Real person fiction: Encyclopedia II - Real person fiction - History

Real person fiction - History

The earliest known RPF was written by the Brontë children from 1826 to approximately 1844. Based on the children's roleplaying game about the Napoleonic Wars, the series featured the Duke of Wellington and his two sons Charles and Arthur, and their arch-nemesis Alexander Percy, partly based on Napoleon. Over the years, Arthur evolved into an amazingly charismatic and powerful figure, the Duke of Zamorna. These stories were not published until well over a hundred years later, but the children used them to polish their writing skills and eventually all became professional authors.

Modern fan stories may go back to Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, and Elvis Presley, but some of the earliest known published cases of RPF come from 1977, when fanzines of the band Led Zeppelin began to print some of the fan fiction being written. Due to the fact that these stories involved real Zeppelin bandmembers, most notably Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, names were changed to pseudonyms such as "Tris" and "Alex".

A number of authors of modern bandfic -- stories based on musical celebrities -- began writing in the early eighties, when MTV brought musicians into close focus for millions of adolescents. Some of these stories may have circulated in fanzine form, but there was little community and many authors remained unaware of others doing similar work.

During the 1980s, actorfics involving Paul Darrow (of the show Blake's 7) emerged. These were mostly humorous vignettes, and were mostly of minor importance.

It was not until the 1990s and the spread of the Internet that RPF began to take hold and fandoms emerge in full.

The RPF community was, for a period of time, centered around the FanFiction.Net website. When the RPF section was removed from Fanfiction.net, the community dispersed to smaller web archives and LiveJournal communities. RPF is generally totally absent from the various Usenet communities, especially in older and more established newsgroups.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki