Lotrips

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RPF Fandom
Name(s): LotRiPS, Lord of the Rings RPF, Real Person Fiction, Real Person Slash, LotR RPS, LotRRPS
Scope/Focus: The cast & crew of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy
Date(s): 2002 to present
See also: Elijah Wood, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Sean Astin, Viggo Mortensen, Liv Tyler, Orlando Bloom, Sean Bean, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, Karl Urban, Miranda Otto, David Wenham, The Hobbit RPF
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Lotrips is an RPF fandom based on the actors who appeared in the The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The name is abbreviated in many ways, but the most popular term may be "LotRiPS" (Lord of the Rings Real People Slash, and is often pronounced "low-trips".) Although the term uses slash for fanfic, art and vids, it encompasses het, femslash and gen as well.

Fandom History

Lotrips fandom emerged in early 2002, soon after the release of the first of the three films, The Fellowship of the Ring.

LiveJournal icon of the DVD extras by chicken_icons
LiveJournal icon of the DVD extras by chicken_icons

The extended DVD editions of the films, featuring cast commentaries on the films, long interviews, and short behind-the-scenes documentaries, encouraged the fandom and created a canon for fan fiction. The fandom was very active through the next two years, reaching its peak when The Return of the King won eleven Academy Awards on February 29, 2004. Since that time, activity has been dwindling, though a steady trickle of new fans joins in.

Fanfiction

Perhaps because the first movie was so focused on the nine male members of the Fellowship of the Ring, and there are so few female characters at all, this fandom has always been mainly slash: there's very little het or femslash, and almost no gen fic. LOTR RPF has enthusiastically embraced nearly every fanfiction genre and trope possible, including (but not limited to) angst, schmoop, PWP, OTP, OT3, OT4, Hurt/Comfort, UST, domestic!fic, dark!fic, kidfic, AU, BDSM, crack!fic, future!fic, tentacle!fic, wingfic (and related horn!fic and tail!fic), crossovers, and mpreg.

Common Pairings

Nearly every other conceivable pairing, threesome, or moresome has been written and re-written.

Archives and Communities

Beyond The Fellowship

On December 28, 2001, Leetal founded the LOTR_RPS mailing list, which very soon buzzed with a staggering amount of talk and stories. April 28, 2002, saw the founding of the Closer Than Brothers mailing list, which focused more on the posting of stories and less on general chatter, and the associated archive Beyond the Fellowship (now lost). Parallel to the activity on these two large mailing lists, many smaller lists dedicated to specific pairings or topics sprang up, but the fandom also started to move to Livejournal more and more where another RPS fandom (Popslash) had already established itself.

The Fellow Shippers community on LiveJournal picked up speed after the release of The Two Towers, and became the main Lotrips fic community.

LiveJournal is still the center of the fandom, with communities based on pairings, including Rugbytackle, monaboyd, vigorli, domlijah and Bloomwood.

As of June 17, 2012, there were 2855 fanworks in the Archive Of Our Own Lord of the Rings RPF fandom list.

Mirrormere automatically archived fics posted to Closer Than Brothers mailing list for a while, and offers archiving to all. The Library of Moria also accepts LOTR RPS fic. Monaboyd.net hosts a large amount of Dominic Monaghan/Billy Boyd slash fic.

Middle Earth News, which comes out three times a week, includes information about book fandom, movie fandom, FPS and RPS.

Fic Challenges, Exchanges and Awards

  • Lotrips Remix - a remix challenge, where each writer re-tells a story written by another of the writers in the challenge, and has one of their stories remixed in turn.
  • Slasha Baby - winter holiday fic exchange, originally conceived in 2003 as a "Secret Santa" gift exchange, has now moved its posting date to New Year's Eve.
  • V/O Xmas - winter holiday fic exchange, originally founded in 2004 as a Viggo/Orlando-specific Secret Santa gift exchange. At its height in 2005, there were 48 participants. It has since been replaced by Merry Viggorli.
  • The Men of Middle Earth (MOME) Awards cover both RPS and FPS, classic stories and those written in the last year, categorized by pairing. Nominations are usually in the summer, with voting through the early fall.
  • The Slashy Oscars are, despite the generic name, specifically for LOTR RPS only, and limited to work posted in the year previous. Nominations and voting generally occur in the spring.
  • Periodically, a fan or group is inspired to create a new challenge or exchange. In summer, 2008, the viggos_50 challenged writers to celebrate Viggo's 50th birthday by writing fifty drabbles, ficlets or chapters including him as a main character.

Fanzines

Celebrity RPGs

There have been many Celebrity RPGs (role-playing games) in LOTR RPS fandom. Hollyweirdos, begun in April 2003, was a meta/crack parody RPG that was more about Lotrips fandom than the actors themselves. One of the most-read RPGs was in the LiveJournal community lotr_porn, a Pornstar_AU game featuring a sex-positive pornography studio, with many LOTR and related celebrities as participants. In The Establishment, a multi-fandom RPS AU in which actors belonged to a kinky sex club, several pairings involving LotR actors were among the game's most popular.

Controversies

LOTRPS was certainly a fandom which brought the crazy, helping coin such exciting terms as My hed iz pastede on yay and tinhat.

External Resources

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