rps, how are you so awesome?
Jun. 21st, 2006 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321...
Having forsooken the launde of the realle personne slashe and forayed into the realm of the fictional personnel, I just over the last two days wrote my first two rps ficlets in many a month.
My god, what a heady experience! Rps is truly something else. Writing it was vertiginous! It is such a charge! I'm remembering my first love.
Things that are heady about rps
• The canon is not narrative.
SGA, for example, is a TVsitromcom sci-fi drama. This means that there is always action and plot. Fanon must weave its clever way in and out between all the narrative that's already out there.
Rps has no plot. It lends itself supremely to the most delicious pwps. One can impose any plot one wants and invent freely.
• The canon is not made by someone else.
This is what seasoned TV fans, I believe, refer to as TPTB (the powers that be -- I hope I got that acronym right) and what is called 'JKR' in HP and 'JRR' in lotr fps. It means that the author, e.g. I, makes a fictional universe out of something that is already a fictional universe. In fps, we make something out of something made.
In rps, the canon is not made by anybody. Or only in the sense that it is out there in the form of media-mediated images, interviews and suchlike. But when we write, we make something out of something raw.
• There is no canon as such.
What, in fact, is rps canon? I've had dozens of conversations about this with various people. It is a very interesting issue. Fps canons are narrative, made by someone else and finite. Even JKR will one day stop writing HP (we hope!). And SGA, though we all await the new season, is for now and for fictive intents and purposes as of June 2006 a finished product with a finite set of episodes.
Not so rps. Rps evolves all the time. It is never finite -- unless a real person, god forbid, dies, I guess. And even so, rps canon is so patchy, that there will always remain unknown gaps. We get fed very tiny bits and pieces of people's lives. In effect, we know nothing about them. Fps allows you access to characters' secrets and emotional inner lives (even SGA! *g* to some degree) but rps characters remain, essentially, surfaces. Projection screens for fic.
Some implications
• Rps tends to be vocationally quite uniform. Popslash: everyone's a singer. Lotrips: everyone's an actor (unless they're a special effects designer, *g*). Football: everyone's a footballer.
Fps, by contrast? Teachers, witches, astrophysicists, politicians, orcs, detectives, escaped convicts, the lot.
It was this rps uniformity that made me retreat more and more into AU towards the end of my stint in lotrps fandom. After a while, the 54th third-rate actor and the 786th hotel room/movie premiere/trailer on set do get a teensy bit repetitive.
• The pretty tends to be thicker on the ground in rps.
In my humble experience, anyhow. I think this has to do with the point above: rps is more narrative. Once you have a narrative, characters do stuff, have backstories and experiences. They also have specific roles and vocations. They have canonical lives. They don't need to be pretty boys because they can be manly geeks.
Rps characters have no canonical lives (see point about canon above). They are surface. And fanfic writers tend to glomp onto pretty surfaces rather than ugly surfaces.
I don't know about others but I drool over footballers to a degree that I do not drool over fictional astrophysicists. Writing Kaká and Cristiano Ronaldo reminded me of writing Dominic Monaghan and Orlando Bloom and Karl Urban: I had butterflies in my stomach and a degree of smitten-ness I do not evince for Dr Rodney McKay, 'awesome' though he is. I think this has to do with plot and narrative. With McKay, Sheppard and the wraith, and with Draco and Harry there is so much plot to be thinking about. Rps has no plot; it leaves the field wide open for pure, unadulterated drool.
Also, I wax more swoony and lyrical about the pretty boys. They move my with their innocence and the wonder of youth. SGA characters are full-grown, with experiences of their own. It's a different proposition.
• The seen and the unseen: Book canon
Of course, Draco, Harry and Dudley are young, too. But they are invisible. They exist in my head. If I want to drool, I need to find images to go with them (unless I do movie canon which I don't). This makes them more my creatures.
• Fps characters can be evil.
This was a discovery I made when I wrote my first lotr fps: Pippin/Orc. An orc is evil! A dementor is evil! A wraith is one hell of a badass! And the other characters: Draco is an unpleasant bully. Dudley is a fat bully. Harry makes problematic moral choices. Everyone in Atlantis makes dubious moral choices on a regular bases.
In rps, people are not complicated like this, and they are certainly not evil. They are only evil in AU. I feel a great reluctance in making rps people nasty because of a certain respect for the aura of the real person out there, and because it is so blatantly non-canon (so one may as well make it an AU). After a while, in lotrips, I felt there was something lacking if you can't have evil.
I certainly can't envisage writing an evil or morally ambivalent Kaká or Ronaldinho. Goodness, the very thought.
• They are real, fuckin' shit! 111 liek @-@
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
helenish once said that she found the thought of a real David Hewlett walking about the earth dizzy-making (or somesuch). This is an interesting thing I've learned in SGA: TV-based fandom separates the actor from the character (a novel concept for a veteran lotripper like me! *g*) while at the same time folding the actor into the character. SGA is not an unseen fandom (as is HP book fandom). Some people (incl. me...) even draw on the actors' previous films for spurious back-stories for the characters, certainly in the looks department (hey! Rodney had hair!).
But fps character always remain in their fictional narrative universe. Rps characters intrude into the real world at odd interval, and it is its own special brand of vertigo. (I remember freaking out when I sat next to Kiran Shah on the tube.) And during this World Cup, certain matches have become impossibly cathected sites because now there is the likelihood of glimpsing a character, come to life.
• Rps characters have an aura of Achilles.
Achilles was the great hero of Homeric myth. Just like Ronaldinho is the great hero of today's football. These people are larger than life. They have a heroic aura around them. The men who love men respond to this totally in their adoring songvids and their obsession with Rooney's legs. We tend not to choose for our rps the men next door or the local councillor. (Though this does exist, I believe!) I, certainly, have rps'ed people who were 'famous' in some way. Even the third-rate lotr actors had an aura of stardom about them. It makes them all a little bit awesome.
It plays with your head, this slash shit. But in a good way.
I think...
Kaká and Robinho
Ronaldinho nude (Well, who's to say he's wearing pants?)
Many more droolpics of teh pretty at my Football Gallery.
Having forsooken the launde of the realle personne slashe and forayed into the realm of the fictional personnel, I just over the last two days wrote my first two rps ficlets in many a month.
My god, what a heady experience! Rps is truly something else. Writing it was vertiginous! It is such a charge! I'm remembering my first love.
Things that are heady about rps
• The canon is not narrative.
SGA, for example, is a TV
Rps has no plot. It lends itself supremely to the most delicious pwps. One can impose any plot one wants and invent freely.
• The canon is not made by someone else.
This is what seasoned TV fans, I believe, refer to as TPTB (the powers that be -- I hope I got that acronym right) and what is called 'JKR' in HP and 'JRR' in lotr fps. It means that the author, e.g. I, makes a fictional universe out of something that is already a fictional universe. In fps, we make something out of something made.
In rps, the canon is not made by anybody. Or only in the sense that it is out there in the form of media-mediated images, interviews and suchlike. But when we write, we make something out of something raw.
• There is no canon as such.
What, in fact, is rps canon? I've had dozens of conversations about this with various people. It is a very interesting issue. Fps canons are narrative, made by someone else and finite. Even JKR will one day stop writing HP (we hope!). And SGA, though we all await the new season, is for now and for fictive intents and purposes as of June 2006 a finished product with a finite set of episodes.
Not so rps. Rps evolves all the time. It is never finite -- unless a real person, god forbid, dies, I guess. And even so, rps canon is so patchy, that there will always remain unknown gaps. We get fed very tiny bits and pieces of people's lives. In effect, we know nothing about them. Fps allows you access to characters' secrets and emotional inner lives (even SGA! *g* to some degree) but rps characters remain, essentially, surfaces. Projection screens for fic.
Some implications
• Rps tends to be vocationally quite uniform. Popslash: everyone's a singer. Lotrips: everyone's an actor (unless they're a special effects designer, *g*). Football: everyone's a footballer.
Fps, by contrast? Teachers, witches, astrophysicists, politicians, orcs, detectives, escaped convicts, the lot.
It was this rps uniformity that made me retreat more and more into AU towards the end of my stint in lotrps fandom. After a while, the 54th third-rate actor and the 786th hotel room/movie premiere/trailer on set do get a teensy bit repetitive.
• The pretty tends to be thicker on the ground in rps.
In my humble experience, anyhow. I think this has to do with the point above: rps is more narrative. Once you have a narrative, characters do stuff, have backstories and experiences. They also have specific roles and vocations. They have canonical lives. They don't need to be pretty boys because they can be manly geeks.
Rps characters have no canonical lives (see point about canon above). They are surface. And fanfic writers tend to glomp onto pretty surfaces rather than ugly surfaces.
I don't know about others but I drool over footballers to a degree that I do not drool over fictional astrophysicists. Writing Kaká and Cristiano Ronaldo reminded me of writing Dominic Monaghan and Orlando Bloom and Karl Urban: I had butterflies in my stomach and a degree of smitten-ness I do not evince for Dr Rodney McKay, 'awesome' though he is. I think this has to do with plot and narrative. With McKay, Sheppard and the wraith, and with Draco and Harry there is so much plot to be thinking about. Rps has no plot; it leaves the field wide open for pure, unadulterated drool.
Also, I wax more swoony and lyrical about the pretty boys. They move my with their innocence and the wonder of youth. SGA characters are full-grown, with experiences of their own. It's a different proposition.
• The seen and the unseen: Book canon
Of course, Draco, Harry and Dudley are young, too. But they are invisible. They exist in my head. If I want to drool, I need to find images to go with them (unless I do movie canon which I don't). This makes them more my creatures.
• Fps characters can be evil.
This was a discovery I made when I wrote my first lotr fps: Pippin/Orc. An orc is evil! A dementor is evil! A wraith is one hell of a badass! And the other characters: Draco is an unpleasant bully. Dudley is a fat bully. Harry makes problematic moral choices. Everyone in Atlantis makes dubious moral choices on a regular bases.
In rps, people are not complicated like this, and they are certainly not evil. They are only evil in AU. I feel a great reluctance in making rps people nasty because of a certain respect for the aura of the real person out there, and because it is so blatantly non-canon (so one may as well make it an AU). After a while, in lotrips, I felt there was something lacking if you can't have evil.
I certainly can't envisage writing an evil or morally ambivalent Kaká or Ronaldinho. Goodness, the very thought.
• They are real, fuckin' shit! 111 liek @-@
helenish once said that she found the thought of a real David Hewlett walking about the earth dizzy-making (or somesuch). This is an interesting thing I've learned in SGA: TV-based fandom separates the actor from the character (a novel concept for a veteran lotripper like me! *g*) while at the same time folding the actor into the character. SGA is not an unseen fandom (as is HP book fandom). Some people (incl. me...) even draw on the actors' previous films for spurious back-stories for the characters, certainly in the looks department (hey! Rodney had hair!).But fps character always remain in their fictional narrative universe. Rps characters intrude into the real world at odd interval, and it is its own special brand of vertigo. (I remember freaking out when I sat next to Kiran Shah on the tube.) And during this World Cup, certain matches have become impossibly cathected sites because now there is the likelihood of glimpsing a character, come to life.
• Rps characters have an aura of Achilles.
Achilles was the great hero of Homeric myth. Just like Ronaldinho is the great hero of today's football. These people are larger than life. They have a heroic aura around them. The men who love men respond to this totally in their adoring songvids and their obsession with Rooney's legs. We tend not to choose for our rps the men next door or the local councillor. (Though this does exist, I believe!) I, certainly, have rps'ed people who were 'famous' in some way. Even the third-rate lotr actors had an aura of stardom about them. It makes them all a little bit awesome.
It plays with your head, this slash shit. But in a good way.
I think...
Kaká and Robinho
Ronaldinho nude (Well, who's to say he's wearing pants?)
Many more droolpics of teh pretty at my Football Gallery.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-21 10:58 pm (UTC)The only problem I have with ihm is the name. I mean, Lobelia, you know German. >_< Ist es nicht einfach dämlich? >Kaká läuft über den Platz, und da ein Pass... blah< Und neben mir sagt Stephan, Ja, auf Klo gehen wäre auch ma ne gute Idee. ;__;
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-21 11:10 pm (UTC)fickersteiger, honestly.His real name is Ricardo something (I forget, it's in my fic! Specially inserted for the name resistant!). And yes, it's a bloody pain to type that & a acute ; all the time but hey, the sacrifices we make.
Not everyone can be called Karl Urban. (Also, I have a penchant for names beginning with K. *g*)
And anyway, Name hin, Name her: er ist einfach zu schön! *is smitten*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-21 11:19 pm (UTC)Deutsche Namen kann man generell in den Wind schießen. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-22 12:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-23 04:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-22 12:32 am (UTC)Hello, Robinho.
You're going to turn me into a fan of that sport thingy with the balls and men touching!
That first picture kills me ♥
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-23 04:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-22 06:23 am (UTC)As a recent convert to the wonderful world of RPS, my own self, this was a really fun post to read. I liked a lot of the points you made -- especially the one about how most fictional fandoms emerge in discrete chunks, while most RPF fandoms are constantly changing, so canon is a lot more subjective. There's so much you just can't know about real people, because it's not publicly available and they don't want it to be. So you get into things like whether persistent gossip is canon. I do think that RPF canon closes to some extent, or at least fades away. For example, the breakups of the most heavily slashed boy bands amount to a sort of "end of the show" for a lot of popslashers. When your favorite footballers and my favorite figure skaters retire and fade from the public eye, they'll still be alive, but will they still be ficcable? Probably not, or at least not to the same extent.
I've never found PWP satisfying, and my participation in an RPS fandom hasn't really changed that. I agree that RPF is more surface-y, and RPF writers have to work harder to develop characterization than FPF writers. But we also have a lot more leeway in our characterization. A lot of depth can be gleaned from interviews, personal websites, and news articles, if you're willing to bother. One of the things that drew me to figure skating RPS specifically was that a lot of the skaters present fairly nuanced public personas that amount to really interesting characters and relationships, not just attractive bodies. My friends who were active in popslash tell me that a similar amount of attention to characters' internal lives was paid in that fandom.
The point that FPF characters can be evil, while RPF characters cannot, is another thing that depends on the fandom. Not on the RPF end -- real people are always too complex for that, as you pointed out. But my primary fandoms before figure skating were Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, ER, and Firefly (in that order), and in all of those cases, pure evil was largely against the rules. I'm accustomed to fandoms that are heavy on the shades of gray and the moral ambiguity, so I was surprised to see someone perceive that as such a stark dichotomy. It totally makes sense if your frame of reference is LotR and HP. But for me, the predominance of moral gray areas was a point of continuity between my FPF and RPF fandoms.
Thanks so much for posting this, and for sharing your pictures of very pretty footballers.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-23 04:45 pm (UTC)Oh, and of course, rps writers do insane amounts of research. I should know! But it is still different from the maven-ishness that is fps, in my experience. Ultimately, no matter the research, everyone (unless they be tinhats) has to concede that there are some things we will just never know. So you make it up, whee!
And figure skating slash? Wow. Fandom never ceases to amaze.
Pwp in rps can be so lovely but in fps it doesn't interest me very much. Perhaps because there is so much plot out there already the pwp seems fake.
In the fandoms I'm in there does tend to be this ultimate evil. So what I do is to write those evil characters and make them more understandable and lo, they cease to be so evil and acquire shades of grey, and I love that. And it gives very interesting scope to thinking about 'evil', what it is, why it is, how it came to be, can it be redeemed? So the continuity you have I never had. *g* Straight from pretty Orlando and Dom to dementors and wraith and Draco.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-22 10:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-23 04:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-22 11:05 am (UTC)I love RPS canon - it's easier, in certain respects, because it is Real World. Even if we as fans don't understand all the details of, I dunno, footballer economics, we know that they do hang together somehow and they do work. As a sometime ST:TNG writer I know all too well that a fictional world often has no bedrock logic to it...
Another wonderful thing about RPS canon is that you can have things which *nobody could make up*. In my beloved popslash... Lance - suddenly, there's The Space Thing. It's brilliant. It's perfect. It is so bizarre it would be very difficult to justify in a fictional account like a TV series - because in fiction, people really ought to stay in character. A fictional Lance would remain a performer with business sidelines... But in real life, however unexpectedly people behave - they *are* 'in character'.
It's great.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-23 04:39 pm (UTC)From what I gather, popslash is (was?) the insanest fandom ever. My friend tells me it revolutionised fandom, and turned a lot of things upside down. Made everything freer and crazier and more experimental. I love that!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-23 04:48 pm (UTC)Popslash is wonderful. By the time I got to writing anything (I only arrived a year ago and had *so much stuff* to read...) I was so accustomed to reading crack that I actually wrote some without even realising it was crack. I mean, waking up as a girl, an animal, or (in this case) in one of your bandmates' bodies - it's just another day in the life of a boybander. Of late, things have been a little more bizarre. (I wrote a sonnet to a lava lamp) Oh, how could anyone ever leave?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-16 01:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-03 12:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-27 09:46 pm (UTC)Anyways, I just wanted to say that I found your comments interesting, and helpful. I have only been writing for about eighteen months, and until July was exclusively in the HP fandom. There I was, quite happy in my little world, lusting over Remus Lupin and having all kinds of fun making him get up to an assortment of depraved stuff with other boys.
Then I found all the footy comms during the World Cup. My initial reaction was one of unmitigated joy to find so many other people who felt the same way as me about these boys. And then I noticed some of them posting fic. It took me a really long time to be able to read any of it. I dunno if it's just prudishness or repression on my part, but I found the thought of people writing about these men getting up to all kinds of nefarious things with other men quite disrespectful. In fact, I even went on about it a bit in my journal.
But, (and here I am finally getting to the point - I'm not the Queen of Verbosity for nothing, you know!) then I started looking deeper. Finding fics that were actually very well-written. Dabbling my toes in the water myself. And I began to come around to the idea. There are still things out there that make me double-take a little and hit the 'back' button, but I guess I have not learnt to be so selective yet as I am with my HP fic. But I am feeling a whole lot more comfortable about reading and writing RPS.
So really, in a long-winded, roundabout and possibly slightly scary way, I just wanted to say 'Thank you'! You've really helped me out.
although I do still feel like a paedo sometimes looking at these young boys...*sigh*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-03 12:10 am (UTC)I wish those long summer days spent mooning over football boys were still here... :-)
Thank you again! This cheers me up tremendously! Look out for more ramblings anon! (I can go on about fps, rps, origfic for years.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-03 12:12 am (UTC)And just in quick response to this last one: Imagine how I felt after a match seen at my local (and very bad football club) where my lusty eyes fell upon a young West Ham player. When I got home, I googled and discovered that this boy was all of sixteen. Ack. I then wrote a fic about him. I just couldn't stop myself... (There was no sex, though. I mean, argh, my son is only three years younger!!! *palms face*)
Um. Note icon.