User:Lauradxr/sandbox

Fandom vocabulary refers to specific terms or jargon used in fandom community whose meanings are not immediately obvious to mundane audience (or even to fans from a different corner of fandom). As fandom is vast and huge, not only does fandom at large have a specialized vocabulary, but each individual fandom itself has its own jargon. . It is only recently that the world of fan creations have been exposed to the glaring spotlight of mainstream media attention.

Fandom vocabulary grew out of internet vocabulary as the form of abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons. They allow fans to keep conversations private within fandom community, and act as a guidance for fans to conceptualize fan products and activities.

The development of fandom vocabulary
The development of fandom vocabulary is bound up with fan culture. In general, people are infatuated with different subjects or cultures at different times, which contributes to the reason why the language of fandom is always changing.

Early years
Fans of the historical literary detective Sherlock Holmes are widely considered to have comprised the first modern fandom, holding public demonstrations of mourning after Holmes was "killed off" in 1893, and creating some of the first fan fiction as early as about 1897 to 1902. Within Holmes fandom, the words pastiche and fanfic are often used interchangeably. By contrast, in the larger fanfic community, "pastiche" typically refers to printed or commercial works, while "fanfic" most often refers to stories appearing on the Internet, specifically those whose creators identify themselves as part of the fanfic community.

Railway enthusiasts are another early fandom with its roots in the late 19th century that began to gain in popularity and increasingly organize in the first decades of the early 20th century. . People usually use trainspotter or anorak (usually derogatory) to describe person who interested, recreationally, in rail transport.

Fandom vocabulary in the 20th century
Science fiction fandom dates back to the 1930s and maintains organized clubs and associations in many cities around the world. Fans have held the annual Worldcon(World Science Fiction Convention) since 1939, along with many other events each year, and has created its own jargon, sometimes called "fanspeak". Two acronyms commonly used in the community are FIAWOL (Fandom Is A Way Of Life) and its opposite FIJAGH (Fandom Is Just A Goddamned Hobby) to describe two ways of looking at the place of fandom in one's life.

With the popularization of mass media, media fandom became mainstream, which mainly focus on relationships between characters within TV and movie media franchises, such as Star Trek. Fans of these franchises generated creative products like fan art and fan fiction at a time when typical fandom was focused on critical discussions. . The crush for certain TV series or film is still very common until now. One of the most typical example might be Harry Potter. Pottermania is an informal term used to describe the craze Harry Potter fans. Diehard fans of the series are called Potterheads. Some even theme their weddings around Harry Potter.

Anime and manga fandom began in the 1970s in Japan and it soon spread to the Western word. Terms such as cosplay and ACG thus become globally accepted.

Fandom vocabulary in recent years
K-pop has swept the globe in recent years. K-pop idols have not only refreshed people's (especially western people's) aesthetic cognation for celebrity, but also have successfully brought Korean culture to the world. Unlike other fandom vocabulary, many jargons of K-pop fandom are directly translated from Korean, such as Daesang and Gayo. In Korean, Daesang refers to one of the highest achievements a group or artist can achieve. While the term 'Gayo' usually refers to year-end festival shows which are packed with special stages and performances.

Nowadays, queerbaiting culture has also attracted more and more people's attention. The term queerbaiting refers to a same-sex romantic relationship between characters in a work of fiction, mainly in film or television.The potential romance may be ignored, explicitly rejected or made fun of. One of the most famous example could be Rachel Berry and Quinn Fabray in the TV series Glee.

Fangirl
It usually refers to 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.

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’.

CP
CP is the short for character pairing, which refers to the hypothetical couple matched according to preferences. The characters in a CP may be realistic figures or roles in fictional works such as novels, animations, films and comics. The romantic relationship between two characters of a CP is based on the imagination of fans and only mentioned in private communication with people sharing the same interests. Officials do not use the expression of ‘pairing’. Moreover, CP can be composed of bg(boyxgirl, the heterosexual couple), bl(boys’ love, gay couple) and gl(girls’ love, lesbian couple) in order to satisfy the illusion of different groups.

OOC
OOC represents ‘out of character’, which means that a character in the fictional work is doing something odds with the way reader expected them to behave, based on the personality of the character presented by the source material.

AMV
AMV is the abbreviation for ‘anime music video’, which consists of a series of clips from an anime series, set to a popular song.

Fanfiction
Fanfiction(also abbreviated to fan fic, fanfic, fic or ff) is fiction created by fans based on original sources materials. Fans takes characters or setting to create their own stories and sometimes they add new characters. For example, Fifty Shades of Gray actually started out as Twilight series fanfiction.

OC
The abbreviation of original character. It is created by the fan authors in fanfictions, which is the opposite of canon. Sometimes it can refer to characters who are only mentioned in passing in the source but are developed by fan authors.

Shipping
It developed by the term”relationship”, referring to fans’ art of supporting a particular relationship between two or more characters. Fans who have and promote favorite ships are called shippers. Shipping comes from The X-Files fandom, which coined the concept in the '90s to describe fan reaction to the interminable UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension) between Mulder and Scully.