[3] The genre includes stories about actors, athletes, comedians, historical figures, musicians, newsworthy people, and reality show contestants among others, as well as fiction about the fans themselves.
In general, the authors seem to adopt the public personas of the celebrities in question as their own characters, building a fictional universe based on the supposed real-life histories of their idols.
[4] This has not stopped mainstream legacy media outlets from giving legitimacy to such fiction in some cases: Chinese outlet Sina World News in 2016 for example promoted a hypothetical friendly written correspondence between badminton athletes Lin Dan of China and Lee Chong Wei of Malaysia immediately after the 2016 Olympics semifinals in which Lin defeated Lee in the peak of their competitive rivalry.
For example, in RPF based around The Lord of the Rings, Viggo Mortensen is frequently shown as taking an Aragorn-like leadership role, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan are lighthearted Hobbit-like pranksters, and Elijah Wood is more physically fragile and emotionally vulnerable than his colleagues.
A Mary Sue may become romantically involved with a band member or actor, join a film cast, prove to have superior acting or singing ability, and/or possess incredible beauty.
[12] Jean Lorrah's "Visit to a Weird Planet",[13] published in Spockanalia 3 (1968), was a lighthearted two-parter about what would happen if a transporter malfunction caused the Star Trek characters to be swapped with the 20th-century actors who played them.
Regina Marvinny, editor of Tricorder Readings, encouraged fans in the early 1970s to write "what-if" stories about meeting Leonard Nimoy.
Due to the fact that these stories involved real Zeppelin band members, most notably Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, names were changed to pseudonyms such as "Tris" and "Alex".
Another popular website for RPF chosen by youth fan fic writers is Winglin.net or Asianfanfics.com, which is more commonly centered on Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese or Chinese musicians and actors, like TVXQ, Super Junior, Big Bang, SHINee, EXO, Mike He, S.H.E, and others.
These are usually complete fabrications, not based on any real-life indications of the subject's sexual orientation, but on the fantasies of the author and the desire to experiment with perceived or invented erotic subtext between the idols in question.
[20] In 2008, a man was arrested in the UK for writing and publishing on the internet a story featuring various members of the band Girls Aloud under the Obscene Publications Act.