To paraphrase a line from the show,

There is NOT a thin line between slashing characters and RPS.  There is, in fact, a GREAT WALL OF CHINA between slashing characters and slashing REAL PEOPLE.  That THICK LINE between character!slash and RPS is the difference between being a passionate, obsessed fan and being ACTUALLY -OUT -OF -YOUR-MIND, BATSHIT -CRAZY.


Actors, it must be reiterated, are real people.  I have SERIOUS issues with RPS.  So what?  Well, for starters, I don't read it, and I try to separate my own comments about the characters from discussion about the actors.  Actually, I hardly care to discuss Hugh Laurie or Robert Sean Leonard at all.  Why?  I don't know them.  And neither do you, no matter how many People's Choice Awards you've watched or E!Online features you've read.

I think that the way television is presented and interpreted by fans gives opportunities to know (created, imaginary) characters on a level that is as deep or deeper than written fiction and movies, especially when it's written and acted as exceptionally well as "House" usually is.  I feel like I "know" Wilson, House, Cuddy, Foreman, Thirteen, etc.  It is that familiarity and interest in their (unreal) lives that is what separates casual viewers from crazy fans like me (and probably like you, if you're reading my LJ).  However, the implied permission and support of this harmless voyeurism-- which is really all an audience of a TV drama is experiencing, when you think about it-- the voyeurism of watching these fictional lives unfold every week-- the implied permission an actor gives to his audience to inspect his work and take from it what they will about his character DOES NOT EXTEND to the actor himself, his personal life, or any other arena beyond what appears on your television screens at 8pm Tuesday (or Monday) nights.

I think it's a deeper social and cultural issue that celebrity culture is at the place we find ourselves in 2009 (an avoidance of real news, an aversion to hard truth), that Americans and other industrialized societies become obsessed with an IDEA of a person ("Angelina Jolie" springs to mind) and begin to forget that there is actually a person there, but one who is necessarily wholly different from the projected idea.  Tabloids, magazines, entertainment news channels all give fans the sense that they CAN know an actor or singer or anyone in a high profile job or position, but this sense is flawed and inherently false.

It scares the hell out of me when I see a post about Robert Sean Leonard and Hugh Laurie arriving at the People's Choice Awards and within the comments are frankly disturbing conjectures about what happened before they arrived or what their lives are "really" like outside of the show.

Outside of the show?  I don't care about "outside the show"!  I am in the "House" fandom!  I care about the show.  I care about the fiction of it.  I understand, accept, and ENJOY that it IS fiction.  I don't need nor want it to be even a little real!  There is something that has fascinated humankind about a simulacrum of reality or the ideal of verisimilitude since the ancient Greeks invented theater from ritual.  I get that.  I identify with it, and accept it as a part of my human condition that I will find make-believe fascinating, especially when it approaches simulations of my own experiences of the world.  I don't begrudge ANYONE a deep love of the show, the characters, or indeed any work of fiction.  I do take huge issue, however, with the extension of that love to infringe on very real people's very important privacy.  Privacy.

If you know any actors in your own life, as in, really know them, you learn very quickly that no matter how good they are, they are not playing themselves when playing a part.  Sometimes, a person can play a character nearly the opposite of themselves and come off so believable that even as their friend, you find it convincing.  Extrapolate a little with me.  If the minorly successful actors you might personally know (a friend who majored in theater, the community theater group in your town) can portray people so different from themselves, why don't you extend the critical understanding of that difference to the more famous, more successful actors of the world?

You can't know any thing-- not a single thing-- about a person from a character they portray on TV.  Except maybe that they're making a lot of money.