lunabee34

Well, you know I have thoughts about this, and I've mostly thought them out loud already. We're almost entirely on the same page. I have the same mix of feelings as you when I read about changes in my RPF-subjects' lives. Like, I read that one of my reality TV favorites had a boyfriend, and on the one hand, I thought, "Aww, they're really cute together, and he seems like a sweet and really supportive person." But it also completely killed the fic I'd started.

I think the sense of canon and character interpretation varies from fandom to fandom in RPF. Actor RPF seems to be the most flexible in this respect, but in other RPF fandoms, there's a higher expectation of research plus quite a bit of built-up fanon. That was really true in popslash, and it seems to be true in Bandom. Just last week, one of my friends in skating fandom commented with, "I love this except for this one line that I don't think this guy would ever say, because it shows more maturity than he usually has." I'm really uncomfortable with the idea that any personality can be pasted onto the pretty body of an RPF figure. That's partially because IMO, there are always enough fansites full of archived interviews and crap on YouTube to figure out what kind of person they are. That might not seem like much, but seriously, there's a TON of it. I feel like I have more canon to sift through as an RPF fan than I ever did in FPF fandoms. And often, there's just as much need to interpret canon: was he being honest in that press conference? Why does she never mention Person X in her blog entries anymore?

But part of what attracts me to the RPF figures I write about is always the personality. That's widely true in skating fandom: there's one guy most people stopped writing about (and several people faded out of the fandom as a result of this) because he turned out to be such a homophobic dickwad that no one wanted to deal with him anymore. A lot of Bandom seems to be this way too -- there's so much squee on my flist because OMG someone said blah in an interview or did some cute thing on stage.

This seems to be a long way of saying that most of your anxieties about RPF were my anxieties, too, when I started doing this hardcore a couple of years ago, and it is strikingly non-different and I love Jared/Jensen and DO IT.