What Does Person A / Person B Mean?
Fandom CulturePlaceholder names used in shippy writing prompts so any fan can apply the scenario to their own pairing. 'Person A walks in on Person B singing' works for every ship in existence.
Person A / Person B in Practice
The Person A/B convention powered Tumblr's golden age of OTP prompt blogs, which posted endless fill-in-the-blank scenarios — who initiates the hug, who steals the blankets, who is the menace at IKEA. The genius of the format is universality: by stripping out names, a single prompt becomes usable by every fandom simultaneously, and half the fun is fans tagging which letter corresponds to which half of their ship. The format drew some affectionate mockery for flattening characters into interchangeable roles, which itself became a meme. It remains the standard grammar for shareable ship prompts.
Example usage
"Saw a prompt — Person A patches up Person B after a fight, hands shaking — and immediately knew which of mine was which."
Related Terms
Prompt
A story seed offered to writers — a scenario, a phrase, an AU premise, a kink, an image. Prompts power exchanges, memes, fests, and a huge share of fic that gets written at all.
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OTP (One True Pairing)
A fan's ultimate favorite ship — the pairing they're most emotionally invested in. The term is one of fandom's most widely recognized acronyms, used far beyond fic circles.
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Imagine
A short second-person scenario — 'Imagine [character] finding you asleep in their library' — written so the reader is the participant. A Tumblr-native genre and the reader-insert's bite-sized form.
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Meet-Ugly
The deliberately awful inverse of a meet-cute: future love interests meet under terrible, embarrassing, or antagonistic circumstances. Think fender benders, rival lawyers, or throwing up on someone's shoes.
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