What Does SMAU (Social Media AU) Mean?
Fic TypeA story told through fake social media — invented tweets, texts, and profiles assembled into a narrative. The format flourished on Twitter, especially in K-pop fandom.
SMAU (Social Media AU) in Practice
The social media AU tells its story in screenshots: the author fabricates the characters' group chats, posts, and DMs, and readers follow the thread as the romance or drama unfolds in-platform, often with interludes of written prose for scenes that can't happen on a phone screen. The form is native to Twitter fandom, where K-pop SMAUs ran for thousands of posts with cliffhangers and reader polls steering the plot, and it migrated to AO3 both as embedded images and as the related texting-fic genre that uses formatted chat logs. Its strengths are voice and immediacy — characterization through typing style, comedy through usernames — and it represents a genuinely new narrative form that fandom invented on the platforms it lived on.
Example usage
"The SMAU ran for eight months of fake tweets, and the day the two accounts finally posted a photo together, the readers lost their minds."
Related Terms
Threadfic
Fic published as a social media thread — written and read in tweet-sized increments, often unfolding live over days or months. Native to Twitter, with descendants on every microblogging successor.
Definition →
AU (Alternate Universe)
Short for Alternate Universe: a story that deliberately changes fundamental facts of the canon setting — the time period, the world's rules, or the characters' circumstances. Coffee shop AUs, no-powers AUs, and modern AUs are classic examples.
Definition →
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