Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2008-12-01 04:56 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2008-12-01 04:56 pm
[ SECRET POST #696 ]
⌈ Secret Post #696 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
CITY STUFF → http://lolbuttsex.myminicity.com/
Secrets Left to Post: 12 pages, 290 secrets from Secret Submission Post #100.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 3 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Re: 143 148 155
Not at all. Again, let's not reduce all RPF to actorfic, but there IS a canon—endless episodes of American Idol over several seasons, or piles of Panic at the Disco interviews and live performances. Hours and hours of canon in which a little more is going on than light-hearted chatter. The better RPF takes in as much of that canon as possible and puts it together into something interesting, such that the words and situations sound right. After all, what is the point of an AU but to see a character reacting to an entirely different situation?
That said, I know a lot more about Ryan Seacrest's sexual predilictions because he talks about them all the time than I do about most characters, given that we rarely see them actually in bed in most canons. And I certainly know more about Ryan than I do about Seamus Finnigan, about whom both I and many other people have written many fics, fics that are accepted as fanfic and not seen as "just like original fic."
I don't have a knee jerk reaction to not writing original fic; it just isn't my personal ambition. I like writing, but I also write fanfic in part as a participation in a larger community. I don't write just to get reception, but to be part of a larger conversation—just like the FPF I write in various fandoms.
What I don't get is the knee jerk reaction to RPF. You say I could label it original fic and then shed the RPF label, but why should I want to do so?
Re: 143 148 155
Because it violates the fantasy/Reality barrier and treats real people as if they have no say in how they are depicted or what their public image is. Because it's not a one-way street, like writing about a character: Where the character himself will never be affected by the fic or have it impact his canon life, because the character isn't self-aware and has no life outside of stories.
Instead there is always the person who will confuse the actor (or band member) with the fic -- and hell you even see on F!S: Those secrets were people are wishing for people to break up with their wives in real life so they can have their ships, and otherwise wishing bad things on the person. Where it stops being their public persona, and starts being their real off camera lives that are being judged and used for entertainment.
These people have control over their public personas -- but they have no control at all over the fic depicting them. A public persona is not completely separate from their essence as a person. It's not all of who they are, but it is a part of what makes them, them. And here, words are put into their mouths that they would never say, actions or done that they'd never do, and all of this with their names attached, as if someone else out there knows them better than they do themselves.
If you go the last step and take out the name, and have it be a fictional character, there isn't this weirdness of the actual person or people who know the person, or casually meet him, stumbling across the fic and having people's fantasies color their perceptions of the real person. Also there is less chance of people being forced to whore themselves on camera for the the sake of fans, because their livelihood is now dependent on fan-service.
Re: 143 148 155
Because it violates the fantasy/Reality barrier and treats real people as if they have no say in how they are depicted or what their public image is.
Actually, legally and in journalistic practice, they don't and they shouldn't. I'm not sure if you saw the recent New York Times article about the deal that Angelina Jolie made with People magazine about coverage of her in exchange for her baby photos, but most of the establishment recoiled. One critique of celebrity journalism asserts that it allows the celebs to have too much control over how they are depicted. After all, other public figures, like politicians, certainly do not.
Where it stops being their public persona, and starts being their real off camera lives that are being judged and used for entertainment.
I'm not sure that RPF can really bear the brunt of all of this. It's much more likely, and more hurtful, to come out of celebrity journalism. The current speculation about Madonna's relationship with Alex Rodriguez, and whether or not they are buying a house together in Miami or Mexico City or something is (a) more widely read and talked about than any fanfic and therefore (b) more likely to affect their lives. RPF is a drop in the bucket compared to the entertainment shows and celebrity glossies and tabloids and gossip blogs, which unlike RPF actually purport to be telling the truth about the celebrity.
And I've found that it's much more likely for people to confuse FPF with actual canon, than it is for people to confuse events in RPF with real life events. Tin hats are tin hats, but the people doing stupid things at cons are just as likely to be McShep as they are to be J/J RPS SPN types.
And here, words are put into their mouths that they would never say, actions or done that they'd never do, and all of this with their names attached, as if someone else out there knows them better than they do themselves.
Again, RPF isn't about knowing them better than they know themselves. It's a sort of meta commentary on their public persona put into narrative form. I feel that you are ascribing a goal to RPF that it does not aspire to.
If you go the last step and take out the name, and have it be a fictional character, there isn't this weirdness of the actual person or people who know the person, or casually meet him, stumbling across the fic and having people's fantasies color their perceptions of the real person.
Ah, but that again has nothing to do with RPF. That has to do with the fantasies built up by the machine, by all those interviews. For a musician, the songs play a part—if you met Michael Stipe and he was shallow and inarticulate, wouldn't that be a surprise, given the lyrics he's written? For an actor, the roles they often play rub off on them—Cary Grant often said that he wasn't nearly as suave in real life, but people often expected him to be. Those expectations weren't because of a bunch of fic they'd read.
Also there is less chance of people being forced to whore themselves on camera for the the sake of fans, because their livelihood is now dependent on fan-service.
Fan service isn't about fanfic, at all. The people writing and consuming fanfic are a tiny portion of the overal fan community for any given figure. There are piles of Star Trek fans who never read fic, but go to cons aplenty. Most of the people getting fanservice from anime aren't writing or reading fic or doujinshi either.
If you have a problem with celebrity culture, that's fine. But the mechanisms of that culture are infinitely larger than fic, and very few of the people who are consuming that celebrity culture are consuming fic. Instead, they're reading In Touch and watching Entertainment Tonight and buying Glamour because Britney is on the cover and refreshing Perez Hilton. Those audiences are significantly larger than anything that RPF is getting.
Re: 143 148 155
You are right, I have a problem with all RPF. In part because I know people who have been harassed and hurt by it -- but in that case it wasn't celebrities, but rather ordinary people being RPFed by a classmate. Which really drove home to me how incredibly hurtful and violating this kind of thing can be. But even before that my "do unto others" sense has made me feel uncomfortable about the genre.
One critique of celebrity journalism asserts that it allows the celebs to have too much control over how they are depicted. After all, other public figures, like politicians, certainly do not.
This is true, but it doesn't make it right. Journalism definitely puts the right to make a buck over the feelings of celebrities. There is a sense that because they act and are popular, their privacy, emotions, and sensibilities no longer count, and they lose their right to privacy. What purpose is served by showing an actor or an actress in an unflattering light -- beyond shadenfreude? Is it okay to put the right of one person to be busy-body over another to have privacy?
The obsession to hound celebrities against their will on their time off contributed to the death of Princess Di, so this isn't harmless fun. I sometimes wonder if the drug use amongst celebrities isn't in part due to their need to escape being in the public eye 24/7/365.
I find this disturbing when it comes to politics as well. To me it seems important to know about what policies they have, and things that will effect their governing. Not so important is how they look in a bathing suit on vacation. And many "satires" make me queasy when they make unfounded jabs at a persons personal life rather than than their professional policies.
But the truth is, journalists don't hound politicians the way they do celebrities. Most coverage of politicians is in one way or another directly connected to their work, while most coverage of celebrities is about everything in the sun except their work.
But you are right those Glossies and Tabloids are much worse than RPF -- which is why I don't buy them. But just because what they do drives celebrities nuts and makes their lives hellish, that doesn't make RPF somehow okay just because it does so to a lesser extent.
It's a sort of meta commentary on their public persona put into narrative form. I feel that you are ascribing a goal to RPF that it does not aspire to.
I'm afraid I don't understand this concept. How is saying (for example) "Joe Flanagan told her "I love you more than anyone I've ever met," not putting words in the mouth of Joe Flanagan? How is this commentary on his public personality if it's not true?
Re: 143 148 155
There's always a conversation in RPF fandom about the non-famous friends/girlfriends of the famous, and whether it's fair to write about them. The answer is mainly no. And I think there is a vast difference between writing about someone you know, and are in a community with, and writing about a famous person's persona.
Journalism definitely puts the right to make a buck over the feelings of celebrities
But celebrity journalism elaborately takes into account the feelings of celebrities--that is, their wish and need to get publicity for themselves, for their projects. It's an economy.
When Angelina Jolie has a movie coming out, she does a magazine cover, an interview, she sits down with David Letterman, all to promote the movie. In exchange, the magazine gets the bump in sales from a celebrity cover, the tv show gets the ratings. And advertisers, especially the ones who make products that you buy at Target, like Cover Girl and Pampers, love celebrity content, because it's either feel-good or dramatic, and it attracts young women like flies to honey. The more publicity the star does, the more they are in the public eye, the more they can brand themselves as "Angelina Jolie" or "Jennifer Anniston" the more likely you are to go see a movie just because they are starring in it. Being able to "open" a movie is the ultimate power in Hollywood--it means you can get projects greenlit no matter what they are. Everyone wins!
And then there are the folks on their way up. All those girls who were flashing the paparazzi last year? They knew the cameras would be there--they were pulling up to the front entrance of a super hot club, the paps are there every night! They also know how to get out of a car and how to wear underpants. Paris Hilton's entire career is about publicity. The reason Britney has 24 hour coverage is because she kept going out and being performative in front of the paparazzi, which gave them pictures that made a lot of money.
And all of these stars have PR people who are paid to help them manage their persona, their public image. Part of Tom Cruise's craziness a few years ago was that he was no longer being managed by his long time PR guru, Pat Kingsley.
As for Princess Diana, it's a tough thing. The UK press are certainly willing to take it a lot further--but her driver was also drunk. And drug use among celebrities, according to some recent work done by Dr. Drew Pinsky, is much more about how Hollywood attracts people with narcisstic personalities and often inadequate family support in their early lives, plus they have a lot of money and surround themselves with people who never say no.
I do think that these hoardes of photogs following the celebs around are taking it pretty far. But that has less than nothing to do with rpf. Fandom isn't big enough to create that kind of climate, and many people writing rpf don't read that stuff anyway. They read proper interviews, and they watch the hours and hours of reality show footage or live shows. That's about 85% of the rpf canon right there.
Now, while I'm happy to patiently explain this, that you keep saying there "is no canon" and rpf can "do whatever they want and slap a name on it" is really insulting. RPF is not trying to recreate the life of the actual person. RPF is creating a character based on the public persona of the person, which is absolutely not the same thing.
Also, actor fic is a tiny subset of rpf! Much rpf is based on people who have appeared on reality shows, or journalists/fake journalists, or musicians in bands, people who are never actually acting as some other character.
As to your final comment, it can only be a commentary on his public persona if it isn't true. Otherwise, it's merely what happened. A commentary is meta, in its truest sense.
I'm not sure you're following that this is all happening at a step removed from these people's actual private lives, as you keep bringing it back to representing some sort of truth about them. RPF is inherently post-modern; there are layers between what is going on in the story, and what is happening in real life.
Re: 143 148 155
I think my problem is that what constitutes "canon" for me in a real world sense is different from what constitutes it for me in a fictional sense. For me canon in fiction would be, in a sense, those interviews. Basically the words on the page from the original source.
However for me real life, canon is truth. What actually is happening, what the person really feels, what really motivates them. Canon would be an autobiography or a biography.
The question becomes is it okay to deviate from canon and to what degree. And in the fictional world this comes up as well, with many people who cannot tolerate non-canonical pairings. And I'll argue it's fine to ignore canon for that. The major difference is that the character in fiction is just an idea, originated with canon, but having no intrinsic existence outside of peoples minds. Characters exist soley for the entertainment of those who read and write about them. They have no feelings or self-awareness. New canons can be made for them, the way Dracula has been reimagined many times over the centuries. It seems that to say that people can't have these alternate realities is denying part of the worth of the character.
But for a real person, there is self-awareness. One can call it just using the public persona, as though it is unconnected with the actual person, but really, is it? Emotionally, when an actor sees his or her name, does she think, oh that's not me, that's no reflection on my worth or what people think of me, I have nothing to do with this? Is this a concern for the community how the person feels about their name being used in such away?
Velvet Mace is not a character I made up to dance like a monkey for the entertainment of others, its part of me -- my public face. When a spider took that name and embedded it into the google search for a bunch of porn sites (and weirdly enough one movie trailer), I was pretty pissed. I didn't endorse any of those things and they had nothing to do with me, and I couldn't control any of it. Velvet Mace isn't my real name, but still it's a part of my identity, and even though I do write porn, I don't want someone googling my name in hopes of finding a fic being redirected to some nasty fetish porn site. Thankfully most of that has passed, and only a few of those spam connections remain (most of them attached to chinese sites, go figure).
So ultimately, I guess the question for me comes down to -- are celebrities not deserving of the same human consideration I'd give non-celebrities. And I just can't see why I would treat one differently.