Fandom nonsense: wuxia, xianxia, danmei, baihe, Kinnporsche. Also languages, writing, history, orchids. Yi Citizen. In my 30s.
AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katzenfabrik/pseuds/villainousfriend


One of my fandom pet peeves is portmanteau ship names, or sm(oo|u)shnames. I refused to use them entirely in fandoms previous to CQL/MDZS—which, to be fair, was only the Vampire Chronicles and Machineries of Empire. I was a latecomer to participatory/transformative fandom.

When I got interested in Chinese media fandom, I admitted to myself that smushnames feel a lot less awful here. With Chinese languages being syllable-based, it makes much more sense to combine a syllable from each name than it does to grab a handful of letters from names written in a Latin script. It might not always make sense: I guess you could translate 晓薛 xiaoxue [1] as 'dawn wormwood', but would you? You also run into interesting questions of which character to take, and which order to put them in. [2] Still, at least it's not Spirk or Spuffy.

Fanlore informs me that I am not alone in disliking smushnames. It adds, however, that they were partially popularised because of technical restrictions on Tumblr tags, so now I'm stuck, because the adaptation of fandom to its platforms and vice versa is one of my favourite things to learn about.

My only [3] love, sprung from my only [4] hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late!

[1] Picked only because I mentioned it on a recent post.
[2] My attention span is too short for me to have a fixed opinion on who tops, sorry.
[3] No.
[4] No.


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