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Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2019: Week 50
Bitter Old Fanfic Queen is a term coined in The X-Files fandom. It had its beginnings in the 1998 essay by Jennifer Oksana: Bitter Old Fic Queens and Why They Need to Get Over It. Shortly after, fans had changed "Fic" to "Fanfic."
While this term began with X-Philes, it is now used in other fandoms where it has evolved to become "Bitter Old Fandom Queen." Happily, "BOFQ" covers both!
Bitter Old Fanfic Queen was originally intended as a negative descriptor, representing a particular type of fan who is unable to let go of the old days - as written in the original essay, "They mourn for the Good Old Days when fic was a brave new world with *talented* authors and low traffic. They bitch about all the crap out there and sulk when the philistine newbies prefer-- gasp, clutch, choke-- sappy, inane, mediocre MSR to their own impreccably written, brilliantly characterized masterpieces."
However, while it is sometimes still used as a pejorative, it has largely been reclaimed by BOFQs who are proud to wear their crown, and is used to mean something akin to "fandom veteran". Positive use of BOFQ may have coincided with the growing negative use of “Fandom Mom.”