my football-fu.

There's ifs tacked along the whole thing, in a way that fiction can't do. The fiction-if is tacked right at the beginning, but fantasy football has it at the start of every "sentence".

I'm interested in the question of WHY the hell people do use N'Sync rather than N'HairGel to loosely contextualise their flights of pornalicious fantasy (or indeed to send the N'Sync boys off to Pern, or what have you) and I'm positing that the relationship between fanwriter and real person is akin to that between fantasyfootball league player and real footballplayer (as well as having some similarities to the fiction-derived fanfiction I'm more familiar with).

I'm not really sure why people don't use N'HairGel. It's an interesting question. I think that, with boybands, the line between what's the public image and what's the private person is different than it is for actors. As I see it, the movies or TV shows are the product that's being marketed to the public, and the actors' public images are being constructed as advertisement for that product. Where you get into problems is when the actors' private lives bleed over into public image, and figuring out where that line is.

With boy bands, the public image, to a large extent, is the product. I think that Milli Vanilli pretty much proved that (or at least proved that that's the way the music industry sees it.) They're not trying to sell the music; they're selling the image. Just about every N'Sync fan has a favorite boy, but generally not based on their singing or dancing skills; it's based on the cute/sexy/dangerous/whatever image. These bands were designed by music execs. So the line between product and image is pretty close to nonexistant.

As for fantasy football, what matters to the fantasy games is performance on the field. How many goals are scored determines the players rankings, and that determines what happens in the fantasy games. When a player in any sport is really good, the press will probably try to find out about his/her life, but the player can decide to be open about it or say nothing. I see the relationship with fantasy football as different than RPF, in that RPF is trying to add details to the public image to make a fuller picture, while fantasy football takes the actual plays made and points scored in real games and uses them to determine rankings of fantasy teams. It's not imposing a narrative on the people the way that RPF is; it's taking things that actually happened and just putting them in a different context.

Hil, I am in no way trying to get you or anyone to like/approve of RPS, and I fully respect the distaste and disapproval expressed here towards RPS.

I didn't think you were. I think it's interesting to try to define where the lines drawn on all of this are.

My DH loves fantasy football and baseball, and believe you me, it has nothing to do with speculating about the athletes as human beings. The players only care about the athletes' personal lives if they get injured and can't play.

(Fantasy sports are high on my "Why?" list. Nothing wrong with doing it, but to me it's more fun to root for a real team than to spend all that time playing with a bunch of dry numbers.)

Fayjay, I understood your question to be as you intended it, I think. And I don't have an answer to you except inasmuch as the "narrative" with which RPF/RPS people are interacting is the narrative of celebrity.

And... damn, I could ramble on about this for some time but I have work deadlines looming like the Angst Train, and I gotta log off. Maybe someone else (*bats eyes at Nutty*) could pontificate on this a bit?

At any rate, I have found this to be one of the most thoughtful and non-flammatory conversations about RPF/RPS I've seen yet. David is raising some good points, and I think there is a slippery slope involved in the whole issue. That doesn't negate my instinctive reaction of "ew!" when I think about RPF, but I'm always happy to have my reactions challenged so I think theem through.

Um. My understanding of the phenomenon is so simplistic as to be beneath laughable, but isn't it basically create-a-nonexistant-team-out-of-real-players? And then say 'Player X scored a goal for InsertNameOfRealTeam, which means that InsertNameOfMyNonexistantTeam has scored a goal, as I've appropriated his name and goal scoring information for one of my players'? Or something kind of along those lines?

I mean, I'm not saying it's the same thing as RPS. The fantasy football uses real world football playing as (constantly changing) source material for imaginary football, whereas the fantasy shaggage fiction uses real world celebrities' (constantly changing) biographical details (appearance, name, habits, whatever) as source material to contextualise a piece of fictional porn.

steps away from dead horse. Nudges it sadly with toe.

Wow. I'm boring myself here. Sorry.

edit

it has nothing to do with speculating about the athletes as human beings

Sorry, I've not made this clear, have I? 'Cause I totally didn't mean to imply that fantasy football DID have anything to do with speculating about the athletes as human beings.

And then say 'Player X scored a goal for InsertNameOfRealTeam, which means that InsertNameOfMyNonexistantTeam has scored a goal, as I've appropriated his name and goal scoring information for one of my players'?

Yes. But the essential distinction for me is the formulaic nature of it. We can all plug our teams in at the start of a season, and in a theoretical season free of trading come back 8 months later and see who won. There is absolutely no conjecture and fabrication past that point.

If I were to say that Pele *would* have scored a goal for my team of ita Real, them I'm just making shit up, since he hasn't scored a goal for anyone recently, and maybe he had bad fish the night before and wouldn't have, so what do I know, but then there's the fact that his rep precedes him, and the goalkeeper (who's less august) was wondering if he could get an autograph after the game and was therefore distracted at that crucial GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL!

That's bridging it for me.

Um. My understanding of the phenomenon is so simplistic as to be beneath laughable, but isn't it basically create-a-nonexistant-team-out-of-real-players? And then say 'Player X scored a goal for InsertNameOfRealTeam, which means that InsertNameOfMyNonexistantTeam has scored a goal, as I've appropriated his name and goal scoring information for one of my players'? Or something kind of along those lines?

That's pretty much it. I'd say that the major difference between fantasy football and RPF is that fantasy football uses only the scores from the real game, and just rearranges the numbers in a way that, as ita said, a computer could do. RPF, on the other hand, takes some details from the private and/or public life of the person, and adds to them by the whim of the author, blurring the line between what's real and what's fictional. In fantasy football, it's clear that anything using FantasyTeamName is part of the game, while anything using RealPlayerName is something real that's just being used for the purpose of the game.

t x-post w/ita, who said it much more clearly.