The Vocabulary of Fanfiction - Emily

Often, fanfiction is looked down upon as a form of writing not worthy of approval or recognition. People have a mental image of a fanfic writer as an 11-year-old banging away at a keyboard about My Little Pony or some other “childish” fandom. Now, I’m not saying that’s bad, because it does fall under fanfic. However, there is so much more than that--there’s a huge range of creators, from aforementioned 11-year-old to people in their 30s and 40s writing about the characters they’ve grown to love. That being said, I’m going to leave the arguments for another time and simply introduce you directly to some terms you need to know if you ever decide to venture into the gold mine of the fanfic community.

Headcanon and canon (not to be confused with cannon) are used to differentiate between things from the source material and fan-created content. Anything canon is explicitly stated in the source material. For example, it is shown that Ron and Hermione date and eventually get married, therefore, their romantic relationship is canon. However, if someone were to write a fanfic where Harry and Hermione got together instead, that would be a headcanon ship. Headcanons are most commonly character traits. The word can also be used as a verb, such as “I headcanon x character as y.”

Alternate universes are very common in the fanfiction community. Often abbreviated to AUs, they consist of taking the source material’s characters and placing them into a different setting or time period. Common examples include high school, modern, and fantasy. AUs can also involve switching the personalities or roles of a character, shown by the trait, an exclamation point, and then the character’s name. These can range from simple good and evil to personality traits, mental illnesses, and even species. (To be clear, I do not condone simply slapping a mental illness on the character just for the sake of doing so. There are well-written fanfictions that flesh out headcanons, and then there are under researched, bad portrayals. For the sake of this post, I’m focusing on the good ones.) For example, if I were to write Hermione as a shy character, I would specify her as shy!Hermione.

Ships are an integral part of pretty much every fandom involving characters of some sort. Shipping two characters means that you see them in a relationship, usually romantic. Platonic shipping does exist, but shipping is almost always done in a romantic sense unless specified otherwise. Because of this, certain types of ships are often looked down upon, and for good reason: incest (siblings are the most common), abuse (why would you encourage this?) and pedophilia (if the characters aren’t aged up) are common types that are explicitly ejected from communities as soon as they are brought up. Ships are written as [character] x [character] (x [character], etc.) for example, Ron x Hermione.

Although there are many other terms, I find these three to be the most common and most important in understanding what is going on in a fanbase. Thanks for reading.


Comments

  1. Shawn S.November 10, 2020 at 3:30 PM

    This was an interesting introduction to the vocabulary of a community that is sometimes difficult to navigate and somewhat insular. Unfortunately, most of the modern fanfiction I have read online seemed quite convoluted and unoriginal, although I have occasionally stumbled upon some well-written and moving pieces. The quality of online fanfiction is most likely a result of everyone being able to publish, as many older, classic works were based on the settings and plots of other stories and similar to fanfiction.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnkitaNovember 14, 2020 at 11:41 AM

    This post was very interesting and well thought out. If anyone wanted an introduction to this, I would direct them here.

    ReplyDelete

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