Holy Jesus Fuck, or, "Good Call on the Stockings": An Essay on Fandom and Celebrity Interactions
This post is 100% meta (plus some personal freak out) about bandom, and about the nature of real person fanfiction. If that's not what you're here for, don't click the cut tag!
Well. So. I guess you're not really in bandom until the fourth wall comes tumbling down. "Fourth wall" is a misnomer, of course, as adellyna says so well over here. But whatever we call it, however we talk about it, we want a solid line between us and them. We want to read their blogs and look at their photos and watch their buzznet videos. We love it when they play to us, and when they talk about how awesome their fans are. But they're celebrities, and we're a subculture, and the last thing in the world we want is for the subjects of our subculture to look back at us.
I've never been in an RPF fandom, before - not to speak of, anyway - and I'm new to this one. I've only really been involved since November, and I have a meager 1500 words of fanfiction to my name. I've jumped in with both feet, though: I've friended strangers, I've read fic, I've bought CDs and concert tickets, I've started writing AU epics, and I've signed up for bandombigbang (although only as a fanmixer). I am truly, madly, deeply in love with everything about this fandom: the music, the bands, the people, the writers, everything. I'm kind of a slut when it comes to fandoms, but this one and I are getting hitched.
I can't explain it, exactly. I've tried to explain it to people with strong aversions to RPF. (For anyone who doesn't know the nomenclature, RPF stands for "Real Person Fic," and is the non-slash-specific version of RPS. In this case, I am talking about bandom, which is a fandom - a fanfiction-centric fandom - focused on current popular bands, especially Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Panic at the Disco, plus the Fueled By Ramen music label and all the associated friends and bands and friends of bands.) Maybe I should have an aversion to RPF, too. Lots of people do, and I'll be the first to admit that it's a little creepy. But the thing about me, really, is that I honestly don't have a lot of lines. I talk about having lines, and there are plenty of things I don't like. But when it comes to fiction and sex and fiction about sex, I'll try anything once. I embody what Pamela Dean once called "the flaw of the novel reader." I want to see what happens.
And bandom - well. Bandom hooked me immediately. Maybe it was how much fun everyone seemed to be having. Maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the gender-bending. Maybe it was the stories - the AU epics, the excellent porn. Maybe it was the picspams and the bunnies and the cracked-out theories. Maybe it was wolfshirts. Maybe, in the post-Jossverse, post-Harry Potter world, I needed a fandom with a canon that would keep growing. Maybe I needed a blank slate, an opportunity to get obsessed about something immense and ever-changing, something full of potential stories and fascinating characters and unanswered questions and the opportunity to do research. Maybe it was all of that.
But excessive preamble aside, this is really an essay about a specific event.
The circumstances are these: about three weeks ago, I posted Fantaisie-Impromptu, a short, rather pornographic bit of femslash for sweetvalleyslut on the occasion of her birthday. It's Greta Salpeter/Vicky-T, of The Hush Sound and Cobra Starship, respectively. There's not a lot of fic about either of them, and both of them - or at least, both of their bands - have admitted to reading fic about themselves. It's not that I didn't know what I was getting into. I'm not naive. I've read the meta. I heard about Tom Conrad. But I never expected that it would happen to me. I guess nobody ever does. I posted the story to bandgirls and bandslashmania, and it was rec'd on heartsintact, and it received a very respectable amount of positive feedback. sweetvalleyslut was happy, and I was pleased with the loss of my bandom writing virginity.
And today, at about 4:30, I checked my email to find a comment on the story from victoraja. Victoria Asher. Vicky-T. Keytarist of Cobra Starship, and co-star of my pornographic fanfiction.
No, I am not kidding. At first I thought it was a hoax, but as far as I can tell, victoriaja really is Victoria Asher. Logged into her LJ and reading my fic and leaving feedback and everything. It's good form to leave feedback, you know. Hypothetically. You can read her comment here. I think it's pretty hilarious, in a panic-inducing sort of way:
ha, this is amazing guys, a fan sent this to me. You have quite the imagination! Reading this stuff is so entertaining. Stockings are my favorite so good call on that ...
thanks for the entertainment while we're on the road.
Vicky-T
My first impulse, when it was still the most surreal thing that had ever happened to me, was hysterical laughter and, "well, I'm glad she approved of the stockings." My second impulse, when it was horrifying and nausea-inducing and made me feel completely exposed, was to go into total lockdown: turn off my internet, take down the fic, and hide under my bed. There's a part of me that's still leaning towards a less extreme version of that: making a fic journal, moving all the fannish stuff - or at least the RPF stuff - and locking this journal down the rest of the way.
But my third impulse, because I am a fan and a scholar, and I've never been ashamed of either of those occupations, is two-fold: first, to analyze the situation, and second, to reply to Vicky-T's comment, saying that I'm glad to do my part for the war effort (i.e., keeping them entertained on the road), and that I fully support the stockings because they're really fucking hot. I'm not brave or foolish enough to follow through on that, but it's the pesky "flaw of the novel reader," again: how can this situation develop?
I can follow through on the meta, though. And to that end, in an attempt at organization that I have thus far completely lacked, a list:
1. However I may feel about Vicky-T reading my story - and my feelings on that are nothing if not mixed - I am pissed as fucking hell at the fan who sent it to her. Unless, of course, "a fan sent it to me," is code for "so I was reading dotcoms_refresh like any normal member of the fannish audience." I doubt it, though. adellyna talked about this in her fantastic Fandom to Celebrity Interaction post, and I wholeheartedly agree. Sending people porn about them? JUST NOT OKAY. Not to mention how awful it makes us look, because there's creepy and then there's creepy.
2. And then there's the audience question. We all talk about this, but the essential thing about our subculture is that we're not writing for anyone but ourselves. If we wanted to write for the general public, we'd be publishing. (Some of us are, of course, but that published work is, with a few somewhat troubling exceptions, kept separate from the fanwork.) Fanfiction isn't training wheels for writers (see fabu on this topic); fanfiction is its own, unique, extraordinary category, and it is unique and extraordinary in no small part because of the relationship between the writers and the audience. Our audience, by the very nature of our writing, is entirely fannish and entirely interactive - or it should be. Being fans, writing for fans - that's the fun of the entire thing, and when that system gets fucked up by a secondary, intrusive audience, we have a problem.
In media or literature fandom, however, the uninvited secondary audience - the authors and creators of the canon texts - are more or less legally obligated not to read the fanfiction. When they do read the fanfiction, they can get somewhat overly protective (e.g. J.K. Rowling), but they've still released their fictional characters to their fan base, and the characters remain fictional. The uninvited secondary audience of RPF is more troubling; when this secondary audience reads fic, it's as if the fictional characters in a novel came to life and started talking back to their author. Freaky shit!
3. "But they're real people," you say. "It's entirely different. What did you expect? Unlike the fictional characters, the real people are actually there on the other side of the mirror." And yes, that's all true. Victoria Asher is a real person. She has a real life, and a family, and a dog, and she went to film school, and she plays in a band. And I know absolutely nothing about her. I'm not writing about Victoria Asher the real person, I'm writing about Vicky-T the character.
"Huh?" you say, which brings us to the crux of the issue. This is the thing that fannish people not in RPF fandoms don't get, because it's a distinction they can't make. I don't know Victoria Asher, I don't know Pete Wentz, I don't know Gerard Way. All I know is the characters they play, the celebrity images they present to their fans and the world at large. I'm writing very, very fictionalized versions of real people, in stories that are sometimes very, very fictionalized adaptations of real events. It's exactly like writing historical fiction, except that the real people the characters are based on aren't dead, and the canon is a growing, changing, ever-adapting organism. In the end, however, it's all about stories.
Recently, I have been researching for a Pete/Mikey/Alicia post-Summer of Like, "Bang the Doldrums"-inspired story. It's exactly the same sort of research I would do to write a short story - or, for that matter, a biographical essay - about Beaumont and Fletcher. Except that instead of looking at plays, I'm looking at songs, and instead of reading dubious biographies, I'm reading dubious fan sites. In the end, I'll throw away a lot of the facts - whatever "facts" means in this context - for the sake of the story, because it's fiction.
4. Okay, fine. It's all very well to say "fiction is fiction," but what about Alicia Simmons, who was - is - a totally ordinary, hardworking, music-obsessed guitar tech and bass player from Missouri? Does it bother her that she now has fan (not to mention hate) sites, and people making up stories about her having threesomes with her husband and Pete Wentz? Does it bother Victoria Asher that I wrote a story about her having sex with Greta Salpeter? Would it bother Greta Salpeter, whose fictional point of view I used for the story? Does it bother Pete Wentz, even as he seems to encourage it? I like to think that all these people are aware of the troubles inherent with celebrity, and know enough to keep parts of themselves private; that they know enough to play characters for their fans - not too much so, but enough to keep themselves protected, so that they won't feel stripped and objectified by the stories we write about them. I hope that they're smart enough to stop reading and walk away if the fanfiction bothers them, and I really, really hope that they're able to understand - on some level, at least a little bit - that they're not the intended audience, that we do this for us, and that our imaginations come up with these things not because we think they're happening or want them to happen, but because we're storytellers.
I don't know, though. That's probably a lot of wishful thinking in one paragraph. Maybe Vicky-T will wander back over here and read my meta. Yeah right. (Hi, Vicky-T!) Still, I can't imagine that the lovely Victoria Asher would have commented on my fic if it made her really uncomfortable, and if it doesn't make her uncomfortable, who am I to say her nay? Once I've written the story, it's out there for the world to see, and as much as I would rather everything was walled in behind enormous signs reading "Fannish Subculture Only," I did know what I was getting into. Kind of. I'm not actually as calm about this as I sound, and there's still about 10% of me that sort of wants to throw up, or go into lockdown, or hide under my bed. Any of those things could still potentially happen. On the other hand, props to Vicky-T for having the guts - or the LJ manners, or whatever - to comment, and to sign her name to the comment. In the end, I don't really know which of us is crazier: the person who wrote the pornographic fanfiction about real people, or the real person person who read - and replied - to the pornographic fanfiction about herself. Let's go with option three: the person who thought it was a good idea to send the story to the story's star.
Have I learned my lesson? Will I stop writing porn about real people? Not a chance. Will I be thinking about what this means for a good long time? Damn right I will. Conversation in the comments, anyone?
ETA: I may be a bit slow to reply to comments, as I have to work/pack/catch a flight in ten hours. (Ahahahahahahahah.) Talk amongst yourselves, and I'll pitch in as soon as I can.
Well. So. I guess you're not really in bandom until the fourth wall comes tumbling down. "Fourth wall" is a misnomer, of course, as adellyna says so well over here. But whatever we call it, however we talk about it, we want a solid line between us and them. We want to read their blogs and look at their photos and watch their buzznet videos. We love it when they play to us, and when they talk about how awesome their fans are. But they're celebrities, and we're a subculture, and the last thing in the world we want is for the subjects of our subculture to look back at us.
I've never been in an RPF fandom, before - not to speak of, anyway - and I'm new to this one. I've only really been involved since November, and I have a meager 1500 words of fanfiction to my name. I've jumped in with both feet, though: I've friended strangers, I've read fic, I've bought CDs and concert tickets, I've started writing AU epics, and I've signed up for bandombigbang (although only as a fanmixer). I am truly, madly, deeply in love with everything about this fandom: the music, the bands, the people, the writers, everything. I'm kind of a slut when it comes to fandoms, but this one and I are getting hitched.
I can't explain it, exactly. I've tried to explain it to people with strong aversions to RPF. (For anyone who doesn't know the nomenclature, RPF stands for "Real Person Fic," and is the non-slash-specific version of RPS. In this case, I am talking about bandom, which is a fandom - a fanfiction-centric fandom - focused on current popular bands, especially Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Panic at the Disco, plus the Fueled By Ramen music label and all the associated friends and bands and friends of bands.) Maybe I should have an aversion to RPF, too. Lots of people do, and I'll be the first to admit that it's a little creepy. But the thing about me, really, is that I honestly don't have a lot of lines. I talk about having lines, and there are plenty of things I don't like. But when it comes to fiction and sex and fiction about sex, I'll try anything once. I embody what Pamela Dean once called "the flaw of the novel reader." I want to see what happens.
And bandom - well. Bandom hooked me immediately. Maybe it was how much fun everyone seemed to be having. Maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the gender-bending. Maybe it was the stories - the AU epics, the excellent porn. Maybe it was the picspams and the bunnies and the cracked-out theories. Maybe it was wolfshirts. Maybe, in the post-Jossverse, post-Harry Potter world, I needed a fandom with a canon that would keep growing. Maybe I needed a blank slate, an opportunity to get obsessed about something immense and ever-changing, something full of potential stories and fascinating characters and unanswered questions and the opportunity to do research. Maybe it was all of that.
But excessive preamble aside, this is really an essay about a specific event.
The circumstances are these: about three weeks ago, I posted Fantaisie-Impromptu, a short, rather pornographic bit of femslash for sweetvalleyslut on the occasion of her birthday. It's Greta Salpeter/Vicky-T, of The Hush Sound and Cobra Starship, respectively. There's not a lot of fic about either of them, and both of them - or at least, both of their bands - have admitted to reading fic about themselves. It's not that I didn't know what I was getting into. I'm not naive. I've read the meta. I heard about Tom Conrad. But I never expected that it would happen to me. I guess nobody ever does. I posted the story to bandgirls and bandslashmania, and it was rec'd on heartsintact, and it received a very respectable amount of positive feedback. sweetvalleyslut was happy, and I was pleased with the loss of my bandom writing virginity.
And today, at about 4:30, I checked my email to find a comment on the story from victoraja. Victoria Asher. Vicky-T. Keytarist of Cobra Starship, and co-star of my pornographic fanfiction.
No, I am not kidding. At first I thought it was a hoax, but as far as I can tell, victoriaja really is Victoria Asher. Logged into her LJ and reading my fic and leaving feedback and everything. It's good form to leave feedback, you know. Hypothetically. You can read her comment here. I think it's pretty hilarious, in a panic-inducing sort of way:
ha, this is amazing guys, a fan sent this to me. You have quite the imagination! Reading this stuff is so entertaining. Stockings are my favorite so good call on that ...
thanks for the entertainment while we're on the road.
Vicky-T
My first impulse, when it was still the most surreal thing that had ever happened to me, was hysterical laughter and, "well, I'm glad she approved of the stockings." My second impulse, when it was horrifying and nausea-inducing and made me feel completely exposed, was to go into total lockdown: turn off my internet, take down the fic, and hide under my bed. There's a part of me that's still leaning towards a less extreme version of that: making a fic journal, moving all the fannish stuff - or at least the RPF stuff - and locking this journal down the rest of the way.
But my third impulse, because I am a fan and a scholar, and I've never been ashamed of either of those occupations, is two-fold: first, to analyze the situation, and second, to reply to Vicky-T's comment, saying that I'm glad to do my part for the war effort (i.e., keeping them entertained on the road), and that I fully support the stockings because they're really fucking hot. I'm not brave or foolish enough to follow through on that, but it's the pesky "flaw of the novel reader," again: how can this situation develop?
I can follow through on the meta, though. And to that end, in an attempt at organization that I have thus far completely lacked, a list:
1. However I may feel about Vicky-T reading my story - and my feelings on that are nothing if not mixed - I am pissed as fucking hell at the fan who sent it to her. Unless, of course, "a fan sent it to me," is code for "so I was reading dotcoms_refresh like any normal member of the fannish audience." I doubt it, though. adellyna talked about this in her fantastic Fandom to Celebrity Interaction post, and I wholeheartedly agree. Sending people porn about them? JUST NOT OKAY. Not to mention how awful it makes us look, because there's creepy and then there's creepy.
2. And then there's the audience question. We all talk about this, but the essential thing about our subculture is that we're not writing for anyone but ourselves. If we wanted to write for the general public, we'd be publishing. (Some of us are, of course, but that published work is, with a few somewhat troubling exceptions, kept separate from the fanwork.) Fanfiction isn't training wheels for writers (see fabu on this topic); fanfiction is its own, unique, extraordinary category, and it is unique and extraordinary in no small part because of the relationship between the writers and the audience. Our audience, by the very nature of our writing, is entirely fannish and entirely interactive - or it should be. Being fans, writing for fans - that's the fun of the entire thing, and when that system gets fucked up by a secondary, intrusive audience, we have a problem.
In media or literature fandom, however, the uninvited secondary audience - the authors and creators of the canon texts - are more or less legally obligated not to read the fanfiction. When they do read the fanfiction, they can get somewhat overly protective (e.g. J.K. Rowling), but they've still released their fictional characters to their fan base, and the characters remain fictional. The uninvited secondary audience of RPF is more troubling; when this secondary audience reads fic, it's as if the fictional characters in a novel came to life and started talking back to their author. Freaky shit!
3. "But they're real people," you say. "It's entirely different. What did you expect? Unlike the fictional characters, the real people are actually there on the other side of the mirror." And yes, that's all true. Victoria Asher is a real person. She has a real life, and a family, and a dog, and she went to film school, and she plays in a band. And I know absolutely nothing about her. I'm not writing about Victoria Asher the real person, I'm writing about Vicky-T the character.
"Huh?" you say, which brings us to the crux of the issue. This is the thing that fannish people not in RPF fandoms don't get, because it's a distinction they can't make. I don't know Victoria Asher, I don't know Pete Wentz, I don't know Gerard Way. All I know is the characters they play, the celebrity images they present to their fans and the world at large. I'm writing very, very fictionalized versions of real people, in stories that are sometimes very, very fictionalized adaptations of real events. It's exactly like writing historical fiction, except that the real people the characters are based on aren't dead, and the canon is a growing, changing, ever-adapting organism. In the end, however, it's all about stories.
Recently, I have been researching for a Pete/Mikey/Alicia post-Summer of Like, "Bang the Doldrums"-inspired story. It's exactly the same sort of research I would do to write a short story - or, for that matter, a biographical essay - about Beaumont and Fletcher. Except that instead of looking at plays, I'm looking at songs, and instead of reading dubious biographies, I'm reading dubious fan sites. In the end, I'll throw away a lot of the facts - whatever "facts" means in this context - for the sake of the story, because it's fiction.
4. Okay, fine. It's all very well to say "fiction is fiction," but what about Alicia Simmons, who was - is - a totally ordinary, hardworking, music-obsessed guitar tech and bass player from Missouri? Does it bother her that she now has fan (not to mention hate) sites, and people making up stories about her having threesomes with her husband and Pete Wentz? Does it bother Victoria Asher that I wrote a story about her having sex with Greta Salpeter? Would it bother Greta Salpeter, whose fictional point of view I used for the story? Does it bother Pete Wentz, even as he seems to encourage it? I like to think that all these people are aware of the troubles inherent with celebrity, and know enough to keep parts of themselves private; that they know enough to play characters for their fans - not too much so, but enough to keep themselves protected, so that they won't feel stripped and objectified by the stories we write about them. I hope that they're smart enough to stop reading and walk away if the fanfiction bothers them, and I really, really hope that they're able to understand - on some level, at least a little bit - that they're not the intended audience, that we do this for us, and that our imaginations come up with these things not because we think they're happening or want them to happen, but because we're storytellers.
I don't know, though. That's probably a lot of wishful thinking in one paragraph. Maybe Vicky-T will wander back over here and read my meta. Yeah right. (Hi, Vicky-T!) Still, I can't imagine that the lovely Victoria Asher would have commented on my fic if it made her really uncomfortable, and if it doesn't make her uncomfortable, who am I to say her nay? Once I've written the story, it's out there for the world to see, and as much as I would rather everything was walled in behind enormous signs reading "Fannish Subculture Only," I did know what I was getting into. Kind of. I'm not actually as calm about this as I sound, and there's still about 10% of me that sort of wants to throw up, or go into lockdown, or hide under my bed. Any of those things could still potentially happen. On the other hand, props to Vicky-T for having the guts - or the LJ manners, or whatever - to comment, and to sign her name to the comment. In the end, I don't really know which of us is crazier: the person who wrote the pornographic fanfiction about real people, or the real person person who read - and replied - to the pornographic fanfiction about herself. Let's go with option three: the person who thought it was a good idea to send the story to the story's star.
Have I learned my lesson? Will I stop writing porn about real people? Not a chance. Will I be thinking about what this means for a good long time? Damn right I will. Conversation in the comments, anyone?
ETA: I may be a bit slow to reply to comments, as I have to work/pack/catch a flight in ten hours. (Ahahahahahahahah.) Talk amongst yourselves, and I'll pitch in as soon as I can.