#i will agree that rpf shipping can feel a little squick to me

[thelioncourts]

Okay, you seem to have thoughts on RPF that I would like to hear more about. It's been a big convo in the fandom lately.

Ah, anon, it's like you want me to get dragged through the coals in this ""new"" fandom.

I feel like I need to preface this with several things. The first thing is that, while I am not necessarily old (though I am feeling tremendously ancient, but that's neither here nor there), I am a fandom old in many ways. I have been involved in fandom for going on twenty years now. The second thing, a sad thing I have to specify before I continue, is ofc I do not, nor does any sane person, condone the harassment of real people over a ship. But that second thing is related to the first thing and that's something I can dive into as I continue -- though I do promise not to make this ungodly long in my rambling.

Fandom has been around for -- forever. One of my favorite things I learned in some of my college classes was about Pamela by Samuel Richardson and how it was such a popular novel, arguably one of the earliest English novels ever published, that people had tea sets with scenes painted on the cups and the pot or how women had fans with lines from the novel on them. A fandom. But fandom as we know it has been around forever too. Protesting the death of Sherlock Holmes in the streets of London, science fiction conventions in the 1930s, and, in terms of today's fandom, the 1970s and Star Trek and The Man from UNCLE tv series, etc. It's been there and it's been growing and growing as the Internet has made everything more accessible.

When I first got into fandom, around the age of 8, courtesy of an older cousin who wrote fanfiction and introduced it to me, I was way too young to be in fandom space. But I was there and I can't go back and change that. And what I will say is that being in fandom at that young of an age and growing up permanently within fandom spaces, as I've never left, has taught me quite a lot and I have seen fandom change in a lot of ways, and not for the better, in my time.

Old-school fandom had some really great policies that I see people trying to bring back. Things like squicks and notps and just all of these old little terms that used to be second-nature and have been somewhat forgotten are maybe coming back because they need to. One of my favorite old-school fandom policies is 'don't like, don't read.' I hope that one comes back ASAP.

Where I'm trying to go with all of this is here: fandom has existed long before most of us were alive. The existence of RPF fandom and fanfiction has existed since long before most of us were alive.

We can get into the morality debate of RPF all we want, but I promise every debate about it has already happened, been done, and people have taken their sides on it.

There are, of course, extreme sides on RPF. But there are extreme sides of regular fanfiction too. I've seen fandoms threaten writers and producers of shows because their ship didn't go canon. I've seen fandoms harass actors that don't agree with fandom-based headcanons of characters or started campaigns to make their fanfiction dreams come true.

Everything is fine if it is kept where fandom is supposed to be -- in fandom spaces. AO3 has a fantastic tagging system for things so you can avoid what you don't want to see and can find what you want, and if someone is tagging things incorrectly, you can politely do what you can to correct them and/or report it to AO3 for being incorrect. Like this is all possible, it's one of the many wonderful things of newer fandom (okay, AO3 is the best thing that ever happened to newer fandom, I cannot imagine life without it).

What kills me is there seems to be some kind of misunderstanding on what shipping is compared to what tinhatting is and compared to what blatant harassment is. Those three things are all distinctly different. And this very much seems to be a new-to-fandom issue. Like -- babies getting involved in fandom for the first time, or in the time of post-COVID Internet.

I'm dreading multiple things from RPF, and none of it is actually RPF (and we all know what fandom I'm talking about rn). The first thing is the harassment of people that do write RPF; like I'm expecting full on death threats at the rate I'm seeing things right now. The second thing is that people are freaking out so much about it, and making so many callout posts about it, that they're going to actually bring attention to it where the one singular RPF fic I've seen in the fandom was just quietly posted and not discussed in detail, the author just went on minding their business, as we all should.

Anyway. This is rambly and no doubt somewhat incoherent, but it's where I am. I'm too old for this kind of debate, again, and I really just want everyone to stay in their little corners and enjoy fandom where it makes them happy.

[ardentperfidy]

ok so I got this response to this post I made about a queer ship in the show arcane and I thought about replying snarkily and then I thought about ignoring it and then I actually couldn’t stop thinking about how commonly I hear variations on this in fandom spaces, across fandoms, and specifically the accusation that queer shipping undervalues friendship

and I think it is true that there are a lot of common queer ships, often mlm ships, that are based on coding that has an equally or more plausible intensely close platonic reading, but I want to defend the romance reading and I think it’s because of this weird confluence of tropes/social phenomena??

because the quintessential romance most of us grew up with is the Disney princess, love at first sight thing, but this doesn’t actually involve much romantic development. the romance is either an endgame prize or a side plot. and because it doesn’t really involve much development (and thus, in the absence of an external obstacle, is pretty boring), it’s the kind of romance plot seen in a lot of mainstream media where the focus of the show isn’t romance. the relationship shown on screen is often just a meet cute, or a moment where characters feel a “spark”, and then a few scenes where we establish that the characters have a common interest, admire some character trait of the other, or even just both felt the spark. and honestly, it comes up a lot in network TV because it makes it easy for producers to try out love interests, keep them on the backburner, and if people don't respond to them well, we get a briefly or not at all foreshadowed conflict that breaks them up, and if people respond well then usually we get a dramatic life or death bonding scene to show the depth of the characters' feelings for each other (of the kind we often see repeatedly between platonic leads - don't @ me, @ the number of episodes i've watched that are just 'girlfriend getting kidnapped'). then there’s the unrelated fact that most men, especially american men, don’t have close, emotionally deep friendships. it’s not good or healthy, but it’s a well-established phenomenon (thx toxic masculinity). and honestly, most people in general don’t have the intense closeness of relationships we see on tv because most people’s lives just aren’t that intense! which is all good and fine, outside of sitcoms most people don't want to watch the reality of like, weekly or monthly catch-ups on life between groups of people who are super busy with the monotony of daily life, but like, it is definitely beyond what most people experience in their everyday friendships.

so then when we get fictional depictions of very intense same-sex friendships, it just hits all of our trope buttons for one of the other big romance tropes, this time often in shows where the romance IS a big part of the story, of long time friends who realize it’s love. I mean, it’s Harry Met Sally, it’s Jim and Pam, Cory and Topanga, Luke and Lorelei. the story is they’re just friends until they’re not, and honestly often the only "set up" or other compatibility we get differentiating this from just a friendship is that the characters are het and hot (again, thx Harry and Sally, men and women can't be friends). so we've seen this trope over and over, we feel it in our bones, and then when you get a show where the canon love interests are shallow (often the female love interests of male leads, because misogyny and comphet), but the same-sex leads have this intense, platonic long-term bond, (like, lookin' at you supernatural, sherlock, 9-1-1, probably more that i just don't watch), and, even when there is no queer-coding, no romance-coding, just a platonic bond, it is totally understandable that this hits all of these trope buttons for people!

or there's also the fact that this is just all fictional, and people can enjoy their media consumption even if it's in ways you wouldn't enjoy your media consumption.

[letitrainathousandflames]

Hiya! I’ve seen you talking about ao3 a lot and up until recently I agreed with many of the posts you’ve been reblogging, but I think you have a little bit of a misinterpretation about why people r presently pissed off at ao3?

Sure, many people (perhaps even most) are angry for the usual puritanical reasons that you’ve been discussing, and I agree that for the most part fiction is fiction and idc what anyone does so long as I can filter it all out. You do you and all that.

But the most recent swell of criticism is bc ao3 has refused to take down rpf (real person fic) smut of minors—not fictional characters, real life children who happen to be particularly popular right now. The specific fic that spawned recent outrage is about a minecraft YouTuber/Twitch streamer who’s 16 years old, but obviously there’s many more which include his friends and other similar instances of rpf involving children.

I don’t think it’s a slippery slope to set the boundary at “don’t write about actual living children fucking” and to pretend as if this criticism of ao3 is equivalent those who want to wipe out all taboo topics or troubling fics involving fictional characters is just absurd. These are real people, real children, who are directly affected by people sexualizing them, especially if it’s left unchecked and allowed to happen more and more.

I hope you can understand where I’m coming from. Again, if this were just the same fandom bullshit over again, I’d fully agree with your opinion; I’m telling you this in the hopes of informing you more about the situation.

Ohh I didn’t know about this particular bit. First of all, let me just make it clear - that’s the most disgusting shit I’ve ever read - and I’m a die-hard “let people ship what they want” person. This sheds a new light on the whole thing.

Personally, i never liked the concept of real person fic. I see a lot of fics about bands like Rammstein where the members hook up and whatnot just as characters in fic do and not only it is not my cup of tea, it actually squicks me.

I wasn’t part of the Dan and Phil fandom generation but i do remember hearing about them being super uncomfortable with people shipping them, as I would be if I were a vlogging with my friend and people suddenly started writing stories about us falling in love/kissing/having sex ect etc.

The thing is, I don’t know if messing with the tags is even an effective form of protest - Ao3 already had a nearly finished, now released new skin that hides excessive tags. Anyway, that’s not the point.

It’s a complex situation. Older fandom people remember and dread events like the strikethrough - tons of stories lost forever because the “think of the children” crowd didn’t want anyone reading or writing smut fics about anne rice’s vampires or something, mainly driven by homophobia.

The Ao3 was built to be a space safe from censorship, and I, as an author of themes such as torture, abuse, gore, etc, am glad that my work won’t be suddenly pulled out thanks to their team of lawyers and their flexible terms of use. I believe that their issue with censoring these works is falling into a slippery slope of “ok so if you blocked rpf now you have to ban other ‘wrong’ content such as noncon/dubcon, abusive relationships, etc etc.” and then suddenly you can’t write anakin/padmé content anymore no matter how OOC bc he choked her to death in canon.

I have no answers for this particular conundrum. Like, me, personally, I would ban rpf. It’s in poor taste and there are actual living, breathing people whose lives could be affected by that. If I found a fic where someone had written my bff and I having raunchy, explicit sex, I would feel awkward being around them.

The whole ship-and-let-ship policy means - at least to me - “let people write what they want, these fictional characters are fictional and therefore they don’t care” and that argument just doesn’t hold up when it comes to rpf.

TL;DR (bullet points for easier reading):

Real Person Fiction is objectively harmful, character fanfic isn’t.

Yes, I get that being traumatized makes one want to write dark shit to process their pain. Been there, done - and still do - that. BUT if I write the billionth fic of Bucky Barnes getting tortured/maimed/raped there isn’t a real life Bucky who’s gonna read it and be grossed out of his mind or possibly traumatized. Thats the difference between fic and rpf

I don’t think fucking with the tags is an effective form of protest. No, I don’t know what is, but i have a few thoughts:

Maybe not giving reads, kudos or comments to this kind of fic is a start. Reporting these fics upon finding them outside of Ao3 (i.e: on twitter), too.

Report any and all attempts to send these fics to the kids themselves, they shouldn’t have to see/deal with this crap (seriously, have y’all learned nothing from the whole avengers mess, where ppl would send graphic porn art to the actors??), don’t do that shit! Aside from being abusive and gross, that’s a whole ass fucking CRIME. These are kids!!!

I guess it’s more or less this. I hope this gets sorted out soon. As I say, I would rather if Ao3 just removed the rpf option of their website. After all fanFICTION is supposed to be written about... well, fiction. Not real people, much less children. Yikes.