What Does Round Robin Mean?
Fic TypeA collaborative story written by multiple authors in turns — each writer adds a section and passes it on. Nobody controls the plot, which is both the chaos and the charm.
Round Robin in Practice
Round robins are one of fandom's oldest party games, flourishing on mailing lists and forums where a story thread could circulate through a dozen hands. Each contributor inherits whatever cliffhangers, plot twists, and abandoned guns-on-mantels the previous writers left, and the results swing between surprisingly coherent collaboration and gleeful sabotage — a beloved variant is the deliberately chaotic round robin where derailing the plot is the point. The form declined as fandom moved to platforms less suited to threaded collaboration, but it survives in Discord servers, anniversary fests, and chain-fic events. Its spirit lives on in collaborative formats like shared universes and relay exchanges.
Example usage
"By chapter five of the round robin, three authors had introduced three different secret twins, and the fourth had to deal with all of them."
Related Terms
WIP (Work in Progress)
An unfinished work being posted as it's written — the serialized heartbeat of fic culture, complete with update hopes, hiatus fears, and the eternal gamble of starting one.
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Crack
Deliberately absurd fanfiction — premises and events too ridiculous for canon, written for pure comedy. The name implies you would have to be on something to write it, or that the fic itself is addictive nonsense.
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Verse / Universe
A distinct continuity — canon's timeline, a fic's established AU, or an author's connected body of stories. 'The coffee shop verse' means that particular invented continuity and everything set in it.
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