It skeeves me when I think too hard about it. So ... I don't.

I do steer clear of fic that's taking really weighty personal matters and using them for plot fodder, though. Like, a certain band boy's issues with leaving his religion and his break with his family. Or another's issues with his alcoholic dad's death. That seems ... way too personal.

But reading about them turning into kittens? Not a problem! Also not a problem to read about them all having gleeful sex, either, somehow.

My lines are vague and have been erased and redrawn too many times to count.

I missed the RPF discussion at the f2f but I would have come down on the side of skeeved.

It skeeves me when I think too hard about it. So ... I don't.

Yeah. There's a LOT of bandom RPF that I don't read, because ... well, because. But a well-written, perhaps cracky AU? Lures me in every time.

I think it's either the crack or the extreme humor that lures me in. I mean, who wouldn't love Simon Pegg not knowing how to deal with a zombie, because you know it was only a movie! And yet...Not Using the Z-Word.

I do steer clear of fic that's taking really weighty personal matters and using them for plot fodder, though. Like, a certain band boy's issues with leaving his religion and his break with his family. Or another's issues with his alcoholic dad's death. That seems ... way too personal.

So do the songs they write about it, sometimes.

Which has nothing to do with fic but everything to do with the song that came up on shuffle when I was reading this thread.

My opinion is very much like Juliana's. If someone I trust recs a piece of RPF, I might check it out, but there is little chance I'll seek it out on my own.

In other news, the spn_summergen stories are being posted. Four are up now, and so far I've liked all of them.

Afraid I generally fall on the skeeved side for RPF, though that may be my only line in the sand regarding fanfic. But I figure if shallot's stories can't interest me in reading it, no one can—I followed her into SGA crack and Wincest without blinking an eye.

Eh, not so much? I mean, I read a fair amount of CW RPF, and a: some of it is, in fact, gen; b: much of it is, in fact, not porn (though a lot of it is romance).

I'm not making any assumptions about what constitutes CW RPF, or why people enjoy it; like Morgana, I'm talking about the metric shitload of J2 fic that one encounters in the course of being a fan of SPN fic, and trying to understand why people seem to be under the impression that J2 belongs in SPN fandom, rather than being a fandom of its own.

I don't disagree that the RPS fandom for a given show is arguably different in tone and direction from their fictional counterparts, but I strongly disagree that there isn't an actual fandom surrounding RPF and its various incarnations.

???

...yeah, um, I'm pretty positive I didn't say that.

I was specifically addressing the way that SPN and SPN RPS are interwoven, and, sorry, when a HUGE number of the prompts on the SPN kink_meme explicitly say they want to read about Sam (or Jared) doing X, Y and Z to Dean (or Jensen), I cannot help thinking that a lot of people are playing that game of their-names-are-pasted-on-yay porn.

If you're treating SPN RPS as a fandom in its own right, with its own canon and context and characterisation etc etc (as you certainly should be, and as I assume most RPS writers do), then Sam Winchester and Jared Padalecki really are not interchangeable. I haven't seen any other fandom where the RPS fic was so deeply interwoven with fanfic for the show.

Am I saying that all SPN RPS is doing that? Of course not. But there are a LOT of fen who think liking J2 and liking Sam/Dean is pretty much the same thing, and whose fic requests (in this and previous memes) reflect that.

I don't know how to look at that thread of SPN fandom without assuming it's their-names-are-pastede-on-yay.

eta

And notwithstanding the fact that it does do my head in, I'm not rabidly anti-RPF. (I mean, fuck, I've cracked and written it, so, you know, that ship has sailed.) It just boggles my mind that SPN is so thoroughly mixed up with the RPS for the show, because I haven't seen that before.

I'm still really not very comfortable with reading about the actors, though, and all the more so when it includes their friends and family (and, Jesus, dogs - SO MUCH bestiality in the SPN kink_meme, along with a number of kinks I had to look up, and others that I didn't have to look up, but was still left going o_O about - but, you know, I'm sure lots of people felt that way about the tentacleporn, whereas I was all "Ha! Hell yes!", for that is the horrifying beauty of the kink_meme). I think RPS is very interesting, with its use of liminal space between reality and fiction, but it still does do my head in.

However, I find most all that sense of residual discomfort gets kicked out the window once you're talking crack AU. Which is how come I ended up writing crossdressing regency dubcon J2 fic, and spent yesterday laughing my ass off over Leonidaslion's fabulous torrid Warrior/Slave Historical AU J2 noncon story yesterday morning. 'Cause at that point, it feels very much less like you're being a creepy stalker, and much more like you're reading original fic with the actors in costume on the front cover. imho. ymmv.

I'm not making any assumptions about what constitutes CW RPF, or why people enjoy it; like Morgana, I'm talking about the metric shitload of J2 fic that one encounters in the course of being a fan of SPN fic, and trying to understand why people seem to be under the impression that J2 belongs in SPN fandom, rather than being a fandom of its own.

Probably, frankly, the fact that they're fraternal twins. Unlike other fandoms where there's a strong RPF section, the RPF in SPN started in parallel with the FPF, if not a few minutes before it. In S1, from what SA would know being in it at the time, and what I dimly recall from other friends who were in it, when it was small, it made logistical sense for it to be grouped in one newsletter. The volume hadn't exploded yet, there was a lot of crossover in readers/writers, so why split it?

But there are a LOT of fen who think liking J2 and liking Sam/Dean is pretty much the same thing, and whose fic requests (in this and previous memes) reflect that.

Or you have a lot of fen who like either/both, and who aren't picky about which pairing gets written, which is similar, but not the same, as thinking of them as interchangeable. Maybe I'm quibbling with semantics here (probably am), but it seems less pasting, more maximizing the chances of someone writing the prompt. Does that make sense outside of my head? Like, if you're into walrus costume bdsm, and you like both Sam/Dean and JSquared, if you want to see someone dressing as a walrus and using whips and chains, you double your chances of seeing it if you're cool with either, though you'd expect the story itself to be different depending on which one the prompt taker chose to do.

Like, if you're into walrus costume bdsm, and you like both Sam/Dean and JSquared, if you want to see someone dressing as a walrus and using whips and chains, you double your chances of seeing it if you're cool with either, though you'd expect the story itself to be different depending on which one the prompt taker chose to do.

This is both logical and brain-rupturingly hilarious.

(And I would be supremely unsurprised to see somebody has requested EXACTLY THAT.)