The Heart of the Maze

I wrote this post a couple of days ago, at home (where we have an OLD computer, no internet access), but didn't get a chance to post it when I was in briefly on Friday. It connects with some recent discussion in virgule (and a recent post in savageseraph's lj), but I haven't learned the "link" commands yet (when I tried it, following a friend's instructions, nothing came up the way she said it would--could be technical problems as well). But what the heck--after reading savageseraph's post, remembered I had this and decided to post...



I've been thinking about this issue since reading some of the prohibitions and "warnings" on the FPS archives against RPS (the "immorality" and "illegality" of it all) and have already posted some thoughts on it in some of the recent threads on virgule (where I'll cross post this as well as in my lj). What I'm saying isn't that original--when I talked to savageseraph a few weeks ago and started laying out this theory, she said she'd seen others saying more or less the same thing--and I'm not even sure it applies to all RPS. I only know that it applies to mine.....

First, as hederahelix argued in her presentation at the conference we were all at in March (a major defining moment for me which is why I keep talking about it), to an extent, media FPS always has an element of the actors in it (at the least, the physical descriptions--but I'd say, in a metanarrative sense, even more--that is, the readers of TREK or X-FILES FPS who are fans of the shows have the actors and "outside" knowledge in mind as they're reading, so the "actors" as "real people" exist in a certain relationship to the FPS stories). (And I'd say most of the LOTR FPS I read has the films in mind--writers are "blending" elements of the book and movie canons as well.)

Second, I think that in some ways at least some of the RPS I've read and written featuring the actors from LOTR at times has the actors' performances as characters (past and present) in it as well. So there's what I want to call a triangulation between the actors as "real" people and the roles they've created in the past (certainly in the FPS, a lot of the writers enjoy mixing characters from the various actors' pasts in some amazing ways). By triangulation, I mean a character can be based on many/multiple sources of inspiration: "factual" information about the actors, elements of their roles/characters as well as their characters in LOTR; and, also, many fics show the writers' own experiences and knowledge about some element of the story (easier to write what one knows, fun too). So most writers (I'd bet) are well aware they're not trying to create the "real" people. So it's a bummer that the name of the genre has "real people" in it. And that outsiders get all weirded out by it, some to the point of what I'd consider a different kind of insanity...

I'm going to use myself as an example because I cannot speak with authority about anyone else and don't want to insult them, though I'd love to hear what other writers think and am trying to think up some questions about this issue!. Certainly my own sense of Sean Bean's "persona" I've gathered from the special features and the interviews I've read is NOTHING LIKE the Sean Bean character I've been working with the past few weeks in "Behind the Scenes." Quite the opposite. I see his "persona" in the interviews as much shyer, reserved (he keeps ducking his head, not looking at interviewer/camera directly). But I wanted a higher energy character, one majorly into playing the dominant role, and being the main one interested in dominance/ submission games with that element being something my character was in conflict with "Viggo" about. I wanted a contrast with the characters of "Viggo" and "David" that had been established in the series, so I ignored my own sense of that actor's persona and went ahead with the fictional one I wanted. (Heck, as I tell my creative writing students-being a writer is the closest thing we get to being a Creator, so you gotta learn to go with it and enjoy the POWER!)

And yet the RPS characters are not totally (originally) fictional either--there is an evocation of the actors (or, why not make them OC, make up names, etc.)

So it's that boundary/border that's so hard to pin down (as all borders are). The more I think about it, the more I see what I'm doing as "role playing slash"--I'm creating "roles" that I would love to see these actors "play." (My theatre background shoots up from the buried depths here, as it's been doing lately.)

Sometimes these roles draw on "facts" from their lives (as far as I know--since my source of these facts are web sites, media, interviews, public "media" performances, the "facts" could be out and out lies--for example, dates of birth!) But then I have written plays using "facts" or situations from my own life and creating a character that isn't really "me" because nothing in a narrative can be "real" in the sense of the messiness and inconclusiveness of real life. And no fictional character can be anything like a real person in any meaningful way.

We probably like narratives and stories in part because of that distance from real life, the greater 'simplicity' of narratives compared to real life, etc. And the "narratives" of slash (OTP, happy endings, romance gone wrong, first time, etc.) are of course not unique to slash as I'm sure lots of people (writing slash AND studying slash) have pointed out. Those plot structures/narrative structures are floating around out there and have never been "real" (that fiction which tries to replicate "real life" usually is irritating and darn hard to read..)

So, role playing slash. Gets me out of the "reality" bind very neatly....because in so many ways reality really sucks which is probably why I like writing and reading so much. (Nasty stuff happening on our campus making me and Entwife v. depressed, but I won't go into that now. Too depressed to even write about it.)