Not We
I just read an article about Doctor Who in which former showrunner Steven Moffat referred to “the Not-We audience.”
Turns out that Not We (with various capitalizations and punctuations) is a term used by Doctor Who fandom to refer to people who are casual watchers of the show, or to “anyone who is not an obsessive Doctor Who fan” whether they watch the show or not.
Which is kinda funny to me, given that I’ve been a fan of the show since the early 1980s but have never encountered this term before.
Speaking of the word kinda, it turns out that Not We “derives from the Not-We, a group of outsiders seen in [the 1982 episode titled] Kinda.” I almost certainly saw that episode at the time, but I have no memory of it. Refreshingly, “Unlike the original term [as used in the episode]—which […] had a mildly pejorative connotation—the fan term is […] rarely, if ever, meant as an insult.”