Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

Oceangate, Death, and The Ethics of Real Person Fiction Here In The Abyss

*This is a repost of an article I published on Substack on June 25th, 2023. I’m reposting it here because recently RPF discourse made its way back to the subreddit r/AO3.

As of just a few days ago, Oceangate Expeditions’ website was still up and functional, shifting through photos of smiling happy people who climbed into a van-sized “submarine” contraption to explore the ocean’s depths and lived to tell the tale. The blurb advertising their deep sea adventures confidently urged you: “You can join the adventure of a lifetime. We’ll show you the ropes topside, and when you’re ready, you will climb inside the world’s largest deep-diving submersible. Get ready for an unforgettable adventure in the deep ocean.” For some folks, going to have a lookie-loo at the 111 year old wreckage that lies 12,500 feet (3810 meters) below the surface of very, very cold water sounds like a fantastic usage of their time and money. For those who have made the Titanic part of their personality (here’s looking at the one kid I knew in 3rd grade who talked about literally nothing else), traveling however they could to ogle at a pile of old ocean trash is practically a pilgrimage to a holy relic. For the gut-punching cost of $250,000, the ultra-rich pay to indulge their special interests in whatever fashion best satisfies them…and by whatever means. Even if those means include some shifty shit.

As we all know by now, approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes into the descent of Oceangate’s Titan submersible, the guiding ship above lost contact and was unable to again reestablish it. The response time and the extent of the search effort was impressive to say the least as the media and a few experts posited that it was possible (though not probable) that the crew, consisting of the CEO of Oceangate, a British Explorer, a French Historian, and a billionaire with his son, were still alive within the lost vessel with just over 90 hours of oxygen. The dramatic nature of this news was apparent from the get-go, the imaginations of millions around the world sparked by the horror of what it might be like to be adrift in a tiny space populated by four other people knowing that a hideous death was far more likely than survival.

Memes cropped up like weeds in a well-watered garden mocking the billionaire lifestyle and the incompetency of Oceangate’s submersible designs. The jerry-rigged nature of the craft along with its dubious distinction of having been piloted by a television screen and a Logitech controller were and still are common fodder for the mobs of internet denizens out for a little bit of a laugh in the face of the ever-present reminder that nothing—especially money—can save you from getting Thanos-snapped out of existence by the incredible 6000 pounds-per-square-inch pressure of the ocean when your craft’s hull simply gives out. And fortunately: that’s what happened. It wasn’t a slow and painful and dare I say it romantic suffocation mere feet from the hull of a massive gravesite—it was a death so sudden that it would have been shocking should any of the crew onboard even known that anything was wrong beforehand. The news that it was a sudden event was jarring for many online who had developed whole “schticks” for their anti-billionaire comedy routines, interrupting the work of a Twitter account dedicated to counting down the hours of oxygen left and ruining the punchlines to a few Oceangate stand up style jokes.

But the idea is still there, floating among the darkness of the human psyche to gently settle within the debris fields in our imaginations. What would it be like…to be lost in a dark cold space with strangers and only a limited time left to grieve? What would it feel like to have your own hubris come to undo you? What might it be like to be annexed into the mythos of the Titanic more than 100 years after it broke apart and sank to the bottom of the sea? Not everyone is so poetic about their feelings, but writers and creatives cannot help but feel things deeply and fully and completely in ways that sometimes have to come out and be seen and acknowledged. So, as is the tradition of humanity: we raised the dead in the only fashion that was possible—through fiction.

Real Person Fiction, or “RPF” for short, is a genre of fanfiction that utilizes the concept of a living person as a base for a character in a fictional work. It is not that any author believes that this work is representative of reality and it certainly is never presented as having any amount of truth within it, being a purely fictionalrepresentation of a character merely formulated to represent an idealized fantasy of that person. A well-known example of RPF is actually the much-read classic, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno where those met in the levels of the nine circles of Hell were actual people who had lived and died on the Earth, their actions and speech within the pages those of Dante’s imagination…what he thought they ought to say should they be present in Hell and met by a visitor. Some of these were even people that Dante knew personally whose downfall in Hell was likely simply one of his personal fantasies or had some literary or philosophical purpose.

Archive of Our Own (Ao3) plays host to plenty of RPF, as it is one of the few online spaces where one might actually find a readership for works that include it. Most of the time, RPF is about a famous person, someone who has given up the expectation of privacy for the public spotlight. Military leaders, politicians, singers, idols, sport stars, and actors are all represented in works that either satirize or memorialize them, casting them in silly or serious works that merely utilize their image for fun or for purpose. Naturally, as the imaginations of millions are sparked with the possible gruesome deaths of five men in a dark, cold submarine as they run out of oxygen, RPF of the Oceangate submersible began cropping up on Ao3. The first RPF of Oceangate’s submersible was titled as many crack fics of Ao3 are titled, The Tin can to see the titanic, but they lost control and now they are lost and getting pretty damn horny. True to most crack fics, it is in no way serious and reads like a particularly bad fanfiction with British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding using words like “senpai” and asking 19 year old Suleman Dawood to be his “daddy.”

The internet exploded with condemnations for disrespectful speech lobbed at those who were on the submersible, claiming that “nobody deserved” the possible deaths they might have experienced had they run out of oxygen or succumbed to hypothermia even while the aforementioned fic ended with “Wish they suffered more” and a hashtagged “#EATTHERICH” in the author’s note. Some Twitter users suggested that one could not be a true revolutionary if one did not celebrate the demise of any and all billionaires as their very existence is an affront to humanity while others lamented that Suleman Dawood, at the very least, was a tragic loss being only 19 and having had serious misgivings about the whole trip, only relenting due to the experience being one he could take with his father for Father’s Day. Comments on the fic itself were a mixture of affirmations and condemnations and at the time of this article, there were over 700 comments, the existence of the fic alone sometimes an issue of contention even without the distasteful content.

From this, several more RPFs about the unfortunate souls aboard the doomed submersible spawned with just over 100 fics now filtered under “Oceangate - Fandom.” Most of the attitudes toward billionaires who made a choice to board a shifty little dollar-store submarine piloted by a Logitech controller were that of unhindered apathy, bordering on malicious. Very little pity was felt by those writers who considered the natural result of poor decisions to be the just desserts for the ultra-rich while others still considered those within the newly-crumbled ocean garbage to be undeserving of their fate. It is natural, is it not, to rationalize that someone facing a terrible end might have somehow deserved such a thing—especially when one’s fate was the direct result of a bad decision? As humans we are designed to separate ourselves from the messy and the frightening—we personally would never board a sub-standard craft to go peek at a mud-covered shipwreck and so those who are crazy enough to do so clearly chose the risk and as they were, in fact, billionaires there were 250,000 better things they could have spent their dollars on that wouldn’t have resulted in their deaths. Pleas for empathy fall on deaf ears when it comes to those who despise the rich.

Arguments suggesting that someone in their families might see the content have been countered with arguments that they simply should not be looking for it and people should not be sending it to them. Much as the brand new internet’s email service made it possible for sick fucks to send Nikki Catsouras’ father leaked photos of her mangled body in his Porshe 911, it is similarly possible for sick fucks to theoretically send Stockton Rush’s wife badly written fanfiction in which he gets brutally raped aboard his own invention. Obviously one might hope that enough people would avoid being soulless in such ways, but we can’t trust everyone. Despite that, censorship here really is not the move; one does not have to like a specific type of content to recognize that it should technically have the right to exist. After all, what really is the difference between someone writing about Stockton Rush getting what they think he deserves and Dante writing about the usurers of his time getting pelted by raining fire in a Plain of Burning Sand? Dante did, let me be clear, write about actual people with whom he had personal beef and well-known political leaders and historical figures. By all rights, what Dante wrote was far more contentious than some niche crack fic tucked away on an archive with just over 1,000 words and there was no doubt that the families of those mentioned in his work certainly were aware of it.

Obviously, from what we know of ethics and western society’s standards of proper behavior toward both the living and the dead, RPF is on the borderline of ethical and unethical. Because it utilizes the “image” or “identity” of an actual person without their expressed consent as the basis for an idealized character, it exists much in the fashion that our five individuals existed for those few days when their fate was uncertain—the Schrödinger’s Cat of Ethics. If five billionaires are lost floating in the ocean outside of human contact, are they dead or alive? If the people involved in RPF never know about it and are never made aware of it, is it ethical or unethical? It cannot cause harm to their emotional well being if they never read it, but the fact that it exists in the first place allows for the possibility that some kind of emotional harm might occur. How far dead does a person have to be for RPF to somehow become appropriate and how come we’re not seeing a continuous upheaval about the usage of living persons’ identities in crime dramatizations such as the hit film Dog Day Afternoon’s portrayal of John Wojtowicz which was made long before he passed on of cancer in 2006?

Whatever kind of personal stance one might take on Real Person Fiction, it remains one of those mires of muddy should you/shouldn’t you scenarios with no real answer in terms of ethical compatibility. Should one indulge in such pursuits, it may simply be a case of preparing for the possibility that someone might lob some criticisms your way and understanding that those criticisms are fully within their rights to make. That does not necessarily mean you have to give a shit about what those criticisms are, though it may be useful to look through and consider the cat you just may or may not have killed in an opaque box. Nevertheless, as Dante wandered through the nine circles of Hell, he did not, actually, come across any that would have housed people who wrote RPF. Do with that information as you will.