Browsing by Subject "fanfiction"

The aim of this master’s thesis is to study how fans negotiate the moral and legal issues in real person fiction. The fans write real person fiction (RPF) about celebrities by using publically available material, such as interviews and social media, as the source material for the stories. The method in the thesis is thematic analysis, which was used to analyse ten different discussion threads in an American online discussion forum Reddit. The material consisted of 242 posts altogether. The messages were analysed using a thematic analysis processing technique: repetition, differences and similarities. Real person fiction is a challenging research topic, because real person fiction is associated with prejudices and fans may not wish to discuss the topic. Celebrity personas can be divided into three personas: the private, ‘real’, persona, the persona constructed for the public and the persona created by the fanfiction writer for the purpose of their stories. Since the celebrity’s public persona is not the ‘real’ persona, the character in real person fanfiction cannot portray the ‘real’ person and therefore many fans see it is morally acceptable. Real person fiction writers often treat the celebrities as characters in their stories. Real person fiction is considered unacceptable especially when real person fiction includes details of the celebrity’s private life, such as family relations or sexual orientation. The fans negotiate the moral and legal issues in RPF through the rights of the celebrity and also through the rights they have as fans. The analysis reveals that according to the fans, the celebrities have the right to their private persona and private life, but at the same time fans have the right to creative freedom. Fans are, at least partially, morally obliged to act according to the wishes of the celebrity regarding whether the celebrity wishes to have RPF written about them or not. Fans have a moral rule, often upheld and monitored by the fandom, to maintain the fourth wall. This is important especially when the fans create RPF against the celebrity’s wishes. The responsibility concerning RPF does not concern the fans only. Also the celebrities have the responsibility to maintain the fourth wall by not actively seeking information about themselves. The celebrities face the moral, and sometimes legal, dilemma of how much information they wish to share about themselves in the public.