THE LANGUAGE OF FANDOM

Like a lot of subcultures, fandom members speak their own vernacular that can sound utterly impenetrable to outsiders. Since so much of fandom is online, fandom vocabulary grew out of internet vocabulary; there is a lot of use of abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons. This glossary is supposed to be as general as possible. There are a great many terms that are specific to individual fandoms; those aren't mentioned here, but if you should wander into a fandom messageboard sometime, you'll hopefully be able to use this as a general guide to what the heck people are talking about.

The fact that a lot of fandom vocabulary concerns sexual activity or sexual deviance should not be taken to mean that most fans – or most fanworks – are perverted. As in real life, slang is more likely to become attached to things that people prefer to discuss in euphemistic terms.

FANDOM-SPECIFIC ACRONYMS

Fandoms use acronyms for a lot of things. A few of these will be discussed in detail in the glossary, but there are also more general categories of acronyms. People posting to a messageboard or talking in AIM will often save themselves from having to type a title over and over by abbreviating it: thus 'Harry Potter' is referred to as 'HP', 'Lord of the Rings' as 'LotR', and 'Pirates of the Carribean' as 'PotC'. Series with many installments may also have common acronyms for each installment; the original 'Star Trek' series will be referred to as TOS, 'Next Generation' as TNG, 'Deep Space Nine' as DS9, and so on. Finally, somebody posting a link to a piece of fanfiction will often use acronyms to list which romantic relationships are explored in the piece. Pairing acronyms take two forms. They can be single letters or shortened versions of names; for example, in 'Inuyasha' fandom, IY/KAG marks a story about the relationship between Inuyasha and Kagome. In Harry Potter fandom, HP/DM is a story pairing Harry Potter with Draco Malfoy. Or they can combine the names of two characters; in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' fandom, a 'Spuffy' story is one that romantically links Spike and Buffy. A ‘Yukiru’ story in ‘Fruits Basket’ fandom is about Yuki and Tohru as a couple.

AMV - abbreviation for 'anime music video'. These consist of a series of clips from an anime series, set to a popular song.
ANGST - fanfiction dealing with emotional extremes such as depression and suicide. Also used mockingly to describe emotional situations in fanfiction that remind the reader of pubescent mood swings.
ANIME - Japanese animation. The term has both a general and a specific meaning. Generally, it means any two-dimensional (drawn as opposed to computer-generated) animated entertainment made in Japan. Specifically, 'an anime' is the set of episodes of a weekly half-hour television show. There are most often 26 episodes in an anime (one season of TV time), but some series stretch out to several seasons. Unlike most American TV shows, which have self-contained episodes that can be viewed in any order, anime usually (though not always) tell a single overall story.
AOLESE/AOLER - exaggerated chatspeak, usually in all capitals, with random abbreviations such as 'OMG' and 'LOL' thrown in for no reason. The beginning of Hamlet's soliloquy might be rendered in AOLese as: 2 B OR NOT 2 BE TAHT IZ TEH KWESTION OMG WHETHER IT IZ NOBLER IN TEH MIND 2 SUFFER TEH SLIGNS AND ARROS OF OUTRAJUS 4TUNE OR 2 TAKE ARMS AGIANTS A C OF TRUBBLES AND BYE OPPOSING ND THEM LOL. Unlike chatspeak or leetspeak, which are most often used by people who are either lazy or think it makes them look cool, AOLese is generally used ironically. The name is a tribute to the legendary cluelessness of the sterotypical AOL customer.
AU - Alternate Universe. This acronym labels a piece of fanfiction occurring in a world based on but slightly different from that of the source material. Like most fanfiction, they range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Examples of Alternate Universes include a Star Trek story set in a universe ruled by the Borg, a Lord of the Rings story exploring what might have happened had Galadriel given in to the temptation of the One Ring and made herself Dark Empress of Middle Earth, or an Inuyasha story in which the characters are students in an American high school.
AVATAR – an image, usually a hundred pixels square, that a person uses to represent themselves on a messageboard or weblog, though the weblog versions are generally called ‘icons’.

BADFIC/TROLLFIC - a piece of fanfiction written to be as bad as possible, either as an attempt to be funny (rarely successful) or simply to draw flames. 'Badfic' is also used as a general term for very poor fanfiction.
BARTENDING IN THE DARK – a person is ‘bartending in the dark’ if he or she is taking a ‘goth’ image much too seriously. The term arose on a Harry Potter ‘sorting’ community, where a member insisted that he had to be in Slytherin House because he was so goth he worked at a goth club, bartending in the dark.
BASH - to 'bash' is to repeatedly insult something just for the sake of insulting it. A 'basher' is the person who does this.
BETA READER - a person who acts as an editor for a friend's fanfiction, reading it for content, spelling, and grammar so that the writer can make any necessary changes before posting the piece.
BISHOUNEN - 'bishounen' is Japanese for 'beautiful boy'. The term was originally anime-specific, used to refer to effeminate young men, but has since expanded to include any good-looking male character, and sometimes real people. Often abbreviated ‘bish’. The equivalent term for beautiful women, though rarely used, is ‘bishoujo’, and both it and ‘bishounen’ are their own plural. ‘Bish’, however, is pluralized as ‘bishes’.
BNF – acronym of ‘Big-Name Fan’. A BNF is a person who is well known in the fan community, whether for fanfiction, fanart, maintaining a website, moderating a community, or sometimes just for being an opinionated loudmouth whom everybody hates. The label carries a certain amount of (often ironic) prestige, and fans often aspire to ‘BNFhood’ or ‘BNFdom’.

CANON – a term borrowed from the Catholic Church, meaning 'established truth'. The definition of ‘canon’ is a bit vague, but is usually understood to mean the body of works upon which a fandom is based, and any information contained therein. This is sometimes extended to include information in guidebooks, interviews, and other such sources. Also used to refer to information from different versions of a story: for example, the school uniforms in Harry Potter ‘book-canon’ are different from those in ‘movie-canon’.
CANON RAPE/CANONRAPE/QANONREIP - blatantly disregarding aspects of the source material in writing a work of fanfiction.
CATGIRL - a being that usually resembles a fourteen-year-old girl, but with the ears (and sometimes paws and tail) of a cat. Can also be used to mean a young female fan dressed in a cat costume.
CHAN - fanfiction about small children in sexual relationships.
CHIBI - from a Japanese word. Used to describe characters drawn with exaggeratedly large heads and eyes, and small, chubby bodies and limbs, as if they are toddlers or small children.
CLAIMS - there exist a variety of communities and websites where people can 'claim' an object, individual, or concept from a particular fandom... for example, the livejournal community 'claim_a_hat' allows people to 'claim' hats worn by characters in various stories, films, and even in real life. In practice, of course, this is meaningless, but does spark arguments between people who want to 'claim' the same thing.
COLORBAR - a livejournal phenomenon, found often in fandom-related communities. The colorbar was invented by a livejournal user who decided to show support for gay marriage by posting a piece of HTML code that showed a rainbow bar and the words 'marriage is love'. Various imitations sprung up, and colorbars now exist for all sorts of things. Most consist of six versions of the same image, though multiple images on a theme are sometimes used, tinted red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple, above a line stating that whatever's in the picture 'is love'. This text is often linked to a page where the person viewing the colorbar can obtain the code needed to post it in their own journal or on their own website.
CON - short for ‘convention’.
CONCRIT - short for ‘constructive criticism’; helpful advice given to a writer or artist about how they could improve their work. Often interpreted as flaming by authors who do not wish to improve.
COSPLAY - short for 'costume play', a 'cosplayer' is somebody who dresses up as a character from their fandom. The term originated in Japan and was originally anime-specific, but has moved into wider use, and is both a noun and a verb: a cosplay is the costume itself, or the event at which it is worn. 'Cosplaying' somebody is shorthand for 'dressing up as' that individual.
CROSSCAST - inserting characters from one story into the (otherwise unaltered) plot or situation of another. Crosscasting makes for some amusing fanart, but crosscast fanfiction generally grows tiresome very quickly.
CROSSOVER - a piece of fanart or fanfiction in which characters from two different sets of source material meet. Crossovers tend to be either very good or excruciatingly bad, depending on how plausibly the writer handles the connection between the two universes. A crossover in which Buffy the Vampire Slayer teams up with Blade against their common foe could be very good - the scenarios have much in common and are easy to link. A story in which the cast of Bishoujo Senshi Sailormoon travel to another galaxy to assist Luke Skywalker in overthrowing the Galactic Empire is likely to be painful.

DDR - acronym for Dance Dance Revolution, a popular Japanese arcade game. Players have to step in particular places on a floor mat in time with fast-paced music. Characters playing DDR are a popular subject for fanart.
DEAD or DED - an individual on a messageboard or mailing list will often say they are 'dead' after hearing something they found particularly funny, surprising, or appalling. The statement should not be taken literally. It is often phrased as 'dead from funny', or 'dead from badfic' - this wording is taken from a messageboard post in which a woman described a former lover who had died as a result of cocaine abuse as being 'dead from coke'; people thought this wording was funny, and the phrase went on to acquire a life of its own. ‘Ded’ is an intentional misspelling of the AOLese variety.
DLDR - an acronym for 'don't like, don't read', often trotted out as an answer to concrit or flaming. A person who uses it to apply to a genre of fanfiction that the reviewer claims to dislike: eg, in answer to a complaint that the writer's work contains nothing but slash, is usually considered to be in the right. A person who answers valid criticism, such as complaints about their spelling or a clichéd plotline, by saying DLDR will probably be made fun of.
DOUJINSHI/DOUJIN - a Japanese word for fanfiction in the form of comic books. The publishing and sale of these is legal in Japan, and they can often be purchased at conventions and on Ebay.
DREAMCAST - a list of actors and actresses a fan would hire to play the characters in a movie based on a favourite book, or the live-action version of material that was originally animated. Usually assumes unlimited funding. The term has fallen out of frequent use since Sony chose 'dreamcast' as the name for their video game system.
DUB - used as a noun. The 'dub' of an anime is a version in which the Japanese dialogue has been re-recorded in English. Dubs are often considered as inferior to the original Japanese. This is sometimes true, but not always.

EBERT'S LAW - Ebert's Law, named for Roger Ebert the film critic, states that somebody does not need to be good at something to know when other people are very bad at it. A person who answers criticism of their fanfiction or fanart with, "well, let's see you do better!" will be told that they have broken Ebert's Law.
ELITIST – a person who considers him or herself and his or her friends ‘better’ fans than anyone else. They may form a special messageboard or chatroom where only ‘good’ or ‘true’ fans are allowed to participate. Are generally mocked behind their backs as pseudo-intellectual wannabes.
EYESPORKING - an adjective used to emphasize that something, usually fanfiction, is particularly terrible. 'Eyesporkingly bad' is about the worse insult an author can receive. The word is used to imply that the piece is so awful the reader wanted to dig out his or her own eyeballs with a spork (a combination spoon and fork) so that he or she would not have to look at it anymore. As far as anyone has ever determined, the term arose because sporks are exactly the right shape and size for the job, though it's unlikely anybody has ever really tried to use them that way.

FANART - a drawing of characters, objects, or situations from a piece of work the artist admires. Where the original piece is in a visual medium, such as a comic book or animated movie, the fanartist will usually attempt to match the original art style.
FANBOY - a particularly geeky or obsessive male fan, usually of some stereotypically 'boyish' medium such as comic books.
FANDOM - the entire community of fans devoted to a particular person or work.
FANFICTION - fanfiction is writing that uses characters or situations from a piece of work the artist admires. The term is often abbreviated to ‘fanfic’ or just ‘fic’. Fanfiction – and fanart – exist in something of a legal gray area; while the authors almost never earn money from this hobby, fanfiction is still a use without permission of somebody else’s creation, and it is considered polite to preface a piece with a short disclaimer disavowing all claim to the source material. Some authors, such as Anne Rice and Anne McCaffrey, disapprove of fanfiction or allow it only under certain conditions. In such cases it is considered polite to honour their requests.
FANGIRL - a particularly obsessive female fan. The term is used especially for female fans of a particular attractive male character or celebrity, and implies that the women or girls in question are not interested in anything about the object of their adulation except for his sex appeal. Often used as an insult.
FANGIRL JAPANESE - the practice of inserting random Japanese words or phrases into anime fanfiction or everyday conversation, especially if the terms are used incorrectly. This can be done to give a Japanese flavour to writing set in that country, or simply for the sake of showing off the author's Japanese vocabulary. Fangirl Japanese is generally frowned upon and most authors try to avoid it. Using fangirl Japanese in a story based on non-Japanese material, for example, having a non-Japanese character in a piece of Harry Potter fanfiction say 'arigatou' instead of 'thank you', is considered the fanfic equivalent of a mortal sin. The phrase can be generalized to other languages; an author using random words of French will be accused of 'fangirl French'. People who write Lord of the Rings fanfiction are occasionally guilty of 'fangirl Elvish'.
FANON - a pun on 'canon'. Concepts that are not explicitly stated, or perhaps not touched on at all, by the source material, but nevertheless accepted as true by most of the fandom, are called 'fanon'. For example, a significant part of the Harry Potter fandom accepts as more or less factual the idea that Sirius Black and Remus Lupin were at some point homosexual lovers. The faction that believes this spends a great deal of time arguing vehemently with the faction that doesn't.
FANPOODLE - a fangirl, only more so.
FANSUBS - episodes of anime, usually available for download via services such as WinMX or Bittorrent, that have been translated and subtitled by bilingual fans living in the Far East. These are usually available within hours of the episodes actually airing. Both the picture quality and the accuracy of the translations vary enormously, but many 'purist' fans prefer fansubs to commercially available versions. Fansubs exist in the same dimension of murky illegality inhabited by MP3’s.
FANZINE/ZINE - a collection of fanworks, usually fanfiction, published in the form of an amateur magazine. Issues are usually available only to the members of a club. Before the internet, zines were the only medium in which fanfiction could be shared, and many older fans reminisce about the era of zines as a golden age of quality control.
FAQ - acronym for 'frequently asked questions'. Many websites and communities have an FAQ page to answer the questions most commonly asked by new members.
FILK – poetry, often humorous, in the form of lyrics that can be sung to the tune of a popular song. Weird Al Yankovic makes his living at this.
FILLER - installments in a serial that fill time without contributing to the overall plot.
FLAME - used as both a noun and a verb. A 'flame' is an insult or a stream of vitriol. ‘To flame’ is to post such things. A 'flamer' is the person doing the flaming.
FLUFF - fanfiction or fanart that does not have much of a plot or point and/or does not deal with dark emotions.
FURRY - can be used as an adjective or noun. Something is 'furry' if it pertains to anthropomorphic animals; art, stories, comics, costumes, and many other things can be 'furry'. A 'furry' is a person who either roleplays as or claims to be such a creature. People in the latter category are usually considered a bit crazy and are often accused of bestiality.

GEN/GENFIC - fanfiction that does not deal with romantic or sexual relationships.
GIP – acronym for ‘gratuitous icon post’. A GIP is a post by somebody who doesn’t actually have anything to contribute to the conversation, but wants to show off a relevant avatar or icon.
GODWIN'S LAW - in its original form, Godwin's Law stated that the longer an online argument continues, the more likely it is that somebody on one side will compare the people on the other side to Hitler or the Nazi regime. As it's usually used, however, Godwin's Law is the statement that the person who makes this comparison has just lost the argument via massive overreaction. This individual is referred to as having either 'invoked' or 'broken' Godwin's Law, although the latter wording really doesn't make much sense.
GUSH - gushing is the opposite of bashing - a gusher absolutely loves and praises something and will go on about it until everybody else is sick of listening to them. The term is not used as often as 'bash', probably because gushers are somewhat less annoying.

HEALING COCK - a piece of fanfiction in which love and/or sex is presented as a magical cure for all of a woman's (or a homosexual man's) troubles. The term is taken from the title of an article making fun of the cliché in The Onion: Come Bathe in the Healing Light of my Cock.
HENTAI - a Japanese adjective meaning 'perverted'. Used as both a noun and an adjective, mostly in anime fandoms: 'hentai' is any sexually explicit material, be it fanfiction, manga, animation, etc. A person is ‘a hentai' when he (almost always he) is lecherous or perverted. And something is described as 'hentai' when it is sexually explicit or sexually deviant.
HET - short for 'heterosexual'. A 'het' fic is one that explores romantic or sexual relationships between members of the opposite sex.
HSAU - acronym for 'high school alternate universe', referring to fanfiction or fanart depicting characters as American high school students. High School AU's are much, much more common than they deserve to be.
HURT/COMFORT - a term used to describe a piece of fanfiction in which a character is physically or emotionally abused, then nursed back to health by his or her True Love. These are often Healing Cock fics.

IAWTC – acronym for ‘I agree with that comment.’
IC - acronym for 'in character'. Can mean either a post made to a roleplaying messageboard or mailing list as the character a person is playing, or that a character in a piece of fanfiction or fanart is behaving in a way appropriate to his or her personality.
IIRC – acronym for ‘if I recall correctly.’
IMHO – acronym for ‘in my humble opinion’.
INTERNETS/INTARWEB – intentional mistakes in writing ‘internet’, used sarcastically in a ‘like the internet, but for stupid people’ sort of way. I believe both terms come from quotes by George W. Bush.

JAPANAMATION - a synonym for 'anime'. 'Japanamation' is not often used and is considered degrading by many anime fans.

LEET/1337 – a short form of ‘elite’. Used to mean ‘exclusive’ or ‘extra-special’. Also used as an abbreviation of ‘leetspeak/13375p34k’.
LEETSPEAK/13375P34K/HAXXOR - a method of typing that substitutes numbers or symbols for letters in such a way that the result is still understandable if the reader puts some effort into it. The opening lines of 'Richard III' could be rendered in leetspeak as follows: |\|0\/\/ 15 +|-|3 \/\/1|\|+3R 0|= 0|_|R |)15(0|\|+3|\|+ |\/|4|)3 6|_0R10|_|5 5|_||\/||\/|3R |3Y +|-|15 50|\| 0|= Y0R|<. Leetspeak was invented as a way of keeping anyone from casually looking over a hacker's shoulder and reading what they were typing, and then popularized by the webcomic Megatokyo. Like chatspeak, it is often used ironically.
LEMON - an explicit sex scene in fanfiction. The term refers to a pornographic anime called Cream Lemon.
LOL - an acronym for 'laughing out loud', used either as a response to a funny comment or to clarify that what the poster is saying is not meant seriously. Generally, if a joke requires an LOL after it, it's not a very good joke. Sometimes written as ‘LOLLERSKATES’, for absolutely no reason than anyone intelligent has ever been able to discern. Anybody using this form is advised not to expect their audience to take them seriously.
LURKER - somebody who reads a messageboard or mailing list, or watches the goings-on in a chatroom, but does not contribute to the discussion. Many people will ‘lurk’ in a community for some time to learn what is considered acceptable behavior before they introduce themselves.

MANGA - Japanese comic books. Unlike most of their American counterparts, manga are published in black and white. They are similar to anime in that most tell a story that must be read in a particular order for it to be properly understood.
MARY-SUE - 'Mary-Sue' is a difficult term to define precisely. She (almost always she) is a character created by a fanfiction author to star in one of their stories, and everything in the piece revolves around the Mary-Sue. She tends to be perfectly beautiful, outstandingly talented, and to be related to and/or romantically involved with canon characters in the piece. A Mary-Sue for, say, a Lord of the Rings fanfic might be Galadriel's beautiful daughter Alphwen, who is the most accomplished archer of the third age and marries Legolas at the end of the story. A Mary-Sue in a Sailormoon story could be Sailor Asteroid Belt, who is Tuxedo Mask's long-lost twin sister Sakura, raised as Queen Beryl's henchwoman but brought back to the good side by the true friendship of the Sailor Scouts. Stories featuring such characters are also called ‘Mary-Sues’. The term is taken from a piece of Star Trek fanfiction that made fun of the cliché via a character with that name. Often abbreviated as ‘MS’, or just ‘Sue’.
MARTY-STU/GARY-STU/WESLEY - a male Mary-Sue is generally called either a Marty-Stu or a Gary-Stu. A less common term is a 'Wesley', in reference to Wesley Crusher from Star Trek; the Next Generation.
MEME - a blogging phenomenon often found associated with fandom. A 'meme' is a little form a person can fill out on a website that will give them some result like, 'which type of coffee most closely fits your personality?' or 'which Sailor Scout are you most like?'. The person filling out the form is given a few lines of code that he or she may post in his or her journal or website, which displays the result and offers a link for other people to fill out the form themselves. Alternatively, a meme can be a line of ‘meaningful’ text or a questionnaire, also posted in a weblog. 'Meme Theory' is the idea that pieces of information, such as good ideas or catchy tunes, propagate through a population much like a virus does; weblog memes do something very similar.
MOD - short for 'moderator'. The mod is the person in charge of an archive or community.
MPREG - short for 'male pregnancy'. This tag is used to mark fanfiction about men becoming pregnant. Such stories are surprisingly common in many fandoms. The reader is often asked to take the idea that a man can bear a child on faith - which is really nothing to complain about, since stories that do attempt to explain how such a thing is possible generally commit unpardonable sins against basic biology. The equivalent term for a pair of female lovers somehow conceiving a child is 'femmepreg'.
MST/MST3K - short for Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the title of a TV show in which an evil mastermind attempted to drive a man and a group of robots insane by forcing them to watch terrible science fiction movies. To preserve their sanity, the group heckled the movies mercilessly. The concept has been appropriated by writers of fanfiction, who will go through a fanfic they disliked line by line and add their own commentary. MSTs are sometimes funny, but more often mean and tiresome, and many fanfiction archives do not accept them. It is considered unpardonably rude to MST somebody's fanfic without the author’s permission.

-NAZI - used as a suffix when referring to a person who is obsessive about some particular aspect of fanfiction. People who are anal about proper use of the English language will be referred to as 'grammar-nazis', those who nitpick deviations from the source material are 'canon-nazis', et cetera. The term was originally an insult, but many of the so-called nazis in question have taken it up with pride.
NETSPEAK/CHATSPEAK - typing using a lot of abbreviations and shorthand, and little or no attention to punctuation or proper spelling. The opening of Juliet's balcony speech might be rendered in netspeak as follows: romeo o romeo, where4 r u romeo? deny ur dad + refus ur name, r if u will not b but sworn my luv, + il no longer b a capulet. Netspeak is usually considered acceptable in chatrooms and over instant messaging programs, but messageboards and mailing lists expect their members to use proper English. Netspeak in fanfiction is unforgivable.
NEWBIE - somebody new to a community.
NOT-BOB - a troll with a grudge against a particular person or community. Such an individual usually remains anonymous, choosing a screen name or member ID that identifies how much they hate their target. The original Not-Bob appeared on Pottersues, a livejournal community dedicated to the heckling of Mary-Sues in 'Harry Potter' fanfiction, claiming to be a friend of the person who had written that day's feature. The members of the community asked if she were the same person who'd earlier said she was the author's friend 'Bob', and were told that she was not. Not-Bob joined the group under the name 'antipottersues' and proclaimed that she had a secret plan for the destruction of the community. She hung around for a few weeks insulting everybody, then eventually vanished without having accomplished anything.

OH NOES! – a sarcastic statement, used to indicate that the person doing the panicking is blowing something all out of proportion.
OMG - acronym for 'oh, my god!' Used as an exclamation of surprise.
OMGWTFBBQ - a combination of 'oh, my god!', 'what the fuck..?', and 'barbeque'. If the inclusion of the last makes no sense, that's because it's not supposed to. The phrase was originally a parody of AOLese, but came to be used as an exclamation of surprise at something particularly odd. It translates roughly as, 'wow, that is really, really screwed up!'
OOC - acronym for 'out of character'. It can mean either a post to a roleplaying group that is 'spoken' by the player rather than the character, or that a character in a piece of fanfiction is doing something at odds with the way the reader expected them to behave, based on their personality as presented by the source material.
OP - acronym for 'original poster'. The OP is the person who begins a particular discussion on a messageboard or mailing list.
O RLY? – acronym for ‘oh, really?’ Generally used sarcastically, to belittle somebody’s statement. Another poster will almost always reply with YA RLY (yeah, really!), and various versions of the conversation, with as few vowels as possible, go from there. Nobody is quite sure where the joke came from, but it was popularized as the caption on a livejournal avatar featuring a rather funny photograph of a snowy owl.
OT - acronym for 'off-topic'. A post that is not relevant to the stated topic of a messageboard or mailing list will be labeled OT.
OTAKU - from the Japanese word for 'house'. In Japan, the word means roughly the same as 'geek' or 'nerd', and the English-speaking world has appropriated it to mean 'anime fan'. The term has fallen out of favour due to its having negative connotations in Japanese; when a Japanese-speaking person calls somebody an 'otaku', they mean that this individual has no life outside his or her obsessions. It can be considered the far-eastern equivalent of ‘thirty-year-old fat guy who plays video games in his mom’s basement all day’.
OTP - acronym for 'One True Pairing'. A fan's OTP is what that person considers to be the only possible relationship possible for a given set of characters. Often used sarcastically. An 'OT3' is a 'One True Threesome'. The term has come into more general use as meaning simply, ‘favourite pairing’.

PAIRING - two characters in a romantic and/or sexual relationship. Many fans choose which fanfiction they read based exclusively on what pairings it explores.
PASTEDE ON YAY - an adjective meaning something is false or overblown. If a fan claims to be an award-winning writer when the quality of his or her fanworks makes this extremely unlikely, somebody make remark that his or her 'award iz pastede on yay!' The term arose out of discussion of a photograph, which the fan who’d taken it claimed showed Dominic Moneghan visiting her home. Closer inspection showed that the picture was in fact two seperate images: a photograph of the actor's face had been digitally laid over one of a different person sitting in a bedroom. A member of the messageboard commented, with intentional misspellings, that the picture could be captioned "my hed iz pastede on yay!"
PHEAR/PH34R - intentional misspelling of ‘fear’. Used to indicate that something - usually a concept, but sometimes a website, news story, etc - is particularly odd or ought to inspire mortal terror.
PIC - an abbreviation for 'picture', used as a short form of 'fanart' because it rhymes with 'fic' as the abbreviation for 'fanfiction'.
PIT OF VOLES - the archive site fanfiction.net. The term was coined by a fan who sought to emphasize the overwhelming quantity of very bad fanfiction in that archive.
PLOT BUNNY - an idea for the beginning (or middle, or end - some fragment, in isolation) of a story, generally occurring to an author in a flash of inspiration and then leaving him or her to work out the rest of the plotline by the hard away. The number of plotbunnies an author conceives of is usually inversely proportional to the time he or she has available to write.
PPC - an acronym for 'Protectors of the Plot Continuum', a group that heckles pieces of bad fanfiction by rewriting the endings.
PRON/PR0N - intentional misspelling of 'porn', used to refer to pornographic fanfiction or fanart without being filtered by net nanny programs.
PWNED - purposeful misspelling of 'owned'. Used as a synonym for 'defeated'; a person who makes a particularly clever or hurtful remark in an argument has 'pwned' their opponent, as has one who beat another player at a video game.
PWP - acronym of 'Pornography Without Plot' or 'Plot? What Plot?' Refers to a piece the only purpose of which is to be smut.

R&R - an acronym for 'Read and Review'. This was originally used to mark pieces of fanfiction for which the author wants constructive criticism, but is now more often taken to mean that the author only wants to be flattered.
RAPEFIC - a piece of fanfiction in which one character rapes another.
RL - acronym for 'real life'.
ROUND ROBIN - a piece of fanfiction to which each of several authors contributes a segment in turn.
RP - an acronym for 'role play'. Used as a noun and a verb.
RPF/RPS - acronyms for 'real person fanfiction' and 'real person slash'. RPF are stories involving celebrities such as actors, singers, or figures from sports or politics. Many fans consider RPF to be in extremely bad taste, especially when the stories have sexual content, though exceptions can be made for historical figures (provided they’ve been dead at least fifty to a hundred years) and in cases such as boy bands, where the individuals’ personalities are obviously just a front by their PR people.

SD - acronym of 'super-deformed'. Used to refer to drawings that are extremely chibi.
SEIYUU/VA - 'VA' is an acronym for 'voice actor', and 'seiyuu' is the Japanese equivalent of the term. Both mean a person who contributes the voice of an animated character. In anime, the actors who provide the voices in the original Japanese are called 'seiyuu', while the ones who provide the voices for the English dub are 'VAs'.
SEME - from a Japanese word. The seme is the 'dominant' member of a homosexual relationship. In smut terms, the seme is the one doing the penetrating.
SHIP/SHIPPING/SHIPPY - from 'relationship' or 'worship'. Ship is both a noun and a verb - a 'ship' is a pair of characters in a romantic and/or sexual relationship. To 'ship' those characters is to be interested in their relationship.
SHOUJO and SHOUNEN - broad categories of anime and manga, which can be thought of as targeted for girls (shoujo) and boys (shounen). Although there is a great deal of variation, shoujo anime and manga tend to deal with characters and relationships, while shounen are more adventure stories.
SHOUNEN-AI - this term literally means 'boy love' in Japanese, and is used to refer to non-explicit fanfiction or fanart dealing with homosexual relationships between two men. The equivalent term for female characters is shoujo-ai.
SHRINE - a website, often only one page, devoted to a work or a character. Shrines usually contain little by way of information, but are simply a small valentine from the fan to something they love.
SI - acronym for 'self-insertion'. A piece of fanfiction is SI if there is a character in it who is explicitly supposed to be the author having entered the world of the story. Such stories are usually godawful and serve as nothing more than ego-trips for the writer. Mary-Sues and Gary-Stus are often referred to as ‘badly-disguised SI’, meaning that the character the author wishes he or she were has entered the story.
SLASH - fanfiction or fanart dealing with homosexual relationships, usually between men. The term comes from the notation used to indicate the pairing, eg: Kirk/Spock, Frodo/Sam, etc. By convention, the first name listed is the 'dominant' member of the relationship. 'Slash' is used as both a noun and a verb: to 'slash' a pair of characters is to write erotic fanfiction about them. An author who writes such pieces is called a 'slasher' (not to be confused with 'slasher' as in 'mass murderer'). Source material is described as 'slashy' if the characters behave in a way that can be interpreted as homosexual romantic tension. The adjective 'slashy' can also apply to such behavior: eg, a Lord of the Rings fan might say that Pippin keeps giving Merry "slashy looks". The equivalent term for pairs of female characters is 'femmeslash'.
SNACKY'S LAW - similar to Godwin's law, but instead of the nazis, the comparison that loses the argument is to say that the other person is just like 'those girls who were mean to me in high school'.
SNUFF - a piece of fanfiction that exists simply so that the author may kill off a character he or she does not like. Snuff fics are generally considered juvenile and petty.
SOCKPUPPET - can be a noun or a verb: a person advocating an unpopular opinion, posting under several names in order to convince other members of a community that he or she has a great deal of support is sockpuppeting. A sockpuppet account is a membership to a messageboard or mailing list created as an alternative identity for the puppeteer.
SONGFIC - a piece of fanfiction written around the lyrics of a song the author considers meaningful. The 'plot' of such a story usually consists of a character either listening to the song or writing it out as a poem and thinking about how much it means to them. The fics are usually about as terrible as that description makes them sound.
SPESHUL - a misspelling of 'special', used to describe something or someone particularly stupid... especially if the someone under discussion is forever crowing their own genius. The term refers to primary school teachers who tell their classes that the mentally disabled child is ‘special’ rather than ‘retarded’.
SPORK - a verb; a piece of fanfiction is 'sporked' when a critique of it is posted to a messageboard or mailing list dedicated to mockery of bad fanworks.
SQUICK - a noun, verb, or adjective. Something 'squicky' is 'disgusting'. A person's 'squicks' are things they personally find distasteful. Somebody is 'squicked' when they are absolutely revolted. The term is often said to have come from a word meaning ‘to masturbate by inserting one’s penis between the halves of a human brain’, but this is probably not true.
STFU - acronym for 'shut the fuck up'. Used to mean that the poster has absolutely had it with the addressee.
SUB - a noun; the 'sub' of an anime is a version with the soundtrack in Japanese, and subtitles to translate each line. Purist fans often insist on subs; extreme purists watch only fansubs.
SUETHOR - an author who writes mary-sues.

TACO SHOW – a piece of fanfiction in which a male character is transformed into a female one, for the sake of humour and/or turning a slash relationship into a het one (or vice-versa). Taco Shows have a reputation for being revoltingly sexist. One of the more peculiar entries on this list, the term was taken from a Harry Potter fic in which Remus Lupin, about to be transformed into a woman, complains that he ‘grew up with a magic stick, not a taco show’ – ‘taco show’ may or may not be a mistake on the author’s part for ‘taco shell’. The term has also come into limited use as a euphemism for such a character’s vagina, or for vaginae in general, and to refer to gender-swapped AU’s. The opposite scenario, in which a female character is transformed into a male, is of course called a ‘magic stick’.
TENTACLE HENTAI - works (fan or otherwise) featuring female characters being sexually abused by monsters with many octopus-like limbs. ‘Tentacle hentai’ or ‘tentacle pr0n’ is generally considered to be about as screwed-up as material can possibly get.
THREAD - all the replies (and replies to replies) to the original statement that started a messageboard or mailing list discussion.
TINHAT - a person so convinced of their pet theory that they will not listen to anyone suggesting otherwise. The term comes from the joke about conspiracy theorists wearing tinfoil skullcaps to keep out the evil mind control waves.
TL;DR – an acronym for ‘too long; didn’t read’. Used in response to particularly verbose messageboard entries, as a way of reminding the poster that brevity is the soul of wit.
TOSED - 'TOS' is an acronym for 'Terms of Service'. Most online communities have a set of rules members must obey. When a member is made to leave the community because of violating the terms of service, other members will say that the person got TOSed.
TROLL - a noun or a verb. A 'troll' is a person who joins a community in order to start a fight. To 'troll' is to post purposefully inflammatory material in the attempt to provoke people.
TWINCEST - fanfiction in which a pair of twins are in a sexual relationship with one another. Those who do not read or write it tend to consider twincest the ultimate low in taboo-breaking for the sake of porn.
TWS - an acronym for 'train wreck syndrome'. Used to refer to things that are fascinating and horrifying at the same time, such as Twincest and MPreg.

UKE - from a Japanese word. The 'uke' is the submissive one in a homosexual relationship. In smut terms, the uke is the one being penetrated.

-VERSE - a suffix used to indicate the universe in which the events of a narrative take place. EG: the Harry Potter stories occur in the 'potterverse', Godzilla movies happen in the 'Godzillaverse'. This phrasing will usually not be used if the world of the story already has a name (EG: Xanth, Middle Earth, etc), or if it does not have rules obviously different from those of real life (there is no '-verse' in fandoms such as Newsies or Holes). If there are multiple versions of the source material, '-verse' will also be used to indicate which one a piece of fanfiction is based on. EG: Slayers has a 'novelverse', a 'mangaverse', and an 'animeverse' that each present a slightly different version of the story.

WAFF - acronym for 'Warm And Fuzzy Feeling'. This is used to mark fanfiction focusing on friendship and romance in a strictly positive light. Such works are described as 'WAFFy'.
WANK - from a slang term meaning 'to masturbate'. The word is used to refer to all kinds of ridiculous behavior on the part of fans, including attention-whoring, ego-stroking, obsessive behavior, violent argument over trivial details, and just about anything else that seems reasonable to the participants but absurd to the onlookers. The people participating in such behavior are called 'wankers', and are said to have 'wanked'. If the discussion is reported to the journalfen community fandom_wank, the incident is said to have been 'Wanked' with a capital W. Denizens of fandom_wank are 'wankas' as opposed to 'wankers'.
WAPANESE – from a combination of the words ‘white’ and ‘Japanese’, this is a Caucasian person who imitates, usually in ludicrous fashion, certain aspects of Japanese culture. Gwen Stefani is considered the archetypal example.
WINGFIC - a rather bizarre subset of fanfiction in which characters suddenly and inexplicably sprout angel wings. For some reason, this is particularly popular in fics about the actors from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
WIN THE INTERNET/S – do or say something particularly witty, ‘pwn’ somebody in particularly dramatic fashion. Comes from the reminder, which must be made distressingly often, that it is impossible to ‘win’ at the internet or ‘win’ at fandom. I do not know when or why the ‘at’ was dropped from the phrase.
WTF - acronym for 'what the fuck'. Used as a shorthand for questions such as "what is this person talking about?" or "what is going on?", but usually only when said questions are not meant to be answered - the person speaking is expressing his or her confusion, not looking for an explanation

YAOI – pronounced ‘yow-ee’, not ‘yah-oy’. An acronym for a Japanese phrase that translates as 'no climax, no resolution', and used as equivalent to 'slash'. 'Yaoi' tends to be the more popular term in anime fandoms, whereas 'slash' is used elsewhere, but the two are basically interchangeable. The 'no climax, no resolution' refers to the plotless nature of a lot of slash. An oft-quoted fact is that 'YA.O.I.' can also stand for a Japanese phrase that means, 'stop! My ass hurts!' The equivalent phrase for femmeslash is 'yuri', which was the name of a female homosexual in the anime Dirty Pair.

! - exclamation points are often used as a shorthand when assigning something - usually a character in fanfiction - to a broad category. A person complaining about an author's characterization of Professor Snape might say that they dislike stories featuring "warmfuzzy!Snape" and prefer those with "darkhero!Snape". Fans who read a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction featuring Professor Snape will be familiar with the ways his character is typically treated, so saying "warmfuzzy!Snape" suggests to them an entire category of personality trains that are generally assigned to the Professor together. This shorthand is also used to differentiate between versions of characters from different incarnations of a story: a discussion on a Fruits Basket messageboard might debate the differences between "manga!Akito" and "anime!Akito", this being quicker to type than "Akito as characterized in the manga" and "Akito as characterized in the anime."