Pop Culture dictionary
Fictionmania
or FictionMania or FM
What does Fictionmania mean?
Fictionmania is a website that hosts fictional stories exploring gender, which are often known as Transgender (TG) stories. Many of these stories are erotic, and some of them are fantasy or science fiction. Topics include gender transformation, transgender identity, crossdressing, and more.
Where does Fictionmania come from?
It all started with the Sierra Bulletin Board, which was a free online bulletin board operated by Mindy Rich in the early 1990s. It hosted some TG stories before the internet was as accessible as it is today. As more people started coming online in the mid-1990s, newsgroups and listservs started to emerge. One such listserv was The Transformation Stories Archive (TSA), which accepted any kind of transformation story, not just those with a gender-related theme. In 1996, Rich founded a listserv called Maniapages, which expanded the gender transformation genre to include all types of TG stories. Many TSA members interested in gender transformation migrated to Maniapages.
After the success of the listserv, Rich launched Fictionmania in 1998, where thousands of stories were available. As of 2017, over 20,000 stories have been hosted on the site. The site’s splash page details the etymology of the name Fictionmania: “Fiction: Something Invented By The Imagination / Mania: Excessive Enthusiasm.” The name aptly represents the feelings of the writers who upload their work to the site.
The word transgender, as it’s used on Fictionmania, is different from the meaning of “a person whose gender identity doesn’t correspond to their sex assigned at birth.” On the site, the initialism TG stands for transgender but also, as the site puts it, “beyond gender, the catch-all word that includes every type of gender exploration.”
Examples of Fictionmania
Who uses Fictionmania?
Fictionmania features an expansive submission-based archive of stories about transformation from one sex to another, crossdressing, forced feminization, and more. The criteria for submission is that the story must deal with the exploration of gender. Each story receives a rating similar to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings based on their content. Some stories are based in an alternative universe. For example, there’s one fantasy universe on the site called “Spells R Us,” which has over 500 submissions.
Sounds like beginning of half the stories in Fictionmania https://t.co/NAUFx3VvMq
— 💀Mari Brighe’s Skeleton 💀 (@MariBrighe) May 27, 2018
When the term Fictionmania is used, it’s always in reference to the website. Often, it appears in threads where posters discuss their favorite stories on the site.
I think I read about this place on fictionmania pic.twitter.com/0OSMKBL9Jk
— Aubrey (@BreeSchuster) August 12, 2016
This Lawrence paper reads like it fell out of fictionmania and rolled around in a thesaurus before being adopted by Bailey
— ROGD = Zinnia Jones Gender Virus (@ZJemptv) March 27, 2016
Note
This is not meant to be a formal definition of Fictionmania like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of Fictionmania that will help our users expand their word mastery.