#dnp rpf

[dapg-otmebytheballs]

I come bearing Gif(t)s (and Fic!)

For @japhan2023 for the Phandom Gift Exchange 2023!! HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

(Thank you @husbants and @ttlmt for organising this!)

These gifs are related to the fic (first fic I've ever written woo):

Title: Knight of Wands

Rating: Teens and Up (light swearing)

Summary: Dan does not believe in fate and destiny and fortune-telling. Dan finds the idea of fortune-telling at the same time exciting and terrifying. He definitely doesn’t believe in it though. But he’s starting to have doubts.

OR

Dan watches Phil do tarot readings and learns something about fate.

Read it on ao3

[philyuri]

being a phannie is about winning the rpf lottery at the cost of your mental health

[antiadvil]

RPF stands for real person FACT. Every time you make Dan and Phil kiss in a fic they have to kiss in real life :(

[themarkofoxin]

every time i think about dan and phil becoming the internet’s go-to example of the Dangers of Shipping Real People it makes me so exhausted. for their entire fourteen year career together they have encouraged people to write fic about them and draw fanart and generally “be creative” as they always phrase it. dan specifically, outside of 2012/2013 when he was aggressive towards fans pestering him about it, at one point said he likes reading fic and that he’s often surprised about how good they can be. hell, they wrote fanfic of themselves in their own published book and hired a popular fanartist to illustrate a manga of them.

and then dan came out. and in his video he mentioned how stressful it was to suddenly blow up and have a bunch of people speculating about his relationship, and how it triggered him due to his trauma from being heavily bullied in school. and then followed up the segment talking about how past that point the fans’ support was actually very healing for him, and hearing people tell him that he had helped them be comfortable with who they were without him even being out was one of the things that made him confident in coming out in the first place.

but the people who write angry posts about the evils of rpf or whatever don’t care about dan and phil’s actual opinions. they saw or heard about how annoying the fans were, heard along a thousand-step telephone game that dan and phil hate their fans, and have now christened them the platonic ideal of creators whose lives were ruined because of shippers. it’s ridiculous. it’s unfounded. and it’s disrespectful to the actual existence of the people they’re propping up to support their argument

[betaphannie]

thank you all for your sacrifice

[fromemotoangel]

:3

[ingydar-phan]

Looking more into @lazydays-au and @queenusagiblog in general and if this isn’t proof that Dan and Phil dgaf, idk what is. This (very talented) person is making a literal AU of sexy catboys being horny together (and countless other cute, beautiful, romantic HORNY artworks) and managed to be commissioned at least twice to do actual real DNP artwork for the actual real people for the actual real branding on the actual real channel. And people are still having the rpf debate? PLEASEEE

Edit: guys usagi liked this post lol

[simplydnp]

hey char! what do you think phil meant when he said "as long as you're not being too weird" when he talked about rpf and being "shipped with another youtuber" ?

it seems like his take on rpf is that if people specifically say don't, then don't (which, considering what he graciously went through for years as a public figure, i can understand the viewpoint), but otherwise, it's pretty much fine, with a few caveats.

now he doesn't specifically say, but based off our history with dnp, the line would be:

insisting/assuming fic is real

shoving fic in their/their families' faces

it's hard to say his actual opinion on some of the very graphic/disturbing crackfic that happened in our community, cause both he and dan reference specific ones when making jokes. any concrete thoughts on that would be pure speculation on my part.

beyond that, i think there's not a lot that would phase him. he truly has seen it all throughout the years. if you're a writer, i hope you're not too stressed. i don't think any of our writers are doing anything even close to 'over the line'. dnp have been good at respecting our writing space and we've generally been good about respecting them back (especially these last many years i wouldnt say theres been anything 'bad')

this is just my take on it!

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

they’re buffoons actually. like so stupid. absolute clowns. sillybillies even.

[tesseractingrey]

i was watching a video essay on another rpf ship and like. comparing any other rpf ship to phan is so different it’s crazy. like yeah back in 2012 or whatever maybe it wasn’t so obvious but the things that other rpf shippers have as “evidence” are like “they looked at each other 10 times in this interview” or “this lyric is probably about her” meanwhile we have dan and phil buying a house together and selling tshirts of themselves holding hands. so like yeah phan is real and all but that doesn’t mean all rpf shippers are onto something here the situations are so different it’s crazy. taylor swift could never like a tweet about serving karlie kloss dressed as a slutty nun.

[momhowell]

backstage, baby

“So, unless that teacup is your prop? Would you mind putting it back?”

Dan looked down at his hands, which were still holding the teacup. The teacup that wasn’t his prop. The teacup that wasn’t his prop so he wasn’t meant to be touching it.

“Right!” Dan turned back around and put the porcelain cup back in its little tape square, labeled ‘ACT 3 SCENE 2 TEACUP’ in scrawled sharpie letters. “I’m sorry for…being an idiot, I guess.”

That made the techie let out a chuckle.

“Don’t worry about it. The first rule of tech is to assume all actors are idiots, so you didn’t change my impression of you at all.”

--

Or, Dan's a theater kid doing his first show at university, Phil does theater tech, and they fall in love backstage.

Read on AO3 (x)

[dapg-otmebytheballs]

Someone mentioned in the tags of that post the times when it was taboo to write fic treating Dan's depression branding as serious and how those fics actually helped this person come to terms with their own mental health struggles (not adding the tags for privacy) and I think that really exemplifies why all these taboos around fiction are just causing repression and harm.

Others in the fandom have already talked about their experience being fic writers getting bullied off of platforms, and it's something we should hope not to repeat. Fiction is fiction at the end of the day, including rpf. It's meant for just a way to project some story that you want to or need to hear onto some characters. And every story out there, no matter how much you might personally hate it or think it's "romanticising" something awful, it still has an audience of at least one (the author) and possibly many more, for whom that story can work as anything from solace, to a safer way to deal with something that's too scary and intimidating in its real raw form, to much needed catharsis over bad shit happening in someone's life.

Fics on ao3 have tags and ratings, and most authors I've seen post even on tumblr take care to put ratings on them. If you have trouble with any of the tropes or with the sex or the kinks or the dark themes etc etc you can skip out of it, but to go seeking them and then saying "this causes harm to people who don't heed the warnings and still read it" is just being obtuse.

People are talking about how fucked up the wave of 'romanticising depression' was, but too many of us didn't have the language to be allowed to take our struggles seriously. Too many of us were too repressed, or surrounded by people who wouldn't be supportive, and sometimes you need that distance that comes from fiction and exaggerated themes and kind of unrealistic portrayals of mental health issues because that distance enables you to explore something about yourself that's too taboo to even consider outside of depressive jokes and fucked up fiction. Not just mental health either, a ton of horrible inhumane things are very real experiences that people have and they're too taboo to deal with head on for many of us.

Dan talking that openly about not being okay - even if it was framed as a joke - was one of the earliest outlets I had to think upon my own mental state. It's understandable that a lot of people are very uncomfortable with those jokes now, and that people were uncomfortable with certain kinds of fics (and probably still are). But repressing our expression and telling people they can't post something because it makes us uncomfortable is only going to take away some safe options of exploring really tough personal issues that might be the only thing helping someone face their struggles.

If it's not for you, it's not for you. Let's not repeat the mistakes of acting like it's not for anyone and can't help or mean something to anyone at all. Mind the ratings, mind the tags, and as always, mind your business ✌🏻🌸

[ryekat]

All of us when we see a video title like "Date Night with Dan and Phil"

[annoyingdog0]

yall... i relapsed last night... on explicit rpf....

[lessthanpog]

reminder that segregating adults and minors and saying there's "literally no reason" for them to have a friendship only makes it Easier for predators to hurt children! without minors being able to have healthy, age appropriate bonds with people older than them, they won't know what an inappropriate bond is!

[phillesterlover]

Kinda scared to post this on Twitter but when will people realize that qrting and talking about something you don’t like brings more attention to it than just simply ignoring something you don’t like/blocking a user who makes you uncomfy. People are gonna act every kind of way it is what it is and everyone has a different opinion about rpf and sexual content/jokes. If you don’t agree with what someone’s doing or you’re worried DnP might see it and be uncomfortable…just ignore it. That’s the best way to make something go away. Any time I’ve seen explicit sexual content about dnp on my Twitter tl it has always been through a qrt or indirect. Seems like you’re inadvertently becoming the problem you’d like to stop.

Also - Dan and Phil have been doing this for a long, long time y’all. While it doesn’t say anything about whether it’s ethically right or not, they’ve been exposed to sexual content about themselves online for over a decade. They’ve sought out and read/viewed some of these things as entertainment. I think that there are lines that they definitely don’t want crossed, which to me is invasion/inclusion of their families/friends who are not content creators, privated/deleted videos/posts being reposted. Other than that, I think they’re grown, internet savvy and can accept the fact that people write smutty fanfic about them. The same people I’ve seen mad about this situation also have several tweets referencing their formspring posts, which I imagine make them more uncomfy than a tweet about them having sex in 2024.

Now if you don’t like accepting sexual content about real people, THAT IS OKAY AND VALID. Just ignore it. It would be different if DnP were to come out and say “hey, this thing actually makes us super uncomfortable and we’d like you to stop doing it.” THEN we can all become internet warriors defending their honor. But if anything they’ve been pretty clear that they don’t care. So I wouldn’t worry about it on behalf of them.

Now about the minors situation, even if an account is not a private account, if someone has “Minors DNI” or “18+” in their bio/username then that to me is an automatic warning that explicit/nsfw content is possible. And even then, as much as I don’t want minors exposed to sexual content, let’s all be real here. Most of us were 15-17 reading mature fics on AO3 unfazed. We watched DnP start the skinfic and knew EXACTLY where it was headed. You can put all the safeguards in place and minors will STILL be able to access explicit content if they look for it. We can’t make it fully safeguarded, so the only thing we can do is just be responsible about the content we put out there and hope that it’s tagged properly.

Sorry about the rant, it’s just getting so annoying seeing this drama continuously pop up. See something you don’t like? Ignore it. DnP don’t need you to be their internet police for them. Writing something explicit? Include 18+ in your bio, tag your fic appropriately. Also, have a mutual/friend who posted something you don’t like- you could always DM them and have a convo before deciding to put them on blast and create a hate campaign against them. This is just my opinion though, so if you disagree, feel free to reply/message to let me know your take.