The first battle cry of any badficcer when their work gets mocked is the age old, "DON'T LIKE, DON'T READ!" Most people from
GAFF would answer, "How do I know if I won't like it before I've read it?" Come on guys, you know that's BS. We all know we're going to hate it. GAFF's MO has always been, "Don't like, read twice, mock for months." That's how we roll. We read badfic because, for whatever reason, we love it. It makes us laugh or makes us feel better about our own writing, or we're fascinated by the mentality of the badfic writer. (I'm part all three.)
After all, "I survived Celebrian" as they say, I MSTed the "tiger sex" chapter of "My Inner Life," and partly MSTed "Crash Crush," a RPS in which Johnny Depp, Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom are the sole survivors of a plane crash on an island ... until Keira Knightly dies and the two men have to eat her to stay alive, in between chapters of boffing each other. As hilarious as that one was, I admittedly had a hard time with it because it's about real people. RPS and RPF make me feel dirtier than any Celebrian any day. I feel like I have to get the filth off of me after I read real-person fiction, and yet I still find myself reading it because, like most GAFF regs, I can't look away. Maybe we're a kind of masochistic bunch in a way.
But honestly, I didn't go out looking for this particular badfic. I was looking for an LJ comm for 30 Seconds to Mars so that I could find a transcript of that Loveline thing, (didn't find it,) and some tour dates. (Sometimes I like to pretend to myself that I will be able to take a day off in the summer and go to a concert. Maybe someday I will. I know a rehabber who just asks me to birdsit all her birds while she goes away in the summer. It's not entirely impossible. Anyway.) What I ended up finding was a comm on 30STM RPS. And I was too masochistic to look away. And yes, I feel dirty. I feel dirty writing about it, never even mind that I'm writing negatively about it.
But I noticed some really weird trends in this particular fandom when it comes to RPS. First, most of it is porn. Second, a great majority is incenstuous porn; I'd be willing ot bet that at least half of the stuff on that comm is Jared/Shannon (the Leto brothers, for those who don't know.) Third, and most obvious, is how the (and here I stop to wonder if I should call them "men" or "characters",)
people in these fics are so often portrayed. It really made me wonder about people in general, and not in a good way. Here's what I noticed.
( Shannon the controller, Jared the sexual ragdoll, Tomo the Tiny, Self-mutilating Croatian, Matt the non-entity. Diagrams included. )That about sums up all the RPS on that one comm. To be fair, I didn't actually read all of it. I skimmed some of it. But it was enough to get the idea.
The most common defense of the RPS / RPF writer is that the people they're writing about are public figures, and therefore should expect this sort of thing. Followed by "they're never going to read it" and "maybe they would like it or think it was funny." To which I always think, "you don't know that," and "you
really don't know that." Yes, Jared joked that he was gay, and yes he joked that he was doing his brother. (FTR, he also joked that he was engaged to his dog.) I joke about my family, too. Doesn't mean I'd be happy if others did, and what's more, I know I wouldn't be happy if someone took one of those jokes I made and turned it into lengthy, angsty porn. Yes, by all accounts, Jared Leto has a lively sense of humor. But celebrities do get taken advantage of. There are videos on youtube of him getting stalked, where he is clearly annoyed. That happens to a lot of famous people, and if they brush off the people who are bothering them--you know, like you might brush off someone who accosted you in the supermarket when you were out trying to have a life?--then all of a sudden they are jerks and the "offended" party has to tell everyone about it. Why does common decency end when people meet celebrities?
There was this one incident with this group of people from LJ, the Jared/Trent comm. They write fiction and do photomanips of Jared and Trent Reznor. (Is Trent a hottie? Oh, I think so, yes. And he writes emo lyrics, too. Fangirl's dream.) This video is actually up on youtube. In it, a bunch of girls from this comm go to at 30 STM show and shove their camera in all the bands' faces. Literally, right in their faces, that's all you see. At first they start pestering Jared to say "happy birthday" to Trent, and though he seems kind of awkward, he jokes around with them a little. Finally one of them asks him--straight out!--"Top or bottom?" For a second he has no clue what the hell the giggling chicks are talking about, then it clicks, and he manages to offset it with another joke, but by then you can see he's a little weirded out by that. Seriously, if some stranger came up to me with a video camera and
randomly asked how I liked to do it, they'd be getting a colonoscopy from said video camera. Later they corner the bass guitarist, and when he doesn't immediately know that they are talking about TRENT REZNOR OMFG FOR GODSAKES!!!!1111 they actually kind of snap at him and he's like, "Oh! Well, okay then!" What a nice way to talk to someone you're supposed to admire, you know?
And that's what really gets me about the whole RPS / RPF thing. You're supposed to like these people, you claim to admire them. Then you turn around and write porn about them, and pester them in public? "OMG you're doing your brother, you brother-doer!" rather strikes me as something you'd say to someone you didn't like and wanted to insult. Yet for some reason all of these rules are off when someone aquires a certain amount of fame. I think as a whole we're a little mad at celebrities--and I'm no exception--for being this dream we know we can never have. I fully admit that I think Jared Leto is beautiful, and Joaquin Phoenix, and Ewan McGregor, and Benicio Del Toro, and whoever else. I fully admit that Shannon Leto is blisteringly hot, I fully admit to taking a glance at that shirtless pic of him on my harddrive some days before work. I fully admit to my own frustration. I would not, however, be rude to any of them if I met them. Or even if I didn't meet them.
You can't reason with a lot of those people, either. When called on it, the "writers" respond like most bad fanfic writers do: grouping together and telling each other "OMG we luff U! Don't be upset! Yr an ARTISTE hon!!!" and bandying about their excuses.
Honestly, I feel sorry even for Britney Spears sometimes, too. I don't like her and she doesn't strike me as being the brightest light in the harbor, but it must be very taxing to have someone following you around reporting on every mistake you make. I wonder sometimes if I had a kid and someone was chasing me down, would I just jump in the car with the kid on my lap to try to get away? There's a human instinct to not want to be followed in the street, you know? I know people personally who are neglectful to their children, unfortunately, but you don't see the entire nation calling CPS on them, do you? What about the kids who are getting beaten and raped and killed in private? Because no one ever takes pictures of them.
Okay, when I started writing this, it was going to be short and snarky; I didn't mean to get pedantic and long-winded. The point is that, in the long run, RPS probably isn't going to hurt its subject. They really may never read it. And even if they do, they probably are used to such things, and maybe they could even brush it off. But why do we, as a whole,
require celebrities to have a thick skin? If you like someone, wouldn't you want to be polite to them?
That's really what I mostly don't understand about this aspect of fandom.
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