Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2020: Week 8
A polyamorous relationship, also called a polyship or simply poly, is a relationship between three or more characters. Most fans would describe it as being deeper and longer-lasting than a one-time threesome/moresome, but how much deeper is down to an individual fic writer. Much like real-life poly people, polyships in fandom are merely multiple simultaneous relationships with the consent of all involved parties so all characters need not be dating each other for a ship to be considered poly. Often, fans ship a polyship because they multiship a particular character or because they're simplifying a love triangle.
Fanfic of polyships is often called polyfic. Polyfic is often related to teamfic, where all members of a canonical team may be written as romantically/sexually involved. In terms of fandom, its popularity is a relatively new phenomenon that can largely be attributed to the shift of fandom onto the internet. While threesome or poly stories can be found dating back to the 1980s in media fandom, most older stories were conduit fic or treated the idea of a threesome as a sexual kink, probably owing to the fact that pre-internet fanfic was sharply divided into slash, explicit het, and gen zines. Since these zines were the primary way fandom was connected, it left little space for anything outside those bounds and to find their spot early polyfic was often PWP.