Thinky Thoughts about Genres in Fandom

[gnomi]

A question that was randomly bouncing around my head recently: when did RPF/RPS become something people wrote? I don't remember it being a big thing in the fandoms I was active in when fandoms mostly hung out on USENET. And up until (probably) the time period of the beginnings of the UPN/WB/CW fandoms, I don't remember it having such a presence in the fandom landscape. Part of my brain thinks it may have started in earnest when bandom became a thing, but I may be totally making that up.

Anyone have any more specific memories?

Comments

[lisafeld.livejournal.com]

So I remember first encountering it with the LotR and PotC actors, I think because so many details were released about behind-the-scenes shenanigans. And then I started seeing it with WWF (where people are kind of playing personae whose names they may share but who are stage personae). And then I saw a lot of Fry and Laurie and some AUs where Stephen Colbert or David Hewlett met their fictional counterparts.

But I also remember there being metaepisodes of Highlander and West Wing where the characters dealt with fanfic and online forums being written about them, and I wonder if that created a kind of proto RPF possibility.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

OK, so you're remembering the approximate same timeframe that I am. Good to know I'm not missing a lot of previous existence. Thanks.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure what the acronyms stand for...

[china_shop]

Real Person Fic/Real Person Slash. :-)

[janedavitt.livejournal.com]

I got on LJ in 2003 and it started up about a year later maybe for me? I remember seeing a Nicholas Brendon and his twin brother one (Buffy actor) and feeling upset.It really shocked me at the time. I'm less pearl clutching now but I'm still not wild about it.

[ephemera.livejournal.com]

I tripped and fell into Popslash RPS in 2002? 2003? And the fandom was already past it's peak at that point, but very much in the wider-fandom closet (and LOTRPS got huge not long after) I think the mainstreaming-within-fandom of RPS, and actor RPS at that, can be dated to season 1 of Supernatural, where the choice between incest and RPS suddenly silenced a lot of the RPS-is-immoral arguments that I remember seeing in the wild before.

[china_shop]

I was going to say popslash too. That was the first big RPS fandom I was aware of.

I wrote my first RPF in Jan 2005, when it was still pretty rare in my corner of fandom. I posted it flocked and was terribly squirmy about it, and most of the comments on it were pretty squirmy too, but that's down to my specific corner of fandom at that time. And, heh, all my subsequent RPF/RPS is flocked as well, so...

[tsuki-no-bara.livejournal.com]

i was vaguely aware of popslash (i blame ephemera) and lotrips, which both predated my experience of cwrps by a couple years - so probably 2003/4 - but i was never remotely in either fandom and i didn't get rps at all. i got the impression that it was big in lotr fandom, but it wasn't a big thing for me until i got into spn in 2006. (and oddly enough it was rps that got me into the fandom. go fig.) i think the explosion of bandom came a year or two later - i remember someone at the second wincon (so october 2007) bitching about the influx of bandom people.

[michelel72.livejournal.com]

Fanlore also seems to finger popslash as the tipping point.

[aubergineautumn.livejournal.com]

All I know is that CW RPS cemented it.

[aubergineautumn.livejournal.com]

...astolat has been in fandom since at least 1994. If you sort her fic by date, you can pretty much see what fandom was popular in any given year.

http://www.intimations.org/fanfic/index.cgi?sortby=allbydaterev