RPS, or “real-person slash“, is when you write fanfic about an actual person (instead of the character they’re playing). For example, instead of writing an ER femslash fic about Susan Lewis and Kerry Weaver, you write one about Sherry Stringfield and Laura Innes.
RPS is kind of icky; it’s like fantasy pushing. Though, I mean, plenty of people fantasize about famous actors, singers, and the like, so it’s not unheard of. It’s just… I don’t know… not cool, I guess.
I’ve written my fair share of fanfic over the years; in fact, my first piece of fanfic was written in elementary school, during a unit about the holidays, when I wrote a story about the Enterprise-D crew beaming down to a planet to learn about Hanukkah (so this would’ve been 1987 or 1988). But in all that time I only wrote one piece of RPS. And it wasn’t even slash; it was a self-insert.
This would’ve been in the mid-90s, I think. I was figuring out that I was a spanko, and exploring it through writing about it and reading spanking fiction on BBSes (kids, ask your parents). This was also around the time I was watching a lot of MTV (and, to a lesser extent, VH1), and Fiona Apple’s song “Criminal” was popular. In the video, she looked like a waif — really like a manic pixie dream girl — and there was at least one part where she was wearing just her underthings. I don’t think they were necessarily sexy underthings, either.
Anyway, the whole thing spoke to me, mixed itself with my burgeoning spanko-ness, and turned into a RPS story about Fiona Apple breaking a vase and being spanked by her boyfriend (who, of course, was a more mature and dominant version of myself). It was a relatively straightforward story — I don’t even think there was any sex in it — and while I didn’t share it anywhere I did reread it from time to time, at least until I lost it during one of my many computer moves. (This was well before the cloud or automatic backups.) At this point all I remember is the first few lines:
“You’ve been a bad, bad girl.”
“I’ve been careless with a delicate…”
“…vase.”
Literally no other information remains in my head about this story.
Interestingly, a few years after this, I read that, while Fiona Apple was dating David Blaine, he used to spank her. I get the general feeling from the tone of the news stories that she wasn’t into it. Too bad.
Blaine spanked the real person, Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart (her real name, according to Wikipedia); in my story, my character spanked the singer Fiona Apple. The line is blurry, but it’s there. Somewhere.