RPF [real-life people's fanfiction] as it is and how it should be

People adore poking fun of fanfiction writers and readers, don’t they? It reads like a goddamn fanfiction, they would say, reading the blurb of a newly released YA romance bestseller on the market. The constant use of italic and the Ohs, the internet lingo, the intermittent misuse of archaic words, the fact that once the work gains a certain amount of attention, the authors would change the name of their characters and get it published and get accepted, no matter how mediocre the work itself can be.

Amidst the passionate and condescending ridicule, there’s also the side of the internet where people genuinely criticize the genre and accuse it of being dehumanizing and harmful. And sometimes, this argument makes a lot of sense.

So, in actuality, how moral are real-life people's fanfictions (RPFs)?

Now, here’s the deal: people enjoy things that others don’t.

Good for them! People seek satisfaction in their own ways - conventional or not. For many, this includes making up things that do not happen in reality. In the confinement of one’s private headspace, no others should be able to censor their thoughts or dictate how they should behave. Right?

Well, sure. But: Is there a limitation to that? Should there be a limitation to that?

1. Limitation for imagination?

Fantasies are define as a form of escapism, wherein participants evoke mental images with a purpose - whether it be sexual, emotional, or otherwise. For some people, this contains unorthodox visions, mostly of acts which are generally not tolerated by the civil public.The question arises: if one is fully conscious of the vileness of their imagined scenarios, is it evil to perpetuate visualizing it in their mind? If yes, how far can it go?

The foundation of how to assess the ethics of fantastical imagination can firstly lie on the depth of belief towards it - whether they consider it to be purely fictional or reflective of their character [1]. In fact, even the most morally righteous people can feel the urge to punch their landlords in the face for threatening to cut their electricity if they don’t pay the overdue rent on time. The difference between them and those who are immoral is that they don’t usually desire going through with the act. In other words, they don’t actually intend to do it, despite whatever feelings the situation might rouse from their mind.

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to ignore evidence that is relevant to his beliefs, or to dismiss relevant evidence in a facile way.” (Clifford’s Principle - Van Inwagen 1996, 145)

Another way to evaluate how an immoral fantasy can be assessed is to consider if it is actively and willfully surfaced [2] (since fantasy can oftentimes be momental, unsolicited and detached from our desire); utilized for personal unorthodox gain [3] (as they can also be used as means to discover different perspectives); or if they have a conscious intention to harm individuals who inhibit their fantasy [4].

But: How much depraved of a fantasy can be excused using these methods? Even if one is fully knowledgeable in the line of ethics inside fantasies, or only came in contact with these thoughts momentarily, can, for example, pedophilic fantasies (or those of the same realm) be excusable? How different are these from momental thoughts of harming people?

Perhaps it can be claimed that fantasies vary in regards to their potential relations they might have with a person’s psyche. A lot of aggressive thoughts are anger-fueled and short-term, partially diverge from the mental reality of a person. This means an unique barrier between the thought and the intent is created, shielding said person from critical judgment. Quite close to this is what happens when people engage in the act of fictive imagining: by separating the physical and the imagined world, they can appreciate violence as an essential part of the false world rather than fixate on whether or not it is ethical.

"Taking a fictive stance means that the audience is not to make certain nontrivial inferences from the utterance back to the utterer's belief." (Brandon Cooke 2014, 319)

Momental erotic imagining, on the other hand, inherently relates to an internal attraction of a person towards the subject of desire. This excludes BDSM and kink-related fantasy, for its practitioners are mostly aware of it being separated from their real-life experience, therefore these people are, in a way, participating in an act of fictive imagining.

2. On the relation between RPFs and the [established] spectrum.

Okay, now that is settled. So. People love RPFs. People love writing and reading about imagined scenarios between people (mostly celebrities) who actually existed, and in most cases, are still alive. How does this particular act fit on the moral scale that we just established?

Regarding [1], it should be a fact that none of the fantasies in these works should be taken seriously by its consumers, right? Even if real-life events and interactions are sometimes brought into the authors’ world, recontextualized and retold, even if many characters in the story can act exactly how their real counterparts do?

Yes. When most fanfictions’ authors write, they treat their work as fully fictional, and this should remain unchanged after however many truths are integrated into the plot. Recipients of these works should also understand the fantasy as a false world, and all that happened between the beginning and end of it as canonical only inside said world. This is called suspension of belief, mostly closely related with fictive imagining. And as long as this remains carefully true, [2] does not matter.

One increasingly accepted attitude towards fanfictions recently has been to treat it as original works. In a sense, this is probably the ultimate way to perceive this genre. In fanfictions, people use the image of celebrities as a vessel - a medium to convey the story they want to tell - rather than fixating on ensuring the characters resemble the real people. The characteristics of these people are of lesser to no importance to the work compared to what the story symbolizes as a whole. What it says about that world, that dynamic of life, that pairing of people [5].

From this birth the concept of “trope” within fanfiction literature: a set of rules, settings, motifs and character archetypes that fits a particular universe. And this can be as particular as “Enemies to Lovers”, “Coffee shop romance” or “Soulmate”, as broad as “Misunderstanding” or “Slow-burn”. Further is the divergence of these tropes from real life, clearer is the fact that these characters are not at all real people.

Interestingly enough, as people get more and more immersed in the world of fanfictions, they also become much better at identifying the line between what’s real and what’s not.

It can even be argued that this makes fanfictions somehow even more ethically correct compared to biopics, where there is virtually close to no suspension of belief, at least for many of its audience. It promises to deliver the actual events to the truest form possible on-screen, then proceed to falsify, rewrite or alter minor and major aspects of it for the sake of narrative coherence.

For example, let’s look at two works of the Tony awards-winning musical writer Lin Manuel Miranda which have one surprisingly similar thing in common: Hamilton and his recent directory debut, Tick, Tick…Boom!.

Hamilton - the over-the-top, people-break-into-songs-mid-sentence musical - serves a contemporary take on the story of Alexander Hamilton, the founding father of the United States. Creators of the show - most probably fully aware of the fact that it’s fictional - go out of their way to highlight it: The songs written into the musical are of a myriad of genres: hiphop, R&B, pop, soul and the traditional musical tunes; the dialogues are written with a contemporary tone; and most importantly, in this iteration of the story, many of the characters are people of color (when historically they should be white). However, as the show has so clearly pointed out that it doesn’t follow the realistic rules of history, no one expected this aspect of it to be. So much of it is reinterpretation that it might as well be considered a fanfiction.

In Tick, tick,...boom!, the semi-autobiographical film about Jonathan Larson - writer of era-defining musical Rent, there is no indication of the story being manipulated: from the preface “Everything you are about to see is true, except for the part that Jonathan made up”, to the realistic albeit comedic tone, plus the set being handled to look as identical as possible to the world that real Jonathan Larson lived in. Despite being a musical, the picture stays loyal to try fleshing out the characteristics and energy of Larson’s life, at the expense of reality: stories are cut, edited and rearranged; characters are added, eradicated and altered. Similarly to Hamilton, many real-life-based POCs in this screenplay are, in fact, not POCs; but unlike that of the other, this fact comes as a surprise for many of its viewers.

As for (3) and (4), fandom’s content creators do not intend to harm the people they idolized, nor do they gain anything from the work that they do. Does this mean that the authors should be shed of any responsibility for negative consequences that might result from their works, as long as they didn’t intend for it to happen? Are writers not at fault when fans try to force celebrities together, developing an immoral obsession, a delusion with their writing as a catalyst? Absolutely not. To be moral, it should be consciously and thoroughly understood from both sides of the fiction’s creation that the story being told is not, in any way, the fact.

“Authors can be held morally responsible for prompting their audiences to fictively imagine something immoral when there is the reasonable expectation that the author intends either for their audience to export some fictive belief to their real-world conceptual repertoire, or their work is designed in such a way (whether intentionally or not) that it allows the audience to use the works to cultivate an immoral desire.” (“It’s Just a Story’: Pornography, Desire, and the Ethics of Fictive Imagining)

3. What about the people themselves?

All that said, there are still many gray areas left to be discussed within the content of real people fanfictions.

The overwhelming portion of this subgenre is works which are labeled ‘slash fiction’. This covers fictional stories that explicitly explore a romantic (or platonic!) relationships between same-sex characters, with this aspect oftentimes being the primary plot element or the driving force behind the main events of the story. And because of course it would, the majority of these stories includes explicit sexual scenes. While these works sure do appeal to their intended audiences, they can also be found to be somewhat disturbing to others.

For example, the archiveofourown.com database contains 181,153 fictional writings written by and for the BTS fandom. Think about it: What if, on a mundane Wednesday afternoon, after an eight-hour commercial shoot and a cup-full of decaffeinated coffee, a member comes across one of these stories. He, then, out of pure curiosity and restlessness, decides to find out what it is all about. Best case scenario, he would be embarrassed but delighted that their admirers would dedicate such effort and love into writing about them, building up alternative universes where they live different lives but still end up with the same people they love. Worst case, well, he’ll be insulted by the idea of these writers appropriating his public body, molding it freely to fit their fantasy, then create a false version of him inside an experience of life that might partially be true to his.

He would be justified for feeling like that. Especially so, taking into regard how many fanfictions use the recontextualizing method to create their work. This is when a real-life interaction between famous personalities - recorded by whatever media is consumed by the fanbase - is written down and reimagined to become a part of bigger narratives and storylines. A look, a stare, a smile, a response, a conversation, a touch of the fingers - anything that is available to the public is open to be recontextualized.

One common rebuttal against why this can lead to RPFs being unethical comes from the “star image does not constitute a real person” crowd. In accordance with this view, the displayed persona of an individual to the public - especially celebrities - can be seen as a commodity, in the sense that it can be regarded as a media - a fictional form of expression - and treated accordingly. As such, it is perfectly okay to perceive it and impose your own interpretation on the subject.

In context, this does make sense. However, let it not be ignored that there are striking overlaps between this view and some of the excuses people make for the terrifying invasion of celebrities’ personal lives. While not deliberately, this notion presumes that as a person of fame, one must carry more responsibility than an average person - to be more tolerant than others with the matter of media falsification; to endure scrutiny and attacks with grace; to protect oneself and one’s people but simultaneously always remaining in composure.

Can the fact that the readers do not consider these fantastical depictions as their favorite people (as demonstrated in [5]) help in diminishing the need for this point? - Not at all! What it is doing is showing that the only way that fanfictions can be completely moral is if they are only accessed by and only by the fandom; and if no members of said fandom goes ahead and insinuate anything towards the stars that have been affected by the fantasy they submerged themselves in. Which, of course, is impossible. People are hardly ever as bright as we would hope them to be.

In conclusion, as there will always be people who are conscious of their actions and its possible consequences, and then there also will exist deeply problematic people, fanfictions should be assessed and reviewed as separate works, in relations with different situations, and morally dubious, I think, is the most fitting description to give to this realm of literature.

Now, for the fics recommendation-

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