Everyone Likes to Fill Holes (heh)

Despite the crude pun of the title, this isn’t actually a post (directly) about sex.

What I really mean is the way that fanworks are created out of a desire to fill in the holes in a narrative.

Sure, there are lots of things in canon sources that can inspire fen to create their own stories and art and vids and more.  Things that trigger the imagination.  Things that suck fen in and prompt them want to make more than canon can provide.  I may, in fact, be back to talk about some of them in future posts.

For now, though, it’s holes in the narrative.

Ever stop to think why so many fanworks are future!fic and pre-canon and missing scene pieces?  Because people like to fill in the holes, and those are some of the major places to find ‘em.  Come on, who hasn’t wondered about what happens to a favorite character 20 years from now?  Who doesn’t want to see a moment from that character’s childhood?  Who doesn’t want to tell hir version of what happened after that confrontation that faded to black?

Fill that hole, baby.  Fill it.  You know you want to.

Conversely, of course, canons that don’t have (m)any holes to fill tend not to make the same mega-sized splash in terms of fannish following.  I mentioned Velvet Goldmine and its relatively small fan following in this post.  Partly, as I said there, that comes from the fact that the subtlety of the subtext is missing.

Right.  Not so much with the subtlety or the subtext.

But also, there aren’t all that many holes to fill in the Velvet Goldmine narrative.  Most of the stories in that fandom are future ones.

Major case in point: Lord of the Rings.

All due respect to LOTR book-verse fen, but it was the movies that exploded LOTR fandom into being.  After Fellowship of the Ring came out, there were a few months of intense fan participation (reinvigorated, of course, after the release of the next two movies), and then things petered out as the beast that was Lotrips (LOTR RPS, that is) fandom came into its own.

A bunch of men bonding during an extended, isolated period of filming in New Zealand—compounded, expanded, made massive by stories and rumors of hijinks, pranks, secret camping trips, and photography sessions, not to mention public touchy-feely antics—offered one hundred and eleventy billion holes for fen to fill.  Whereas book-verse LOTR fans are presented with a wonderfully complete world crafted lovingly and in extreme detail by JRR Tolkien.  It’s a fantastic place to read about and to see on screen.  But what it doesn’t have a lot of is… you guessed it.  Holes.

So Lotrips exploded with stories (sexual and non, but yes, mostly sexual) about what happened with all those men out there in the wilderness for all those months, and fully-fleshed-out LOTR became a smaller, quieter presence on the fan scene.

You get my point with this, I take it.  Fans like to fill holes.  Where there are more holes to fill, I can almost guarantee you you’ll find more fans filling them.

And now I’ll stop before this goes from crude pun title to bad tongue-twister ending.

Let’s Talk About Real People

Yep, it’s RPF discussion time, because this is a blog by a fangirl who has spent a good deal of time over the years reading fic, and given that’s the case, this is one of the major issues that comes up over and over again (as evidenced by the delicious ‘rpf’ tag for metafandom).

At its heart—if you happen to be a fic-reading fan who lives under a rock or a non-fic-reading fan who doesn’t really know what I’m talking about—the issue I want to get at here is the ethics of reading/writing stories (or viewing/making art or vids) that create fictionalized relationships (usually of a sexual nature) between real people.  Hence RPF.  Real Person Fiction.  As opposed to FPF, or Fake Person Fiction.

I have to include a couple highlights from Wikipedia’s timeline of RPF, because some of them are kind of genius and some of them make me want to laugh and some of them fascinate me as events in fandom history.

From 1977 to 1983, Led Zeppelin slash fan fiction begins to circulate in fanzines. The early zines used the names Tris and Alex, or Allyn Sterling/Derek Quinn instead of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

Early 1980s – Star Wars stories are published in which Harrison Ford meets Han Solo.

1984 – Elliot Roosevelt published the first of his detective novels starring his mother Eleanor.

Late 1990s – Inspired by t-shirts showing Clinton and Gore’s heads on embracing twink bodies, a few Clinton/Gore stories are written.

On December 28, LOTR_RPS appears, the first The Lord of the Rings real person fiction community.

I (fondly) remember my Lotrips days (because LOTR RPS was simply too many syllables and fen love nothing more than shorthand names), including my own subscription to the LOTR_RPS yahoogroups list from issue #1, and though I think the 90s boybands are where RPF started as a major subset of fandom, I give Lotrips the credit for taking RPF from a subset into a fandom force to be reckoned with.

Me, I come down squarely in favor of RPF.  I have no problem with it whatsoever.  As far as I’m concerned it’s fantasy, and as long as people clarify that what they’re creating is intended as a fictional scenario, then I say live and let live.  There’s nothing different to me about fantasizing about a made-up character or a real-life person.

The truth of the matter is that even if your character of choice shares a name and a physical appearance with someone who’s out there living and breathing and acting/singing/dancing/doing something you get fannish about, when fan material is created about that person, he or she is still just that.  A character.  A character formed from observations of a real person’s public behavior, yes, but hell, if all of my public behavior was observed, I can’t imagine the conclusions people would draw about me as a person would be totally accurate.  And that goes even more for public figures who, one imagines, have crafted personae to show the public that may or may not have much to do with them in their private lives.

Of course, there are the crazy people and tinhatters out there who jump on the RPF train and then claim that no, really, Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan are really gay for each other and madly in love.  (True story of fan nuttery summarized over here.)  And the people who have no sense of boundaries, like the one who saw this Q&A post on Ian McKellen’s official site:

Q: My fellow yahoogroup members and I all respect you, the cast, crew, and movie itself. Most of us indulge in a hobby called ‘fanfic.’ A great deal of us write (or read) ‘slash,’ and a few members write ‘RPS’  (Real Person Slash.) What are your thoughts on such things? Do you consider them slanderous to your good character and/or to the good character of any actor/movie/etc?

A: I am not well acquainted with slash but find nothing harmful in sharing fantasies about favourite characters or their interpreters. Within the context of such sites even Real Person stories seem unobjectionable as they are clearly fictional.

and responded by printing out some of that (sexually explicit) slash and giving it to Sir Ian at a public event.  *facepalm*

I’ve got to say, though, those sorts of occurrences seem to thankfully happen fairly rarely.  For the most part, I give fen the benefit of the doubt and happily observe us keeping RPF safely where it, in my opinion, belongs.  In the realm of fantasy and well away from the people who inspire us to create and consume it.

Please feel free to jump in and debate this one.  I know there are lots of opinions about RPF, and I know a lot of them contradict my own.