the believers will believe

I personally hate any kind morality thought policing. I'm not Catholic or religious and I do not feel guilty over my thoughts. You are not an inherently evil person because you saw two athletes in an interview and went "Hmmm...... what if...." The Feds are not going to come banging down your door because you wrote about one band member dicking down the other and sent it to your friend.

Wondering about other people's lives is very human. Being nosy about their personal lives is very normal. People have been writing fiction about other people's lives since the dawn of time. Some people even manage to write New York Times Bestselling Books that are "historical fiction" or "alternate reality." It does not make you inherently bad to be curious about the details of someone's personal life. That's being human. Being nosy is kind of fun.

The problem, however, comes with the ways in which people engage with it, and involve the real people in this. Harassing an musician's real girlfriend because it doesn't fit into the RPF ship. Showing up at real sporting events holding signs about how certain teammates should kiss. Trying to get actors to sign art of them fucking their coworker. Flooding social media with comments using the celebrity's full name and speculation. There's a line, there's a fourth wall, and there's fandom etiquette.

I hate the question of "Is RPF ethical" because it feels like morality thought policing. Post your fics on locked accounts, censor someone's name when you tweet about it, blow up your groupchat with hundreds of "DID YOU SEE THE WAY THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER??" texts. It's not inherently evil to wonder what other people are doing when they're out of the spotlight. Kill the cop in your mind.

-your best friend turns out to be mystique

-hey look some new x kids, time to ignore the ones we already had for the rest of *checks watch* forever

-the x men are DISBANDED!!!!!

-alternate universe babies

and I do not have to hand it to them, but I will say that I never in a million years could have guessed that one of their hot new character reimaginings was going to be taking the head of the blood purity house, the guy who torments his students beyond reason on a regular basis, the guy who has a specific hate-on for the protagonist because he wanted to fuck that kid's mom, the guy whose hair and nose are frequently remarked on to emphasize that he's a unpleasant and creepy-looking motherfucker—never would I ever have guessed that anyone would have come up "hey, what if that guy was Black?"

People seem to be really resonating with this so I'm putting it over here too.

Who do you think makes professional quality fanart and fanfic? People who've been practicing it for ten, fifteen, twenty years!

Or even people who've been practicing it for thirty, forty or fifty!!!!!

example: Diane Duane. Currently in her seventies. Star Trek fangirl since the original run. Goddess-level Ascended Fan who has created official tie-in works in more forms of media than pretty much anyone else alive, possibly even Rodenberry himself because they didn't have audiobooks or video games when he was with us. Writer of Spock's World, The Wounded Sky, Doctor's Orders in TOS. Co-writer of TNG script Where no one has gone before, and writer of the tie-in novel Dark Mirror among others. Writer of a half-dozen Star Trek Comics. She has adapted her own work for audio, has written for the Star Trek manga series, has written short Trek fiction for anthologies, and plotted and wrote the video game Star Trek: the Kobayashi Alternative.

In other fandoms, she was a personal friend of Terry Pratchett himself. As a scriptwriter, she's also worked in fandoms like Scooby-Doo, Transformers, My Little Pony, Gargoyles, Batman: The Animated Series, Spiderman: Unlimited (and a trilogy of tie-in novels still in print) and Barbie: Fairytopia. ...And that's just cherry-picking her imdb page.

While she can't give out specific details due to Obvious Reasons, she's still active in the Sherlock BBC fandom - and there's a specific subset of her fans who love guessing which of the legendary fanfics might be her work (I am not one of them, BTW, as it is None Of My Business. I'm old-school that way).

Fandom is not for teenagers. Fandom is for everyone of good heart and enthusiasm for a good (or even bad! No judgement!) story.