A fandom is a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of camaraderie with others who share a common interest. Fans typically are interested in even minor details of the objects of their fandom and spend a significant portion of their time and energy involved with their interest, often as a part of a social network with particular practices, differentiating fandom-affiliated people from those with only a casual interest.
Science fiction fandom or SF fandom is a community or fandom of people interested in science fiction in contact with one another based upon that interest. SF fandom has a life of its own, but not much in the way of formal organization.
Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex. While the term "slash" originally referred only to stories in which male characters are involved in an explicit sexual relationship as a primary plot element, it is now also used to refer to any fan story containing a romantic pairing between same-sex characters. Many fans distinguish slash with female characters as a separate genre, commonly referred to as femslash.
Femslash is a genre which focuses on romantic and/or sexual relationships between female fictional characters.
Henry Guy Jenkins III is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He also has a joint faculty appointment with the USC Rossier School of Education. Previously, Jenkins was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities as well as co-founder and co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has also served on the technical advisory board at ZeniMax Media, parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks. In 2013, he was appointed to the board that selects the prestigious Peabody Award winners.
Kirk/Spock, commonly abbreviated as K/S or Spirk and referring to James T. Kirk and Spock from Star Trek, is a popular pair in slash fiction, possibly the first slash pairing, according to Henry Jenkins, an early slash fiction scholar. Early in the history of Star Trek fan fiction, a few fan writers started writing about a romantic and sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock, highlighting a romantic or sexual element to the friendship between the men. As of 1998, most academic studies on slash fiction focused on Kirk/Spock, as Star Trek was by that point one of the longest-lived and most prosperous subjects of slash fiction, while its mainstream popularity made it one of the most accessible titles for academics and their audience. As the first slash pairing, K/S was created and developed largely independently from the influence of other slash fiction, with most of the conventions of the slash genre seeing their debut first in K/S slash.
MediaWest*Con is one of the largest and longest running media-based fan-run conventions in the United States. It is held annually over Memorial Day weekend in Lansing, Michigan. The convention emerged in the late 1970s, beginning as T'Con in 1978 and 2'Con in 1979 before taking on the name MediaWest*Con in 1981. The convention remains the world's largest gathering of Fanzine writers, artists, and publishers, and for decades was the event where most new science fiction and fantasy Fanzines were released. The annual "Fan Quality Awards" for Fanzine excellence, known as the "Fan Q's", have been given out at MediaWest*Con since 1981. In addition, the convention's art show has been the principal location for the display and sale of published Fanzine art and illustrations.
Vidding is a fan labor practice in media fandom of creating music videos from the footage of one or more visual media sources, thereby exploring the source itself in a new way. The creator may choose video clips in order to focus on a single character, support a particular romantic pairing between characters, criticize or celebrate the original text, or point out an aspect of the TV show or film that they find under-appreciated. The resulting video may then be shared via one or more social media outlets and online video platforms such as YouTube. The creators refer to themselves as "vidders"; their product as "vids", "fanvids", "fanvideos", "songvids", or the more recently adopted name "edits"; and the act itself is referred to as vidding.
Participatory culture, an opposing concept to consumer culture, is a culture in which private individuals do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media.
Fan labor, also called fan works, are the creative activities engaged in by fans, primarily those of various media properties or musical groups. These activities can include creation of written works, visual or computer-assisted art, films and videos, animations, games, music, or applied arts and costuming.
A Mary Sue is a character archetype in fiction, usually a young woman, who is often portrayed as inexplicably competent across all domains, gifted with unique talents or powers, liked or respected by most other characters, unrealistically free of weaknesses, extremely attractive, innately virtuous, and generally lacking meaningful character flaws. Usually female and almost always the main character, a Mary Sue is often an author's idealized self-insertion, and may serve as a form of wish fulfillment. Mary Sue stories are often written by adolescent authors.
Fan fiction or fanfiction is fictional writing written in an amateur capacity by fans, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from the original creator(s) as a basis for their writing. Fan fiction ranges from a couple of sentences to an entire novel, and fans can retain the creator's characters and settings, add their own, or both. It is a form of fan labor. Fan fiction can be based on any fictional subject. Common bases for fan fiction include novels, movies, comics, television shows, musical groups, cartoons, anime, manga, and video games.
A Trekkie or Trekker is a fan of the Star Trek franchise, or of specific television series or films within that franchise. The show developed a dedicated and enthusiastic following shortly after it premiered, with the first fanzine premiering in 1967. The first fan convention took place the year the original series ended.
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit, fan activist organization. Its mission is to serve fans by preserving and encouraging transformative fan activity, known as "fanwork", and by making fanwork widely accessible.
Transformative Works and Cultures is a peer-reviewed open access academic journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. The journal collects essays, articles, book reviews, and shorter pieces that concern fandom, fanworks, and fan practices. According to Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), the journal "supports the [Organization for Transformative Works's] mission to promote the legitimacy and sustainability of non-commercial fan creativity by providing a forum for innovative criticism in fan studies, broadly conceived."
Star Trek Lives! is a 1975 book, co-written by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston, which explored the relationship between the Star Trek television series and the fandom that emerged following the series' cancellation. It was published by Bantam Books.
Kristina Dorothea Busse is a professor in the Philosophy department at the University of South Alabama. As the co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures, her research focuses on fanfiction communities and fan culture. Alongside fandom academics Alexis Lothian and Robin Anne Reid, she coined the term "queer female space" in 2007.
Francesca Coppa is an American scholar whose research has encompassed British drama, performance studies and fan studies. In English literature, she is known for her work on the British writer Joe Orton; she edited several of his early novels and plays for their first publication in 1998–99, more than thirty years after his murder, and compiled an essay collection, Joe Orton: A Casebook (2003). She has also published on Oscar Wilde. In the fan-studies field, Coppa is known for documenting the history of media fandom and, in particular, of fanvids, a type of fan-made video. She co-founded the Organization for Transformative Works in 2007, originated the idea of interpreting fan fiction as performance, and in 2017, published the first collection of fan fiction designed for teaching purposes. As of 2021, Coppa is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania.
Fan studies is an academic discipline that analyses fans, fandoms, fan cultures and fan activities, including fanworks. It is an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, which emerged in the early 1990s as a separate discipline, and draws particularly on audience studies and cultural studies.
Beginning in the mid-2010s, significant discourse emerged within fan spaces such as Tumblr and Archive of Our Own (AO3) regarding the ethical implications of portraying taboo and abusive sexual content within shipping fanfiction. "Shipping"—the depiction of a romantic or sexual relationship between fictional characters—has long been a staple within fanfiction. The lack of censorship emerging from spaces such as AO3 allowed for the portrayal of disturbing or taboo dynamics within fan works, including incest, abuse, rape, and pedophilia.
