A man by any other name would smell as sweet
Someone on my flist has announced a fic that she edited. nearly a hundred thousand words of meticulous worldbuilding and character development, a personal journey, and a prostitute-training plot. Loads of gorgeous men.
It’s RPF. With all of that magnificent work on the fantastical details– the author used the names of real people. Who are alive right now, and have concerns and families and jobs they are getting on with– i know, I know, all of this has been said before by people more eloquent than I. All the talk aboutrespect and privacy and public personae becoming public property and… yeah all of that. But i couldn’t enjoy the fic, as hot as it was. In fact the hotter it got, the more my insides roiled.
![[info - personal]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
watersword has a beautiful little essay about what our stories are and what they do for us. And something in it has to do with why this woman put 98,000 words on screen with the images of existing men in her mind’s eye.
What I’ve felt, in my own forays into fanfic, is that there are three things canon can supply for us; Plot, Characters, and Worlds already built. We take these things and subvert them, or lean on them — I hate worldbuilding, for instance– and we can get to the meat of the story without using our energy on anything we don’t want to.
But this woman has created strong individual characters that have nothing– nothing– to do with the real men she’s basing them off of. A copy-and-paste to replace those movie-star names, and she’d have a completely original fic, and a very good one. And those men would be compelling and unforgettable, in my opinion.
(ETA) I know that creating compelling original fiction isn’t a goal we all share, and that creating compelling fan fiction is more prevalent in fandom.
(ETA)
Full disclosure, I’ve written one myself. It was not so easy for me to do, and I keep thinking about creating new characters for it. And yet– I haven’t…
A copy-and-paste to replace those movie-star names, and she’d have a completely original fic, and a very good one. And those men would be compelling and unforgettable.
I agree with this but I’m not sure it’s an argument that she ought to do so.
I can’t write those kinds of arguments. She did what she did and had her reasons for it– which I can’t fathom, personally– but they are legit enough for me.
I just always wonder about it.
I don’t write that sort of RPF myself, but I think the attachment comes from the background and the community of the work… that is, it grows out of a fannish tradition that has produced works more or less linked with the lives of the people concerned.
I know the pro- and anti-RPF debate can and will never be solved, but ultimately what it comes down to for me is the basic fact that what we all get out of storytelling and storyreading (fannish, original, slash, het, gen, vanilla, kinky, fantastical, reality-based, whatever) is the chance to visit other worlds in our heads; the chance to fantasize. The characters who populate those worlds and fantasies are all constructs, no matter whether or not they share the names of real-life people. They’re still characters.
I know there are many out there who disagree with me, but in the end, I don’t see much difference between enjoyably fantasizing about a well-written original character getting up to something or other vs. a well-written character from some already-written canon vs. a well-written character who’s got the name, appearance, and publicly-known personality traits of a real person. Because ultimately, they’re all still fictions made up by the author.
it’s… I dunno. If I look at it one way, it’s a malfunction in MY imagination, that I can’t (or won’t) separate the (name appearance and personality traits) for the real person.
Looked at another way, it’s the writer’s imagination that I feel is lacking something– that she can’t, or won’t, take that single step further into fiction.
My main complaint is purely selfish, that I can’t read the thing without my stomach curdling. Those real names harsh my mellow, man!
Characters I have no such compunction about, and has written incredible strokers using Spike, Angel, Lindsey in ways that are so far out of canon that all that’s left are the physical appearances as generated by their names. And I’m all whoo-whoo about it
A copy-and-paste to replace those movie-star names, and she’d have a completely original fic, and a very good one. And those men would be compelling and unforgettable.
I agree with this but I’m not sure it’s an argument that she ought to do so.
I can’t write those kinds of arguments. She did what she did and had her reasons for it– which I can’t fathom, personally– but they are legit enough for me.
I just always wonder about it.
I don’t write that sort of RPF myself, but I think the attachment comes from the background and the community of the work… that is, it grows out of a fannish tradition that has produced works more or less linked with the lives of the people concerned.
A copy-and-paste to replace those movie-star names, and she’d have a completely original fic, and a very good one. And those men would be compelling and unforgettable.
I agree with this but I’m not sure it’s an argument that she ought to do so.
I can’t write those kinds of arguments. She did what she did and had her reasons for it– which I can’t fathom, personally– but they are legit enough for me.
I just always wonder about it.
I don’t write that sort of RPF myself, but I think the attachment comes from the background and the community of the work… that is, it grows out of a fannish tradition that has produced works more or less linked with the lives of the people concerned.
I know the pro- and anti-RPF debate can and will never be solved, but ultimately what it comes down to for me is the basic fact that what we all get out of storytelling and storyreading (fannish, original, slash, het, gen, vanilla, kinky, fantastical, reality-based, whatever) is the chance to visit other worlds in our heads; the chance to fantasize. The characters who populate those worlds and fantasies are all constructs, no matter whether or not they share the names of real-life people. They’re still characters.
I know there are many out there who disagree with me, but in the end, I don’t see much difference between enjoyably fantasizing about a well-written original character getting up to something or other vs. a well-written character from some already-written canon vs. a well-written character who’s got the name, appearance, and publicly-known personality traits of a real person. Because ultimately, they’re all still fictions made up by the author.
it’s… I dunno. If I look at it one way, it’s a malfunction in MY imagination, that I can’t (or won’t) separate the (name appearance and personality traits) for the real person.
Looked at another way, it’s the writer’s imagination that I feel is lacking something– that she can’t, or won’t, take that single step further into fiction.
My main complaint is purely selfish, that I can’t read the thing without my stomach curdling. Those real names harsh my mellow, man!
Characters I have no such compunction about, and has written incredible strokers using Spike, Angel, Lindsey in ways that are so far out of canon that all that’s left are the physical appearances as generated by their names. And I’m all whoo-whoo about it
I know the pro- and anti-RPF debate can and will never be solved, but ultimately what it comes down to for me is the basic fact that what we all get out of storytelling and storyreading (fannish, original, slash, het, gen, vanilla, kinky, fantastical, reality-based, whatever) is the chance to visit other worlds in our heads; the chance to fantasize. The characters who populate those worlds and fantasies are all constructs, no matter whether or not they share the names of real-life people. They’re still characters.
I know there are many out there who disagree with me, but in the end, I don’t see much difference between enjoyably fantasizing about a well-written original character getting up to something or other vs. a well-written character from some already-written canon vs. a well-written character who’s got the name, appearance, and publicly-known personality traits of a real person. Because ultimately, they’re all still fictions made up by the author.
it’s… I dunno. If I look at it one way, it’s a malfunction in MY imagination, that I can’t (or won’t) separate the (name appearance and personality traits) for the real person.
Looked at another way, it’s the writer’s imagination that I feel is lacking something– that she can’t, or won’t, take that single step further into fiction.
My main complaint is purely selfish, that I can’t read the thing without my stomach curdling. Those real names harsh my mellow, man!
Characters I have no such compunction about, and has written incredible strokers using Spike, Angel, Lindsey in ways that are so far out of canon that all that’s left are the physical appearances as generated by their names. And I’m all whoo-whoo about it