lunabee34

I read a lot of CW RPF. A lot. All Hail the CMM!

But I get that RPF seems kinda weird to some fans. Recently, ariadne83 said to me: I think I just fundamentally don't *get* RPF. I don't know how you tell if something is 'in character' or not because really, we don't know anything about what these people are like in private, you know? I mean, we have the 'canon' of performances and interviews and appearances but to my way of thinking none of that counts because they're still in performance mode. It just seems like they're OCs in all but name, and I'd rather read characters I'm familiar with, you know?"

So, what follows is why RPF works for me. [Note, this is not intended to be prescriptive, but rather descriptive of what I have noticed in RPF and what I personally like as a reader/writer of RPF. That's all.]

( Teal deer! Stampeding across your flist! )

So that's my spiel. What are your thoughts about RPF?

1. I can haz house!!!!!!!!!!!!! Josh and I found an awesome house in Cochran and it is bigger than our current house (with a garage and a huge fenced-in backyard for Ems) and cheaper! Whoooo! We are moving on the 27th and shortly after that, when we get phonage, I'll update you guys on our contact info. *beams*

2. While I was house-hunting, apparently Jared and Sandy broke up. This is very interesting to me for a variety of reasons, but from a purely introspective one, their breakup has caused me to examine my own feelings about RPF.

I love RPF. I think it's really this amazing and wonderfully cool genre of fanfic because it lives in this very fluid space with so many possibilities. It isn't based on the canon of a show--with specific plot and character voice to confine it. It's based on the canon of a person's life--which is much more wide open because so much of it is open to speculation. Many celebrities allow the public to know a lot of details about their personal lives, but many don't and so RPF writers get the latitude to each do a lot of different things in their fics that read as equally plausible. This is not to say that actors don't have "voices" the way characters do or that there isn't a "canon" of events in their lives that RPF that isn't AU must deal with; just that that canon is sometimes more a vague suggestion than anything set in stone. Add to that the conflation of character and actor (especially when an actor is private and doesn't do a lot of interviews or give out much personal information, I think some character bleed is a little inevitable in RPF) and that makes RPF totally freaking awesome to me and fun to read.

I suppose I must also caveat that like most of the people who read and write this genre, I don't think RPF is in any way a reflection of reality. Celebrity is by its very nature persona and even in what seems to be a very intimate interview, a celebrity is still to some degree performing for the public. I have no ethical qualms or issues with RPF because I think that most people involved know that these stories aren't real and the ones who can't make that distinction are the kind of crazy that isn't just confined to the internet. RPF isn't written for money and it isn't damaging to the celebrities about which it is written. If anything, I would think that RPF is just another kind of PR machine for the celebrity because to write it, you have to really familiarize yourself with the actor (watch his/her interviews and movies and buy the magazine with that photo spread, etc.) I speculate (with no evidence!) that RPF generates publicity for an actor while perhaps inspiring some fans to go buy that early movie or that ill-fated CD or that back issue of Playboy that said celebrity appeared in.

When I first heard about Sandy and Jared breaking up, my first thought was, "That is going to generate a lot of really good fanfic." And then my second thought was, "And I am sorry that they broke up, cause it has to suck to go through something like that in the public eye." The same sort of thought process happened for me when I heard that Heath Ledger had died. My initial reaction was this very dismayed, "Oh, no. I wonder how this will affect the production of Batman." And then my next thought was for the *man* who had died and how sorry I was for his wasted potential and for the family and friends he left behind. And I don't know what to do with that except be ashamed that I am first and foremost a consumer and secondly an empathizer.

Sometimes I fantasize that I get to meet and befriend celebrities because a) I have written a story/novel that wins the Pulitzer and said celebrity wants to turn it into a movie or TV series or b) we've made another movie and it OMG won Sundance LOL and then I get all these TV and movie offers. At some point in these fantasies, there is always the moment of lament (for yea verily my fantasies contain mostly world building more than anything else and include bathroom breaks for all) when I realize that I can't write fanfic for SGA anymore because I'm on the cast and I know these people and that would be strange but SPN is still fair game, at least until I run into Jensen in the grocery. LOL I think that's the point at which I would have ethical issues with writing fanfic because when you actually know a celebrity, it's not persona anymore. But since none of these scenarios, sadly, seems in the least bit likely, I can be completely worry-free regarding my consumption of RPF.

In final thoughts on the subject, I have never written RPF, although I desperately want to. I have a burning desire to write/read RPF AU where Jared and Jensen are grad students and I have a vague outline and eleventy million humorous situations taken from actual experience in mind, but I'm nervous to write this because I don't even know where to begin to do the research for RPF. I don't think I've ever watched a single interview with either of them, or read one either, although I feel like I know things about them from the sheer volume of RPF I've read. Everything I know about Jared and Jensen I learned from stellabelle's From Here We Go Sublime. Which you should read. For it kicks ass. But that's sort of cheating, right? LOL