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The Shipping Glossary is a list of terms and the definitions in shipping and fandom. It is common in fandom to find a large use of slang terms about shipping and the various different fandoms.

Contents

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

A

  • Animanga - An umbrella term used by fans to refer to anime and manga at the same time, particularly in the context of a single, large, combined fandom.
  • Alternate Universe - Often shortened to AU, Alternate Universe is a concept, typically in fanfictions where characters are imagined to be in different scenarios. For instance, the characters in a mediveal fantasy might be put in a modern universe (Modern AU).
  • Angst - A genre of fanfiction typically dedicated to being sad, angry, or just accociated with negative feelings.

B

  • Biromantic - The romantic attraction to both girls and boys, or also sometimes meaning when someone is romantically attracted to the same gender and others.
  • Bisexuality - The sexual attraction to both girls and boys, or also sometimes meaning when someone is sexually attracted to the same gender and others.
  • Bisexual triangle - a love triangle, one of the corners of which represents a canonical or potential homosexual attraction. For example, the male MC rival is the best friend of his love interest, who is (maybe) also in love with her. Such relationships often cause a fierce ship war between het and slash / femslash ships, which makes this shiping very problematic.
  • Buddyslash - The term for slash between characters who are friends, or more often, partners in canon.
  • Brotp - The term used when describing you ship a pairing platonically, or as friends.

C

  • Canon - Another word for official. Used to refer to a pairing or another aspect of the series that is considered to be true to the storyline.
  • Cargo Ship - Crack!Ships between a fictional character, or real-life person and an inanimate object.
  • Class S - Japanese literary genre, idealizing female friendship as a special form of platonic love between women, the forerunner of yuri and many of its tropes. Elements of its ambiguous aesthetics such as emotional tension, lesbian subtext and the characteristic "S relationship's pairings" are widely used in modern Japanese culture both to portray strong friendship and to create a loophole for adding shiping in works without actual (canon) lesbian romance. A classic modern example of this approach is KumiRei and other femslash ships from the Hibike Euphonium franchise.
  • Character - A character is a fictional invention who does not exist in real life.
  • Crack Ship - A pairing that is considered to be way out there or impossible. Usually between characters who have never met each other or barely interacted.
  • Crossover Ship - Similar to a crack ship: a paring between characters from different medias.

D

E

  • Endgame - Refers to ships that are canon at the end of the series.
  • Enemyslash - The term for slash between characters who are canonically enemies, antagonists, or rivals, sometimes to the point of obsession.

F

  • Fandom - The community that surrounds a TV show/movie/book etc. Fanfiction writers, artists, poets, and cosplayers are all members of that fandom. Fandoms often consist of message boards, livejournal communities, roleplaying, people and much more.
  • Fanfic - Short/slang form of fanfiction.
  • Fanfiction - Fanfiction is when someone takes either the story or characters (or both) of a certain piece of work, whether it be a novel, TV show, movie, etc., and create their own story based on it. Sometimes people will take characters from one movie and put them in another, which is called a cross-over.
  • Fanon - The opposite of canon. It is the collection of concepts and ideas that is normally used in fanfictions, but doesn't exist in the official (canon) work.
  • Femslash - Femslash, derived from 'female slash' refers to relationships between two female characters. Also occasionally called F/F, Femmeslash, Girlslash, Ladyslash or Sapphic.
  • Fluff - A type of fanfiction with a happy ending, or a joyful plot.
  • Frankenword - See Portmanteau.
  • Friendship as Romance - idealized image of friendship between two characters, which uses a large amount of homoerotic subtext to indicate the depth and importance of their relationship. The most famous forms of this attitude are American bromance and Japanese CLass S, which directly promotes platonic love between two women as the highest form of female friendship. In the context of shiping, this is often intentional when creating relationships in all-male or all-female work, since such a loophole allows author to add great shiping potential to the plot without using actual romance.

G

  • Gay - See Homosexuality.
  • Genre - A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.
  • Gender - Gender is the range of physical, mental, and behavioral characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity.
  • Ghost Ship - A ship that you once supported and perhaps still do that went down in the ocean, drowning all on board (basically, a hopeless relationship)

H

  • Het - A pairing of characters or real-life people, where one side is male and the other female. The word "Het" is derived from the word, "Heterosexual".
  • Heteroromantic - Romantically attracted to people of the opposite gender.
  • Heterosexual - Sexually attracted to people of the opposite sex.
  • Holosexuality - The romantic attraction to holographic items. Usually those who are Holosexual come from Simply Nailogical's fandom and originally find the attraction in holo nail polish.
  • Homo - A word that is short for homosexual.
  • Homoromantic - Romantically attracted to the same gender.
  • Homoerotic subtext - Using romantic, "homoerotic", metaphors to write relationships between characters of the same gender. The most common reasons for using it are either an intention to give emotional depth to non-romantic relationships between the characters or to hint at a possible attraction between them without a direct statement about it. The most popular forms of this subtext are bromance and the broader concept of friendship as a romance".
  • Homosexuality - Sexual attraction to someone of the same gender.

I

  • Incest - sexual or romantic relationship between close relatives. For obvious reasons, many such ships have only the illusion of real incestuous relationships and often become canon or semi-canon only under the condition of traditional loopholes such as revealing that the characters are not related by blood. However, it is not uncommon for canon to intentionally retain an incestuous nature, mainly either to directly appeal to the audience with a related fetish or to add a big drama to the idea of ​​potential relationships between characters.

J

K

L

  • Lesbian - A homosexual woman.
  • LGBT+ - Abbreviation term of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexual, romantic or gender identities. Also a community.
  • Love - Feel a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone.
  • Lemon - A fanfic, or One Shot including sexual intercourse or sexual interactions. Also know as smut.

M

N

  • Non-binary - The unbrella term used for those who do not identify as either male or female. Includes genderfluid, genderqueer, agender or bigender.
  • Notp - A ship that that you don't ship. Or a ship that you hate.

O

  • OBHWF - An acronym used in the Harry Potter fandom which stands for One Big Happy Weasley Family. It refers to the combined Harry/Ginny and Ron/Hermione ships.
  • OTP - One True Pairing. Meaning your favorite combination of characters in a fandom.
    • OT3 - A play on OTP, and means "one true threesome".
    • OT4 - Means "one true foursome"

P

  • Pairing - The characters who make up the central focus of a fanwork.
  • Pansexual - A person who is sexually attracted to anyone, regardless of their gender. Typically pansexual people can be attracted to any gender or sex, as the prefix "pan" means "all".
  • Polyamorous - A relationship between three or more characters which is deeper and more long-lasting than a one-time threesome/moresome sex scene. In a polyamorous relationship, anyone can have any type of attraction(sexual, romantic, sensual, platonic...) towards anyone else in the relationship.
  • Poly - A shortened version of the word polyamorous.
  • Portmanteau - The combination of two or more words to create a new word.
  • Potterhead - An extreme version of a fan of the Harry Potter books.

Q

R

  • Rarepair - A ship that is uncommon or unpopular within its fandom and doesn't have many fanworks.
  • Roleplay - Typically taken part on message boards, email or on tumblr. In group roleplays, users make their own character and play them in a set of rules laid down by forum moderators/admins. In fandoms, these are typically set within a specific fandom. Occasionally, these roleplays are in a ship-based scenario.
  • Romance - A feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.

S

  • Sailed Ship - A ship that became canon.
  • Shippers - Someone who takes part in shipping. A fan is called a 'shipper' when they support a relationship, whenever it's canon or not. It is a common joke to say that you "sail" on a certain ship.
  • Shipper Goggles - the tendency to interpret any interaction between characters, even obviously non-romantic, as romantic. Although the term originally appeared as a satire on especially obsessed fans of slash shiping, at the moment it is more often used as a joke on oneself or intentionally excessive interpretations.
  • Shipperpression - A depression caused by the end of one's favored ship. For instance, when a fan becomes upset when a fictional relationship breaks up.
  • Shipping - Derived from the word relationship, is the belief that two characters, fictional or non-fictional, would be interesting or believable (or are, or will be, or should be) in a romantic relationship. It is considered a general term for fans' emotional involvement with the ongoing development of romance in a work of fiction.
  • Shipstruck - The emotion you feel when a ship that you really love and support, usually your OTP, has an amazing ship moment that makes you feel compellingly lovestruck with your ship and result in thinking about it and adoring it for a minimum of a day. Being shipstruck can also occur when you engage in supporting activities for your ship for a specified amount of time.
  • Ship Manifesto - A essay about a certain ship and why people ship it. These used to be popular on LiveJournal back in the 2000s and were often posted to the ship manifesto livejournal or dreamwidth.
  • Ship War - A heated disagreement between two or more groups of shippers. Ship wars span a long time and involve many people in their fandom.
  • Side Pairing - A pairing that is described in the story, but is not the main focus. Side pairings can vary in "screen time" and importance; a "secondary" pairing might have almost as much plot relevance as the "main" pairing, or it might be better described as a "background" or "minor" pairing that is only mentioned incidentally.
  • Sinship - A ship (usually of a BROTP) where the characters involved are paired causing mischief together.
  • Slash - Slash refers to relationships between two male characters. Occasionally, two female characters can be categorized under slash. However, femslash has become a more popular term for this. Slash ships are recognizable by the slash, '/' between the characters.
  • Slasher - A fan of slash ships, usually those who write male/male fanfiction. Some fans of slash who also read or write in other genres prefer not to identify as slashers, seeing the term as meaning fans who are only interested in slash pairings.
  • Slashy - Commonly used to describe relationships between characters of the same gender that can easily be read as sexual or romantic, or texts that contain homoerotic subtext supporting slash pairings.
  • Straight - See Heterosexual.
  • Subtext - ambiguous moments between the characters, which can be read as a hint of a romantic attraction between the characters. Due to the abstractness of this term and the frequent uncertainty of the true intentions of the author, the correct reading of the subtext and its context often becomes an important element of shiping.
  • Superwholock - A crossover between the three fandoms Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock, which has formed a fandom of its own on Tumblr.
  • Superwholockian - An individual who is an avid fan of Supernatural, Doctor Who and Sherlock.
  • Smut - Typically describing fan written works that include sexual intercourse or sexual interactions.

T

  • Threesome - A label often used for fanworks involving three characters in a romantic or sexual situation.
  • Transgender - An umbrella term to describe a person who identifies as a different gender than their biological sex. This includes transgirls/transwomen, transboys/transmen/transguys; or nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid people.

U

V

W

  • Weasleycest - A term used in the Harry Potter fandom to describe fanworks that contain incest pairings involving members of the Weasley Family—most often twins Fred and George Weasley.
  • Wincest - popular incest ship. The name of the term is a pun of the word "win" and the surname of the Winchester brothers from the Supernatural series, where this word denoted the extremely popular slash ship between them. Following this tradition, many incest ships began to receive a name according to the scheme "surname of characters + cest".
  • Wrongshipping - When a fan ships two characters who really shouldn't be together.

X

Y

  • Yaoi - Yaoi is a slang meaning 'boys love' or homosexuality that is used in Japanese culture.
  • Yaoi fan- A fan of such relationships or works depicting such relationships
  • Yuri - Like Yaoi, but with girls who are lesbians.

Z

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