I want to study the thing where any time a story acknowledges the existence of fanfic within the setting, there's a really good chance it will exclusively be RPF (real person fiction), and also very commonly it'll be about people the writer personally knows, without anything more than a jokey acknowledgement that this is bizarre.
I know most of it comes down to the characters in the story being the only reason to introduce fanfic to the setting in the first place and it being a very meta reference in general, but for me it's one of those "poor person on TV has a really nice Manhattan apartment" things because it would be so mindblowingly creepy to do in real life. And as a fanfic author/romance writer it often seems well-intentioned, sort of like, "Yay, we see you!" and usually I'm just mildly horrified because if I found out someone I knew was writing porn about me and other people and making it public, they would need to hold out for the seventh child of a seventh child to break the curse I would put on their lineage.
Weirdly it feels like it's of a piece with the tendency for some writers to portray writers in their stories as bizarre caricatures who lack self-awareness, and in-universe fiction as over-the-top clunky and melodramatic. All the characters are displaying recognizable human behavior and then one of them is reading a book and the excerpt in the text will be something like, "Princess Vidalia clasped her hands over her ample bosom and sighed deeply. 'Where, oh where is Prince Hasenpfeffer?!' she cried. 'Without my love, I shall surely die!'" and the character reading it goes, Wow! The greatest love story of all time! This is a normal book!