the following are concepts that i quickly learned my way around when growing up in fandom, but that seem to have fallen out of use recently. i’d like to propose a revival of…
NOTP: a pairing that, for whatever reason, you simply cannot stand. it can be because the ship repulses you morally, or because you hate one of the characters, or love them both but despise their dynamic – or just because looking at it makes you uncomfortable, for whatever reason.
different from labeling something a “bad ship” in that it implies an entirely personal preference.
calling a ship your NOTP informs others that you really, really, REALLY dislike it, while also acknowledging that you don’t know what other people’s reasons are for shipping it, or what interpretations they may have that makes it work for them.
a cool way of avoiding stuff you hate while also not morally condemning thousands of complete strangers for liking it.
squick: similar to notp, but goes for anything, not just romantic pairings. something you just don’t like, either for specific reasons or just because it irrationally repulses you.
not as severe as a trigger in the sense that it doesn’t cause any extreme and potentially harmful reactions – it’s just something you’d rather not see, because it grosses you the fuck out. and that’s okay.
decent people respect other people’s squicks, while also remembering it’s cool for other people to like things they personally are squicked by.
this works as long as everyone agrees not to be dicks and shove stuff in people’s faces in unwarranted ways.
crackship: a ship that just doesn’t make any sense. there’s absolutely no chance that these characters would ever end up together.
perhaps they’ve never interacted. perhaps they are on opposite sides of a war. perhaps one of them died a thousand years ago. for whatever reason, there’s zero possibility of this becoming canon.
still, you’d like to see how they’d romantically mesh, to explore their dynamic or a what-if scenario – or maybe they’re just two characters you really like to imagine smooching one another.
the fact that it isn’t and never will be canon doesn’t matter, and can even be part of the appeal. it certainly does not invalidate the ship’s existence. the ultimate form of doing something just for fun.
these words all help describe the cool concept of doing stuff you enjoy, while also realizing others may be doing things you hate, but not in order to victimize you personally. live and let live! give people the benefit of the doubt! it’s a good time. we should all try it.
I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.
I saw this post about an hour after I saw a post that said, essentially, “There should be a word for that thing where [exactly describes ‘squeeing’].”
I feel like the time has come to produce something like this:
Squee: The noise you make when something is so good that all you can really do is squeak or squeal. A high pitched sound of delight, often accomanied by hugging yourself or others.
Squick: A fic/art/concept/topic that is repellent to you, so you reject association with it and instead retreat to your personal comfortable spaces- all the while remembering that someone else’s comfort is not your own.
YKINMKATO: Also called “kink tomato.” Abbreviation meaning “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.” Used to explain why you are rejecting art or fic brought to you by someone else. A solid mantra to recall instead of sending flames in people’s comments
Flames: The comment equivalent of anon hate.
AMV: “animated music video” or “anime music video.” Often, this is stylized to fit a specific fandom, such as a “PMV” (pony music video) in my little pony. May also be referred to as a lyricstuck.
Filk: Combination of the words “film” and “folk,” this is a music genre, to which “fan songs” and “fan parody covers” belong. If you don’t really understand what this means, take a quick listen to American Pie, then compare Weird Al Yankovic’s Saga Begins
BNF: Big name fan. You know that one person who is just so fuckign popular in your fandom? Their art is always on your dash, everyone knows their fics? Being spoken to directly by them is basically being noticed by everyone ever’s senpai? That’s what these people are called.
DL:DR; Not unliked the teal deer (tl;dr, or “too long, didn’t read”), DLDR means “don’t like? Don’t read!” It’s a reminder that you are under no obligation, ever, to expose yourself to uncomfortable (or, squicky), or potentially harmful (or, triggering), material. Not ever. If you don’t actively like something? It’s not worth your time. Skip it.
Gen: or “genfic” “genart” etc. Fan works which contain no or very little romantic content. Often these are styled after the canon material, and may be called “episodic” ro “slice of life” in addition.
Lemon: Work containing strong pornographic elements
Lime, or Citrus: Work containing mild or implicit pornographic elements
Sockpuppeting: The surprisingly common scenario of someone making a bunch of fake accounts/sideblogs to send themselves reviews or hate, to try to increase views or drama surrounding a work. The accounts they make are called Sockpuppets.
WAFF: Warm and fluffy feelings. A genre of fic that exists just to be therapeutically sweet. Nowadays, usually just called “fluffy.”
Schmoop: Take WAFF and somehow make it even more syrupy. You’ll know it when you see it.
Whump: Imagine if you will, a hurt-comfort fic. The comfort might be considered WAFF. The hurt? That’s the whump.
Wapanese: When white autors pepper their anime fanfic with random, tonally inappropriate japanese words.
Anthropomorfic: Nowadays we just call these “humanstuck” or “humanized AU.”
Wank: Wildly disproportionate drama that crops up because someone wrote/drew/did something that someone else didn’t like. Seriously, I cannot begin to express the fiascos that have come about from all this. Just… Just go look at this.
Plot bunny: Story ideas that you probably won’t ever actually deal with, but that multiply entirely out of control, creating huge worlds in your head that you’re probably not going to write. But hey! You might! And until then they make great sideblogs/askblogs/tumblr posts.
Casefic: Fanfics that try to create an episode-like feel for procedural and crime dramas, moster of the week shows, etc.
Jossed: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a series, and whoops, turns out we were all very, very wrong.
Kripked: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a show and, hot damn, we fucking called it.
Secret Masters: The people who run the websites/ communities/etc that we all do our fanning on. Less relevant now that we have things like tumblr, but when everyone had to run their own archival and social sites for each fandom, it was more important to pay our respects to the strange and powerful beings that brought us all together and gave us our fannish homes. Think the staff of AO3, for example.
Bashing: When a writer purposefully writes a specific character as a horrible, horrible person so that they can throw them out of the storyline, usually to allow their OTP to get together without trouble. Distinct from fridging in that it doesn’t require the character to die, but rather to be such a screaming harpy that they get rightfully removed from the main characters’ lives for being an abusive hell beast. Generally, a type of character hate. Be wary of people who bash women, queer people, and POC with consistency: they are not safe to be around.
‘Squick’ also has an alternate horrible meaning for Harry Potter fans who were in fandom a while back. Dear god.
Also:
Purple prose: Fic that is excessively flowery and complicated. Basically the “me, an intellectual” meme. If it has the phrase “cerulean orbs” you know it’s purple prose.
Beige prose: The opposite of purple prose. Basically, the plainest (and, if done wrongly, the most boring) type of prose.
R&R: Read & review. Back from when fic comments were called “reviews” and there was no such fucking thing as the kudos button.
*wipes a tear away* I feel so vintage.
Know your history children.
important history lesson
*stares out. breaks fourth wall*
Lemons.
For all you young’uns out there.
Also, I’ve seen people tag a ship-focused fic both M/M and Gen on AO3. Just because it also features friendships doesn’t make it Gen! If the main focus is a romantic relationship, do the Gen readers (which is not me, but they do exist) a favor and don’t tag it Gen.
^^^^^^^ THIS. filters are only useful if things are tagged correctly and i can’t search for non-ship fic when everything is tagged for both ship AND gen 😦
please for the love of god tag responsibly and don’t make people who are looking for non-romance fic suffer
I miss proper gen, and the expectation of it in specific places. I wish that was still a tag that followed specific conventions
I actually had a look at that fandom wank link, and it reminded me of another term that’s gone a bit by the wayside:
TOSsed: when an online community was kicked off a platform for (real or alleged) violations of the Terms of Service. This was not infrequently the result of complaints about queer content specifically.
Never forget why we needed an archive of our own, folks.
In corollary to the “If the drive is romantic don’t tag it gen” thing, if there are romantic relationships but they exist as total background nonsense (example: Character A asks her parents to put together a Princess AND Pirate theme birthday and wacky hi-jinks ensue trying to book a fairy princess actress and a schooner shaped bouncy house on the same day, both parents love each other but wish they’d share details like who ordered the cake) THAT’s gen, not het or slash. Don’t tag it as het or slash, you’ll drive away the pure-gen readers who actually want confetti-canon crisis fics.
A Beautiful Monster 