Ascended Meme / Literature

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• One of Citadel's chapters, Origins includes a question and answer session with William Power, the Citadel's most prominent operative. A number of the questions came from the readers.
• Harry Potter:
  • The fan abbreviation DADA for Defence Against the Dark Arts was used in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and the fan nickname Voldie for Voldemort was used by Peeves at the end of Deathly Hallows.
  • Prior to the seventh book, Draco Malfoy's family home had never appeared or been named, though it was implied to be some kind of castle or mansion. Fans assigned it the name "Malfoy Manor", which became ubiquitous in fanfiction before eventually being made canon in Deathly Hallows.
• In the Honor Harrington series, the abbreviations "SD(P)" and "podnaught" for missile pod-laying superdreadnoughts started out as fan nicknames on David Weber's messageboard.
• The Queen's Thief books by Megan Whalen Turner were called that by its fans, since there wasn't an official title for all of them. With the 20-year reprinting and announcement of the fifth book, Turner and her publishers have officially dubbed the books the Queen's Thief series.
• Carl Sagan never said the phrase "Billions and billions"... until he made it the title of what was to be his last book. In the foreword, he even lampshades the situation.
• In-Universe example from Diane Duane's Star Trek novel The Romulan Way. The Romulan spirituality of the Elements (something resembling animism with a heavy dose of the concept of karma) actually began as a Internet messageboard joke as the proto-Romulans prepared to leave Vulcan. It started to get discussed seriously and then gradually had its original meaning forgotten over the subsequent 1,600-plus years.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Several books, including Scoundrels and Honor Among Thieves, make a point of how Han either Shot First or failed to so, in different circumstances.
  • Similarly, Admiral Ackbar is semi-regularly given longer lines containing the phrase "It's a trap!"
  • The infamous difficulty of the Redemption mission (Tour 1, Mission 4) in X-Wing led to its appearance in the very first chapter of Michael Stackpole's X-Wing novels—as an infamously difficult training scenario for Rebel pilots (so it also doubles as a Shout-Out to the Kobayashi Maru Scenario).
• The Stormlight Archive: After fans had discussed for a while the potential existence of other forms of weapons similar to Shardblades (such as Shardspears or Shardarrows), one fan posted this list of tongue-in-cheek "predictions" for the third book of the series, which culminates in Lift getting a Shardfork. This became somewhat of a meme on the official forums. Then, in the novella Edgedancer, she does, but finds its Absurd Cutting Power tendencies make it very impractical to eat with.
• In the Whateley Universe story Five Elements Dancing: Book Of The Fire, Dr. Diabolik's suggestion of a response to the Tong of the Black Madonna's breaking the neutrality policy originated from this piece of Fan Art:
  I think a measured response is in order, wouldn’t you say? Say, something on the order of Orbital Bombardment?
• The Wheel of Time: In The Gathering Storm, Elaida's Aes Sedai faction is called loyalists, which was previously a fan nickname.
• World of the Five Gods: "Dratsab" originated on the Bujold mailing list as a way to avoid overzealous content filters; in The Hallowed Hunt, Learned Hallana uses it as a curse.
• A Running Gag in the comments section of Worm has a character saying, "Meh, I could take her" in reference to the protagonist, due to how she is frequently underestimated. Jack Slash says a paraphrase of the line in the story.

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