(no subject)

[neadods]

You'd think I'd learn not to talk about RPS after last time... but here I go. Since this wasn't directed as a question for the non-RPS folk I'm not going to go stir the shit on the original post or in the community. However, I just can't pass without comment.

carlanime posts a question to RPS readers/writers on fanthropology linking back to this post about how she started looking at people differently after RPSing them as a joke. I don’t mean to suggest for a second I agreed with any of his views or shared any of his motivations; in fact, the more of his speeches I read, the more opposed to his views I became. But, nevertheless, I was taking him seriously in some sense I hadn’t before. It was as if the process of ficcing him had somehow forced me to acknowledge his humanity.

Leading to this comment to the post that really blew my brain: This happened to me too. I looked and went, "Oh my GOD. That's actually a living, breathing, eating, sleeping person!"

Yes. It is.

Which still leaves me with my question about the whole damn genre - Why do you have to turn them into your fictionalized characters before you grasp that a human being is a human being? In all the flood of commentary when I first got my butt kicked for discussing this on LJ, I never got an answer to that that made any sense to me. Why in hell should it be a revelation that the actual person you're writing about is indeed a living, breathing, eating, sleeping person, and why only after writing about them do they become someone whose humanity now can be acknowledged?

Comments

[tacnukesoul.livejournal.com]

I suspect it's because it's the only time they ever think about people.

I have real problems with slash in general. It puts forward the notion that you can't have love without bed romping and that platonic relationships are somehow weak and unfulfilled.

For example, Kirk/Spock or Julian/Miles. I fully believe that the bond between them was deep friendship/love, but I don't feel that either has to be sexual love.

And RPS - putting real people through their paces strikes be as a cultural taboo up there with real people in holodecks.

Just my opinion.

[lizbetann]

I have real problems with slash in general. It puts forward the notion that you can't have love without bed romping and that platonic relationships are somehow weak and unfulfilled.

I get angry about this in hetero couples, too. Angel and Cordelia are the perfect example. I loved that they adored each other, were willing to kill-or-die for each other, WITHOUT the necessity of being in luuuuuurve. Surely extremely close and lasting attachments are capable without passionate love being involved.

I apply the "romantic gesture" rule to a lot of slash couples; if it would be unequivicably seen as romantic gesture if the pairing was m/f, then it remains a romantic gesture if the pairing is m/m or f/f. Best example off the top of my head is in Master & Commander: Far Side of the Ocean. When Captain Aubrey breaks off pursuit of the enemy ship to go back to the Gallapagos Islands so that Maturin can recover from a gunshot wound (and study the wildlife), if it had been in a romance novel and Maturin had been a woman, it would have been a major WAFF (warm-and-fuzzy-feeling) moment. Is it any less because the two characters are male?

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Angel and Cordelia are the perfect example.

Scully and Mulder are an even more perfect example. I loved it when they had a professional relationship, and I thought their partnership got some interesting dynamics when it seemed to me that he was slotting her into the place in his life where his sister had been.

But then they had to go Be In Lurve and bang and angst because they had interlocking genetilia. And all the other possible dynamics, more intersting possibilities, and any breath of originality (not to mention professionalism) went right out the window.

Why Love != Sex is a whole different rant with me.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I have real problems with slash in general. It puts forward the notion that you can't have love without bed romping and that platonic relationships are somehow weak and unfulfilled.

Yes! And the same applies to het romance/fic, but it bugs me much more when screamingly het characters *cough*Brother Cadfael/Hugh Beringar*cough* are slashed. It's not so much any individual story (some of which I do like), it's the body of fanfic as a whole and the cumulative impression it leaves.

I grew up in a time when "common wisdom" held that it was IMPOSSIBLE for a man and a woman to be "just friends", that there was always a sexual component in any male/female relationship. I fought huge wars with my parents over my right to have male friends -- some of whom were the wrong race as well, which really stirred things up. My mother went to her grave convinced that I'd had a clandestine romance with one of my high-school buddies -- clandestine because there was NEVER any evidence of romantic attraction, but of course it just had to be there, so I must be hiding it. I have spent my life fighting this bullshit, and it just frosts me to see the same attitudes manifesting in today's teenagers.

Effectively, it's the flip side of an extremely Victorian/Puritan attitude. Those people saw sex everywhere, whether it was there or not, and found it disgusting. Fanfic writers see sex everywhere, whether it's there or not, and find it titillating. That they are willing to extend this viewpoint to homoerotic relationships doesn't make it any more palatable to me. Why CAN'T Kirk and Spock have the kind of rock-solid bond that I have with my best friend, to whom I am not sexually attracted at all, nor she to me? Because that's harder to write? Sometimes I think that must be the answer.

Whew... I've been thinking about writing a post to this effect for a while, and now I think I've just done so. Gonna go copy this into my own journal; I invite comments there.

[linaerys.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting question, and I can't really answer it. All I have to say is that if I look at the way the media demonizes or lionizes anyone it talks about, it is easy to see how people fail to see someone as a living, breathing human being. Especially when it's a politician who stands against everything I stand for.

Sometimes I write down fictional conversations between myself and someone else in my life in order to rehearse talking to them in person. Sometimes it helps me see things from their perspective. Not that I didn't see them as human before, but having to write at least part of it from their perspective makes me understand the person a little better.

This "RPS" never gets shared, and stays in my private journals, which is, I guess, the only thing that separates it from LJ RPS.

[lizbetann]

Personally?

It is impossible to gain a real, thoughtful knowledge of another person ONLY by media reports of that person. I admire Mother Teresa and the Dali Lama, but I do not know them.

So, by necessity, it is impossible to write Real Person Fic about a media personality that portrays that person with the same depth and breath of character that they have in real life. By the limitation of a lack of personal knowledge, the portrayal is always going to be massively simplified. To mutilate a great line, Real People Fic is taking complex people and reducing them to ciphers, reducing them to a small, specific collection of characteristics that the writer would like to see.

It is at this point that people go one of two ways. Either on one side of the line, they say, "Okay, I'm fine with that," and write RPF, or they say, "That bothers me," and they don't.

So the people who are okay with the idea that they are writing about a very simplified character and using a real person's name on that probably *are* going to be a little startled to make the jump back out to, "Wait, this isn't just a person that lives in my head, or lives in the head of an executive producer and has invaded mine. This person is *real*. This person has a life, and motivations, and tastes, and opinions that the person in my head doesn't share."