Good point. It's also why it almost doesn't feel like RPS to me. I seldom know much about the actors themselves even in shows that I like, just their characters. (As an aside, it's same with musicians for me: I don't actually care much what the band members names are, and certainly not about their birthday or favourite food or dog's name; I just like the music.) So even if I were trying to write actual RPS, it'd be deeply shaped and informed by the characters they play: kind of like reverse engineering? Like imagining what the actor must be like based on the way they interpret a character. With JM, for instance, an awful lot of Spike characterization is physical and not something that's actually written on the page, so it makes sense to imagine that JM's got that kind of physicality and angular movement. (It gets easier if you've seen the actor play different roles.) And imagining what the way Dean looks at Sammy might give away about the ways JA thinks about family ties or guilt or expressing his emotions.

And then in an AU, where the roles and eponyms are changed - not "vampire", or "demon hunter", or "computer geek", but "Formula One driver", etc. - I don't really know where the characterization is supposed to come from or be informed by! My completely invented view of the actor? The character they play? Practically speaking, I imagine that if I were to expand this I'd end up writing it much more as "Dean as driver" than "JA as driver", but in the end I'm not sure it'd resemble the guys in anything beyond the names.

/blather

Um. Now perhaps I'll go read your AU to gather some info, instead of musing aloud about something I don't really understand? *g*