Another natural pairing

There will be actual content again soon, I promise.

When Fics Take on a Life of Their Own (4359 words) by storiesfortravellers
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Critical Theory RPF, Feminist Ryan Gosling
Rating: Mature
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Michael Fassbender/James McAvoy
Characters: Feminist Ryan Gosling - Character, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Original Female Character, Fanfic Writer
Summary: A fanfic writer and Feminist Ryan Gosling discuss celebrity culture, gender and theory, and the political perils of Fassavoy fic.

Without taking any kind of epistemological stance on RPF as a phenomenon, I will say this is definitely a fic to be read and contemplated by people in fandom--our peccadilloes and our predilections and the reasons for all of them turned over and exposed to inspection. It's knowing and self-critical and consciously caught between and a rock and a hard place, and also frequently hilarious. (Feminist Ryan Gosling will do that.)

The follow-up rec is not a fic but a post, namely hey girl it's feminist fandom by metaphortunate:

Everybody makes their own erotic compromises with the patriarchy. We're going to die while the world is still fucked. We can't put our libidos on hold until everything is sorted out. And to sort out our libidos we'd not only have to sort out the world but we'd also have to hop in our imaginary time machine and go back and fix it so that we grew up in a fair world where people cared about what happened to people who weren't rich white men and that is also going to happen on the twelfth of never so you will forgive me if I say that there is nothing wrong with the way we live with our oppression by eroticizing it.

I would wager that all or most of us have had the experience of enjoying some piece of media that our higher cognitive functions find intensely problematic, and like the man said, I would hope that we not judge ourselves too harshly, or solely on the basis of what is said or even done in public about sex and sexuality. (Remind me to tell you the story of the prof I'm teaching for dropping surprise!Greek love into the lecture on the Hellenization of the Roman Empire into lecture yesterday. Hilarious, if you're me and knew what was coming.) But hoping for that degree of absolution doesn't absolve us from the obligation to keep questioning where we're at, as M and this fic both make clear.

Note to interested readers: neither of these pieces contain any actual RPF.