Real Person Fiction - Description

Description

In general, the authors seem to adopt the public personas of the celebrities in question as their own characters, building a fictional universe based on the supposed real-life histories of their idols. Information from interviews, documentaries, music videos, and other publicity sources are assimilated into the "wank corpus" on which the stories are based. It is also very popular to write fiction about celebrity couples. Communities of writers build collective archetypes based on the celebrities' public personas. Communities also develop their own ethics on what sort of stories are acceptable – some are uncomfortable with slash fiction, or with mention of the celebrity's real-life families, or with stories involving suicide, murder, or rape. Like most fan fiction, the RPF genre includes stories of every kind, from innocuous to sadistic to pornographic. Like many fan fiction writers whose subject matter is commercially-prepared entertainment, particularly before the advent of the Internet, a number of RPF authors report that they began writing on their own, without any awareness of a larger fan fiction community, and were surprised to learn that they were not alone. Many report having been completely unaware of media fandom's taboo towards RPF; that is, many fans believe it is acceptable to write about the characters, but not about the actors who portray them.

Depictions of actors in RPF stories are often heavily influenced by characters the actors portray. This is particularly noticeable in The Lord of the Rings RPF, where Viggo Mortensen is frequently shown as taking an Aragorn-like leadership role, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan as lighthearted Hobbit-like pranksters, and Elijah Wood as more physically fragile and emotionally vulnerable than his colleagues.

Between one fifth and one third of these stories may take the form of a "Mary Sue" story. A Mary Sue is a character, usually but not always female, who is described in extremely idealistic terms and is supposedly always a wish-fantasy image of the author. A Mary Sue may become romantically involved with a band member or actor, join the cast, prove to have superior acting or singing ability, and incredible beauty. A number of RPF fans find these Mary Sues (or Gary Stus) distasteful and sometimes bash them. A small number of RPF writers are apparently under the belief that a celebrity is involved in a real relationship with another celebrity, and go as far as to spend large amounts of time searching for proof of this relationship. By writing RPF stories, these people believe they can "prove" that a particular pair of celebrities are in a relationship. Politician fic is sometimes used as a form of satire, or to highlight the underlying biases or attitudes of the politician being portrayed, although more recently there has been an increase in more 'ordinary' fanfiction about British politicians in particular, with a notable emphasis on slash.