What Does Fanfiction Mean?
Fandom CultureFiction written by fans using existing media's characters, settings, or worlds — transformative storytelling built on a shared source. The founding practice of modern media fandom, shortened universally to fanfic or fic.
Fanfiction in Practice
Retelling and extending other people's stories is ancient, but fanfiction as a named, organized practice grew through twentieth-century fan communities — science fiction zines, then the Star Trek fandom of the late 1960s, whose fanzines established forms and ship culture that persist today. The practice moved through mailing lists, personal sites, and FanFiction.Net to today's AO3-centered ecosystem, accumulating its vast genre vocabulary along the way. Legally, fanfiction's modern footing rests on the transformative-use framework championed by the Organization for Transformative Works; culturally, it operates as a gift economy where stories are written for love and community rather than sale. Its scale is staggering — millions of works across every conceivable source — and its alumni include plenty of professional novelists who started in the archive trenches.
Example usage
"I explain fanfiction to relatives as 'imagine the book kept going, written by the people who loved it most.'"
Related Terms
Fic
The universal short form of fanfiction — both the mass noun ('reading fic') and the countable unit ('a fic,' 'three fics'). The word fandom actually uses day to day.
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Fandom
The community of fans around a particular work, franchise, or person — and, collectively, the whole culture of organized fan activity. One belongs to a fandom and also to fandom at large.
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AO3 (Archive of Our Own)
The largest fanfiction archive on the internet, run by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works. It is fan-built, donation-funded, ad-free, and famous for its powerful tagging and filtering system.
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Fanwork
The umbrella term for any creative work made by fans from existing media — fic, art, vids, podfic, mixes, cosplay, meta, crafts. The category AO3 and the OTW exist to host and defend.
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Canon
The official source material and everything established as true within it — the events, characters, and facts of the original book, show, game, or film. Fanfiction defines itself in relation to canon: following it, bending it, or discarding it.
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More Fandom Culture Terms
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