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).
