Current mood:	thoughtful
Current music:	Miranda July - "Girls on Dates"
Entry tags:	fandom rambles, lotrips, writing

casting
Recently during a discussion of slash, I saw someone (sorry, lost the link) mention that she thought of "RPS" as standing for "Role Playing Slash" rather than "Real Person Slash", because she thought RPS writers are better served by thinking of the characters in their fiction as original, even if they're modelled heavily on actors; RPS writers are using the actors to play roles, not trying to faithfully depict the actors' lives.

That sounds accurate to me, but potentially confusing, since quite a few of us do write stories via role-playing games, so classing all RPS as "role playing slash" may not be ideal.

I wonder if we aren't ready to move past the RPS label, though, and away from the "morality/legality of RPS" debates. Maybe we can call it something else to help promote understanding of what RPS really is. ETA: After all, Real Person Fiction doesn't have basis in 'reality'; it has basis in media events, reports, articles, and photographs, almost all of which are staged and artificial to one degree or another. So while the term is useful and popular and widespread, I wonder if it's not time for something less semantically loaded and more accurate to the current state of fan fiction to take its place.

Any ideas for other good terms? I kind of like the idea of calling it "casting"... "casting fiction", "casting slash". We're not really writing about Orlando, or Viggo or Ian or Billy or Dom or Elijah. We're casting them in roles in our stories. We just use their names to evoke the appearance and presence of the actor we're casting in the story. And in some AU stories, even the names are different-- David Lawford (Jude Law) in Sable Knot, Nic in Lotr_Porn, Lando in West, for example.

Clearly there's something other than "real person slash" going on here-- the genre's expanded beyond fantasies about the people in question, if it was ever even confined to that. I'd love to see new ways of framing the fiction, new ways of talking about it.

Crossposted with more discussion at Journalfen's Fandom_Lounge.