honestly.

sidnihoudini:

If I have to read one more thirteen year old’s ‘friendly reminder’ that RPF is creepy or dehumanizing, I am going to join hands with satan and smack a bitch down myself.

I will take down ALL OF YOU.

Here’s the thing.  Tumblr did not invent real person fan fiction.  I guess it might seem like it if you weren’t there to experience the wild fucking west of Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal, but all Tumblr did was make RPF fucking weird.

You know how long RPF has been around for?  Your #1 bitch Shakespeare used to write stories about the Brontë fam.  Charlotte Brontë, with her on-going boner for the Duke of Wellington (aka a real adult male person), used him as a character in a series of stories.  CB even went through a shitty goth phase like the rest of us!

Not interested in that dusty old shit? Fair. You should still know that your mom and maybe your grandma were writing stories about people like Donny Osmond and Gene Roddenberry LONG before you turned your nose up and decided that it was “creepy – ew, mom.”

(For the record I do think a story written about Donny Osmond would in fact be creepy, even though I probably would still read it just so I could gross myself out a little, think who the fuck would write this, and then feel even better about my own life choices.)

THAT ASIDE, I remember the days when RPF (bandom, thank you, you’re welcome) was something you didn’t know about UNLESS you were into reading it or writing it.  It always had a disclaimer – something like this is just a story, it’s not real, please don’t sure me haha! – and it always STAYED IN ITS LANE.

Side note: If you want to read more about the history of RPF, visit Fanlore.  They good.

So that means: links were not sent directly to the actors via fans on various social media networks.  That means: interviewers and YouTube stars did not read the stories out loud on air/on video as a form of shock entertainment.  That means: whoever the story was about? did not know of its existence – in any way or form.

Like, do you see where I’m going with this?

RPF is not an invasion of an actor’s privacy, because the personality said actor is presenting to the public is not their real goddamn personality.  It’s a character, a manicured version of themselves.  There is a real person behind that manicured and marketed image, and that’s not the person we write about.

Don’t even get me started on the finer subtleties and aspects of this argument, because I’ll go on and on and on until someone tells me to shut the fuck up, and even then I’ll probably keep ranting.

So let’s make a deal: you keep your shit out of my shit, and I’ll keep my shit out of your shit.  You don’t go in the tags of the pairing you don’t like, and I won’t slap a couple of fictional dick stories in your face.

Finally: if anyone here actually thinks they can end the RPF war that has been waged since literally 1960 via a classic Tumblerina text post, please raise your hand so I know which direction to throw my head back and cackle in first.

PS: If anyone is still looking for a witch hunt, can we all agree to take down those Reader/X people first?