Fanfic Glossary Fanlore

What Does Fanlore Mean?

Fandom Culture

The wiki run by the Organization for Transformative Works that documents fandom history, terminology, communities, and events from a fan's-eye perspective. It is the closest thing fandom has to an institutional memory.

Fanlore in Practice

Fanlore records what fandom itself would otherwise lose: definitions of slang and how they shifted, histories of zines and mailing lists, timelines of platform migrations and wank, and pages for individual fanworks, tropes, and ships. Its editorial approach favors plural points of view, preserving disagreements about what a term meant rather than flattening them — appropriate for a culture where definitions are perpetually contested. For anyone researching why a fandom convention exists or what some archaic abbreviation meant, Fanlore is usually the first and best stop. It is volunteer-edited, like everything else fandom builds, and perpetually deeper in some fandoms than others.

Example usage

"I fell down a Fanlore hole reading about 1990s X-Files mailing list drama and surfaced three hours later, changed."

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