Meme: February 19: Generation Kill and the border of reality
February 19: _whiskers asks, do you consider GK an RPF fandom? Why or why not?
Hmmm. Mostly yes--there are real guys with these characters' names, and it's their real lives I and my fellow GK fandomers are basing fic on. I personally certainly have written copious amounts of One Bullet Away fanfic under the banner of GK fandom.
At the same time, we're all definitely working off the HBO fictionalized versions of these guys, and the packaged, memoir-ized versions, plus the slightly less filtered RPF fodder of information about their lives that have trickled out in the years since the miniseries. I feel like it's definitely an RPF fandom at a slightly greater remove than most things that you would unquestioningly call an RPF fandom--maybe a bit more like writing fic about My Chemical Romance's Danger Days personas than writing fic about them directly, as a vague analogy. It's Stark Sands and Alexander Skarsgard who I picture when I'm picturing Nate and Brad having sex, not Nate Fick Actual and Brad Colbert Actual, so in that way there is a difference. The way I ship these guys has a lot to do with acting and directing choices from the miniseries, less to do with anything that comes from the Actual Guys Themselves.
And all of that said, I have bounced between RPF and FPF so long, and have worn down so many of my moral lines about which is okay and which isn't, that I find the question of whether or not it's an RPF fandom mostly uninteresting. I know that people who are in the fandom operate in different places along a spectrum of engaging with information about the real guys in fiction--many people deliberately use fictional names for their family members, reject the ~canon~ of what we know about their real lives post-2008, and of course this is also the root of a lot of the keep-it-secret-keep-it-safe attitude of the fandom--and I'm okay with meeting people wherever they are with that. For me I write it in a pretty-RPF-y way and I'm comfortable doing so.
I will say that back in bandom, when the fourth wall was getting punctured in various ways (VickyT commenting on fic about her! Pete Wentz's everything!) I realized that my point of anxiety about real people finding the fic I wrote about them was not that they would be upset by it (because whatever, if you don't want to read fic about yourself don't read fic about yourself, you're an adult) but that they would know what I got wrong. With the GK guys I don't even feel like I need to worry about that. Although...
...So maybe I should be more concerned, but idk, that seems like a pretty supportive reaction. :)
This entry was originally posted at http://dira.dreamwidth.org/688044.html. There are currently
comments there.
Hmmm. Mostly yes--there are real guys with these characters' names, and it's their real lives I and my fellow GK fandomers are basing fic on. I personally certainly have written copious amounts of One Bullet Away fanfic under the banner of GK fandom.
At the same time, we're all definitely working off the HBO fictionalized versions of these guys, and the packaged, memoir-ized versions, plus the slightly less filtered RPF fodder of information about their lives that have trickled out in the years since the miniseries. I feel like it's definitely an RPF fandom at a slightly greater remove than most things that you would unquestioningly call an RPF fandom--maybe a bit more like writing fic about My Chemical Romance's Danger Days personas than writing fic about them directly, as a vague analogy. It's Stark Sands and Alexander Skarsgard who I picture when I'm picturing Nate and Brad having sex, not Nate Fick Actual and Brad Colbert Actual, so in that way there is a difference. The way I ship these guys has a lot to do with acting and directing choices from the miniseries, less to do with anything that comes from the Actual Guys Themselves.
And all of that said, I have bounced between RPF and FPF so long, and have worn down so many of my moral lines about which is okay and which isn't, that I find the question of whether or not it's an RPF fandom mostly uninteresting. I know that people who are in the fandom operate in different places along a spectrum of engaging with information about the real guys in fiction--many people deliberately use fictional names for their family members, reject the ~canon~ of what we know about their real lives post-2008, and of course this is also the root of a lot of the keep-it-secret-keep-it-safe attitude of the fandom--and I'm okay with meeting people wherever they are with that. For me I write it in a pretty-RPF-y way and I'm comfortable doing so.
I will say that back in bandom, when the fourth wall was getting punctured in various ways (VickyT commenting on fic about her! Pete Wentz's everything!) I realized that my point of anxiety about real people finding the fic I wrote about them was not that they would be upset by it (because whatever, if you don't want to read fic about yourself don't read fic about yourself, you're an adult) but that they would know what I got wrong. With the GK guys I don't even feel like I need to worry about that. Although...
...So maybe I should be more concerned, but idk, that seems like a pretty supportive reaction. :)
This entry was originally posted at http://dira.dreamwidth.org/688044.html. There are currently
comments there.