Fandom Jargon Glossary.
What are all these strange terms used to describe the stories? Find out here.
BLEW-Specific Terms
- Kurt lives
- An AU story in which Kurt does not die in 1994.
- Let's hurt Kurt
- A story that focuses on Kurt's emotional or physical pain.
- Pay to play
- From the song of the same title. Sexual activity that is paid for, rather than consensual.
- Wist Wagon
- A term stolen from BBC 6 Music. A story with a pronounced sense of wistfulness - pensiveness, sadness, melancholy, longing.
General Terms
- / vs &
- Name/Name means the characters are romantically or sexually involved. Name & Name means the characters relate to each other as friends.
- Angst
- Stories featuring anxiety, depression, and other negative emotions.
- AU
- Alternate Universe. Something that diverges in a significant way from reality.
- Band Member/Reader
- A fourth wall-breaking subgenre of fanfic in which the reader is encouraged to view themselves as a character participating in the story.
- Crack
- Crazy as someone on crack. Stories that are deliberately wacky, funny, or over-the-top.
- Crossover
- A story that features characters from a different band, or fully fictional characters (e.g., My Little Ponies, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), alongside those from Nirvana.
- dark!Name AU
- An AU story wherein the character with the dark! in front of their name is depicted as evil or morally corrupt.
- Drabble
- A very short story of exactly 100 words. Sometimes used incorrectly to refer to any very short story, for which a better term is "ficlet". Some people write non-standard drabbles, for example, stories of exactly 250 or exactly 300 words.
- Dub-con
- Dubious consent. Sex stories that hover in the grey area between consensual and non-consensual. Upsetting for many readers.
- Fake Dating
- Where two characters date each other for any reason other than actually wanting to date. E.g. They need to fool other characters, a bet was made and lost, one character won a date with the other in a charity auction, etc. Typically ends with the characters actually developing feelings for each other.
- Feels
- Feelings. A reader can be given feels by many different aspects of a story.
- First Time
- A story where two characters have sex with each other for the first time. Usually not related to virginity.
- Fluff
- A lightweight, happy story that will make you feel good. Nothing heavy.
- Fusion
- A crossover in which two sets of characters never meet, but one set of characters appears in the world in which the other characters normally reside. For example, if a story had the members of Nirvana being born in Liverpool in the '40s, that would be a Nirvana/Beatles fusion.
- Gen
- General interest. No romance or sex.
- Het
- Stories featuring heterosexual/romantic relationships.
- Hurt/Comfort
- A story focusing on one character being hurt (physically or emotionally) and the other character(s) comforting and caring for them.
- Kid fic
- A story that focuses on the characters having and raising children.
- Mpreg
- Male pregnancy. A controversial subgenre of fanfic that some love and others hate.
- Non-con
- Non-consensual sex. Rape. Major squick for many readers.
- OFC
- Original Female Character. A fully fictional character created by the author. Often, but not always, a stand-in for the author herself.
- OMC
- Original Male Character. A fully fictional character created by the author. Often, but not always, a stand-in for the author himself.
- OT3
- Rhyming slang from OTP. One True Threesome. When a reader has major feels for a particular threesome of characters and how they relate to each other.
- OTP
- One True Pairing. A reader's favorite romantic, sexual, or friendship pairing of characters to read about.
- PWP
- "Plot? What plot?" or Porn Without Plot. A smut story that exists solely for the sexual content, a story that consists solely of a sex scene.
- Recs
- Recommendations. An easy way to wade through the cluttered heaps of fanfic.
- Slash
- Stories with homosexual and/or homoromantic relationships in the spotlight. Refers to the / between the names.
- Smut
- Unapologetically sexy stories. May also have a plot or important elements that are non-sexual, unlike PWP.
- Squee
- Onomatopoeia of the excited noise a reader makes when they really, really love a story or an aspect of it. The sound of happy feels.
- Squick
- Something that grosses out, repels, or offends a reader. Squicks can be very personal and individual.
- UST
- Unrequited Sexual Tension or Unresolved Sexual Tension. Stories that build up the sexual tension to a high degree before relieving it (if they relieve it at all).
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