Six Degrees

Synonyms:	6 degrees, six degrees fandom, spin-off fandom, extended universe
See also:	Crossover, Fannish Drift, Same-Actor Crossover
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Six Degrees is a fannish term borrowed from the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game that is sometimes used to describe fandoms or fan activity where the only connection is the professionals involved in creating the canons (usually actors) rather than a shared canon universe or genre.

Note that this term applies to fanworks about fictional characters in addition to RPF, and that an individual fanwork in a six degrees fandom need not be a crossover.

The term six degrees was especially popular in 2000s LiveJournal fandom when it was used to describe the eclectic fan communities that grouped together fans watching and making fanworks from the filmographies of Stargate Atlantis (SGA) and Due South (dS) actors: 6 Degrees of Stargate Atlantis and Canadian 6 Degrees (C6D). Usage in Due South fandom may have appeared first, with the LiveJournal community ds_6degrees created in September 2005; the SGA community sga_6degrees was created in February 2006 and explicitly acknowledges the Due South comm as its inspiration. Circa 2007 Bandom was also sometimes known as Six Degrees of Pete Wentz.

dS and SGA may have been the only areas of fandom where the term six degrees was consistently used, but SGA was a fandom that ate fandom so a large number of LiveJournal-era fans are familiar with it.

Related terms for this phenomenon are Fannish Drift (the act of moving to a new fandom via actor connection) or spin-off fandoms (the fandoms with this actor connection). See example fandoms. The difference is that "six degrees fandoms" can describe both new separate fandoms that fans migrate to as well as the multifannish communities where fans share their interest in all of these canons simultaneously. The term "six degrees", unlike "spin-off", also emphasizes multiple points of connection; the Canadian film industry is so small that the subjects of C6D fandom had in various combinations all worked with each other on several other projects.

A similar phenomenon is taking the actors for a popular ship in one fandom and writing crossover pairings using the actors' other roles. The Archive of Our Own tag system calls these "Character Combinations", but fannish terminology varies.

Actor-based fannish involvement where fans watch an actor's other roles and may be drawn into those fandoms is such a common mode of engagement that sometimes no term is used at all. See Harrison Ford for a fanzine fandom example.