Fandom Culture--Affixes, Blending, and Portmanteaus
I participate in fandom culture, and I've always been interested in observing how fandom slang develops, changes, and evolves. In the past few years, I've noticed fandom culture is gradually becoming more popular and recognized in certain circles. It's definitely a big deal on this website, Tumblr.
The fandom slang people use can determine what others think of them. If a person uses slang that is associated with other websites, such as FanFiction, Facebook, or Reddit, others may assume he/she is a netizens (lookie here, a portmanteau) of that site. If someone uses a non-typical ship name or an out-of-style slang term, people are likely to identify him/her as an outsider or newbie. And slang evolves quickly, so it's easy to fall behind.
On Tumblr (and elsewhere, but Tumblr is my specific area of focus), affixes are an important part of identity for fandoms.
A popular webcomic called Homestuck uses the suffix -stuck. A lot of AU (alternate universe) spin-off comics and stories are made by fans, such as marchingstuck, promstuck, and highschoolstuck. On Tumblr, anything with -stuck added to it is commonly understood to mean it involves Homestuck.
It gets really interesting when you consider crossovers, fandom spinoffs that encompass more than one fandom.
That's when you get words like Superwholockian, which is used to describe a person who is a fan of the television shows Supernatural (super-), Doctor Who (who-), and Sherlock (-lock; adding an additional affix, -ian, makes the word go through a functional shift).
In addition to affixing, fandoms tend to do a lot of blending and portmanteau creation. Even the word fandom is a portmanteau!
People in fandoms like to "ship" characters together, which is a slang term that means pairing characters together in relationships (often romantically, but also in other ways, including as friends, enemies, and rivals).
People who ship Harry/Draco from Harry Potter tend to call the ship Drarry (Dr- from Draco's name blended with -arry from Harry's name). People who ship Peter/Wendy from Once Upon a Time tend to call the ship darlingpan (a portmanteau combining the characters' last names). I'm not even going to get into fandom inside jokes and three-or-more-way pairings.
Bottom line: slang is a big part of fandom web communities, and there are lots of linguistics phenomena going on in fandomland.