If you want to bash rpf shippers for *existing*, make your own post.
RPF has been a part of fandom since the beginning, and I’d highly recommend doing some research into the topic; as always, Fanlore is a good place to start.
The problem with RPF is when people breach the fourth wall, which fandom is doing more often as the internet expands and becomes the current culture, and newcomers to fandom either are not taught or do not care about the basic rules (i.e. the purpose of this post). The problem is not with people having fantasies or telling stories.
Fandom is transgresive by nature as much as it is transformative, because we are thieves and magpies and because here we’re allowed to talk about things that we’re not supposed to in mainstream culture. I have never seen a space like fandom creates, where people are able to share their desires and fantasies and kinks openly and *talk* about the taboo.
And when people come along and talk about how RPF shouldn’t even exist, it is frequently less rooted in a concept of “this causes this specific harm” and more “this is disgusting and I don’t want it near me, how can this even exist.” It causes discomfort because it’s rooted in taboos (talking about sexual fantasies in public, openly, even though those same fantasies are well acknowledged in pop culture - think about the concept of the “free pass”).
When people break the fourth wall and get the actors involved, sending fics (or letters back in the old days), explicit images, harassing them online or at conventions and concerts, they have committed actions that cause harm. And there is real harm, I’ve done my digging and seen the results in bandoms and fandoms (hell, my fandom has done some things over the years.)
Thoughts are not actions. Fantasies do not make you a villain, telling stories is not a sin (though it has been a crime). Sharing those things with other people is part of what makes fandom culture what it is.
There are conversations that need to happen about objectification and dehumanization, there are conversations (like this post was meant to be) about maintaining healthy boundaries and treating the actors as people when we interact with them; there are conversations that need to happen about how much more mainstream fandom is now than it was fifty years ago, and what that does to the relationship dynamic we have with our creators and actors, what may need to change as we move forward. The Hockey RPF fandom’s solution to that problem was to lock a great deal of their content so that the fourth wall could not be breached.
RPF is the single greatest squick I have dealing with fandom; the way people talk in my fandom hits my “someone is altering my sense of reality” button really hard. I frequently have to blacklist it to control my exposure to the low-level shipping that permeates everything in my community, otherwise I get punchy. But my discomfort with the topic doesn’t mean I’m ever okay with throwing those people out of the communities they helped build.
I don’t have to like something to defend it. Fandom is built by people who were told “you shouldn’t do that, go back to the shadows”, and we are not doing vague purity-culture and thought police nonsense tonight.
