In fact, the focus on fertility and mating cycles in many fanfictions with male protagonists is certainly interesting when considering that a large majority of the slashers, and thus the writers who use this trope, are women. Whether it is a way to engage issues of enforced sex or to think through biology-based societal constraints, in many of these stories, the male characters in heat are forced to play out traditional female roles, victims of biology. In fact, when putting the man into the position of needing to be fucked, fan writers often alter male biology to include self-lubing asses.
Ass Babies and Boy Baby Bumps
As if the desperate need to be fucked were not enough, the ultimate purpose of heat is, of course, impregnation. Male pregnancy (mpreg) is a popular trope across fandoms, sometimes explained within the logic of the source show’s universe through magic or science, but more often just occurring spontaneously. Whether Alex Krycek switches genders, Severus Snape creates a pregnancy-inducing potion, John Sheppard activates an ancient artifact, or Brian Kinney wakes up one morning pregnant for no reason whatsoever, a corner of fandom relishes impregnating its male heroes. And while Kirk and Spock’s love child only ever existed in fanfiction, the 2001 prequel series, Star Trek: Enterprise, did give us canonical mpreg when engineer Trip Tucker became pregnant during an encounter with a female alien.
Mpregs come in all shapes and sizes and, as a result, can fulfill a vast variety of fan desires: a romantic need to create a love child between male lovers, an interest in pregnancy’s emotional and physical fallout on a partnership, or even a fascination with the horrors of forced breeding. Even more than the heat trope, mpreg allows a female writer to play out themes of female bodies, concerns of gender in relationships, and issues of reproduction. And she can interrogate all these ideas in a setting that allows for a certain emotional distance by divorcing the pregnancy from the female body. At the same time, one of the criticisms of mpreg is that it often replicates rather than critiques the portrayal of women by embracing stereotypical gender roles.
Wolves Mate for Life
In fact, given how many mpreg stories feature unexpected, if not initially unwanted, births, the amount that depict happy families in which the child cements their love and lifelong bond is staggering. Then again, fandom generally seems to prefer happy over unhappy and soul mates over one-night stands. So while the fannish desire for intense bonds may not have any canon basis, source texts that celebrate bonding certainly don’t hurt.
A/B/O may have transcended its name-giving wolf source, but the role of imprinting, mating, and bonding remains powerful. Twilight, for example, features not only intense bonds but gives us canonical imprinting when Jacob first meets Bella’s baby. The imprinting trope effectively offers a biological determinism that mandates that the pair belong together. In fanfiction, where we write thousands of scenarios to get our beloved pair together, through space and time and alternate universes, imprinting is a satisfying and effective conceit.
My Mind to Your Mind
Meanwhile, in Star Trek, the Vulcan mind meld, which guarantees “my mind to your mind,” has generated a wealth of stories about deep and permanent mind bonds. Given that a lot of fanfiction and particularly slash is about strong emotional bonds and eternal ties—about the love between partners—the predominance of bonding fic isn’t a surprise. A marriage vow may only be as good as the participants who utter it, but a bond is forever.
Mind and soul bonds are simply the most extreme form of a trope that habitually collapses the physical and the emotional. It presents readers with a couple whose love is not only unlimited and forever but trustworthy: both partners can be sure of it, since they can feel the other’s every thought and emotion. This trope then uses bodies, uses physicality, uses sex to signify emotional intimacy. Partners in these fics read each other’s bodies, read thoughts from each other’s eyes, know each other’s state of mind from their posture, can sense their loved ones by sound or smell. Often their biology allows them—nay, forces them—to seek out the other person and know them in all their parts. All of these things may indeed be horrifying in reality, but if their popularity is anything to go by, as fictional metaphors they have immense emotional appeal.
Omegaverse: The Perfect Storm
This brings us back to A/B/O, where all of these tropes come together in a seemingly perfect storm, often with a heavy helping of raunchy sex: huge, knotted dicks; an enormous amount of fertile alpha semen; and wet, open omega assholes. Still, just as important as the kinky aspects of the omegaverse are the emotional ones: the forcefulness of heat cycles and impulsive desire, the inevitability of imprinting and bonds, the joys and horrors of mpreg.
In the end, then, there can’t be only one explanation for why fans enjoy Alpha/Beta/Omega fic, or even one description that encompasses all the stories. Some stories play with the primacy of the senses and the ability to smell one’s mate. Some stories engage in dub-con scenarios where one or both partners are out of their minds with heat lust and lose all reasoning and inhibitions. Some stories create near-slave cultures where biology determines all aspects of society and sexuality is the central force of domination. Some stories play with the world building, while others just want the filthy, kinky sex; many do both.
And then there are those stories that play with the tropes only to subvert them: Tony Stark all but loses his company because investors don’t trust alphas; Erik and Charles have an illicit alpha/alpha relationship; Sherlock hides his real scent with various chemical pheromones because he doesn’t want to be prey to biological prejudices; Mike hides his omega status by remaining close to Harvey. All these stories use A/B/O tropes to interrogate gender and sexuality as well as sexual orientation and cultural assumptions. And when successful, these stories are not only hot and allow our beloved sex objects to get and stay together in bonded bliss but they also interrogate some of the issues and prejudices of our day.
V. Arrow is a fan studies scholar and writer of fanfiction. She is the author of Smart Pop’s Panem Companion and has published nonfiction in a variety of venues. She writes fic in the realms of YA literature and “real person” musicians—including One Direction, her topic here.
As Arrow explains, Real Person Fic—RPF—is today the subject of much controversy and disdain in the broader fic community, a subculture considered beyond the pale even by writers who have few boundaries regarding what they’re willing to read versions of fictional characters get up to. There’s a general sense that RPF is a contemporary decadence of some kind—but it’s hardly new to fic. J. M. Barrie’s parody for his friend and collaborator Arthur Conan Doyle featured both these “real life” authors interacting with Doyle’s characters Holmes and Watson, and the 1950s zine-published Fables of the Irish Fandom stories were RPF by fans about fans. In V.’s essay, we explore the world of band- or musician-fic from the point of view of RPF fan writers today.
Real Person(a) Fiction
V. Arrow (aimmyarrowshigh)
Real Person Fic, or RPF, is a world in some ways completely apart from the rest of fanfiction subculture. While all of fanfiction suffers from a stigma in the mainstream, RPF is something even other fanfiction writers often mock and deride as “creepy” and often “juvenile.”
Why? RPF, as its name suggests, is fanfiction written about “real people”—celebrities. Written, almost solely, about—well, cute boys. And nothing but cute boys, essentially—despite the pervasive idea among other fans that RPF readers and writers want to imagine themselves with their favorite stars, RPF thrives on fans imagining their favorite cute boys with other cute boys.
Almost all RPF is slash, with the notable exceptions of Robert Pattinson/Kristen Stewart (which generated an enormous boom of material from 2008–2010 but has largely, or maybe completely, fallen off now) and David Henrie/Selena Gomez from the Disney Channel show Wizards of Waverly Place. While some RPF has become an ingrained, central part of media-based fic fandoms, notably J2 RPF (Jared Padalecki/Jensen Ackles) in Supernatural
’s fandom or Andrew Garfield/Jesse Eisenberg spinoffs in The Social Network fandom, it is generally seen as an entity entirely its own, with little writer or reader crossover between it and the fanfiction about the media canon on which its cast works. And rightfully so: it is its own entity There is a large contingent that writes Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto completely separate from their basal pairing of Kirk/Spock; the pairing of Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law, which originated in their roles as Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, is written as distinct from their roles as the great detective and his assistant—despite “Johnlock” being a hugely popular slash ship unto itself, no matter the adaptation.
However, most RPF actually revolves around pairings in fandoms that have no ties to fiction. There is fanfiction for actors, there is fanfiction for politicians, and there is fanfiction for historical figures, but the majority of RPF is for musicians. Virtually every mainstream band of the last fifty years that includes at least two men has had a slash RPF fandom, from John Frusciante/Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Brendon Urie/Ryan Ross of Panic! at the Disco; Nick Jonas/Joe Jonas of the Jonas Brothers (yes, even that line is not sacred in the world of fanfiction—very angsty) to, most notably and hugely right now, the members of One Direction with . . . every other member of One Direction.
One Direction, of course, is a boy band: a prefabricated harmonic vocal group designed to align with certain archetypes rather than to produce music; fortunately, One Direction does both well. Formed in 2010 (after appearing on the British TV talent competition The X Factor) as a business venture of notorious music mogul Simon Cowell, One Direction is made up of five boys, born between 1991 and 1994, from different parts of the UK and Ireland. They align, as all boy bands do, very neatly into their distinct, publicity-driven personae, something that lends itself incredibly well to both writing fanfiction and, its intended purpose, courting the admiration of fans. Niall Horan, the Chill One; Zayn Malik, the Sensitive One; Liam Payne, the Mature One; Louis Tomlinson, the Funny One; and Harry Styles, the Cute One. They’ve been received with broad critical acclaim and financial success; One Direction was among Barbara Walters’ “Most Fascinating People of 2012,” won a coveted BRIT Award (the British equivalent to a Grammy) for “BRITs Global Success” in 2013, snagged two VMAs, performed at the 2012 Olympics closing ceremony, and are a favorite of the Obama girls.
Despite this acclaim, One Direction suffers the same pitfalls as most boy bands in terms of “respectability.” RPF, as noted, carries a stigma within the larger fanfiction community. But even within RPF, there is a hierarchy of respectability, and One Direction, along with other boy bands—due to the poppy style of their music, their prefab start, and the perception of their audience as teenage girls—is at the bottom. Compared to the muddy festival circuit and close-knit inter-band connections of “bandom,” and the pop-punk royalty of the Fueled by Ramen and Decaydance labels, One Direction and its fans are seen as immature, and their fic as underdeveloped fantasy. As music writer Natalie Zina Walschots pointed out in the Toronto Standard, “If men approve of an album, if they think it’s . . . sophisticated enough, then that opinion has value and weight . . . On the other hand, [the] love of female teen fans is seen as something reductive and dangerous.”125
The way an RPF fandom is viewed is frequently connected to the way its source material is seen by the rest of the world—in other words, whether or not it is based on people seen as legitimate “artists,” or at least connected to a legitimate narrative. The Social Network (TSN) RPF is an excellent example. The Social Network, of course, is RPF itself, about Mark Zuckerberg’s relationship with Eduardo Saverin, making fanfiction of the film a sort of second cousin of RPF; fanfiction about its stars, then, is RPF about people acting out RPF—an incredibly cool, meta kind of fiction.
Since TSN itself is legitimate art, it’s a short step from there to considering fanfiction about the actors playing those roles to be legitimate as well. As TSN was so lauded by film critics and mainstream media, its fandom, including the RPF offshoots like Jesse Eisenberg/Andrew Garfield, is not only well-respected but also assumed to be made up of older fans writing carefully constructed slash. In contrast, because the members of One Direction are young, cute, and bubblegum pop, and are subject to derision by Serious Music Critics, it’s assumed that their fans are young and doodle their fanfiction while dreamily staring up at posters of the boys they will one day polyamorously marry.
This misconception of RPF by nonparticipating fans/fandoms comes down to the idea that RPF, because it tends to occur in fandoms seen as being predicated on the good looks of their celebrities, must be a delusional attempt by younger fans to do one of three things: to feel their devotion to those celebrities is validated, and is about more than just their appearance; to “prove” in some way that they “know” a star better than other fans (and therefore deserve his love); or—and this is often RPF detractors’ biggest bone of contention—to seek to legitimize the “lesser” form of media of which the star is a part.
By “lesser,” they usually mean, as even teenaged fans in other fandoms will snort, the domain of Teenage Girls. Of course, this is not actually true. In a survey performed in the fall of 2012 of over 1,550 One Direction fans who wrote or read RPF, a whopping 83 percent were over sixteen, and 35 percent were over twenty.126 While teenage girls do comprise the base of One Direction’s fans, this survey suggests that the majority of the community that participates whole-handedly in fandom, especially reading and writing RPF, is on an age spectrum comparable to fandom in general—or at least matches many fans’ perception of such. What is really being said when the term “teenage girl” is used by other fans as a smear against RPF or, particularly, a fandom like One Direction’s, is: I don’t think what you like has as much cultural value as what I like, and I think less of you because you like it. In a fandomsphere that both glorifies and objectifies men while often demonizing—or wholesale ignoring the existence of—women, this internalized rejection of femaleness is damning.
The implication of criticisms of pop music RPF is that because you like “crap” media, you must naturally produce crap fanworks. The conversations in real-person fandoms couldn’t possibly have the nuance of conversations about fictional personae. What could there possibly be to write about besides stripping off One Direction’s painted-on red trousers and letting them—to quote their own song lyrics—“be the first to take it all the way like this”?
A look around any One Direction fanfiction community, however, reveals the polar opposite. Of course, as with most RPF, it is largely oriented around slash—98 percent of surveyed fans read slash, while only 15 percent read het fic (and of those, 18 percent will only read genderswap/sexswap het, wherein the girl is “really” one of the One Direction boys in an intra-band pairing). In fact, 66 percent of RPF reader-writers surveyed within the One Direction fandom don’t even consider self-insert, wish-fulfillment fanfiction to be fanfiction.
“Self-insert, to me, is like writing a more sophisticated diary entry about your daydreams or telling your friends (and the entire internet) of them,” says Colazitron, a twenty-four-year-old One Direction writer. “I do, however, have absolutely nothing against self-insert on principle. We’re allowed to fantasize and we’re allowed to share those fantasies with friends/the internet, if we wish. I do think it is a companion of RPF, although there is a difference.” (Colazitron writes het fic about Louis Tomlinson/Eleanor Calder and Harry Styles/Caroline Flack, in addition to slash fic about Harry/Louis, Harry/Ed Sheeran, and other pairings, and used to write slash fic about the German boy band Tokio Hotel.127)
Lucy Jones, a twenty-one-year-old One Direction slash writer, takes a semantic view on the subject: “I do consider [self-insert] to be a different genre from traditional RPF. The whole point of RPF is that it’s fiction: your characterization is fictional, the setting is fictional, the plot is fictional . . . [Self-insert is] no longer completely fiction, because the person writing it isn’t fictional, eve
n if they are placed in a fictional environment.”128
“Me personally, and I know this is a probably unpopular opinion to most of the fandom . . . I do not want to get to know [the members of One Direction] just as much as I do not want to get to know my new neighbors,” says eighteen-year-old slash writer Elle. “I believe in the fourth wall, strictly, and I write about them not to get closer to these people, but because they are attractive and entertaining and are fun to write about . . . To write about them I need a certain amount of distance.”129
So what kind of fic are One Direction fans reading and writing, if there’s such a preponderance of slash and no self-insert? A whopping 94 percent of One Direction fic, as of the 2012 survey, is written about the pairing of Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson, although other pairings have healthy showings, too: 74 percent of fans read Liam Payne/Zayn Malik, for example, and since the original survey was taken in 2012, Niall Horan/Zayn Malik (then 58%), has seen a massive upsurge in popularity.
As in other fandoms, a lot of the content is smut-driven: 98 percent of surveyed fans read NC-17-rated material, but that is rarely the purpose behind the story; PWP (Porn without Plot; or Plot, What Plot?) is rare in One Direction fandom. While most stories do include (or revolve around) sexual content, the dynamics of the band or pairings are what drive the story, since it is the boys’ real-life interactions that tempt fans into fandom in the first place. Far more than their looks (although that’s obviously one root of their popularity), it is the way they behave around each other, or the ways they might behave around each other because of inherent similarities and differences, that intrigues fans. While boy band members like those of One Direction come neatly prepackaged in their archetypes, devout fans are the first and loudest to interject that none of them really fits the role they’re being paid to play. Instead, they find the nuances of behavior that set them apart from their color-coded trousers and use that to create virtually new characters who wear One Direction boys’ faces.
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Page 37
