meta meta meta

[meretricula]

gonna try and update the rec list before I have to go back to school (wah, wah, I DON'T WANT TO DO WOOOOOORK), but in the meantime, let's have a discussion about something I've been pondering lately!

has the emergence of Twitter (and Facebook, and all those other social media platforms where celebrities can talk directly to each other in public) fundamentally changed the nature of RPF? we used to be completely dependent on the reports of others about how celebrities felt about and interacted with each other, whether a gossipy anecdote on TMZ or an interview published in the Guardian. writers had no choice but to extrapolate huge things from small actions: a hug during a press junket, a quick kiss to celebrate a goal. but now we have all this source material available, only it isn't in a very convenient format, so I think most of us don't use it as much as we could. and of course there are problems of how seriously to take the persona a celebrity chooses to present; Misha Collins' twitter is obviously not a full portrait of Misha Collins, to give one glaring example. and Gerard Pique's facebook is not really helpful if you want to know what Gerard Pique is like, since it's clearly run by PR minions.

but with less famous figures (and now I'm getting into my own area of expertise), to what extent should we take things like Twitter conversations into account when thinking about RPF? Iker Muniain has however many thousands of followers, but I don't know how much he's thinking about them when he tweets David De Gea or Javi Martinez to say hi or let's go to the movies. is it fair to say that any publicly available information is part of their media persona, and therefore fair game? at what point does it become intrusive? and at the other side of the spectrum, at what point is it bad characterization to contradict information that is publicly available but maybe not commonly known? I try to research as much as possible to avoid the but that just isn't true reaction, but I still wrote a fic about Pique and Cesc trying to get Leo into social media when he's had a Weibo account since before either of them had heard of Twitter. he's obviously not the social media luddite I portrayed him as; I just didn't know that at the time.

I sometimes wonder if there's a generational gap between pre-Twitter and post-Twitter RPF writers. I fall very firmly into the post-Twitter party, so it's hard for me to judge. if you're writing about someone who has a twitter, I think you should read it, and I think conversations on twitter or facebook are a great way to figure out how two people interact. (and the absence of interaction when two people are both capable of interacting is a pretty good clue, too. anyone remember the kerfuffle over how Rafa never followed Novak on twitter?) it's kind of elitist to say that good characterization should take all available material into account, because not everybody has the time to do that sort of research, especially when it isn't in English, but I do side-eye characterization that is contradictory to what I know from doing research into how someone presents him/herself online, so...

well, maybe I'm just a snob! (no one is surprised.) what do you guys think about my latest crackpot theories?

Comments

[louis-quatorze.livejournal.com]

Social media is definitely part of the public persona we build characterizations out of, I believe. It is public- the fact of advertising it to fans, getting it validated, etc etc means that it is a public act intended for public consumption. Even if they are using it to ask a teammate if they want to go to the movies, that's still something they're doing in public. If they didn't want the world to know, they would do it differently. Even if they still wanted to be involved in social media. (When I was working at my university's Arts & Entertainment department, I had to shepherd around a semi-well-known emo band for a concert and the singer had a private Facebook profile with a different name that he was on constantly, for example.) If they put it out there, it's not intrusive.

The thing about RPS is that, yes, you should probably do your research. Or at least have a very good reason for contradicting what is known about someone. You should read their Twitter if they have one. It just seems odd to me to not try and figure out all you can. The point is that you're using a specific figure, and that figure should be recognizeable. There's a lot of leeway in that, but.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

I definitely agree with you about people who use their social media to advertise to fans, I just wonder if there's some ethical line I'm crossing when I follow... I don't know, the women's team. or the U-16 team. or somebody's girlfriend. we could be talking about people with only a few hundred followers, you know? the less famous someone is, the more personal information they seem to put where anybody could read it. and that's great for me as someone who likes to know everything (cuz I'm nosy, hey) but sometimes seems like I'm applying fair-play rules to a situation where they're not really relevant. especially since I'm trained to find connections that a regular internet reader might not notice. idk.

see, that's the thing that bugs me, right. because a lot of the stuff that I read when I first got into fandom was... not terribly accurate, if I go back and read it now. but I find that there's a lot of stuff written that is only superficially connected to real people; there's a characterization, and sometimes it's very good and complex and clearly a believable person, but not necessarily the same person whose name is being used. and there's obviously a continuum between "copy-pasted in the names" and "brilliant, accurate, sensitive portrayal" but there's a definite trend towards letting fandom establish a character and then only recognizing that character, rather than the real person. especially in AUs. (I think of it as J2 syndrome sometimes. like, if your fic is about two tall and goofy dudes, one of whom is really pretty and the other of whom has dogs, you've covered all that's expected of J2 fic. everything else is bonus. but that's pre-Twitter characterization, and I don't follow them on twitter so idk if that's consonant with how those actors actually interact.)

[louis-quatorze.livejournal.com]

Hard to say, really. In Arsenal's case, the players are actively advertising the the Twitters of their wives or kids in the youth team (Jack Wilshere was just promoting the Twitter account of one of Arsenal's youth keepers because apparently he'd been "begging" him to do so). I think it kind of depends how much they're trying to get their name/affiliation out there, but also, if they didn't want people to see what they were saying, they'd at least lock their Twitter, you know? I think Manuel Almunia's wife has a locked Twitter.

Hmmm. I guess that's a good point. Like my Cesc Fabregas issues (beyond the normal Arsenal fan issues). I don't like his "fandom characterization" so I find a lot of Cesc stories hard to read. But, on the other hand, are they just bad stories?

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

I'm not usually so squeamish, haha. but one of the Juvenil-Cadete girls requested to follow me on twitter (I guess because I follow her?) and I was all HELL TO THE NO, OH GOD, which has made me re-examine how I feel about investigating people who might care enough to investigate me back. XD

yeah. I mean, a LOT of the Cesc stories are terrible. but some of them are very good, they're just about a person who I don't think has a ton in common with Cesc Fabregas as he exists in the present. there's something I can't quite articulate about the difference between wanting to write a story in reaction to something a person has done or said or is to inspire it and wanting to write about a person because you think he/she would fit into the specific story you already want to tell. and there's a zillion shades in between as well. but if you don't know anything about Cesc Fabregas, what difference does it make?

[louis-quatorze.livejournal.com]

hahaha, yes. But then, I guess, it depends on how "deep" you want to go in your writing-fandom activities? Like, I'm not sure I'd be able to write about the Arsenal kids at the "scholar" level, because they're kind of...too young and not mediatized enough? A kid who's already been getting notice/interviews and has a contract and is in some ways "acting" like a professional already, like Benik Afobe, is different in my mind.

Yeah. You raise a good point at the end there- if you don't know anything about Cesc Fabregas, it's a much different story than if you do, and that does have an effect. Like, when I read a fic about hockey players, I don't even know what they look like, I just read the story. But it doesn't absorb me like football does. I wouldn't participate in hockey meta or idle speculation or whatever. There's something to be said for both approaches.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

what's the deal with Afobe, anyway? seems like he and Jack are attached at the hip.

I wonder if the enjoyment to be found in a good fic is quantitatively different depending on how much you know about the characters? like, I know that a fic with bad characterization is more enjoyable if you don't know the characters and one that depends on obscure allusions is incomprehensible. but given a fic that is really well written and accurate but not terribly "deep" in terms of knowledge required, do you enjoy it as much in a state of ignorance as one of knowledge? (too much philosophy, haha.) I mean, I'd like to say that additional knowledge makes it more enjoyable, but I would say that, wouldn't I. XP and I can't go back in time to compare with my pre-knowledge self.

[louis-quatorze.livejournal.com]

he's adooorable! He's one of the promising Arsenal babies, at the beginning-to-poke-into-the-first-team stage. He's been injured most of the season (story of everyone), but he's considered to have a bright future and will probably go on one of those training loans when he's fully fit. He's 19 and plays for England, and hangs out a lot with Jack and the other English-ish kids of that age at Arsenal who came through the Academy (Conor Henderson, Emmanuel Frimpong, Wojciech, etc.). On Twitter he talks with the Arsenal Ladies/baby Ladies and actually knows how to spell and punctuate, so he's pretty easy to like.

I think so. I've read a couple of hockey fics recently, and the enjoyment is different. I don't want to make value judgements on it, but they do feel different. However, when I read a fic that I get on the meta level, there is something else there. I guess it's kind of like humor in that way- if I get the references of a joke, it adds another layer to it that deepens the enjoyment.

[brojan.livejournal.com]

interesting post! i was just talking to someone recently about which ballers are difficult to write for me, and now reading this, i realize it's a lot of them that are active on social media (pique and cesc, specifically). i think knowing more about them makes them harder to fictionalize for me. on the other hand, it's cool as a fan to hear from them, and i'm sure for some people it does provide a lot of fodder for fic.

idk, maybe i'm biased by the fact that i'm super lazy about research myself, but unless a player is SUPER out of character it doesn't really bother me to see alternative characterizations. i guess because i'm always aware that even if they're really open in public and active on social media, etc etc, i don't really know these people and there's a good chance they're totally different than i think. in the end it's all fiction, right? i mean in your example, knowing that messi actually does use social media doesn't at all take away from my enjoyment of that fic, because it's believable in the context of that story and not totally contradictory to the little that i know about messi as a person. i guess it's a matter of degree though, because i'm sure if i saw a story with messi as, like, a loud-mouthed lazy punk, i'd be like "errr..."

[mardia.livejournal.com]

maybe i'm biased by the fact that i'm super lazy about research myself, but unless a player is SUPER out of character it doesn't really bother me to see alternative characterizations.

Yeah, I veer towards this kind of thinking myself. I mean, I fully acknowledge that part of it is because I just don't use Twitter that much as a research tool (I follow exactly one footballer on Twitter and that's it) I generally veer towards interviews and such if I'm going for research. I mean, I definitely HAVE used Twitter as a tool, but it's not going to be my first thought when I'm coming up with characterization. And I think part of that is that divide, in my head at least, between the "persona" we're all using as the basis for fic, and the actual real person, who we don't know and never will really know. For me--and this is entirely MY thing and I don't expect anyone else to subscribe to it--but it almost feels like interviews are more--fair game, I suppose, because they're part of that person's public persona. Not that a person's Twitter ISN'T, but--I don't really use it as my first go-to, I suppose.

Of course, part of it is that public celebrities on Twitter, 95% of the time, hit my embarrassment squick like nothing else. But I know that for a lot of people, that's not the case, which is awesome! Truly!

As for fic more generally--I kind of consider meticulous research to be more of a plus, than a necessary part to any fic, if that makes sense. If it's a good story, then it doesn't really have to jive with all the public facts about someone for me to enjoy it.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

clearly my problem is that I know too much :P /humblebrag

[mardia.livejournal.com]

ahahaha, you are definitely my go-to person for info, I will say that!

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of it comes down to a person's style as a writer. like, for the most part I do not have stories floating around in my head that I want to write (which is why I don't really like writing original fiction), I just react to things, and I like researching so I find a lot of interesting facts. but if you already have the story, you don't need to find something to react to. does that make sense? idk. I have trouble writing people if I don't know anything about them, but sometimes it gets harder for me to write slash about them if I do a whole lot of research and wind up adoring their girlfriends, so. six of one, half dozen of the other? XD

it probably comes from my being a tremendously inquisitive know-it-all, haha. it does bother me that that fic I wrote implies that Leo is not tech-savvy, because I can't un-know the fact that he's quite good at social media and surgically attached to his BlackBerry. once I know stuff it bothers me to see things get it wrong, and I make it my business to try to know everything. XD like, a lot of fic I read when I was first getting into fandom cast Victor Valdes as the villain, because back in 2008 or whatever all anybody knew about him was that he was big and short-tempered and had tattoos and he made a good villain. so I didn't care then because I didn't know Victor from a hole in the floor, but I know a lot more about him now and I have trouble enjoying those fics as much, because it seems like lazy characterization. maybe it comes down to established headcanon? I do a lot of research so I have ridiculous amounts of headcanon, and reading something that contradicts my headcanon rubs me wrong. but someone who has less headcanon would presumably have much less trouble.

[brojan.livejournal.com]

i'm not so much up on the lingo of fandom, is 'headcanon' basically like what you believe to be true even though there's no definitive proof (which would be canon)? if so, that's really interesting, i guess i have no headcanon. there's pretty much facts i know about their lives - relatively little - and the rest is flexible. probably why i have no otps either.

anyway. interesting discussion you've got going here!

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

haha now that you ask what I think headcanon means I can't define it! um, I think I just meant it as the information you have internalized about a character? the example distira and I always throw around is Javi Martinez being awkward with girls, because he complains in interviews all the time about how he can't get a girlfriend. but someone who has not read all those interviews wouldn't know that, and it probably wouldn't be part of their headcanon. (and presumably that's something he chooses to play up in interviews, though god knows why, because he has managed to find a woman to go out with him since then.) although I think it is possible for headcanon to have nothing to do with canon as well, or else people wouldn't still be writing Cesc as if he were a seventeen year old when he's now twenty four - you can get headcanon from fic, or pictures, or memes, or whatever. maybe my biggest frustration in reading fic is dealing with fandom's collective headcanon (Silva is a sweet doormat, Villa is an emotionally dysfunctional dick, Cesc is an idiot, etc) when it butts up against my own. it's not that the collective headcanon isn't based on something, usually, it's just that it's fossilized. XD

[distira.livejournal.com]

you make some interesting points here! ps yay reclist imma need things to read while i sit around during the opera this week!

down to business: i think social media has changed how we characterize RPS. granted what we see through social media is only a specific slice of any given player's personality, one that s/he has expressly chosen to share with us, but it's still part of their personality. and to an extent, i definitely think authors should do some research! if a player's on twitter, why not scroll through to at least see who he tweets at the most, who he seems to be good friends with, etc. BUT at the same time, we're all still writing fiction, and part of the fun of reading different authors is reading their different takes on their characters, you know? so if everyone did obsessive research to the point where the characters were as close as possible to how they are IRL and there wasn't much room for variation in characterization between fics or authors, that'd be pretty boring, you know? idk, saying this probably makes me a hypocrite because i adore my headcanon characterizations and will refuse to read, say, a javi martinez who isn't socially awkward and doesn't have an adorable high pitched giggle.

i don't think taking info from twitters/facebooks is intrusive. the players in question are choosing exactly what they say and how they say it, and if they wanted to keep conversations private, they would have them via text message instead of on twitter, IMO.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

I think no matter how obsessively we read somebody's twitter, there will still be plenty of room for variation in characterization XD much as I love the added access, like you said, it's not everything. still lots of improvisation that can be done! but there's some stuff that is less handwavy characterization and more fact, and I get a little cranky when I read stuff that's wrong. like, if I saw a fic in which Javi Martinez spoke Euskara I would be annoyed, because I know he doesn't. but before I researched him I wouldn't know that, so it wouldn't bother me! ignorance is bliss, is I think where I'm going with this. XD but on the other hand (we might be up to three hands by now) a fic that explored how he felt about not being able to speak Euskara would be really fascinating, and impossible unless you did know he couldn't. depth vs breadth, maybe? ability to enjoy a lot of stuff in opposition to being able to really, deeply appreciate a few things?

I mean, the guys clearly all get media training, you can tell, and I don't feel bad about using their twitters. but I'm still not entirely sure it's kosher of me to harvest vacation photos from the ladies' Facebooks. >_<;;

[willowcabin.livejournal.com]

my most recent fandom is, in a large part, dependent on online personalities in a way that would never have been possible in the pre-twitter age; one guy, for instance, has been pretty much out of the public eye for maybe a year now except for twitter, and although some people have taken issue with the way that he presents himself, that's kind of all we have to go on these days until his album drops and he's more public. there was a LOT of fandom squee about various tweets, and social media aka people posting on facebook or twitter is the way that people tend to find out that the dudes are hanging out with each other these days, because they're pretty quiet about it, and there are rarely any pap pics. in that fandom it would be pretty ridiculous to ignore the online persona because otherwise these days there wouldn't be all that much. he does make it obvious that his twitter is a kind of stage where he interacts with fans/posts day to day pics/music information, so i do feel that any info on there is fair game because i don't think he does anything thoughtlessly on there, if that makes sense? it's a public persona so it's fair game.

my twitter is locked purely because it is such an internet-y fandom; everyone we write fic about has a twitter. people follow their friends, their managers, etc. for a while a friend of one of the guys followed me, although i blocked him because, well. yeah :| it's scraping a little too closely along the fourth wall for my liking. anyway, i know this is not remotely to do with football, but the issue VERY MUCH still applies, i think.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

I wonder if maybe there are MORE fandoms in the twitter age as well, if that makes sense? like, obscure bands that it would be impossible to find anything out about are now on twitter and interacting with people when even five years ago all you'd get is maybe one interview in a music magazine to find out what they're like. I never thought about Dresden Dolls RPF back when I was a serious creepy Dresden Dolls fan and had their pictures all over my walls, but I bet if they'd been bantering back and forth on twitter I would have.

I feel you, bro. one of the younger girls on the ladies' team requested to follow me and DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON would be an understatement. XD

[justkisa.livejournal.com]

if there's a generational gap between pre-Twitter and post-Twitter RPF writers

For me, at least, yes I feel like there is. The last fandom I wrote in was popslash (primarily *NSYNC). The kind (and amount) of information that was readily available at the time I was writing (9-10 years ago) it’s almost not even comparable to the types (and amount) of information available now.

It’s really a different experience for me writing with those sources of information in the mix. And when I first started I didn’t pay much attention, to say, twitter, but now I pay, what sometimes feels like, too much attention. I’ve really had to think about where I get information from and change where I look for it.

It’s also caused me to have more than a few moments of, well how far is too far? Who’s fair game? What is fair game? Especially when it comes to people who are associated with a public figure as opposed to being a public figure. For the most part, I feel, if the information is available publicly (especially if the person chooses to make that information publicly available when they could easily choose to make it private), then it’s fair game.

When a person is associated with a public figure without being a public figure, I’ll admit I think a lot more about what I’m comfortable using/referencing. One of the things I’ve looked at is how the person presents his/her relationship with the public figure. For example, I thought long and hard about including Adam’s friend Dale in my Vegas story. One of the things that I thought about when I was trying to make that decision was the way he talked about the relationship on twitter. He calls attention to it a lot - even, for awhile, was using a picture with Adam in it as his icon, - it seemed, almost, like he was trying to put himself more in the public eye by referencing that relationship - that’s, of course, just my interpretation. That (among other things) sort of tipped me over into thinking of him as fair game for inclusion.

Even so, I’m not sure I made the right decision tying a character who, I’ll admit is pretty much an original character (because besides knowing that he and Adam are friends and that he was in Vegas with them I know next to nothing about him - I created his characterization to suit the story) - to a real life person. In fact, I don’t know that I would make a similar decision again.

I’m pretty sure I’m babbling but, in sum, all the available information has forced me to think a lot more about what I include when I write.

All the information available, though, it also makes me want to write, it’s almost like you’re seeing little bits of stories and I want to know what happens around them, to explore that by writing (if that makes any sense). I kind of love it. I’ve really never been more inspired and I’ve never written more.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

people associated with public figures are hard, sigh. =/ even aside from the difficulty of finding anything out about them in the first place. I think I tend to err on the side of "whatever, if it's on the internet it's fair game" but I've also never been bitten in the ass by that, and if I had I'd probably change my tune. XD but we all invent characterization to fill the gaps of what information is available - if all that's available about someone is a name and who he hangs out with, of course he's going to end up being almost an original character. so long as he's convincingly a human being who fits with what's known about him I don't see how that's a problem!

idk though. I've been wanting to write fic about Emili Ricart (one of the Barça physios) for ages, and I seriously know almost nothing about him, but. I still really want to!

it’s almost like you’re seeing little bits of stories and I want to know what happens around them

thisssssssssss

[worldcoup.livejournal.com]

Hey there! I follow your rec list (and think we have talked before-- briefly) and I stumbled upon this post while looking at your journal for updated recs. So this is an interesting post, I hope you don't mind me commenting!

I feel like while a fic with intense research, that takes into account tweets and interviews and little researchy things, is a great fic, but it's only one kind of great fic. I feel like fanfiction is the telling of a compelling story, and as long as you can weave a compelling story with strong characterization -- not in the sense of, 'does this conform to every detail available to the public about x character's life?' but in the sense of 'I can see a human being behaving this way, especially given what you have told us of this character through the story, and the circumstances you have put him/her/them in' -- you can have a great fic. Fanfic is not supposed to be, I think, an accurate historical narrative, nor do I see it having any different purpose from any other form of good literature-- to tell you a good story, to be a good read, to entertain you, to enthrall you, to fascinate you, to suck you in and get you emotionally invested, to make you experience a complex web of emotions, etc etc. I don't think that a character not sounding like he did in some of his interviews, or some of his tweets, necessarily stops a well-written, well-told fanfic from doing any of that. Especially since the information we do have is very, very sketchy-- we know none of these people in person; we have no accurate means to judge who they really are. Interviews are expressions of their media persona. The internet, twitter, especially-- can be very misleading. We all-- LJ'ers, tumblr-ers, tweeters, invest a lot into our online selves, because we're netheads-- we use the internet so much, we know how to express ourselves within the kind of new framework of the internet, in the language of the internet. But people who use the internet super casually don't. My dad, bless his heart, sounds like an idiot in emails, chats, fb status updates, etc-- even though he is one of the most articulate, intelligent people I know. There's just this huge gap between what we can see through these very distorted lenses-- the internet, cameras, etc, and the actual, breathing person in flesh.

I like to think of fanfiction as a construction out of a self-chosen collection of elements. For example, David Villa is always characterized-- and I love this characterization, too-- as someone who is arrogant, don't-give-a-fuck-attitude, rough, yet super-talented, painfully ambitious, an idiot in terms of matters of the heart, hot tempered, and -- as you summed it up perfectly -- "a lovable dicksmack." But if you actually read his tweets and blog posts and his interviews and other things-- he's actually a dorky, non-confrontational, non-hyper-competitive, pretty chill guy who doesn't hate Raúl. Yet, you can construct him, using certain elements of his history and upbringing and on-field persona and some statements from some interviews, as how he is predominantly constructed, and that's totally okay-- it makes for an interesting story. I could read Silva as slutty, or Silva as shy, or Silva as fierce-- and it would be really great if you could back that up-- if you're going "shy" then find me a compelling explanation for why he can still swear like a sailor and headbutt Poldi, or if you're saying he's fierce as fuck, tell me why he mumbles in press conferences, etc. It's like writing a good paper for class- yes, doing all the readings and referencing them all would give you an A, but so will thinking of an interesting, non-conventional thesis, and just being able to back it up with quotes and write and argue it well.

Full disclosure though: I like AUs a lot, better than non-AU fic, so I might be coming at what I want from fanfics at a different angle here.

Arghhh sorry this was so long! Hope you don't mind, again!

[brojan.livejournal.com]

yes, i love that you brought up villa, because i've thought before about the fact that he's the one character that i constantly make a conscious decision to write in a way that's contrary to how i actually think about him. i wonder what it is about him. the facial hair? haha

[worldcoup.livejournal.com]

YES I totally feel you on that conscious decision to write him very differently from who I think he is.

Facial hair could be it XD. I know a friend who thinks he looks like satan because of the soulpatch. I guess it's probably also the intense looks, focus on the pitch, occasional bitchslaps and his infamous bitchface? XD

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

errbody can comment! the post is public for a reason! XD welcome welcome!

like, I agree with you so much about a fic needing to be consistent with itself and with human nature more than with every tweet or interview someone's ever given. and there's a lot of room to maneuver, especially in AUs, for "but what if this happened, what would they be like then" - but sometimes there's something that just doesn't work with what I know about a character, and that will throw me out of the fic. (this largely only applies to my teams, haha. if I don't know any better, idgaf if it works outside the fic!) I don't think it's about referencing things so much as... absorbing a plausible characterization? maybe?

but it's funny you reference Villa and Silva, haha, because those are some of the fandom characterizations that drive me the most up the wall. and even though I absolutely hate the way DVilla is portrayed as this jackass when he's obviously a total sweetheart off the pitch, I do it too! that's how deeply ingrained fandom's reaction to him when he was "stealing" Raul's spot on the NT is! I wasn't even AROUND back then when he had a chip in his shoulder, and I have absorbed that characterization to the point where I can't not write it. (though he's obviously still got some anger issues, even if he has cooled off with age and fatherhood, or he wouldn't still be slapping people on the pitch. XD)

but ugh, don't even talk to me about fanon Silva, it makes me so mad. like, I appreciate that he's adorable and everybody likes to think he can do no wrong, but he gets plenty pissy and sulky and I like him that way. (basically, I pay attention to Silva and thus get upset when I see a Silva being written who just doesn't work with the Silva I have seen in interviews and so on. overinvested? moi?)

so... yes. I like this paper analogy. obviously you've got to develop your arguments, I don't think just referencing all the readings should get you an A, but if your thesis is that the earth is flat or Shakespeare was really a woman... well. I don't subscribe to the "no wrong answers in English" philosophy. there are no right answers, but there's an infinite number of wrong ones. XD

[worldcoup.livejournal.com]

I definitely see what you mean, and yeah, it's weird because while I get that, I guess I'm willing to give anything a good chance if it's really compelling to read. I mean, I would probably need some clarifications-- like if you're making, say, Sergio Ramos completely disinterested in fashion, then some kind of explanation to his ridiculous self-grooming would be nice, but really, I would like anything a great author writes. I just thought of another analogy for this-- I guess it's like history majors and period films. Some loathe them for their blatant inaccuracies/anachronisms, while some love that it depicts a time or a kind of place or culture or whatever they are interested in, especially if it does so well and interestingly, and can overlook flaws. Yet, both kind of people love history as much, just have opposite ways of showing it. I mean, it's a stupid analogy, but I guess it explains it, kind of? Because people have different ways for liking to see their favourite players depicted in fiction, I guess.

You know it's funny that you brought up needing to see the right kind of characterization because you know them so well/love them so much, because that's the exact reason I don't mind seeing alternate characterizations! Like, nowadays, I almost exclusively read/write DV/DS, so if people stuck to the same characterization of them, I'd be reading basically one kind of fic, over and over. But then again, I think my love for AUs has a huge part in this-- I just like seeing them in versatile situations, especially since with their looks/behavior etc, I can see a whole range of personalities fit either of them, and I like seeing them all tried onto them.

Oh, Villa, Villa, Villa. Yes, like, I know that is not his personality irl, but I really love him written that way the most-- and like you said, it does have a lot to do with how intimately his NT career ties in with and parallels Raúl's. And he definitely showed us some of that attitude during Valencia's horror year of '07. I think it just works so well in a literary sense-- it gives him this depth, and it likes fits him beautifully into this whole Raul-Mori-DV-DS structure, where they all complement and parallel eachother's personalities and it's just wonderful.

I don't know, you know, re:Silva. So, I'm totally biased: I have a friend who RPs him, and I just think she's so ridiculously spot on with him I can't objectively see anything else, but despite stanning him too, for some reason I don't seem to mind when he's written differently-- as long as the writer respects him. Like, I hate it when people think he can't hold his own, and doesn't have his own agency, but other than that, I think he presents himself in this incredibly versatile-to-interpretation manner. There are his lovely smiles and shy little mumbles, and then there's his secret partying lifestyle and drunken shenanigans and CLEARLY CLOSETED PAIN OF BEING IN THE CLOSET. I just feel there are so many ways in which he can be written that can conform to his interview personality/pitch personality but still be vastly different from each other. I think it's a bit like Mori, he keeps things in, but also can't keep things out-- and he can have so many layers-- young or manipulative or feisty or good-hearted or slutty or hot-tempered. SORRY I SPEND WAY TOO MUCH TIME THINKING ABOUT THIS. Clearly.

Oh yeah, I definitely think not every answer is a right answer, but just...there could be a lot of right ones, and a lot of ones made right by a good enough story.

[stickmarionette.livejournal.com]

I definitely agree about social media having changed the way RPF fandoms operate (sometimes, as in one of my previous fandoms, in really unfortunate, skeezy ways). You know how much of a research nut I am - my eye starts twitching when a fic's timeline doesn't match up. Buuuuuuuuuuut now that I'm writing about people who I could possibly characterize more accurately if I spoke Spanish I'm sort of torn between 'well, I know enough without going into all that' and my usual OCD.

(Can you tell I'm having issues writing my Cesc/Gerard fic? How can two people who put themselves out there to such an extent be so hard to pin down? :D)

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

idk, hopefully current sources would be consistent with each other and it shouldn't be necessary to read them all... social media can be really helpful for getting to know a character, obviously, but if you already have that basis of knowledge from other places presumably you don't need it! if somebody's twitter completely contradicts the way he/she sounds in interviews, something is wrong. (or the twitter account is being run by PR minions and probably not very helpful. XD)

Cesc and Geri are weird cases, though. I feel like they're some of the most media-savvy of the footballers on twitter, and almost everything they say there is conditioned by awareness of who is reading it. (not that they're insincere, but... I think Puyi is a lot more genuinely Puyi on twitter, for instance.) they're putting themselves out there, but only in a very pre-packaged format, and it's a little hard to get a grip on the shiny plasticky media-persona. I'm going to be very sad if Barça's new "social media rules" make everybody fake and plastic, too. :(

[stickmarionette.livejournal.com]

I agree with you about Cesc and Geri being careful about their media persona. That in itself is an interesting aspect of their characters - it sort of belies the way they're both written in fic (Cesc, in particular, I think is much more mature and thoughtful).

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

which in turn makes me wonder (in a sort of Machiavellian twist) how much of the donut-eating, Desperate Houswives-loving empanada media narrative was his own deliberate construction... XD

[guede-mazaka.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I'd call it a generational gap--that seems like a misnomer when you have a split within generation between the source people who use social media and who don't--but yeah, I think it's fair to say it adds an extra dimension to characterization. To get all personal, I have to admit I felt better about leaving old fic up back when there wasn't this instant massive body of source material for later readers to check out, because it was easier for people to understand you might not have had much available to you at time of writing (for example, when I started Hitverse, basically all that was up in English-language for Messi was a couple bland PR interviews, the odd fan profile and a bunch of cheeky commercials. And Cristiano's coverage was totally skewed due to his then-recent spat with Van Nistelrooy--something to the 'Net's way of burying old coverage, too, since if you run a Google search now, you would have a hard time dragging that stuff back up with all the Real drama linkage coming first). But now it's not just dealing with a potentially changeable flow of information, but a total waterfall of info.

On the other hand, sometimes I think the immediacy of social media also encourages characterization to be sort of shallow? Because social media is right now, how the person is right now, and it tends to freeze a personality into a particular moment. But when you research in things like old news articles, you get more of a sense of how a person might change over time. Like, a lot of the older/former players I write, they're completely different from their young days. Or players I've just written for a while. I'm really fond of Zlatan partly because I've been working on my version of his fictional "character" for years, and it's been kinda cool/hella infuriating to be adjusting that to the real version's changes. You wouldn't get that from a Twitter, if only because nobody's had one for more than a couple years.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

sometimes RPF is the only thing reminding me of how incredibly unrealistic most fictional narratives spanning a similar length of time are. people change! but on television they kind of don't, so then I'm stymied by how different the same person can be at ages 17 and 23. (which is a little ridiculous because obviously I changed between 17 and 23 too, but when you're in the middle of it you notice it less, I guess.) there's a kind of... anthropological?... interest in not only what a person was like five years ago, but how he was commonly perceived. when I read old fic it's something I find really fascinating, maybe even more than old interviews. (though old interviews, when I can find them, are frequently gold. fat-faced baby Zlatan was such an adorable brat! and I can easily see how he grew up to be the person he is now, but man, he could have just as easily turned out to be someone else entirely.)

but yeah, I totally understand what you mean about the immediacy of social media, though I think I'd say more "in the moment" than shallow... obviously it's not a replacement for going back and reading the interviews if they're there, though I tend to like the youth teamers who have very little media coverage and also haven't learned to filter themselves yet. XD or maybe I like them because they haven't learned to clam up or package themselves yet? and even at its best, I think it's hard to get all that much from somebody's twitter without following him and all the people he talks to for a few months and seeing how their interactions work in real time, so it's pretty damn inconvenient. (gender-neutral "he", for what it's worth; applies equally to the ladyballers I keep and eye on.) but one thing I see a lot of in this fandom is a sort of fossilized characterization, freezing people at the moment in time most memorable to the writer/fandom (2008 for Fernando Torres and Sergio Ramos, 2006 for Lukas Podolski, etc.) even when writing about events that happen later. social media certainly isn't the only way to keep abreast of how a person is growing and changing over time (keeping on reading interviews will do that too, if there are interviews to be found!), but it's one of them. I don't know, I had this ridiculous overwrought metaphor upthread somewhere about how characterization over time is like plotting a curve, and twitter gives you a lot of points of reference. but (to strain the mathematical metaphor to its breaking point) you'll never get the actual equation out of the dots you do know, because it's not a straight line. /is shot for abuse of literary devices

[aramley.livejournal.com]

I find social media a double-edged sword in that, while it does offer a lot more material for characterisation and ideas for fic, I always want my fourth wall to be made out of reinforced concrete and barbed wire eighteen feet tall, but with twitter that's just gone. So I find myself balancing between what is useful for me to know, and what makes me uncomfortable to know. I have hesitated at rightclicksaving pictures from Nole's twitter when that's like, stuff he's comfortable with sharing with the world (i.e. EVERYTHING). I have to keep a clear mental line between the person and the character, and so I don't mind if they diverge a little. I mean, I don't do enough research so when I was writing sparkle motion I had no idea that Gilles doesn't read books! But I would have written it anyway. So basically my amusement > reality. This is, I realise, a personal and incredibly unhelpful response to your post!

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

twitter is so terrible for tennis fandom, all it does is destroy our dreams. XD bet you money that if I'd gotten into tennis after the twitter boom I'd be shipping Rafa/Marc and Marc/Marcel in a hardcore and unattractively tinhatted fashion. I don't even know, man. there's just... so little out there for tennis fans to build stories out of, I think we inevitably end up making most of it up. it's that or write Fedal until the end of eternity, so.

[flywoman.livejournal.com]

I just stumbled upon this post and found it really interesting. I don't know David Silva from Thiago Silva, but the football rpf fanon version of David Villa as the go-to villain/bad boyfriend/hot jerk you love to hate has always left me scratching my head, after what I have seen of him in interviews and his Twitter account, etc. Nevertheless, I love some of those stories and can truly appreciate them as fiction, as long as I don't expect him to act exactly the way he seems to in RL... which, since he's usually having sex with Leo Messi in these stories, is already pretty much a given ;).

And - this is a separate point - I read your story of the Baby Dream Team teaching Leo about Twitter before I found and started following his Weibo account, so I wasn't bothered by the discrepancy... but I wonder whether it would have bothered me if I had known? And if you had known, you wouldn't have written that story. Which would have been a shame, really, because I love it.

After all when writing in non-RPF fandoms, authors often choose to ignore or alter particular aspects of canon - I can't remember what this is called, offhand, but it's basically "alternate reality" instead of "alternate universe." As long as the characters still behave recognizably in character and I can hear their voices clearly, I have no problem with that at all - it can be a really interesting exploration of what might have happened if not for... And I definitely feel like you achieved that in "hola bonita tienes msn?" especially with Leo.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

ah, Villa the lovable dicksmack syndrome. XD it's interesting, actually, because when I was first getting into football I went back and reread a lot of Sid Lowe's archived articles from five, ten years ago, and I think the basic issue is that that characterization is based on RL to an extent... but it's an extrapolation from the available sources from ~seven years ago, and those sources were scanty at the time and are out of date now. but he isn't someone who puts himself out there much so far as I can tell relative to how popular he is as a character, so the current characterization is based on the fic that was written back then. /crackpot theory.

honestly I should just put a note on the damn fic acknowledging that I was pretty new to football fandom when I wrote it and I got some stuff wrong, and here is Leo's Weibo account. if nothing else it would salve my guilt. XD

like the "world without shrimp" hypothesis in Buffy? I get what you're saying, although to me it's an alternate universe if you're intentionally changing anything at all--whether that's making the characters a different gender or altering the outcome of one football match (there's a fic concept--how would life have been different if Leo had managed to score four instead of three against Madrid in the league in 2006-07? what if Andres passed instead of shooting against Chelsea? what if... you get the picture XD) or making them all vampires. I love the idea of the domino effect, what changes if this one thing is different. and I absolutely love fics that explore that sort of thing! I'm just embarrassed that I wasn't trying to do that, haha. I hate being wrong! about anything!!! but I'm glad you liked the fic anyway XDD