Category talk:Music RPF

Why the * sorting?

Some artists have a * before their category name. I can't figure out what makes that category have the * before or not; anyone else know? Distracteddaydreamer (talk) 17:37, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

It's basically a hack to put them at the top of the list alphabetically in that category. I think these days we generally prefer to do this with a space-- e.g. Worm has `` to put it at the top of that category b/c it's the main fandom page for that category -- but a lot of older categories used punctuation to move things to the top of the list (according to the sort order here), and we haven't redone all of them. See also MediaWiki's Help:Categories for more info about this. -- Quaelegit (talk) 08:41, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Having a Music Category

I'm wondering if we should rename this or have separate a parent category called "Music Fandom" or "Musicians Fandom" or something similar. Currently almost all music fandoms are categorized as Music RPF, but one can be a Swiftie, or a fan of Katy Perry, etc, creating transformative works like fanart, vids, etc, and not necessarily participate in the RPF part of the fandom -- Kingstoken (talk) 19:19, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

At a certain level when you cross over from a casual fan to a superfan of someone, you have much more in common with someone who's writing RPF than someone who just happens to like a musician. Swifties, for example, tend to closely follow her relationships and tinhat with the best of us and even if they're not actively writing fanfic about her I would argue they're still participating in Real Person Fiction and so it doesn't really make sense to me to have two separate categories? I guess I just don't understand what sorts of things you would file under one and not the other. My other suggestion would be that, perhaps, it might be better served as Category:Musicians under Category:People? - flyingthesky (talk) 20:16, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

I think there's a fair amount of Music fandom that doesn't fall into RPF-ish territory. Like, I linked a bunch of OKGO fan videos down below -- the thing OKGO is mostly known for is an elaborate DIY feel to their videos, and they collected a bunch of fans making similar videos to their songs. Well, okay, a lot of it is choreography, and I guess we've decided by analogy to KPOP that choreography is RPF(?!?!) But i dunno, there's a lot of stop-motion animatics, at least one AMV, and a lot of fans making their own choreography/videos more loosely inspired by "canonical" videos.

Or how about Stan Rogers fans, or Tom Lehrer?? Yeah, any moderately involved fan probably knows some facts about their lives (just like moderately involved Discworld fans probably know some facts about Terry Pratchett's life) but most of the fanac is about their music. I don't really feel like pages would merit and Template:FandombyText-RPF, but the normal template:fandombytext doesn't work well either. I guess for The Crane Wives I use Template:Fandom?? Ugh i'm still not sure how to handle that page. Sorry tihs might not be coherent, i'm really tired. I will try again in a few days -- Quaelegit (talk) 09:26, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

I recommend against it. All RPF fandom categories on Fanlore are understood to refer to the fanworks fandom generally, not specifically the act of writing fanfiction. This is also how the RPF fandom tags on AO3 operate--not just fic, but all fanworks.--aethel (talk) 03:17, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

I was thinking that it would be nice to have a category for music that is not RPF, like "Category:Music" or "Category:Music Fandom" because I think there is so much more to being a fan of a musician or band then RPF shipping, like you can be a Swiftie without shipping her with anyone. We could still keep the Music RPF category, but maybe saving it for the shipping portions of those fandoms? -- Kingstoken (talk) 22:52, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

(I just realized that I brought this idea up once before, please forgive me and my sleep addled brain) -- Kingstoken (talk) 10:32, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

I like the idea of having a category for music things where the fandom is based on the way the music is rather than the creators of the music (like maybe animatics/song titles/some song memes), though those are kind of split across multiple categories. But would this mean that music RPF only refers to shipping? What about things like fansigns, fandom meet and greets, fan clubs, celebrity drama, fan accounts? Parts of music fandom which are centred around the creator / celebrity, rather than the music - would this be separate from RPF? Not sooo familiar with the definition, but intuitively I feel like restricting RPF to just shipping might create a very narrow category and expanding it might lead to confusion about what content goes into each category.

But it could open the door to easily categorise new pages, like maybe those covers / drafts of the hanging tree pre-hunger games movie? Distracteddaydreamer (talk) 07:13, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

I will say that there's a lot of fandomish things about Music and Musicians that I've hesitated to add to Fanlore because I don't see how it fits in the current RPF-by-default framework. And it's too much effort to jury-rig my own templates. E.g. I considered making a page for OKGO when I was doing a really deep dive and discovered all the fan videos (1, 2, 3, 4) that the band has collected on their youtube channel. Similarly... I guess i already made a page for The Crane Wives b/c idk it felt like there was this distinct fandom for it on ao3 for a while (or maybe I just talked to specific people who were really into them) --- but almost none of it was RPF. IDK maybe there's groupies at their live shows or something, I was interested in trying to describe what i saw on ao3.

The new Template:Song is helping for some of this, e.g. I made a page for Curses (song), but yeah at the band-or-musician level I still feel like there's a gap missing. -- Quaelegit (talk) 08:57, 6 March 2025 (UTC)