It was the stuff of RPF. After more than 15 years of making YouTube videos together, Dan Howell and Phil Lester sat down this past October to share a revelation: They were in a secret, long-term gay relationship for most of their career. “Phan,” the ship name for Howell and Lester, is one of the most popular real-person fiction, or “RPF,” pairings of all time.
Phan dominated platforms like Archive of Our Own, one of the biggest and most popular websites for fanfiction, which has recently seen an all-time high interest in RPF, according to Google Trends. Band members, K-pop idols, video game streamers, actors, and athletes are all popular categories where fans ship real people. They fantasize about specific pairings, write fic, draw art, and even conspire that the relationships are real. Speculation about the sexuality of famous people is rampant. And alongside the growing popularity of RPF is a growing conversation about whether this is an ethical practice or an invasive, inappropriate one.
“Now, some think that shipping real-life people is problematic,” Howell said in his video with Lester, where they discussed the history of Phan with humor and sometimes even appreciation. “I think that humans cannot stop this natural tendency, so we might as well embrace the good sides of it.”
But, Howell and Lester continued, lines were crossed when people began investigating their real lives for evidence that they were gay and in a relationship. They recalled fans reaching out to their family members, covertly recording them in public, and spamming their comment sections with the conspiracy theory. Those fans may have been onto something, but trying to confirm their suspicions "turned into a public FBI hunt,” Lester said.
“It’s almost as if people are no longer interested in the real you,” Howell reflected. But, he emphasized, this was a minority of fans and shippers, with the majority of their fandom staying respectful. He and Lester differentiated between the fetish fan art of them that was created with the intent they would never find out about it, versus people commenting on their livestreams and shouting about Phan during stage shows.
For Anna Wilson, an assistant professor of English at Harvard University who teaches classes on fanfiction, the ethical boundaries around RPF are something she’s thought about a lot. Archive of Our Own has more permissive content policies for fanfiction under its content guidelines; the creation of RPF “never constitutes harassment in and of itself.” Fictional works in which characters based on real people die, are subjected to slurs, or are otherwise harmed as part of a narrative “are not usually a violation of the harassment policy.” According to the guidelines, content becomes rule-violating when it is “designed to be seen by the subject of the work,” for example, by being directly given to them. “To me and to a lot of other RPF readers, the line is when you send it to the celebrity, because at that point you are violating their boundaries,” Wilson says.
Other people think imagining and sharing writing about a celebrity in fictitious scenarios is violating, but she disagrees: “To me, that’s an imaginary construct. It’s not the real celebrity,” she explains. “I tend to think that RPF is fundamentally harmless, unless it is forced upon the celebrity in some way and as long as it is carefully labeled that no one reads it without knowing what they’re getting into.”
The idea of a celebrity being a construct dates back to the earliest days in Hollywood, Wilson says, where fan magazines were produced by the entertainment industry, “which really encourage fans to feel like the celebrities are their friends.” Fans could even write into the magazines to talk about how they perceived their favorite stars. It was the original parasocial relationship, one that has expanded significantly alongside social media.
But RPF also predates the internet, with Star Trek fans whose fics involved meeting celebs at fan conventions and swapping the characters with their actors. Then, in the 2000s and 2010s, fanfiction became even more accessible when it was digitized and accessed online, and collected in sites like Fanfiction.net. Some popular RPF pairings from this era, like the members of the band My Chemical Romance, are still the subject of ongoing fanfiction today—even after the actual band retired.
“There is some truth to the fans’ fevered imagining of the fact that tour life is very weird and bands, of course, become very codependent and all up in each other’s business,” Wilson says, recalling how Spice Girls star Melanie Brown described having “a little bit of a thing” with fellow singer Gerri Halliwell when they were touring. “There is a sexual frisson between band members, because otherwise how could they perform as well as they do? They have to have chemistry.”
The lines between a persona, a fictional character being played, and a celebrity’s real life can get messy, as evidenced by the fandom discourse about the hit gay erotic HBOMax romance Heated Rivalry. Originally posted in an early form on Archive of Our Own by author Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry has since inspired plenty of RPF about its cast members, as well as scrutiny around what fans suspect is a relationship between two of its stars. A lot of that discourse revolves around the role of women shipping and writing about gay men, which is the more common gendered dynamic in RPF.
“Women and queer people are used to, culturally, accepting narratives that are primarily about men. We’ve been reading books about men since we were in school,” says feminist YouTuber Ophie Dokie, who has covered the controversy around women and Heated Rivalry on her channel. “With RPF, in part, it’s a gendered backlash. When men write fanfiction, it’s just a derivative work. It gets to stand as its own thing, as art; but when women do it, it’s always this silly thing that needs to be criticized.”
Arguably, there’s even a gendered impact in how RPF fanfiction and shipping affects the subjects, with women being disadvantaged. While the male stars of Heated Rivalry have been rewarded for their on and offscreen chemistry, an anonymous Oscar voter told NewsNation that, besides not enjoying the movie as much, they snubbed Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande from nominations because they “were turned off” by their closeness during promos and red carpets—a closeness that at least some RPF fans and Glinda/Elphaba shippers actually appreciated, if the fanfics are any indication.
“People really love to draw this equivalency of, ‘Well, we all agree it’s bad when women and lesbians are sexualized, and this is just doing the same thing to men,’ but when did we agree that?” Ophie Dokie says. “When did we ever care about how lesbians and women are being treated?”
On the flip side, fictitious sexualized depictions of real women and celebrities are currently widespread in the form of nonconsensual deepfakes, which use their real likeness to create fake sexually explicit material that is then often shared for harassment and profit. Fanworks are, of course, very different from deepfakes. Fanworks tell a story, and many of them don’t involve sex or nudity at all. They are typically based on the creator’s impression of the subject matter, versus manipulating real photos and videos of them into sexualized images.
Fanworks also tend to involve real creative labor and are primarily housed in relatively walled-off online spaces like Tumblr and Archive of Our Own. Although, with algorithm-driven platforms like X (formerly Twitter), there is more of a chance that a fan’s work or take on something will get blasted well outside the boundaries of their fandom, invoking disproportionate backlash and rage.
Examples of RPF violating the boundaries around sharing it directly with the subject can often happen in press or media settings, like on late-night talk shows, not directly from fans. Often the celebrity is instructed to read it aloud—the existence of fanfiction is played for laughs. These aren’t fans forcing the stars into uncomfortable situations; it’s the wider celebrity industry weaponizing fandom and fan interest for profit and attention.
“More than 90% probably, of RPF writers, are appalled and disgusted and ashamed whenever anything like that happens,” says Wilson. “That’s a major violation of the RPF writer’s privacy, as well as the celebrity’s. It’s really gross and I wish people wouldn’t do it.”
At its best, RPF can launch writing careers and communities that celebrate diversity, self-expression, and shared appreciation for art. The stigma around RPF can have the opposite effect, replacing feelings of belonging and creativity with shame. But as long as fans and outsiders respect the boundaries of everyone involved, there’s no reason to feel guilty.
