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08/13/2005: wondering about RPS
I'm curious, for those who read actor RPS pairings or are familiar with that section of fandom, is the RPS pairing usually based on or derived from a fictional one? So that the two kinds seem somewhat interchangeable? I'm asking because recently I came across a community that for my fiction reading preferences is really inconvenient and counterintuitive, but I'm wondering whether it's common for RPS.
I was browsing for SW slash and came across a number of links to posts in ewan_hayden. I would have never browsed that community on my own, unlike the communities called sw_slash or starwars_slash etc., because from its name I'd assumed it to be purely RPS about the actors. And while I'm not squicked by RPS, I don't care about it at all. I mean, I can't even remember the full name of the actor playing Anakin Skywalker in AotC and RotS. However it turns out that the community is for both RPS about the actors as well as FPS about their characters, and now I'm wondering whether that is common, and whether readers who like RPS usually equally like the fictional pairing, so that for them it makes sense to make no difference.
For me OTOH it is really inconvenient when Anakin/Obi-Wan slash is mixed in-between actor slash, because the characters for me are very much separate from the actors, and not just because in the case of SW there were several actors for the characters, as well as comics, novels and such. To me the fictional setting and character background is really important.
On some weird level I find myself vaguely annoyed that RPS and FPS is mixed like that, which I'm aware isn't quite rational, because obviously that kind of mixed community seems to work for a lot of people, like the 900+ watching ewan_hayden. And yet--
Perhaps it feels vaguely "wrong" to me (I don't mean "morally wrong" or anything, just like "wrong" as in mixing two things that don't belong together, like having a combined humor/torture archive for example doesn't make much sense), because in my "fandom socialization" RPS was very much separate and (at least initially) still controversial? I'm now wondering whether the "real" vs. "fictional" character boundaries in fandom are even still perceived as such by a majority.
