The Dictionary of Fandom

Are you fresh on the fandom scene, and a little confused by the lingo? We don’t blame you, young Padawan.

Even if you’re thoroughly informed about all your fave fictional worlds—and you know how to say “Go pee up a rope” in Elvish, Entish, and High Valyrian—the world of fandom has a vocabulary of its own, one you’ll need to know to participate. Let’s get into it…

Fanfic
There’s literally no chance that y’all don’t know what a fanfic is, but we’ll tell you anyway: You’re making one every time you take the characters and worldbuilding from an existing book, or series of books, and use ’em to write your own scene or story. While some authors aren’t super keen on fanfic, it’s a boon for fandoms, especially those who aren’t ready to let go of certain characters after their stories are technically over.

Canon
When you’re dealing with existing characters created by another author, it’s important to differentiate between what’s official and what’s not. The facts as established by the original creator—anything in the source material—is canon, and for some fans, it’s ironclad. Of course there are no limits to what you can imagine a given character doing for the purposes of your own fic, but if it goes too strongly against canon, fellow members of your fandom may call shenanigans.

AU (or Alternate Universe)
If you want to go against canon, AU is your ticket out. Alternate Universe fanfic changes something essential about the official story—and it can be anything. Wanna rewrite The Hunger Games in outer space? Imagine 50 Shades of Gray as a steampunk romance? Reinvent Pride and Prejudice in a zombie apocalypse setting? (Wait, that sounds familiar.)

Headcanon
Within every story are millions of other, untold stories: things implied but unspoken, things assumed but never explained, or things simply never addressed because they’d only bloat and distract from the story. The remedy for all those untold stories? Headcanon! In short, this is all the stuff you imagine happening behind the scenes and outside the timeline that fuels your personal interpretation of a story. Headcanon usually operates within the existing canon framework—i.e., you’re not likely to headcanon something that runs contrary to the official truth as written in the source material. And if many fellow fans agree with your interpretation of a story? Your headcanon may graduate to the next level: Fanon.

Slash
It’s not uncommon for fanfiction or fanart to take a turn for the erotic; it’s also not uncommon for the sexual orientations of certain characters to, ahem, swing around to serve someone’s lusty imagination. When two (canonically straight) same-sex characters are paired up sexually and/or romantically in a fanfic, it’s called slash. Fun fact: If you lined up all the existing Sherlock Holmes/John Watson slashfic end to end, it would reach beyond the known limits of the universe.

Ship
Are you at all invested in seeing two particular characters hook up? Congratulations: That’s your ship. (As in, y’know, relationship.) Unlike your OTP, there are no limits on how many ships you can hop aboard; you can even be torn between multiple competing ships for one character. (Rey and Finn look so cute holding hands, but Finn and Poe Dameron looked HAWT while hugging.) While the advent of the internet has been a boon for shippers of obscure and peculiar couplings (we’re looking at you, Dumblesnapers), this phenomenon has been around since the dawn of storytelling, when the first men sat drinking mead around a rudimentary cookfire while Yngvild read aloud from his Grendelwulf slash fic. (It was really gross.)

OTP
This is it: the fictional pairing you ship above all others, for all time. The bounds of canon, genre, time, place, and even logic need not apply to your OTP. If you feel it, it’s not wrong. However, you can only have one [*true pairing*]—so choose wisely.

BroTP
Got a pair of favorite characters who belong together, forever, but without the kissing? That’s your BroTP, brah. From Sam and Frodo to Sherlock and Watson, there’s no shortage of friends to ship.

NoTP
Never, ever, under any circumstances can this horrifying pairing be allowed to pass. Harrmione? Kale? REYLO?! STOP THIS SHIP, WE WANNA GET OFF.

Crossover
A ship or fic that combines characters from two different universes. Do you dream of a world in which Gollum from The Hobbit finds love and understanding with Kreacher the House Elf? Do you just die every time you think of what a kickass boyfriend Thomas from Maze Runner would make for Katniss Everdeen? (No offense to Peeta, of course, but c’mon.) There’s a crossover for that.

Genderswapping
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the basics of fan art and slashfic, you can move to the next level in creative fangirling: swapping the genders of your fave fictionals to create weird, wonderful new dynamics. Reimagine all the Disney princesses as burly dudes with beards! Rewrite an old-school fantasy series to make all the heroes female! Even professional storytellers occasionally delve into genderswapping, particularly if their source material is a total sausage party—which is how a lady elf warrior, Tauriel, found her way into Peter Jackson’s adaption of The Hobbit.

Racebending
If you’ve ever written, drawn, or otherwise imagined a canon white character as a POC (or vice versa, on rare occasions), you’ve participated in the popular practice of racebending. And if you haven’t, you might want to try it! Amazing things can happen when you reimagine some diversity into your favorite series, including, occasionally, the thing where your longtime racebent headcanon becomes real. (Hello, Noma Dumezweni as Hermione Granger, WE LOVE YOU.)

What did we miss?