Fetishizing Actors in Fandom

[keiramarcos]

Content moved to Writing and Junk

Comments

[liekinloimu]

I admit I hesitated to write this, as I’ve trodden extensively on the side of the devil here. I have had two fandoms where I read RPS in a major way.

I’m in no way refuting your points, since they are spot on.

Even though I have read a lot of RPS, I have never liked reading the type of stories you refer to in your post that try to imitate or modify reality to suit the writer’s world view. I have only ever read a handful of these type of stories, most of them by accident, since what I like to read are stories set on sci-fi and fantasy universes or the occasional “bakery-au” type of stories that kind of only borrow the looks, names and some typical characteristics of the actors’ public persona but could actually be original works with very little modification. Some of the best fics I’ve ever read have been of this type of RPS.

However, I do recognize the problem even these types of fics pose; they can make some readers think they know the real persons in question even more than they would think otherwise. They do, after all, use real persons as the base of the story, no matter how far removed the actual story is from the reality.

Unfortunately, fandom or no fandom, there are always going to be people who confuse the actor with the character they play. Only the other week there was a facepalm worth news story about a sales clerk who refused to sell a case of beer for an actor on the basis of the alcohol problem his character is suffering from in a popular television serial. Admittedly the fandom does spread this problem around in the mass hysteria kind of way, though.

I do sometimes wonder about the writers of the types of fics you describe in your post, who demonize the wives/girlfriends or make them cheat their wives or use the actors’ real children in their writings. Do they really not get that they could actually be sued for slander by the people in question? I guess not.

To be fair, sometimes I’d like to see the PR machinery behind the actors/singers take some responsibility for the shit they sow. In one of the comments to your post, was probably on Facebook, somebody mentioned about the Supernatural actors, how they flirt with the Misha /Jensen shippers but are more bothered by the J2, because the J2 fans are so batshit crazy. Well, there was a time when they flirted with the J2 fans as well and even sometimes threw gasoline in the flames, most probably because some publicist thought it a good idea (insert facepalm here). I’m not very knowledgeable about bandom stuff, but I’ve understood something similar happened with for example One Direction. Then when shit hits the fan and way too many fans (ha!) have been sold on a purely fictional relationship, the actors/singers and their significant others are the ones left to take the crap. The PR people should know better than to do this.

[timepiece]

I, also, have read a fair amount of RPF for one fandom. But I will say that I never read the ones that had them cheating on their wives, and in fact I tended to prefer the RPF AUs, which might as well have been called original fic where the characters were named after the actors, and looked like them. Often set in high school and college.

Some of them are amazing. There was one particular one with a boy raised in a fundamentalist household falling in love with another boy and being kicked out of his house that really should have the serial number filed off and get published.

[junipepper]

They can’t be sued for slander in this circumstance, because they’re not asserting that what they’re saying is true. But it’s still a shitty thing to do.