History of Real Person Fic
From Fan History Wiki
Fan fiction is a genre of literature and a distinct culture. A story can look like a piece of fan fiction, smell like a piece of fan fiction but if it is absent the cultural aspects of fan fiction, of fandom, then there is a real question of is that material fan fiction. Literature and popular culture has a long history of writing, of producing fictional stories about real people. Shakespeare would work in real people into his stories. Dracula, based on the real Vlad Tepes, has become an integral part of our culture. The Simpsons regularly fictionalizes real people: from William Shatner to Fidel Castro to Adolf Hitler. Dante fictionalized several popes in various levels of hell in the book, “The Divine Comedy.” Arthur Miller reworked the Salem Witch Trials in his play, “The Crucible.” There is a whole genre of works deemed alternative history. And none of these works are considered Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash in the general fannish context, with the general fannish understanding because they lack the cultural practices of fandom.
When Real Person Slash, Real Person Fic started is hard to pin down. Unlike Star Trek fans, Blake’s 7 fans and other media fen, the Real Person Slash community did not start out as an outgrowth of other movements and did not have people chronicling, at various periods in its history, zines that were published. In fandom, we know of stories of people writing and circulating drawerfics, stories that they wrote by hand or typed and that they circulated amongst their friends or stores in their desk drawers, as early when the Beatles first came to the United States back in 1964. These early examples of Real Person Fic are mostly believed to have featured heterosexual pairings written by fangirls, to share with their friends in high school and college. They would feature the author or the author’s surrogate, where the person met a member of the band and become romantically involved with them.
During this same period when fictional stories based on musicians began to circulate, Star Trek fen began to dabble with their own type. This happened in 1968 with the publishing of the story, “Visit to a Weird Planet.” It differed from the other material that fans recall having heard that was circulating. First, this story was published in a fanzine, Spockanalia. Second, the story was, according to Langley, written with the consent of the actors involved. Lastly, the story was absent any romantic overtones, with out a romantic pairing as the general focus of the story. This story was written with the intention of exploring the canonical universe of the show, using the actors as vehicles for that exploration. “Visit to a Weird Planet” would beget a sequel, published in June of 1970 in the fanzine, Spockanalia. By Ruth Berman, the author of the first story, it was title “Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited.” This story and its sequel are the first pieces of published, circulated ActorFic that are present in the full fannish cultural context.
The late 1960s and most of the 1970s were quiet. The paper trail, the second hand stories of early Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash does not say much about what was happening. One generally assumes that stories, that drawerfic continued to circulate. A few people vaguely recall fanzines related to bands publishing the occasional story from fans in their letters section. These stories were, like drawerfic, featuring fangirls involved with band members. By the late 1970s, more members of the Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash clearly recall seeing fanzines with only fan fiction dedicated to a band. This band was Led Zeppelin and the stories featured the same sex pairing of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. The writers of this period were not using the band members’ real names, using Tris and Alex instead.
Back in the media fandoms, there continued a small fan base in that community that wrote fan fiction based on the actors of their shows. The Blake’s 7 community during the 1980s was one of the media fandoms that engaged in the writing and publishing of ActorFic. According to members of the fan community like Celeste, Langley and Sidewinder, the material of this nature was generally rare but it still circulated either published in fanzines or as drawerfic. The material circulating generally had three flavors: humor, canon exploration or sexually explicit. The more sexually explicit material tended to circulate as drawerfic but, according to Celeste and Langley, some of this material made itself into the hands of Paul Darrow. He was apparently not happy to have received a sexually explicit story featuring himself and his wife from a well meaning fan, though he took no action and did not attempt to actively and publicly crack down on this material.
Music fen continued with their writing of fan fiction. Zines like Cometbus, founded in 1983 for punk fans, continued to carry the occasional piece of fan fiction. Starting in the early 1990s, there emerged a group of Duran Duran fan fiction writers and a zine, UMF, the Zine for the Creative Duranie. This would become one of the biggest, earliest recognized and organized music based fandoms. This community, like other music based fan fiction communities, was relatively isolated from the traditional media based fandoms of the same era.
Starting in the mid 1990s, more fandom activity began to move on-line, to Usenet, to mailing lists, to the World Wide Web, to services like America On-line, Genie and Prodigy. For the first time, the fan space of media based fan fiction communities would begin to be shared with music based fan fiction communities and sports based fan fiction communities. And traditional media fen fought back. Media based conventions with panels on fan fiction, selling fanzines started enacting policies of zero tolerance of Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash. This backlash was not helped by the meeting of Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash with erotica archives such as the Nifty, which was founded in 1993. A number of fen in traditional media based fandoms dismissed the whole genre as erotica or invasive of privacy because, well, look at the context of where the material was being created.
This intolerance of Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash left a these communities segregated, either in terms of membership or archiving space, from traditional media based fan fiction communities. Many of the sports fan fiction communities would be absent these connections to other communities. Things like political slash or fan fiction based on big names in business would be so actively discouraged that the possible large scale of this material was cut off at the knees, before it could gain any traction.
At the same time, there was some crossover in the communities. Sites like FanFiction.Net made finding and mainstreaming of this material more feasible. Concepts that were largely absent from zine Real Person Fic fan fiction culture that existed in the media fandom made their way into these communities. This included terms like Mary Sue, canon, beta reader and badfic.
The technology boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s and reduced costs for being on-line helped to spur the growth of Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash. Egroups and coollist made setting up mailing lists easier and cheaper. Services like Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire allowed anyone to cheaply create, with out much knowledge of any programming language, to set up their own personal fan fiction archive, to post and share pictures, to poll readers and more. Sites like FanFiction.Net and automated scripts allowed for the creation of larger and larger archives, spawning interest in fandoms that might not have existed or garnered attention with out them. File sharing services like Napster made it possible to give a much wider audience to more various bands, giving them new audiences and fueling the existing fan fiction writing fan bases. The falling price of DVDs and the dearth of new material, some from concerts ten to twenty year olds old, coming out also motivated the fan base and helped attract new audiences. More and better search tools made it easier to accidentally stumble across Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash. Instant message tools made it easier to find and contact like minded fans. All of this was helping to fuel a massive mostly Internet based growth of this slice of fan fiction.
By 2000, parts of the Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash communities had mainstreamed into traditional media fandoms. As the material forced itself into those traditional circles, some of the bigger names began to write Real Person Fic and Real Person Slash. Rather than take some the traditional models of behavior in the community, these new groups of fen just changed their canon source material to real people and continued on. This did not give these communities much of a connection with older, established practices in the Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash communities; they did not draw many people from those communities into their groups. For this reason, these newer communities were largely segregated from others.
As Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash stands now, in 2005, there are many communities existing historically and culturally in isolation. In other places, this community has begun to do what traditional media based fan fiction communities have done for years: produce zines, hold conventions, create their own fanzines, adopt their own unique terminology. These groups have a decent amount of membership from those traditional media based communities but once many of the members enter the Real Person Fic, Real Person Slash communities, they tend not to go back to where they originally were fannishly. Still yet, in other places, this material and the fans of it exist happily side by side with traditional media based fan fiction fen. There are brief bouts of intolerance towards of this material as some people felt overwhelmed and deluged by this material, unable to escape it and be openly intolerant of it with any form of cultural acceptance of that intolerance. Despite fears of many fen over the years, there was only one cease and desist letter ever known to be sent for Real Person Slash.
Where Real Person Fic and Real Person Slash will go from here is a big question.
