neadods: (Default)
neadods ([personal profile] neadods) wrote2005-08-15 07:34 am

RPF - the Professional Book Side

[livejournal.com profile] ginmar, [livejournal.com profile] fanthropology, and [livejournal.com profile] geezer_fen have all been discussing RPF - that's fic, not slash in specific - this week, so it's on my mind. Especially since the book I'm reviewing is RPF - and more F than I expected it to be, and that aspect is overwhelming me in response particularly to lasst week's discussions.

So, for a minute I'd like to talk about professional RPF, although I'm not sure I have a coherent thesis.

In the professional stuff I tend to draw the same lines as I do for fanfic. I intensely dislike people taken out of their own context - I flat-out refuse to review the Jane Austen or Louisa May Alcott mysteries, for example. Those horrify me on three counts, two of which go well above and beyond my opinions of fanfic:

1) The author is using a real person well out of context for their own purposes.
2) Worse, the author is doing so for personal profit, which I consider unspeakable.
3) And possibly worst of all, the author is riding the coattails of a much, much better author.

I have yet to see an imitator of Alcott or Austen who can come near the power of the orginal, either in power of the writing or in staying power in publishing. It's obscene to me to see someone whose book will disappear without a trace within a year trying to hitch their career to someone who has lasted for centuries. Work on your own craft and don't try to steal someone else's reputation! The only living author who could equal Austen is probably Susanna Clark, and she wisely stuck to her own work.

And yet... I did review a Edgar Allen Poe mystery, despite objections 2 & 3 above. Poe wrote such stories, it didn't seem to me to be so disrespectful to imagine he might want to write one, if handled properly. That the author completely reimagined him into "Eddie the Accountant" and wrote such eyeball-bleedingly bad prose that I slammed the book here as well as on Reviewing the Evidence is a different matter. Why would anyone center a series on someone they so obviously have contempt for?

The book I'm reviewing is slightly younger - so much so that the author specifically said he was waiting for everyone involved to die. I'm still making up my mind about that...

[identity profile] ginmar.livejournal.com 2005-08-15 01:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Who's the other person? Your tag can't be read.

Yeah, those Jane Austen things give me the creeps. The only thing that can be said in their favor is that they can be complimented as not being sexually explicit. I have no objections to using historical figures in context, but using these writers for the author's gain is creepy.

[identity profile] neadods.livejournal.com 2005-08-16 12:38 am (UTC)(link)
A small community called "Geezer_fen" for the older coots among us who remember fandom before the Internet. Or VCRs. Or the smell of mimeographed fanzines.

Tag fixed. Sorry, had NO net access all day today!

Pro-choice Quilting

[identity profile] the-jammers.livejournal.com 2005-08-15 04:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Hello. My names Skrike. Found your blog doing a technorati search on real person fiction. Enjoyed your dicussion a few threads back. I checked your user info and saw you are interested in Pro-choice Quilting. Then I cleaned my glasses. However, that chuckle and your blog in general prompted me to say hello.

I read through several of your entries and enjoy your blog. This LJ is just to post in LJ's that don't allow anonymous postings. I can be found at http://skrikespeaks.blogspot.com. In case you're wondering how I wandered in here. I am generally unpopular, and my friends are a quirky bunch, but wander by if you like. If you don't like the blog, I won't be offended.

I'll fade back into the ether now.

Re: Pro-choice Quilting

[identity profile] neadods.livejournal.com 2005-08-16 12:53 am (UTC)(link)
I had an anonymous troll a while back - glad you dropped by and enjoyed the read! Will check out your blog.

[identity profile] beckyzoole.livejournal.com 2005-08-15 05:11 pm (UTC)(link)
At what point does objectionable RPF turn into acceptable historical fiction? Is Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra alright even though the characters don't really behave much like the real people they are based on? For that matter, what about the movie "Shakespeare in Love"?

[identity profile] neadods.livejournal.com 2005-08-16 12:52 am (UTC)(link)
I've never entirely nailed the line down for me. If we're going to talk about how Shakespeare wrote, that's a whole 'nother rant - I waver between "he's brilliant" and "Damn, he needs a good editor!"

As for how he wrote people - Shakespeare wrote propaganda in a time when sucking up to the Queen was a matter of life or death, professionally and personally, ESPECIALLY when he was writing about her relatives and her throne (90% of the histories.) Frankly a much, MUCH different yardstick than whether a c-list author should be using a classic author as their mealticket.

Personally, I pass Shakes in Love because it hits most of my pass criteria - he's depicted as a writer behaving much as writers did in that time and he appears to have acted, so he's not being twisted into something other than he was. And everyone real involved is centuries dead, so they're hardly going to be hurt.

But as much as I want to enjoy the book I'm reading, the elements of reality are terribly fresh (the author outright admits he was waiting for the principles to die off and moved the second they did) are creeping me. And the one I reviewed right before that I thought was about a fictional character only, but turned out instead to be about the real life model for her - and that disconcerted me badly. Moreso because I don't know anything about that woman, so it seemed like a violation of her privacy. People have studied (and projected upon) Shakespeare for centuries; the movie was hardly the first.

Basing a book and a murder on an obscure model who doesn't seem to have courted publicity nor was "outed" by enduring fame was bothersome to me.