rename Celebrities & Real People?

[aethel]

Over at the RPF talk page, a few of us are mulling over the possibility of changing the category Celebrities & Real People to something more recognizable to fans, like RPF Fandom or Real Person Fiction. I recollect the category used to be called just Real People, which was even more confusing because we had another category called People. "Celebrities & Real People" matches the fandom media type on AO3, but there's no law that says we must follow AO3's format.

Comments

[highlander_ii]

The AO3 is currently waiting on the implementation of the Category Change proposal where 'Celebrities & Real People' is to be updated to 'Real Person Fiction', so going that route would align Fanlore w/ AO3 if that was the preference. Though, it isn't necessary, as you said.

[ruuger]

For some reason Fanlore wont load for me right now so I can't check, but is Celebrities & Real People currently just about RPF? Because there's a lot of celebrity-related fannish activity that doesn't involve fic at all. If anything, the actor-fandoms that I've been involved in have been pretty strongly anti-RPF.

[anatsuno]

This is a good point! Maybe Real Person Fandoms would be better than Real Person Fiction ?

[soyalex]

+1 on this one.

Real Person Fandoms sounds much better to me and it's not as limiting as Real Person Fiction.

[msilverstar]

+1 on Real Person Fandom

[aethel]

See below--Doro introduces the complication that fans are divided over what RPF itself even stands for. Meanwhile, all the subcategories under "Celebrities & Real People" already contain the word RPF, and the meta/parent category is Fandoms by Canon Type, so it is implicit that "Celebrities & Real People" is a category describing fandoms wherein fans make fanworks from the "raw material" of celebrity personas.

I assumed one of the reasons we had the generic "Celebrities & Real People" was to allow for non-RPF focused fandoms, but in practice I don't think there's anything in there that isn't about RPF. If you could provide specific examples of non-RPF actor-based fandoms/fannish topics to write about, it would help to figure out what our category needs are. We do have an Industry category to collect all pages about actors, authors, showrunners, etc.--they may have RPF fandoms or are a source of interest to fandom for some other reason.

[ruuger]

If you could provide specific examples of non-RPF actor-based fandoms/fannish topics to write about, it would help to figure out what our category needs are.

Well, I've been meaning to do a write-up of the James Marsters fandom but never got around doing it :) There is RPF about JM, but the actual *fandom* around him is very much about other forms of fannishness so to put it under RPF would feel wrong. Also things like The Robert Patrick Forum, Cold Dead Seed, Robin's Green Shades, the Baker Boy forum, and the Queen Mailing Service.

But yeah, if there's a separate category to the fannishness around the *actual person* (vs. the "persona" that gets used in RPF), then the Celebs & Real people could be renamed. And probably should be renamed, since my first association when I see the category name is specifically non-RPF celebrity fandoms - which I guess is a cultural divide of sorts, because I've spent much of my fannish history in celeb fandoms and and fannish spaces that didn't do RPF, so my viewpoint is different from people who have a RPF background.

[aethel]

I think the Harrison Ford fandom might be similar to what you're describing? Fanlore has a category for him, as there was a lot of interest in him and his movies, but I don't see anything about RPF. So the solution there was just to create a Harrison Ford fandom category and put it under the Fandoms by Source Text category and add the Harrison Ford page to the Industry category.

There are actually several fandoms documented on Fanlore based around an actor or group of actors where the focus is on their projects and fic about their characters in those projects and not RPF. There's also something called coded RPF. We don't currently seem to have a good way to group these things together. I don't know if there's a better name than Celebrity-Fandom-Not-RPF.

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

The "P" in RPF/RPS doesn't just stand for "person". Real People Slash (for example the Real People Slash Webring (http://web.archive.org/web/20010329174100/http://www.crosswinds.net/~katieoneal/rpsring.html)) and Real People Fiction (for example the Real People Fan Fiction Directory (http://web.archive.org/web/20011107175241/http://www.fanficweb.net/rpfdir/)) were terms in common fannish use. That's why the RPF page is named RPF and not Real Person Fiction or Real People Fiction. Renaming it RPF Fandom would reflect the use of the term on the subcat level.