Where Do We Draw The Line With Real Person Romances in Publishing?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | October 5, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | October 5, 2023 |

I get many publicist emails about upcoming book releases, particularly romance novels, and I’ve noticed a trend over the past few months. I’ve received many eager PR hype around books like My Roommate is a Vampire by Jenna Levine, the works of Ali Hazelwood, and Forget Me Not by Julie Soto. It seemed like standard stuff before it dawned on me that these are all Reylo fanfictions. Reylo, the pairing of Rey and Kylo Ren from the third Star Wars trilogy, is a popular ship and one whose appeal I fully understand. I wasn’t unaware of the rise in Reylo stories having their serial numbers filed off to prep them for traditional publishing, although I was surprised by how open the publicity around them was about their origins and who they were about. Looking into many of these books for a piece I wrote for Paste last year, something else became evident. These books weren’t really about Kylo Ren. They were about Adam Driver.

a única coisa a respeito de Star Wars que me interessa hoje em dia é isso aqui 🥰https://t.co/gAsrISJvL9 pic.twitter.com/w9LhOdkycK

— 🖤✨ autora Stephanne Says (@stephannesays) April 7, 2023

This past week, a book went viral on Twitter due to its astonishingly creepy status as Prince Harry self-insert fanfiction. The Prince in Her Royal Highness by AJ Arnault is nicknamed Archie and he’s a bearded redhead who is clearly the Duke of Sussex. The heroine is, of course, a blonde white woman like the author. The internet called out the ghoulishness of this novel, one of many royal romances from the past five years to use Harry in this manner. This was just the most blatant case, and the trend isn’t going away. Real person fanfiction has gone professional and people have feelings about it.

imagine if you will, the series of decisions that resulted in someone putting prince harry on the cover, naming the character archie, but making the love interest a white woman. pic.twitter.com/iMTNCkhYhA

— Jen (@JenReadsRomance) September 22, 2023

For those of you who didn’t spend your adolescence in the trenches of LiveJournal, here is a quick explainer: Real person fanfiction (also known as RPF) is, as you can guess, fanfic centred on real-life people. It’s a common feature in many a fandom, and Rule 34 has ensured that, if you can imagine it, there will be fic of it. Pod Save America? The Obama administration? The comedians on Taskmaster? There’s RPF for it. Self-insert fic (that’s what he said) lets the writer turn themselves into a character, usually for the purposes of creating a romantic fantasy with the character or person of their choice. You can learn a lot about a fandom through which figure has the most original character ships written about them.

None of this is new, of course. Fanfiction has a decades’ long history as a crucial part of transformative art and fandom-centered creativity. If we wanted to get super pedantic, we could talk about how centuries’ worth of fiction could be classified as fanfic, from Shakespeare’s history plays to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy to any number of icky inspirational novels set during the Second World War. Art takes inspiration from history, it always has. There is immense artistic potential to be found in mining our past, near and far, for new and challenging narratives. In many ways, turning your Adam Driver or Chris Evans fanfic into a novel doesn’t fall far from that tree.

Still, I know I’m not the only one who’s grown uneasy with the ways that publishing has embraced using fanfiction or fanfic-specific tropes to sell stories that are built upon the appropriation of a well-known figure for romantic and sexual purposes. Once the door is opened, it’s hard to close it. 50 Shades of Grey changed the game, making fanfiction a totally reasonable area of creativity for editors to mine for the cycle of traditional publishing. Fic was always something of an open secret, the thing that fans did in their online communities and generally kept to themselves because of the scorn it invited from skeptical outsiders. Many fans had faced the wrath of authors who didn’t want their works to be used as inspiration for fanfic and threatened legal action to stop it. Everyone was aware of the ethical and lawful issues that could arise if one crossed the streams, so to speak. But then a Twilight fanfic sold over 150 million copies worldwide, and such concerns were tossed aside.

After 50 Shades and its many Twi-fic descendants came After by Anna Todd, a Wattpad fanfiction about Harry Styles. Well, about a fictional version of Harry Styles where he’s an abusive creep who treats women like dirt, but the allure of the One Direction name was what drew fans to it, as well as publishers. It led to multiple novels, prequels, and an entire dang film trilogy starring young Voldemort. These are but a handful of examples of something that I see a lot of in the romance world these days. Not everything was initially published as fanfiction but many of them were, and those that weren’t still played up their connection to real people (see Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman, which is a shameless retelling of the Chris Evans GQ profile by Edith Zimmerman, although the author does not acknowledge this.)

Where is the line and how do we know when it’s been crossed? All these Adam Driver novels may not be billed as fanfiction but publishers, writers, and fans are happy to embrace the openness of that set-up. Even if the fake version isn’t much like the real one, I can’t help but feel uneasy at the appropriation of a real person in this manner. Yet I’ve also read books like Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates and Mr Wilder and Me by Jonathan Coe and not been so concerned by the fictionalizing of real people to tell a new narrative. Perhaps those two books hit different because the people involved are dead and offer a distance from the truth, or maybe it’s because they’re not being positioned as romantic characters for the reader to project their own desires onto. I’m from the generation of fandom where fic of all kinds was kept out of the ‘real world’ and the mere idea of monetizing it was forbidden. That time has clearly passed.

Part of being a celebrity is giving implicit permission to total strangers to have all manner of opinions about you, justified or otherwise. It almost universally sucks but it’s also a crucial part of moulding your image, whether you’re America’s sweetheart, the sensitive character actor, or the supremely candid queen of relatability. Even the images you define for yourself are seldom entirely within your control. It doesn’t take much for the girl next door to become the backlash-laden irritant who’s apparently trying too hard. Part of being famous is also the awareness that you are being positioned as an object, a figure of desire by total strangers. I doubt Chris Evans or Adam Driver or Benedict Cumberbatch or Prince Harry entered public life with total acceptance of this prospect (especially Harry, who has been famous since he was a fetus.) Regardless of its intentions, and many fans do not want to upset their favourites, it can feel uneasy. The various forms of objectification are evolving too, from AI and deep-fakes to this new publishing norm, and the legalese surrounding them is often vague. Sometimes, you don’t really have any way to truly push back against it for fear of invoking the Streisand effect (see how Felicia Wennberg, the wife of ice hockey player Alex Wennberg, faced harassment for calling out fans, including writers who used him as direct inspiration for their work, who fetishized her husband against his will.) Many celebrities have faced the wrath of unhinged fans who believe they exist to be their toys, and that often leads to a hell of a lot of misogyny towards their spouses. When you see a writer turn the love interest of a ginger British prince named Archie into a blonde white woman, how can it not make you think about the abhorrent misogynoir Meghan Markle has faced for over seven years?

Fanfiction is one thing. You do you and you enjoy yourself, as long as it’s in your own space and you’re not entrenching on that of those you’re writing about. Is there anything more cringe-worthy than famous people being forced to acknowledge and even read the fic written about them? Stop doing that, world. When money and the professional structures of publishing enter the picture, however, the game becomes very different. When you’re banking on your audience’s awareness of the celebrity being fictionalized and eroticized (and using the marketing machine to strengthen it), at what point does the lack of consent from the person in question begin to feel ethically questionable? This isn’t about censorship. Writers should be able to write what they please. It’s the multi-layered corporate system at play to remould real people into figures of self-insert fantasy that feels like a problem waiting to explode. Sometimes, fantasies should just stay that way, and it’s not a bad thing to keep it to your AO3 account.