Nothing new for the paper…or maybe it is
I wanted to record an incident that is fairly revealing of fandom in general, even though this tidbit won’t make it into the paper. Fen can get fairly clannish: there’s the Supernatural Clan, the Star Trek: X Clan, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer Clan, etc. Within the safety of the clan, people post requests for beta readers (test readers/editors, depending on how serious the writer wants their beta to get), post fic or fan art, post recommendations, and post stories about the actors who portray their favorite characters.
This last piece — stories about the actors — can be taken a couple of different ways. The first is that fen discuss actor sightings at cons, what projects the actor is working on and what’s happening in the actor’s personal life (girlfriends, boyfriends, etc.). The second is that fen will write fiction about the actor(s), and this type of work is called real people fiction (RPF) or real people slash (RPS), depending on the content of the story. Fen know perfectly well that these stories aren’t about the actor so much as they’re about the persona the actor projects during public appearances (in a way, the actor plays a character that has their name and appearance and that has little to do with their personal life). RPF has a long history, as evidenced by Gorgias and Phaedrus, and the only time it might get a little hinky is when the fan writes RPS with explicit erotic content.
Even so, this type of writing is done within the safety of the clan. There is zero expectation of the actors finding the RPF/RPS or fan fiction, and when a person violates that expectation by sending the URL of another fan’s story to an actor, the reaction is almost universally negative against the person who sent the URL. In other words, it’s okay for fen to look at the actors and the show, but it’s not okay for the actors to look back. There have been a few exceptions to this rule, but they only occur when the actor stumbles across the fic on their own, as when Eli Roth discovered fan fiction and dove in headfirst, much to fandom’s delight.
Misha Collins, who joined the cast of Supernatural as a regular this season, is another exception to the rule. As one fan put it, “Misha looked into the dark heart of fandom and said, ‘Hm. That’s interesting.’” Misha has a devoted following on Twitter (I think he’s planning on taking over the world, but as pretty as he is, I really don’t want to be one of his minions, so I haven’t been paying attention), and within the constraints of Twitter interaction, it’s fine that he recognizes various fen.
Outside of Twitter is another story entirely. Yesterday or Friday (I don’t know the full story), Misha was at a Supernatural con and happened to mention a fan by name, specifically referencing her LiveJournal. The fan in question became very upset and locked down her journal as soon as she could get to a computer. He was apparently very sorry that he upset her so much and in an effort to reestablish the expected boundaries, he promised that he wasn’t actually reading her journal or even searching out fanfiction.
The story is interesting to me in the way that it highlights fandom’s relationship with celebrities (we look at them) and what happens when that relationship is turned around (they look at us). Supernatural in particular has been breaking that fourth wall since last season’s “Monster at the End of the Book,” when it was revealed that a prophet had been publishing the two main characters’ life story as a series of novels and that the books had a decent fan base.
In a way, Supernatural shining a light on fandom is parallel to the way fandom shone a light on Ogas and Gaddam. They, like fandom, expected to be able to look at their subjects of interest without the subjects of interest really looking back. Unfortunately for them, not only did fandom look back, it looked back with a vengeance, producing tentacle porn and RPS (with Ogas and Gaddam as the starring characters) in response to the researchers’ complete inability to see that they had failed in their primary responsibility to ensure their research subjects were protected.
Supernatural has responded to fandom in a similar fashion (not quite as viciously, though there may be fen who disagree with me), playing with fanon much the way fen play with canon.
