The RPF Question

A Tumblr post crossed my dash recently, demanding that fans not “ship real people who play characters with each other.” In the midst of yet another round of Twitter discourse, I saw a post that read, “i hate rpf and i’m not afraid to say it. i hope every rpf writer gets cease and desisted to hell and restraining orders from the targets of their stalking and sexual harassment.” On TikTok, I stumbled upon a video with thousands of likes bemoaning new fans arriving in a rock fandom, ignoring the actual music in favor of a “new gay romance to obsess over” imploring shippers to “get a life.”

I remember reading the same sentiments ten years ago in the One Direction fandom, twenty years ago in the Lord of the Rings fandom, and thirty years ago before the web even existed. These hot takes can seem quaint to those of us who’ve watched attitudes toward real person fiction (RPF)—the transformative fan practice of shipping, writing stories, and creating fanart about real people—shift radically over the last three decades. But they also reminded me of just how much the boundaries and ethics of RPF have changed, and how the debate surrounding it still remains so incredibly fluid.

In the internet era—and especially with the rise of social media—we’ve witnessed an unprecedented increase in our access to public figures, the objects of our fandom. That’s led to collisions between celebrity culture, transformative fandom, parasociality, and conspiracy thinking. As a consequence, we’ve seen a full life-cycle in the acceptance of RPF, from something that was once seen as a completely taboo behavior to widespread tolerance and back again. And now, when our life online has consolidated into a handful of crowded platforms and fan communities have grown exponentially in size, we face a reckoning with the ethics of RPF in a world where few fandom boundaries remain.