The Ethics of Real People
Jul. 26th, 2012 08:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenMinor kerfuffle today on the Mass Effect Kink Meme.
Few months back – February, actually – someone requested a rpf story. That’s a little weird for a video game fandom, but, hey, Mass Effect has a few characters designed to look like their voice actors – sometimes to a disturbingly uncanny valley extreme – so it makes a little bit of sense.
Personally, rpf sets off my squick alert. It’s really not my thing – I’m not fond of celebrity culture, and, generally, I find myself attracted to characters a lot more than the actors who portray them. Besides, fictional characters exist to have stories told about them, real people not so much. Honestly, I’m not too fond of historical fiction that uses real figures as key characters either.
But, hey, it’s a kink meme, and I don’t pass judgement unless a prompt is openly trolling. I mean, if it were purely down to my tastes, one of the top pairings on the meme would barely have a presence. So, I added the prompt to the index, and created a new ‘genre:rpf’ tag for it. Since then, there’s been a few more requests, none of which have been filled or attracted much attention at all.
Last night, there was another one. As before, I indexed and tagged it before I went to bed. I wake up… and find it’s suddenly a huge controversy with a big argument raging across the meme.
As I said, I’m sympathetic to people who don’t like rpf, and don’t want to see it on the meme – but, bloody hell, if it takes you five months to notice something exists, it can’t be that much of a problem…
Few months back – February, actually – someone requested a rpf story. That’s a little weird for a video game fandom, but, hey, Mass Effect has a few characters designed to look like their voice actors – sometimes to a disturbingly uncanny valley extreme – so it makes a little bit of sense.
Personally, rpf sets off my squick alert. It’s really not my thing – I’m not fond of celebrity culture, and, generally, I find myself attracted to characters a lot more than the actors who portray them. Besides, fictional characters exist to have stories told about them, real people not so much. Honestly, I’m not too fond of historical fiction that uses real figures as key characters either.
But, hey, it’s a kink meme, and I don’t pass judgement unless a prompt is openly trolling. I mean, if it were purely down to my tastes, one of the top pairings on the meme would barely have a presence. So, I added the prompt to the index, and created a new ‘genre:rpf’ tag for it. Since then, there’s been a few more requests, none of which have been filled or attracted much attention at all.
Last night, there was another one. As before, I indexed and tagged it before I went to bed. I wake up… and find it’s suddenly a huge controversy with a big argument raging across the meme.
As I said, I’m sympathetic to people who don’t like rpf, and don’t want to see it on the meme – but, bloody hell, if it takes you five months to notice something exists, it can’t be that much of a problem…