Today I was reading some post about Harry Potter, and the writer kept on referring to this thing called "wolfstar." It took me a few minutes to realize this was referring to the pairing of Remus and Sirius. Jesus Christ, that's how I know I've been out of the fandom for a while; I no longer know the terminology anymore. When the hell did this happen? I'm seeing stuff like Romione for Ron/Harry or Snarry for Snape/Harry too. In the 2000s when the books were coming out, that's how we would fucking write it: character/character. As someone into history and linguistics, I'm fascinated to know when and why people moved from that standard to this portmanteau and neologism stuff when what we used back in the day worked perfectly fine. It survived the move of the fandom from eGroups (remember that shit?) to livejournal, but maybe not from livejournal to tumblr? I'm not certain.