h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Very interesting. Just FYI; a lot of the terms you defined are not defined this way across all fandoms.

In my experience, slash is a generic category like het is. It doesn't have to contain sex and is no less realistic or well-considered than any het fiction. Any fic with a pairing (slash or het) has a 'ship' in it. Even a PWP has a ship. A 'gen' fic is one that has no pairings at all. It seems that this is the kind of fic you like best.

So you see why your distinctions between slash, ship, and gen with confuse people who aren't in the fandoms you describe, but are active in others.

I've been working on a glossary for some months now, and the way these terms (among some 100+ others) are used in the Harry Potter fandom are described here: http://veela-inc.net/glossary.html

Cheers!

Ivy Blossom

Also...

I'm not sure where you got your information on the number of fics at ff.net. You note that their Harry Potter archive has 14,500 stories, not even coming close to rivaling anime fanfiction, the top two fandoms with 27,000 stories combined.

In reality, the Harry Potter archive at ff.net contains 58,328 stories as of right now (Saturday morning), and this is after a massive purge that had a good chunk of HP stories deleted.

ff.net clearly contains well over 50,000 stories. You may want to revise your breakdown of 'largest fandoms' and cite some real numbers.

If you note, the date on the article is October 26th 2001, at which time the numbers were accurate. H2G2 does not work well for revisions - since I no longer have control of the article and the editors have way too much else to do - but if a revisions system is ever instituted, the developments between the initial time of writing and the time of revision will doubtless make a fascinating section all of their own. I resent the implication that I just made the numbers up.

As to the usage of various terms, that was garnered from a non-scientific, cross-fandom survey of fanfic glossaries. At the time, as far as I could find, 'sex-free' was very much the minority usage of gen, which was also widely used to describe canon pairings, and 'ship was in some way distinct from slash, but no one felt entirely comfortable defining how.

Once again, it is an unfortunate fact that H2G2 does not lend itself to revision. There's been lots of interesting discussion here, and many points raised that make me want to rewrite the article, but even if I do so it will not be for H2G2; not yet, anyway. If nothing else, it would be interesting to revise the article now that I write fan fiction myself.

We've been discussing the term "gen" very much in the Stargate-fic-world recently, after the recent fic awards appeared to bend the definitions of not only gen, but ship and slash too.

We haven't reached any agreement, but generally most people seem to feel that gen is anything that would appear onscreen (ie. near to canon)

As for slash, to be honest, IMO, it's really just another sort of ship. It's a pity that a lot of people equate "slash" with "sex" and assume it's an NC-17. There are some lovely slash stories out there which do no more than deal with the realationship between two same sex characters, in some cases less "strong" than shown on the tv.

Is there really no chance of a revision?