Fandom Lounge's Journal - Day

3:51PM - Some thoughts that came out of the most recent RPF kerfluffle and other places

So I've read the latest kerfluffle and although I think ginmar is an idiot, I keep going back to one thing.

An RPF story was written about her and she was hurt by it.

Regardless of how I feel about her personally (not very much, to be honest) I can't help going back to that.

As an RPF writer, I do go by the creed that I'm not hurting anyone. If someone I wrote about found out about my writing and asked me to stop posting, I would. No questions asked (I'm not going to say I'd stop writing, but the stories would stay on my hard drive if I wrote any more with that person). If I found out someone didn't like RPF written about them, I probably would stop, or at least curtail, my writing about them (more because it would be less bunnies to try and write than anything else). I would hope that most RPF writers would feel the same way - if not stop, at least not do anything to bring the RPF to the attention of the subjects.

So why are we so vitriolic about that part of it? I understand being pissed of about ginmar's idiocy, but even someone so stupid and idiotic still has the right to feel violated if RPF is written about them.

Also, ginmar isn't the only person who's said something like this (I might have been tempted to ignore it if so, to be honest). In Virgule, a slash theory discussion community that is very RPS-friendly (on lj) a user called pinkdormouse said some of the same things. Most of my sympathy in this post is more directed at her than ginmar.

But yes, it does happen. We have to face that. It could happen with anyone who RPF is written about. Maybe we should consider this part of it too.