It FINALLY just dawned on me that people in anime fandom who refer to “WSJ” are in fact, referring to Weekly Shonen Jump rather than the Wall Street Journal.

I've spent almost two years thinking that the business newspaper has a rather large fandom. :|

- typical acronym-confused nonnie, May 2013

Nonnies are fond of throwing about acronyms related to their pet interests. Inevitably, this leads to confusion, plaintive requests for clarification, and/or wank from other memers. “WSJ” is a prime example of this phenomenon. Some of the manga-fandom nonnies use those three letters as shorthand for Weekly Shonen Jump, which is the home of many of the most popular ongoing titles discussed in the frequent weekly manga update threads. Time and again, this has sparked confusion on the part of other nonnies whose main association with “WSJ” is the Wall Street Journal (not to mention painfully-earnest discussion of less acronym-privileged manga magazines.)

After one too many rounds of bewilderment and minor wank, a creatively derailing nonny popped up in an “Acronym Fail” thread in late May, 2013 to propose crossing the streams:

Now I suddenly want to ship WSJ/WSJ. I think the Journal would be the sexy ojicon type, a handsome, reserved middle-aged businessman with sharp suits and sexy wireframed glasses, and Jump would be the hot-blooded, genki younger man with experimental hair and a more casual fashion sense and lots of athletic hobbies, who turns Journal's stuffy life upside down…

This proposal was met with great enthusiasm in the original thread, and a month later a different nonny requested it in a fic prompt thread:

Wall Street Journal/Weekly Shounen Jump. In which Journal is a bespectacled, somewhat jaded oyaji businessman and Jump is a genki younger man who's about to bring some unexpected brightness to Journal's life.

(Not my idea, but damn if I haven't been desperate for it from the moment some other brilliant nonnie mentioned how awesome it would be.)

This prompt was then gleefully cosigned by one of the earlier nonnies befuddled by the thought of the Journal having a large fandom, and in short order a talented nonny delivered the goods:

It started when Wall Street Journal got a catalogue for sporting goods in the mail.

This was moderately puzzling, because Journal had never signed up for any such thing, but maybe he'd accidentally gotten on some mailing list the last time he'd bought golf clubs. He laid it aside on an endtable and didn't think much about it. He had more important things to worry about.

The next day, he got a magazine about martial arts. He definitely hadn't signed up for that. He peered at the address on the back: “W.S.J., apartment 5-A,” and the street address of his stylish New York apartment building. Which looked about right, except that he lived in 15-A. Which was odd, but he had a meeting to get to, so he put it on the endtable with the other one and went off to find his cufflinks.

But then it kept happening. He got brochures for sky-diving and travel to exotic places. He got catalogues of pirate-, ninja-, and samurai-themed merchandise. He got a hand-addressed letter with no return address which looked like it had been chewed on slightly by a wild animal. He got comics. And, most distressingly of all, a certain portion of his normal mail seemed to be missing.

After a week of this, he decided it was time to sort all this out. So on Saturday afternoon (right after a lunch meeting with an important client), he gathered up the pile of mysterious missives, went down to the fifth floor, and knocked on the door of apartment 5-A.

The door swung open to reveal a short, wiry young man wearing fraying jeans and a t-shirt adorned with a skull and crossbones in a jaunty hat. He had untidy black hair and a smile that could only be described as “goofy.”

“What's up?” said the young man, smile fading into a look of vague puzzlement. “Do I know you?”

“Er, no,” said Journal, “but I think I've been getting your mail.” He held out the stack of papers in his arms by way of backing up this explanation.

The young man peered down at it and then began unceremoniously rifling through it. “Dude!” he exclaimed. “I was wondering where the June issue of Kickpuncher Monthly had gotten to! Thanks for bringing this over.”

“You're welcome,” said Journal. “Er.” He cleared this throat. “I think I've been missing some mail myself. You wouldn't happen to have received anything addressed to apartment 15-A, would you?”

The young man thought this over for a minute. “Hey, now you mention it, I was wondering why I was getting all those finance magazines and stuff.”

“Can I have them back, then?”

“Uh, I think I threw some of them away, but I still have most of them! Somewhere. You'd better come in while I look for them.”

Journal heaved a deep sigh and stepped into the young man's cluttered living room. He pushed aside some of the junk piled on the sofa (video games, DVD cases, a basketball jersey…) and sat down.

The young man, meanwhile, began pulling apart the room with great enthusiasm but very little method. “My name's Weekly Shounen Jump, by the way,” he said (his voice slightly muffled because he was on his hands and knees behind the television). “What's yours?”

“Wall Street Journal,” Journal said stiffly.

The young man–Jump–straightened up, grinning again. “Heh, how about that–same initials! I guess that's why the post office mixed us up.”

(To be continued when it's not 3AM???)

The WSJ/WSJ ficlet was received with great enthusiasm, including praise from the original derailing ship-prompter and speculation about the periodicals' previous dating history:

OMG this is adorable. I don't read either of these things, but I well and truly ship it now.

(And now I'm wondering about their dating history. Like, maybe Weekly Shounen Jump and Shojo Beat decided they were better friends than a couple, and she keeps trying to set him up with her other single friends, but Wall Street Journal is still smarting from when The Economist broke up with him because long-distance relationships never work out, and then he found out Economist had been cheating on him with the New York Post, of all people.)

A few days later, another creative nonny immortalized the nascent ship in a haiku thread:

Weekly Shounen Jump
Is about to meet his match:
The Wall Street Journal.