• Lemon: This refers to a piece of fanfiction with explicit sexual content. I understand that the source of this term comes from an early pornographic anime called "Cream Lemon." If you want to think about it in another way, if you squeeze a lemon, it juices all over your hand. Call it 'filthy smut' if you prefer that.
  
  
• Hentai/H/Ecchi: means it's filthy smut. 'Hentai' means 'perverted'. 'Ecchi' is just how you would say 'H' - the first letter of Hentai - out loud.
  
  
• Mary Sue: Now, this term might have REALLY confused you if you don't read a lot of fanfiction. A Mary Sue is an author avatar - a self-insert, put more simply. Just about everyone has wished that they could 'jump into' the world of their favorite show/series/book and meet the characters (or the real people, if we're talking musical groups). Most of us, however, never inflict these desires on the general public. Those who do - write Mary Sues. I was going to say that you outgrow the urge to write yourself into a story, but that would be a complete lie. The most famous Mary Sue (or Marty Stu for male ones, I suppose) would be Wesley Crusher from Star Trek, the series created by Eugene Wesley Rodenberry. :P (For that reason, male Mary Sues may also be called "Wesleys".)
  But as I was saying before I got completely sidetracked, was that the main problem with Mary Sues is that they are so incredibly annoying to read about. These Mary Sues are almost invariably perfect, multi-talented, and a boy/girl magnet. Everyone (especially the author's favorite character) falls in love with them, or is their father, or something like that. They appear out of nowhere, are embraced into the canon, and are given important positions in the hierarchy (in Fushigi Yuugi, it would be something like a new Miko, or in, um, an Anne Rice book, it would be an incredibly talented, previously-unknown member of those wankers, the Talamasca.) If they're not important in the entire universe of the book/series, then they're given a major role in the lives of the characters, usually supplanting the heroine/hero or their boyfriend/girlfriend. Again, going with the Anne Rice example here, this mysterious, highly-talented member of the Talamasca would meet, um, Louis (who we all know is about as straight as a doughnut) and makes him fall PASSIONATELY in love with her, wiping his little hangups with Claudia and Lestat clean out of his mind, and then he, uh, makes her a vampire or something, so that they can be together forever. Gosh, I'm a bit scared at how easy it is for me to speculate on the plot of these things, and then to realize that someone's probably already written it.
  Are you beginning to get the idea? USUALLY the Mary Sue is an incredibly annoying original character. However, sometimes the Mary Sue infects a canonical character, transforming the character into a clone of the author. For example, I recently read a Harry Potter fic in which Ron Weasley, who I always thought was your standard Guy(tm) in the making, grew up to be a long-haired, anorexic waif who sobbed about his tragic unrequited love for Harry Potter. I couldn't even begin to explain how weird it was to read this fic. The emotionally scarred, physically frail Ron, who hadn't eaten for a week, who could count his ribs in the mirror, and who fainted from malnutrition or something at the end of the first chapter, had absolutely no resemblance to the Ron Weasley I remembered from the books. It became crystal clear that either the author was smoking some pretty powerful shit, or that they had somehow wriggled into Ron's skin and turned him into, well, themselves. It's kind of both frustrating and creepy to read about those Mary Sues...you feel like you're getting a slightly voyeuristic peek into the personal problems and issues of a complete stranger. Ick.
  "Wait!" Authors might say. "My original character isn't a Mary Sue! Look, s/he has FLAWS!" Yes, but are they noble, tragic flaws, such as the flaws you'd make up at a job interview when asked what your weaknesses were? "I'm too self-sacrificing. I beat myself up over things that aren't my fault, but because I'm so noble, I angst about them anyways. I'm a perfectionist; I have to make everything run smoothly." A Tragic Past is the hallmark of a Mary Sue, as is pointless angsting or a Noble Death, where all the canon characters sob about how noble Mary Sue's sacrifice was.
  Another good page explaining the Mary Sue phenomenon has pointed out a quick test for a Mary Sue: if you take genuine criticism - not flaming, but criticism - of said original character very personally, there's a high risk that it's a Mary Sue. (Because, of course, criticism of the Mary Sue feels like peronal criticism, since you probably share so many traits.)
  This entire explanation was cribbed from several good sites - I don't claim to be the most original analyst of the Mary Sue phenomenon. But I'd be hard-pressed to say anything that these sites haven't said, and said better than I did.
  
  
• PWP: stands for "Plot? What Plot?" Basically, there are two kinds of smutty fics: ones that pretend to be high-brow, and those which admit that they're essentially padded sex scenes. The latter are called "PWP", and the former are called all kinds of silly euphemisms such as 'sekkishiaru roman' (sexual stories) or the like. I'm not saying that the presence of sex in a fic makes it a smutty, plotless lemon. I'm just saying that if the point of the story is to talk about two characters getting it on, Romaaaaaantically or otherwise, the plot IS the smut, so you might as well call it a PWP. And no, I'm not saying that smut is bad either. Look at what the hell I've been reviewing!
  
  
• WAFF : stands for Warm and Fuzzy Feeling. Self-explanatory, right? Either this is a feeble excuse for writing characters so saccharinely romantic that it makes me cringe, or for writing a fic that involves people treating each other nicely without bastardizing their characterization, in which case I go "Awww" and want to hug the monitor. I'm a cranky, cynical bitch, but well-done WAFFy fic is a joy to read, and makes you smile after finishing it.
  
  
• OOC: Out-Of-Character. Avoid this unless you can really do this well and justify it, which you probably can't.
  
  
• Yaoi: Essentially 'slash', but usually applied to male homosexual relationships between characters in Japanese games, manga, novels, anime, whatnot. You WILL, however, see things such as 'X-Files yaoi' which sounds WEIRD to me. 'Yaoi' is an acronym for something that I don't remember off the top of my head ( " yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi" - No Climax, No Resolution, No Meaning? something like that) but my favorite acronym for YAOI is "YAmete! Oshiti ga Itai!" ("Stop it! My butt hurts!")
  
  
• Yuri: involves lesbian relationships. I understand this came from early Dirty Pair fanfiction involving Kei and Yuri. I might be wrong.
  
  
• Fanon: 'Canon' is 'the works of a writer that have been generally accepted as being authentic.' FANON, on the other hand, is a particular storyline, characterization, whatever you like, that sprung up in the fan community. Some fanon characters deviate wildly from their canon characterization, become extremely popular among fanficcers, and some of them may eventually forget that the fanon characterization is NOT THE ORIGINAL ONE. An example that springs to mind is that of Draco Malfoy, from the Harry Potter books. In the books, he's a selfish, petty, spoilt brat. However, in the fan community, he's become some kind of bizarre divine anti-hero, sarcastic, witty, angelically beautiful, and prone to wander about in form-fitting black clothes. His character flaws have been varnished and buffed into a glossy shine, until all you can see is a typical 'bad boy'. Bleh. All well and good, but don't forget that THAT'S NOT HOW HE'S WRITTEN.
  
  
• Seme: the 'top' in a gay relationship. The one doing the spelunking. The one finding the South Pole. The one whose Tab A inserts into the uke's Slot B.
  
  
• Uke: the 'bottom'. In a lot of stories, this means that he's made into a snivelling, crying little girl who feels 'fulfilled' by the seme. Filled, maybe.

This slap to the head was administered at 02:38 p.m. on Wednesday, December 19, 2001.