Citations:fluff

Noun: "(fandom slang) fan fiction, or part of a fan fiction, which is sweet and feel-good in tone, usually involving romance"

 * 2010, John Lennard, Of Sex and Faerie: Further Essays on Genre Fiction, page 287:
 * In fanfic terms this makes it fluff, idealistic (and often romantic) feelgood fic that gives readers WAFF—'Warm and Fuzzy Feelings'.
 * 2011, anonymous, quoted in Katherine Larsen & Lynn Zubernis, Fandom at the Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/producer Relationships, page 138:
 * And when something triggers, I can close the window and go read fluff for hours until I calm down.
 * 2013, Lauren Billings, "Million Words", in Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, page 196:
 * but as I grew aware of the sheer size of the [Twilight] community, my obsession expanded to reading all of these stories. All Human, canon vamp, crossover. Slash, poly, BDSM. Angst, fluff, you name it.
 * 2014, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth & Malin Isaksson, Fanged Fan Fiction: Variations on Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, page 46:
 * Some genre labels are recognizable also for someone not used to browsing fanfic archives, such as romance, mystery and horror, whereas subgenres such as mpreg (male pregnancy), hurt/comfort (where one character suffers and another consoles) or fluff (an often humorous story depicting a minor event) require a certain level of knowledge on the part of the reader to be decipherable.
 * 2015, Amanda K. Allen, "Social Networking, Participatory Culture and the Fandom World of Harry Potter", in Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture (eds. Gail Ashton), page 280:
 * Explicit norms may include guidelines, restrictions, reader feedback, labels labels and paratextual warnings ('fluff' suggests a light, romantic story;
 * 2017, "Flourish Kink", quoted in Ashley J. Barner, The Case for Fanfiction: Exploring the Pleasures and Practices of a Maligned Craft, page 67:
 * Fans prefer fluff to other types of fic. But angst (dramatic stories where characters have a wide range of emotions, including...angsty ones) comes in close second.
 * 2017, Carrie DiRisio, Brooding YA Hero: Becoming a Main Character (Almost) as Awesome as Me, unnumbered page:
 * Ah, fluff. My happy place. These fics are dedicated to feel-good feelings, which are the very best type of feelings.
 * 2018, Emily E. Roach, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Closet: Queerbaiting, Slash Shipping and The Cursed Child", in Harry Potter and Convergence Culture: Essays on Fandom and the Expanding Potterverse (eds. Amanda Firestone & Leisa A. Clark), page 133:
 * Many of the early studies also focused on the inherently romantic and/or pornographic nature of slash fiction, which doesn't account for the wide variety of fan works from fluff to dark fic, a study which is beyond the scope of this paper.
 * 2019, Svenja Hohenstein, Girl Warriors: Feminist Revisions of the Hero's Quest in Contemporary Popular Culture, page 148:
 * The diversification also shows itself in the range of subgenres, with hurt/comfort, fluff, AU (alternate universe), angst, first time,
 * 2019, Andrew Murray, Information Technology Law: The Law and Society, page 258:
 * Fanfic may be in many forms from fluff (a happy story) to smut (sexually explicit or pornographic).