Yes, yes, YES. We've just moved into the wrong zone, boys and girls. There's a real James Marsters, and it's nasty to put your fantasies about his boybits on to paper or phosphor and share them.

Well, you know, people do it and it makes them happy. What I do by co-opting Joss Whedon's characters and world is almost as or as aggressive an act as what a popslasher does; I don't think I have the perspective to talk about things from a moral angle.

I do feel pretty secure in the idea that I will never be a RPF-er, because I'm just not *interested* in real people. I thought it might have been because I'm not so interested in the lives of movie stars or pop stars, but I've looked at RPF about historical or politician characters, and the same thing happens: the spark goes dead for me. I downloaded that Britney Spears "Me Against the Music" music video, in which she spends a lot of time chasing Madonna around lasciviously, and, you know, when the video ended, I wanted to know more, I wanted to see what happened next, I was intrigued by the characters and the world presented in the video. But I realized I wasn't actually interested in Britney Spears herself-- I was interested in the chick named Britney (there seemed to be a definite character) she was playing in the weird little illogical world of the video. I watched that movie, Sylvia, and I kept getting jarred out of my watching because even though I *knew* intellectually that the movie was about the poet Sylvia Plath, I kept forgetting, and thinking it was just about this unhappy poet character; every time she quoted a line of Plath's poetry, I'd get all annoyed. "Wait, who are you, taking credit for that poem! Plagiarist." Etc. My mother is writing a historical novel about Mozart's family; but I'm not interested in the people themselves, but the fascinating characters she's making them be.

This is how I seem to be wired, and it probably has to do with the imbalance of fiction and nonfiction I took in very young; it doesn't have to do with anyone else's view of things.

xpost with la marcontell!

I'd love to read it. I see it as well, and in much the same way as you do.

I will post about it, then.

What I do by co-opting Joss Whedon's characters and world is almost as or as aggressive an act as what a popslasher does;

How so? Is it as aggressive against Joss as popslash is against NSYNC, you mean?

I write RPS, and it's never, ever about my own personal kinks or fantasy life.

I don't write actorfic because I find actors, for the most part, to be dull as ditchwater in terms of subject matter. Politics, however, is just ripe with possibilities. At some point, it becomes all about the metaphor.

Pop's fun for a dabble, because there's real/persona and it's the mutable personas that (for reasons not unlike my attraction to political fiction) appeal to me.

Well, it's his characters, which he conceived and bore into existence; we're stealing the controls out of his hands and marionetting his characters into doing things he quite possibly would be horrified to see, just as Danny Strong might be horrified to see a little avatar of himself getting it on with Tom Lenk. It's probably usually not something *quite* as personal as a representation of yourself; but creative work can be felt very personally yours.

I do believe that fanfiction is an immoral act, however vaguely so. I'm not stopping. But I'm also not ready to shove it in ME's face.

I don't write actorfic because I find actors, for the most part, to be dull as ditchwater in terms of subject matter.

But that's exactly where the Buffy people I respect are going. Marsters/Boreanaz slash. And, yes, it's personal, but that has always been my Do Not Cross line in fic.

But you acknowledge that that boundary is a subjective and personally-felt thing, as PMM said hers was?

What I do by co-opting Joss Whedon's characters and world is almost as or as aggressive an act as what a popslasher does

I don't agree, either quantitatively, or qualitatively, and I think that's where the "here is the line!", "No, here is the line!" argument becomes a stalemate. Not particularly up to rehashing it today.

Is is a taboo thing, then, these trends you all are describing? I actively avoid most of these trends, so I don't really know except the general-fandom blowback in places like this. But incest, "controlling" a real person by being his author -- they sound like the fringes of the sexual fetish/fantasy world, rather than primarily fannish. The same way that some people wrote BDSM fanfic some years back, and it was a lot more BDSM than it was actually fanfic. At the time, this was a tiny minority of fanfic writing that I knew of, and considered kind of out there, not the cool thing to do.

When people write porn where [insert name] turns into a giantess, or [insert name] turns into a cat or a robot or is wearing diapers, then we'll know definitively!

I couldn't do that, personally.(And I know that the slash makes it a bad example for me anyway, but I couldn't write one where SMG and JM rehearse and things get out of hand. Or one where Belzer "comforts" Leo after her fucknut ex calls her 500 times in one day, and she gets the restraining order. His taste in women tends to the bleah in real life, and I already feel embarrassed and like I spent too much time on this)

I don't agree, either quantitatively, or qualitatively, and I think that's where the "here is the line!", "No, here is the line!" argument becomes a stalemate.

I'm sorry, I thought I'd tried to make it clear that this is my visceral feeling, and not some law I think should be agreed with, just as I'm not interested in real-person fic but obviously do not think that's true for everybody.