A few weeks ago I received an email from an editor I’m working with that had “Urgent” written in the subject line. Always a great way to give a grad student her daily heart attack. This actually wasn’t a big issue though, just a legitimate question she was relaying from the copy editor: Why in the world did you write “powerful!Harry” at the end of your essay? Is this some sort of typo?
It definitely looks like one doesn’t it? By the rules of conventional English (whatever the hell that means) chucking an exclamation point between two words so you can string them together pretty much isn’t a thing. Fan language though? Loaded with meaning. The exclamation point—otherwise known as a bang—is used as a way of emphasizing a trait that a character possesses (Fanlore). Harry isn’t just powerful in this fic, he’s powerful!Harry, in that his power is a defining aspect of his identity and a driving element of the story. Writing “barista Harry” is distinctly different from “barista!Harry” as the former is merely a descriptor of his occupation while the latter highlights that occupation as something formative to Harry and our experiences of the fic. As the beautiful, wonderful, fantastically detailed Fanlore also points out (you’ll notice throughout this post that there is pretty much a grand total of One Source and they’re it. Welcome to the limited records of fandom history), the bang can be used to denote fic genres as well—or fic tropes if you prefer. Differentiating the two in fandom is messy to say the least.
@carry-on-my-wayward-wesley – I think I’ll do that sometime! There’s definitely a lot to be said about how television shows in particular (X-Files, Star Trek, Beauty and the Beast, Starsky and Hutch, etc.) emphasized certain genres, narrative structures, and dynamics between duos that really resonated with fans and helped to define a lot of the pre and early Internet fandom.
(And then there’s Harry Potter in a class all its own. Freaking international cultural phenomenon lol)
Plot Designing 