Pre-Supernatural, popslash was huge in the early 2000s, on LJ and in places like Geocities. It generated a lot of strong anti-RPS sentiment in fandom, even amongst other slashers. I recall it being equated in all seriousness to actual rape. I went to a slash con back in 2003 where there was a panel which was basically: RPS, acceptable or not? (Somewhat complicated by the anti-RPS panelist having been converted to a more-or-less pro stance by the time of the con.)
The questions I would ask myself and anyone around me are:
- Why was bandfic different than actorfic in terms of fandom reception in their own circle? How much hetero vs slash RPF play a role in this? How much was slash vs het self-insert?
- How much gen vs smut content play a role in this, with RPF crackfics being more easily tolerated but sex becoming the issue?
- How much was the shock of different fandom communities coming together on ffnet?@mannafrancis Oh god, was it Escapade? We do that thing where one panel every year is a throwback to a panel from the con 10 years ago or 20 years ago or whatever. The con chairs read through a list of things from the program that year, and attendees vote on which panel they want to revisit.
A couple of years ago, we were doing this, and the con chair read off “RPS, Taboo or old hat?”, and we all blurted out “Old hat!” Heh. (And then we picked some other panel that was still relevant.)
How times change!
My memory is that popslash was adopted by a bunch of fans who hadn’t thought about RPF before. It was the latest hot thing that slash fans were leaving other slash fandoms for (always a cause of bitterness in and of itself if you like the old fandom that’s emptying out). Actorfic wasn’t necessarily on those people’s radar at that time. I don’t know that actorfic was seen as different so much as baby’s first RPF fandom was seen as a unique outlier in a way that RPF fandoms just aren’t now.
(I wasn’t in popslash, but my friends who tried to get me in at the time presented it very much as ‘This is a unique case where the canon is this band, but it’s like your other fandoms’, not as a general ‘We like RPF now’ thing.)
RPF only got called that later. I remember it being “RPS” for ages and ages, even when there was some amount of het mixed in with all the slash. But the het would be the Brittney/band guy pair the spares side story in somebody’s m/m epic. There has always been a ton of Famous Guy/Female Self Insert content, but my memory is that different people were producing it in different spaces. It’s not even that fans judged one more harshly than the other–though I’m sure we did–but that they just weren’t seen as the same genre at all.
An early 2000s slash fan evaluating whether “RPS” was bad or not wouldn’t have been thinking about OFC self-insert romance at all.
RPF crackfics are something I associate with Quizilla type spaces. The early RPS I was aware of was all conventional shippy stories, some more pornographic than others. The shipping was what was controversial, not so much the porn itself. I suspect the fundamental issue for a lot of people was that it was “disrespectful” to imagine a famous person in a gay relationship. I remember this being a startlingly common feeling at the time, even among people who were otherwise not homophobic.
MediaWest*Con, that bastion of bad policies, still segregates slash vids, regardless of level of explicitness. They play after “gen” (i.e. low-rated het and actual gen) and “mature” (dirty het). Rating is not important to how oldschool fandom evaluated slash. Gay cooties are.
It used to be common for dicks who hated slash to complain about slash being “disrespectful” to the authors or actors of canon. The argument against that was that they’re fictional characters, and the audience’s take is valid. The rise of a big RPS fandom risked making that claim look like the dumb excuse it was. (”Fuck you, I ship what I want” not being seen as sufficient justification back then.)
Popslash fans, like fans of kpop and such now, argue that these types of musicians have manufactured public personas, so the people who are being slashed aren’t really two actual humans but two characters. This is a reasonable argument for boy bands, less so for most actors. It’s still how RPF fans talk about the difference between actual real life and the celebrity news they’re basing their fic on, but I wonder if it might have been a hard sell back then–e.g. when LotRiPS got big. I definitely remember some of the talk about popslash being very “my one exception”, not a broad defense of RPF.
I don’t remember being aware of ff.net’s RPF ban at the time. (But I was observing popslash through friends, so that’s probably why.) A lot of the oldschool slash fandom people I knew were only just starting to discover ff.net when it repeatedly enacted policies they hated. It only started at the end of ‘98 and banned everything fun in ‘01/’02. So we’re talking about a roughly 2-year window of lots of people discovering ff.net and then lots of them leaving it. There were other archives springing up. I started in X-Files, which had its own archive that predated ff.net. It wasn’t the institution it is now, and the people I knew in popslash fandom weren’t discovering fandom through it. Most of them were more active on usenet or mailing lists. Around 2003 (as popslash’s boom was waning and LotRiPS was exploding), that crowd was all moving to LJ, but the discussions were very much “Is LJ killing lists?” Nobody was talking about ff.net.
My experience of the cultural effects of popslash was that it was less about different communities coming together and more about people who had formerly been part of the slash fandom old guard getting into a different, new thing and their friends going “Don’t go where I can’t follow!”
I don’t think it was so much the gayness that was seen as disrespectful–a lot of anti-RPS folks were slashers. It was simply the fact that it was real people, people fans had even interacted with at cons (Brit SF fandom especially, where the circles were smaller) that crossed the line into squick for a surprising amount of people. You really did get people who wrote saucy m/m (and not all of them straight, either) saying they could never do RPF. Even with slash itself, the whole “it’s disrespectful to the actors” angle was *the* hot potato–you only have to dig in to the history of Blake’s 7 fandom to see just how nasty it could get. (Long story short: anti-slash fandom faction A shows slash art/zines by faction B to actor, actor is homophobic about it, wants to ban all slash materials from fan activities; faction A rejoices over a petty triumph and for getting various members of B ostracised).
All I can say, thank fuck hobbit RPS and bandom changed all that around 2000-2003 and RPS finally became normalised. I’m pretty sure RPF fics now outnumber FPF fic on Ao3, don’t they? Bandom certainly is one of the hugest fandoms out there.
Signed, someone whose very first online fic circa 1997 was RPS of two actors she fancied because she didn’t find suitable characters of them to slash, and who did not know RPS was just Not Done until she was told off for it. Think About The Actors/Creators Whose Feelings You Might Hurt!
B7 was also one of those clusterfucks where TPTB thought they had a cash cow like Star Trek when really they had a cult classic. They were paranoid about cooties from fan stuff they didn’t like ruining their chance to cash in. (Or so I’ve seen speculated.) Of course, it was all absurd because they never would have raked in the Star Trek $$$, and they managed to tank some of the opportunities they did have by messing up the fandom.
RPF is an overwhelming majority of fic on Wattpad from what I’ve seen. It’s big on AO3 but definitely not the majority.
Looking at the RPF metatag, it’s 200k+, while AO3 overall is around 4 million works. (i.e. around 5%–though not all RPF fandoms are under that umbrella.) That’s a bit bigger than the Supernatural or Harry Potter tags and a bit smaller than the Marvel metatag.
There are 46,197 works in the ‘Bandom’ tag, which makes it a medium-size fandom by AO3 standards, half or a third the size of the true megafandoms.
To give some perspective:
- Castiel/Dean Winchester (76,206)
- Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (58,625)
- James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers (35,877)
- Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter (31,060)
- Dan Howell/Phil Lester (14,756)
- Jeon Jungkook/Kim Taehyung | V (14,656)
- Frank Iero/Gerard Way (8,877)
- Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz (5,514)
- Tom Hiddleston/Original Female Character(s) (2,504)
- Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin (2,462)
That “they thought they had a cash cow” thing with B7 was with those guys who got the rights in the 00s; the fanfic fiasco was way before that (we’re talking decades earlier) and more to do with schisms between fans. (B7 never even had RPS apart from like… three fics, and 15 years or so after this brouhaha. The schism was all about fictional character slash itself being “creepy” towards the actors). The doofuses who bought the rights later LEGIT thought it was a wholesome family adventure series like Trek/Star Wars and completely missed the dark dystopian bits… which made B7 what it was in the first place. I’m glad to see their reboot attempts haven’t got off the ground; they sound awful.
I guess the RPF thing depends on how you do the statistics, yeah. But I do remember being really surprised at just how huge it’s got after Ao3 happened, and I’m really glad people aren’t prudish about it any more. What I wanted to contribute was the angle I experienced the backlash from–but that depends on which fandom you were in, what kinds of circles, obviously. I only ever got the “it’s disrespectful and creepy” angle, less of the “slash itself is creepy” angle since I started out in slashy fandom communities to begin with. The squick wasn’t the gayness; it was the real people-ness.
I *do* remember those times where you were basically bullied into tagging all slash as R or NC-17, though, even if it was mere kissing or UST. There were some LJ comms that kicked you out if you didn’t do that, AND insisted you put the term “NSFW” in both the post title and the fic header just in case some innocent might stumble onto a porny fic/artwork under a cut if you didn’t warn them twice. (And again, these were the slash-positive comms, with queer members). The self-policing back then was insane. It is insane now, too, but in different ways.