Complicated RPF feelings

[epershand]

So here's a moment they don't cover in the pamphlet everyone gets when they join an RPF fandom (ha): what's the least creepy way to emotionally process watching a celebrity you care about go through hard times, knowing all the while that what you're watching is going to be a significant theme in your fandom's canon in the future?

This is a real family going though a real period of significant grief and trauma. And I am genuinely sad for them, in the abstract way that one is sad when the family of a casual acquaintance is going though grief and trauma. But... Jeff Smith isn't just the father of a drummer in a band I like. He's also a character who appears in a whole lot of fiction I've read in the last six months.

The easiest way for me, personally, to deal with my feelings about this fictional character would be to read fiction about it. But that is really messed up when the character person I'm talking about isn't fictional. And isn't dead yet. I have to keep telling myself that it is not.okay. for me to think of this week as being "the episode where Spencer's father was gravely ill."

Retroactively, I'm feeling really weird about all the fic I've read that uses George Ross's death for thematic purposes, even though that happened in 2006 and I didn't read any of it until 2011. This is people's lives and their deaths and their trauma. And while I can normally shut off the part of my brain that views them as fictional characters in a never-ending, never pausing show from the part of my brain that views them as people who happen to be celebrities, that part is broken right now.

And... I just don't quite know how to deal with that.

Caption: Brendon Urie from tonight's Tonight Show appearance, with "JEFF ♥" written on his arm. Not shown: the alternate drummer who joined the band so that Spencer could be with his family. Image via starafar.