As long as fandoms have been functioning, so have ships, in all their forms. The act of being a superfan in the internet age has evolved from the days of one true pairings—better known as OTPs—to crack-ships like Diary of a Wimpy Kid’s Rodrick Heffley with Mean Girls’ Regina George. It’s all in good fun, of course, until these characters’ real-life counterparts are thrown into the mix, thanks to RPF, or Real Person Fiction.

Olympian Amber Glenn is the latest celebrity to speak out against RPF, albeit subtly. After posting a TikTok with Alysa Liu as they hit the rink during their Stars on Ice tour, Amber was met with a ton of comments shipping her and her fellow Team USA Blade Angel.

“Now THIS is yuri on ice,” one person wrote, referencing the Japanese media genre that focuses on WLW relationships. Another chimed in, “Is it getting hot in here ???”

Amber then stepped in to put a stop to the shipping, mainly because she has more of a sisterly bond with Alysa. “GUYS ALYSA IS LIKE A LITTLE SISTER TO ME! I’VE KNOWN HER SINCE SHE WAS 10 AND I WAS 16,” she wrote, alongside a sweet selfie from their early training days.

It wasn’t long before fans came to her defense and combated the RPFing. One person in her comments section may have put it best: “Stop shipping real people like they’re fictional characters. ’Cause that’s where shipping comes from. There’s a difference between celebrity, gossip, and that. It’s weird!!! Don’t do it.”

Amber and Alysa aren’t the only public figures who have fallen victim to RPFing. Recently, Hudson Williams had to urge Heated Rivalry’s dedicated fan base to stop shipping him with his on-screen love interest, Connor Storrie, in real life, replying to a fan edit with, “Rpfing gotta stop yall.”

Lest we forget, two things can be true: They can have insane chemistry as Shane and Ilya on-camera while maintaining their own separate relationships offscreen. Especially because Hudson has a girlfriend, and both actors have maintained that they are nothing more than close friends.

RPF feels particularly invasive when it affects how these folks move in real life. I witnessed it firsthand in the 2010s, as part of two separate fandoms on Stan Twitter as a teen. The first was Larry Stylinson—or, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson—in One Direction’s heyday in 2012. The pair were nothing but teenage guys and bandmates, as they claimed many times during their tenure, yet fans ran wild with theories that they were secretly lovers. Neither of them had commented on their sexuality, let alone their relationships to each other, and Larry shippers, in their grand delusion, chose to see it as a forbidden romance.

It eventually got to a point of frustration where Louis had to address it head-on, as he was dating Eleanor Calder at the time. He took to social media, writing, “Hows this , Larry is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard. I’m happy why can’t you accept that.”

Their former bandmate, Zayn Malik, even opened up about how out of hand Larry Stylinson had gotten during a 2015 interview with The Fader. “It’s not funny, and it still continues to be quite hard for them. They won’t naturally go put their arm around each other because they’re conscious of this thing that’s going on, which is not even true,” he said, maintaining that there were “no secret relationships going on with any of the band members.”

Similarly, Lauren Jauregui and Camila Cabello faced severe levels of RPFing as former Fifth Harmony bandmates around the same time. Like Larry, fans picked up on their chemistry as friends and built a ship of their own: Camren.

Lauren, who identifies as bisexual, openly shut down theories that she and Camila were ever romantically involved. When Camren shippers seemingly celebrated Lauren’s breakup with her real-life partner in 2017, she claimed she hated the RPFing because “it’s invasive, scary, delusional, disrespectful to us both and was never real...Ever.”

A few years later, she got candid about how the fictional ship surrounding her and her real-life bandmate had affected her approach to romantic connections with other women.

“People thought Camila and I were, like, into each other, and that made me so uncomfortable. Like, disgustingly uncomfortable,” she said during an interview on En la Sala with Becky G in 2020. “Because I was queer, but she was not.”

“To this day, I hyper-analyze every connection that I have with a girl,” Lauren, who claims the ship was “traumatizing,” admitted. “Because I don’t want to make them feel that I’m looking at them that way, because to this day, they are convinced that that was real.”

While fictional characters can live with the fantasy their fans project upon them, public figures aren’t meant to be part of such interactions. So, let’s keep the energy fictional, because ships are all good fun…until they’re not, and they affect the mental health of real people.