Fiction written by fans about someone else's characters — fanfic — from 1960s zines into the internet's largest body of writing, and the record's entry for the form that trained a generation of novelists and is still apologised for. It shouldn't be.
The record notes several bestselling novels began as fanfic, that the authors were embarrassed, and that the readers were not.
Small fix: the peak year is right but the peak was shorter than a year — closer to six weeks. The rest of 2012 was people explaining it.
My first sighting was 1995, in a reply from someone I have never met, and I understood it immediately. That is the closest thing to magic the internet still does.
Where did you see it, and when? A date and a source that still resolves.
