future history of fandom

[psocoptera]

Skip this one unless you're interested in fanfiction.

So right now, in the fanfic world that I browse at least, two relatively popular fandoms, Star Trek:Reboot and Sherlock Holmes, happen to be cases where there was a preexisting fandom and then a popular new movie brought in a bunch of new writers mostly interested in the new version. And there is a whole discussion to be had of the various ways that these writers position their fic with respect to the old canon/fandom, whether they get interested in it and start mining it for ideas (or try to reconcile it with the new version), or ignore it and feel that the new source can stand alone. This is certainly not a new thing - there was an X-Men comics fandom before people started writing fic based on the movies, and I'm sure there are even older examples I'm not aware of. But I think it's safe to assume that, given Hollywood's love of remakes (and the shortening remake cycle) and basing movies off of books, comics, or anything other than original ideas, this is going to start happening more and more.

What I want to know is, how long before we start seeing this with RPF - real person fic? Will a bunch of teens in 2020 be writing fic about "Glam: The Adam Lambert Story", starring some kid who's in junior high right now, and that's who they'll think of as the canonical Adam Lambert? (Adam Lambert was a recent American Idol contestant.) I don't just mean "people writing RPF based primarily on a dramatization where the real person was played by someone else", but "people doing that when there was also a prior fandom around the real person". I did some cursory searching on AO3 to see if it had happened already and didn't find anything, but it's a somewhat complicated search.

What are your predictions for the timeframe of this development? Will it be someone who's famous now who's the subject, or someone not yet famous? Bonus points for titling and/or casting the biopic: "Don't Stop Short: The Derek Jeter Story", starring Jaden Smith. (Derek Jeter is the shortstop for the Yankees.)

Comments

[wayman.livejournal.com]

I believe some episodes of a fictional future sitcom portraying Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada as neighbors in a Manhattan apartment building may have been written (they were at least talked about conceptually...) around 2002 or so. Whether the idea was that Jeter and Posada would themselves star and play themselves, or that actors would play them, I don't know; but the whole premise of that fic adds yet another complicated dimension to this....

[irilyth]

I'm not 100% sure I understand the scenario... The idea is that someone in 2020 is writing Adam Lambert fic, but it's not fic set in 2010 in which Lambert is 28 (like he is right now), nor set in 2020 in which Lambert is 38 (like he will be then), but fic set in 2020 in which Lambert is 18?

[wayman.livejournal.com]

I'd interpreted it as fic written in 2020, set in 2010, in which Lambert is 28 (like he really is in 2010), but the Lambert in the fic is based on the fictional character, who might have a "backstory modified to fit your tv", who might look like the actor rather than the real Lambert, etc. So, maybe for television the producers of "Glam: The Adam Lambert Story" decided it would be much better if he had a twin sister, and if his best friend got abducted by cultists just before the taping of an episode, etc... and the fic authors adopt all of those things as "canon to Adam Lambert's life" not realizing they were in fact fictions created for television, and not aware that there's this whole body of fic that already existed ten years earlier (ie, in 2010) based on the real Adam Lambert... but maybe other fictional conventions had become canon because someone wrote an influential story where Adam had a twin brother, and his brother's girlfriend's dog can talk. Or something? Maybe I don't entirely understand the scenario either.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Your first sentence there is more or less what I had in mind (I got a bit lost with the twins etc): fic based on a specific theatrical portrayal of actual characters.

Maybe another example would help: let's say people right now were writing fanfic about John Dillinger based on the recent movie "Public Enemies" in which Johnny Depp played Dillinger, and in their fic Dillinger was described as looking like Depp and as having done the things he did in the movie. However, there actually was a John Dillinger, and one could imagine that there could have been a previous wave of fandom at some point in the past, centered around the actual Dillinger, and in those stories Dillinger was described as looking like Dillinger and as having done the things he did in real life.

The differences would likely not be as dramatic as talking dogs; here's the kind of thing I mean: fans of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes describe him as meticulously clean-shaven. Fans of Robert Downey Junior's Sherlock Holmes describe him as scruffy. (Nimoy's Spock is tranquil, Quinto's Spock is angry...) I just think that gets *even more interesting* if the character in question started out as an actual person instead of a purely fictional creation. What does it mean if I think the actor playing Adam Lambert is a better/more interesting/more appealing/more attractive Adam Lambert than Adam Lambert? Dolly Parton once commented, on a drag queen, that she "looked more like me than I ever will"...

[tapas.livejournal.com]

This isn't quite what you describe, but I think it'll happen first (if it hasn't already) with stars who have multiple incarnations. One person writing Marky Mark fic while another is writing Mark Wahlberg fic. And the Wahlberg writer will have no idea who Marky Mark is.

[franzeska]

Well, will it lead to a revitalization of Fandom Wank? Will it cause half of the internet to explode with rage? If so, then someone will do it some time. :D

[vardibidian.livejournal.com]

Wait, now you're saying that Sherlock Holmes was not a real person?

Oddly enough, I'm in a play right now in which a writer, fellow name a' Shakespeare, took this character from a play that was based on a story by Thomas More and made a whole new play about that character, without ever bothering about whether that character was ever a real person. And do you know what? People still argue about it.

Happens all the time. Henry Fonda was Young Abe Lincoln; Don Ameche invented the telephone. People writing later are totally affected by those things. I assume there's fan fiction about JFK and RFK (and Marilyn Monroe!), and I wouldn't be shocked if people writing it were mostly familiar with actors playing them in movies.

I could totally imagine that happening with Ray Charles and Jamie Foxx. That is, not only people writing fan fiction about Ray who came to being fans of his through the movie generally, but who think about Ray primarily as a fictional construct in a movie, and never listen to his music or find anything out about him, just think he's sexy in a Jamie Foxx way. I'm not going searching for it, though...

Thanks,
-V.

[ccommack]

"X faked their death", for many celebrity values of X, is a promising storyline; the Illuminatus! trilogy does it several times for various cameos, although in that example all of the narrators including the omniscient one are unreliable...

[antimony.livejournal.com]

I bet it's already happened; I just don't follow RPF at all, so I can't cite an instance.