Real Person Fiction - History

History

The earliest known RPF was written by the Brontë children from 1826 to approximately 1844. Based on the children's roleplaying game about the Napoleonic Wars, the series featured the Duke of Wellington and his two (actual) sons Charles and Arthur, and their arch-nemesis Alexander Percy, partly based on Napoleon. Over the years, Arthur evolved into an amazingly charismatic and powerful figure, the Duke of Zamorna. Percy became a tragic villain, partly inspired by John Milton's version of Satan from Paradise Lost. These stories were not published until well over a hundred years later, but the children used them to polish their writing skills and eventually all became professional authors.

In the early 1920s, Seigneur Books published the series “Fatty Arbuckle and the Time Pirates.” Inspired by the actor’s career-ending scandal, the novellas depicted a time-traveling Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle forcibly raping famous historical figures.

During the 1940s, the Whitman Publishing Company released authorized editions of real-person fiction, possibly as a boost to the careers of the Hollywood stars of that era. Described as "The Newest, Up-To-The-Minute Mystery and Adventure Stories for Boys and Girls, featuring your favorite characters," a variety of famous actors and actresses were spotlighted, including Ginger Rogers, Betty Grable, John Payne, Ann Sheridan, Jane Withers, Bonita Granville, Gene Autry, Deanna Durbin and Ann Rutherford. Along with the celebrity titles, Whitman also published books adapted from comic strips, including Boots and Her Buddies, Terry and the Pirates, Joyce and the Secret Squad, Tillie the Toiler, Nina and Skeezix, Invisible Scarlet O'Neil, Polly the Powers Model, The Adventures of Smilin' Jack, Red Ryder, Blondie and Dagwood, Little Orphan Annie, Brenda Starr, and Dick Tracy. The hardcover publications had colorful dustjackets with a photo of the celebrity on the front, and several illustrations of the actor or actress inside the volume. Liberties were taken with the identities of the celebrities; for example, in the story "Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak," the "Ginger Rogers" character is not an actress at all, but is instead a humble telephone operator who becomes involved in a mystery.

Elliot Roosevelt wrote a series of detective novels casting his real-life mother Eleanor Roosevelt in the role of a crimesolving sleuth, with titles like Murder and the First Lady, Murder in the Oval Office, and Murder in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Modern fan stories go back to Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, and Elvis Presley. Jean Lorrah's Visit to a Weird Planet, published in Spockanalia 3 (1968), was a lighthearted two-parter about what would happen if a transporter malfunction caused the Star Trek characters to be swapped with the 20th-century actors who played them. Regina Marvinny, editor of Tricorder Readings, encouraged fans in the early 1970s to write "what-if" stories about meeting Leonard Nimoy. However, some of the earliest known published cases of RPF come from 1977, when fanzines of the band Led Zeppelin began to print some of the fan fiction being written. Due to the fact that these stories involved real Zeppelin bandmembers, most notably Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, names were changed to pseudonyms such as "Tris" and "Alex".

A number of authors of modern bandfic – stories based on musical celebrities – began writing in the early 1980s, when MTV brought musicians into close focus for millions of adolescents. Others wrote humorous short stories about Paul Darrow from Blake's 7. Some of these stories may have circulated in fanzine form, but there was little community and many authors remained unaware of others doing similar work. It was not until the 1990s and the spread of the Internet that RPF began to increase in popularity.

The RPF community was, for a period of time, centered around the FanFiction.Net website. When the RPF section was removed from Fanfiction.net, the community dispersed to smaller web archives and LiveJournal communities. RPF is generally totally absent from Usenet, especially in older and more established newsgroups. However, Quizilla is a popular choice these days for younger people wanting to read or write RPF.

Another popular website for RPF chosen by youth fanfic writers is Winglin.net or asianfanfics.com, which is more commonly centered around Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese or Chinese musicians and actors, like TVXQ, Super Junior, Big Bang, SHINee, Mike He, S.H.E and others.