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nannyfeline · 1 year

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ELM: [laughs] But I was thinking, I’m not like, super in celebrity fandom, but there are some actors that you know I love, and if I witnessed one of them being rude in an interview? FK: Yeah. ELM: I’d feel bad. And I never feel that way when I’m reading or writing fanfiction about, you know, about…

I've recently gotten into Hockey RPF, so I have thoughts.

I have no illusions that the people I read about (or listen to someone read about, I've been on a big podfic kick lately) act at all like their RPF personas. It's "real person fiction," not "real person facts." This breaks down in a few ways, some of which I think follows from a lot of the anti behavior and purity culture that's been on the rise over the last year in (my corners of) fandom.

1- I can accept a fictional character acting like a bag of dicks (hello there, Mr. Izzy Hands--or literally anyone else on OFMD), but I wouldn't be able to accept the actor who plays that character being rude in an interview, to steal ELM's example.

The fictional characters are fictional. Acting like an ass in fiction is wildly different from acting like an ass in real life. Doing things that cause harm to others is different when it's fictional, because the harm isn't real.

2- I can accept a fictional character acting like a bag of dicks and not the actor who plays them, because I just don't get as much time with the actor. I get that moment of the actor (or celebrity or whatever) showing their entire ass on social or whatever and that's all I get from them. I don't see them hanging out with their buds, bingeing Friends, or feeding the stray cat that hangs out on their porch. Real people that we don't actually know are one-dimensional characters.

In fiction, I get a whole development arc. I see that character change over time, I see them grow, I see them get fleshed out over hours watched or pages read. If the fictional character does something redemptive, if they feel really badly about the hurt they caused, I get to experience that with them

3- I can accept a fictional character acting like a bag of dicks and not a celebrity, because I don't know what's going on with real people. I can't see inside their heads to understand why they do anything. If they apologize, I can't tell if it's genuine.

With fictional characters, there's at least some insight into what they're feeling and their intentions. If the story is told from the character's point of view, I may get to listen to their thoughts and understand what led them to do the bad thing. I can also tell if their apology or remorse is real. Fictional characters are three-dimensional in a way celebrities aren't.

As an example of all of this, may I present Tyler Seguin and the Case of the Shitty Tweet.

Tyler Seguin was traded from the Boston Bruins to the Dallas Stars in 2013. He was not happy about this. I wouldn't be happy about this. Context for people who aren't hockey fans: Being traded away from the good team to the enh team is bad. It feels bad.

And then Tyler tweeted, "Only queers and steers in Texas, and I'm not a cow," which, hoo boy. (It also implies he's queer? Which I am 100% sure was not the intent.)

Immediately he said his phone had been stolen by his friends and that they'd tweeted from his account as a prank. Later he said he needed to remember that when he's tweeting, it's not just him and his friends, it's him and his millions of fans. In my opinion, both of those are fair.

a. His phone was stolen and it was a prank by not!Tyler. Okay, that happens. Maybe it happened to Tyler. But I can't know that. I can't know if he's lying to cover his ass. (Personally, I think he was lying to cover his ass.)

b. He was tweeting like he was chatting with his friends and not communicating to the masses. Yeah, okay, sure. I say dumb shit to my friends I wouldn't want the public at large to hear. That's valid. If I tweet something truly scandalous, it goes out to maybe 600 people. It's not ending up on ESPN.

So what's the truth? I have no idea.

Maybe he was drunk and pissed and hurting (because being told you're being relocated to, I repeat, Texas, and you're going to work for a shittier company, that's gotta sting). He's leaving his friends, his coworkers, his home. That sucks.

Then one of Tyler's friends steals his phone in an epically misguided attempt to make him laugh. Or Tyler says something dumb and hurtful because we all say shit we don't mean when we're angry and feel cornered.

I can't know if either of those are true. Again, personally, I think it's closer to the second scenario, that he tweeted it himself in anger and later regretted it, both for how bad it made him look and for the media fallout, not necessarily for the content of the tweet. But there's no way for me to know for sure.

The takeaway is that real person fiction characters are *drumroll* fictional characters!

I read a fic about Tyler Seguin being traded. I got to be inside "his" head for that moment. I got to know for sure what happened, how the tweet got posted, and his genuine remorse and frustration. I was able to empathize with him.

But that's Tyler Seguin the character. His RPF character is fully developed; the celebrity is one-dimensional. I don't have to imagine RPF!Tyler's motivations to understand his fuck up and forgive him, because the RPF character isn't real. All of his motivations are spelled out for me by a creator.

I have to do the work of generating empathy for Tyler Seguin the real person all by myself. I have to imagine him complexly. I have to understand that him being traded isn't an isolated event. He had complicated and conflicting feelings before, during, and after the trade.

Or I could just be projecting. That's something else I have to understand, that my knowledge of Tyler Seguin is superficial and incomplete, as it should be.

Whoops, going back to the numbered points.

4- When canon characters (and for the sake of RPF, the humans are the canon characters) are translated to fanworks, the creator chooses what to keep, what to throw away, what to replace from canon. They also use their understanding of a character to depict non-canon scenarios (or to work through canon events from another perspective).

That's okay.

Fandom's understanding of a character doesn't affect the canon character, and, here's the big brain moment, the canon character doesn't have to affect the fanon character.

Fanon and canon are two separate things and do not have to agree. Not even a little.

There's this new thing called "I do what I want," maybe you've heard of it.

So there's "canon" actual human Tyler Seguin, and then there's fanon Tyler Seguin. When actual human Tyler does something shitty, the fanon Tyler can go get a mud bath instead.

I know this is sounding a lot like Hatsune Miku Wrote Harry Potter.

It's not that. At least that's not what I'm trying to say. I'm not saying we have to or even should be uncritical of the real life subjects of RPF. I'm not saying it's okay to write Tyler Seguin apologia, and I'm not saying it's okay to excuse celebrities causing harm.

What "harm" means to you and what it means to me may be different, though. Are there direct victims of the celebrity's actions? That's harm. Are conditions made worse for a minority group? Harm. Is it "causing harm" when a celebrity says some dumb shit on Twitter? Enh. It's a sliding scale. You have to make that call for yourself.

But it's possible to still enjoy the characters that have been created in RPF even after we figure out that humans are dumb and fallible and really shouldn't be the subjects of such directed adulation.

(Someone is going to reblog this and say that I'm a Seguin fanboy. I am, at best, Seguin-neutral. I don't care one way or the other. Love him, hate him, I don't give a shit.)

Case study #2: Neurodivergent Sidney Crosby.

Here's the hockey context: You've heard of Wayne Gretzky? Sidney Crosby is Wayne Gretzky if he'd been born in the late 80s. Sid is a big fucking deal.

Sidney is often depicted in RPF as being neurodivergent. Sometimes he's just a little out of step with his teammates, and sometimes he's written as if a hockey-playing alien put on a human suit.

Is Sidney Crosby neurodivergent? I genuinely do not care. It's none of my fucking business.

Has Sidney Crosby in the past been really fucking weird in ways that would make a lot more sense we knew he was neurodivergent? Yeah, absolutely. The actual person Sidney Crosby has actually behaved actually really fucking weird. This is not a fannish invention.

"Sidney Crosby is autistic" may be a true statement, it may not, but we don't know one way or the other, because, again, it's not our business.

But I sure do love me some "Sidney is a big nd weirdo" fanfic. Love it. Could eat it up with a spoon.

And if tomorrow the Penguins organization PR announced that star center Sidney Crosby has been tested and is definitely allistic, I'd still want to read more nd!Sid fics. Because the person Sidney Crosby and the RPF character Sidney Crosby are not the same, and new things we learn about Sid don't have to be reflected in hockey fanworks.

I got one more Hockey RPF example for you.

"Travis Konecny and Nolan Patrick aren't on the same team anymore."

I don't know what the ship name is for those two, but I'm gonna say patrecny. Patrick and Konecny used to both be on the Flyers. (You may know them as the team that exists in the shadow of Gritty.) They sure did seems like good buds, too.

Through a game of hockey telephone, Patty was traded to Las Vegas, a team in a land without snow. TK is still in Philly.

I have less than zero idea about these people's personal lives, but I saw a tweet say that TK/Patty shippers are out of luck because they're not on the same team and don't even talk in real life anymore.

Bitch, do I look like I care? They also don't fuck in real life, but that's not stopping anyone. No one thinks the things happening in fanfic are really happening, because it's fiction. What happens in real life or canon or whatever does not have to be recreated in the fanworks.

We do what we want.

Episode 185: RPF Revisited

In Episode 185, “RPF Revisited,” Elizabeth and Flourish use a trio of listener letters to return to the perennially thorny topic of real person fiction. How does RPF fit into the broader fandom space in 2022? What does “canon” even mean when it comes to real people? How do fans reconcile with troubling new information about celebrities they’ve written and read about? And is RPF source material the same as fictional source material, or are there fundamental differences between the two?

Click through to our site to listen or read a full transcript!

#meta #fandom meta #RPF #hockey rpf #fansplaining

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