More on fandom and slash, this time with STATS and numbers.

[prozacpark]

Over the weekend, someone was arguing with me over how slash is really a small subsection of fandom and isn't really the new fandom majority. I know from experience that that's not true, but could not find any stats. But then it occured to me that a good way to break down the numbers would be to search for these cateories on AO3 and analyzing the

Comments

[lilacsigil]

In my experience, lots of slashers and femslashers post to AO3, lots of het writers post to forums and fandom-specific archives *because* there's so many of them and they're very comfortable there. I see more slashers on multi-fandom archives because there's a lot of cross-fandom continuance (e.g. lots of Inception slashers moved to XMFC and Avengers), femslashers because there's few fandom-specific femslash archives since the days of Xena.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to see the proliferation of slash (and not slash as a genre itself) as a manifestation of how patriarchal narratives train women (and men!) to mostly care about and identify with (white!) male characters while writing women and people of color out. Yes, and I appreciate that you're phrasing this as the prevalence of slash rather than any particular writer (personally I write gen, femslash, slash and het) because talking about YOU OVER THERE doing it wrong is unhelpful, but talking about why this is a trend and how it fits into historical writing trends is useful and

[prozacpark]

You're right, and I hadn't considered het-only communities, especially when the het ship is vaguely canon. Good point, as much as it fraustrates me that I cannot get ACCURATE stats. ;) I know there was an LJ user who used to do stats on Yuletide requests and fic turn-out, specifically in terms of looking at femslash vs. slash. I may have to hunt down those entries

[lilacsigil]

I think in the case of AO3, there's a perception that the originators were recruiting the "better" writers when in fact they were recruiting their friends, many of whom were primarily slash writers. There's obviously a knock-on effect there, where people see their friends and people in their communities posting to AO3 and follow them there. I do agree that slash is considered trendy, but I haven't seen it called edgy in about 6-7 years (slash been a big thing in X-Men fandom for about 15 years now

[prozacpark]

Yeah, 6-7 years would be right around when I stopped slashing for the most part, which is around the time I discovered comicbooks and X-men and the draught of femslash made me focus only on that because how is it even possible that Rachel/Kitty isn't an EPIC fandom OTP? Sigh, I'll never understand this

[lyssie]

Er, I think using AO3 numbers might skew it towards boyslash, as the people running it are big in the boyslash community, iirc? Or at least were, at one time or another.

Also, a lot of people don't have any interest in AO3, and their.... advertising? idek, but I've gotten the impression they're mostly interested in luring in the 'good' fic authors, so of course there's lots of boyslash.

But I do agree that it's a vast majority over het and f/f in many many places.

[prozacpark]

Firstly, I feel like you're engaging in a shipper war with me through your icon

[lyssie]

LOL. It wasn't intentional, that's the first femslashy icon on the alphabetical listing.

I think it's going to be hard to get numbers, as most archives aren't... tagged so that you can sort by that sort of preference?

I tried a search on ff'net, though, which turned up:
slash: 106,428
m/m 101,636

femslash: 7855
fslash: 13
femmeslash: 1988
f/f 7143

het: 4574
m/f: 1240
f/m (returns same results as m/f): 1240

(by using the search, and searching through fic summaries).

Off the top of my head, I don't think ANY of my fic is tagged as 'het'. The femslash that's on ff'net is noted as such, though.

ARGH. I didn't mean to start on that perception, but I was distracted. *goes back to trying to get the bead out of her keyboard*

[glitterberrys]

Dunno, I consider myself woman-positive but I love m/m fic.

Also, it seems that specific m/m pairings just generate a FUCKTON of fic. I blame Supernatural for 20% of the fic that exists in the world :P

[prozacpark]

Women-positive people are allowed to write/read/like slash. I only worry about people who read/write/like slash EXCLUSIVELY or have a strong preference for it to a degree that they find most female characters boring/annoying. There tend to be female characters that these slashers sometimes adopt and like, but the trend of being bored by/actively hating most other women stands.

And yeah, m/m pairings do generate a lot of fic, and I am interested in the dynamics that made het fall out of favor and made slash the new fandom trend.

Thinking of Supernatural fic always reminds me of that horribly racist slash novel fanfic that someone wrote for Supernatural big bang. So I sort of fear all fanfic in that fandom, I admit! ;)

[glitterberrys]

I don't actually know anything about Supernatural - I tried to get into it when it first started and just hated it - but I do know that EVERY DAMN TIME i got looking for fic, I hve to wade through a million spn fics.

[lm]

As someone who will equally go for het, femslash or slash, I write and read fic based on which characters I like. Fanfic is inherently dependent on the source material. And keeping that in mind...IMHO there seem to be, in general, more unlikable female characters than male characters, and more appealing relationships between men that could be interpreted as slash, than similar relationships between women. This has been my experience EVEN THOUGH I tend to gravitate toward stories with strong female characters. So I think the resulting fic is bound to reflect this to one degree or another, and that is definitely going to show up in the statistics

[prozacpark]

My feminist lit theory professor drilled the "Gender is Genre" into us over and over, and was big on comparing similar patterns of stories starring men and women and how they were culturally recieved. It was one of the most interesting and enlightening classes I have ever taken, which is to say YES, there is definitely a perception that women's stories are not INTERESTING stories because they don't do epic things. And when they do do epic things, they're generally disliked for abandon more traditionally 'feminine' pursuits. This is another reason I see slash as problematic, because it really is a product of a culture that continually writes women out of narratives so men can bond over more important things, even in a platonic context. And that really can't just be a coincidence

[prozacpark]

(Or maybe I'm just not understanding this labeling system...Or maybe slash is more likely to be explicitly claimed and tagged as such, while het fic that's often vaguely canon isn't necessarily as consistently labeled?)

Hmm. I didn't really compare the two sets of numbers to each other, but you're right. That does seem very low, and at first, I thought that AO3 just wasn't very large? But comparing them to the second set of numbers does show a huge discrepency. So probably, the tagging system of f/f, m/m, and f/m is the more popular choice. Which would give us almost 53,000 het fics.

major "historical" boyslash fandoms, which may skew numbers somewhat. THIS. And I admit that I tend to get a lot more bitter about this around Yuletide time when I want fanfic in small, possibly literature-based fandoms and they've been disqualified because of how much m/m slash there is, but the female characters still haven't been written about much or at all. Thus more skewing of numbers, sigh

[prozacpark]

You seem to always induce (more) wordiness in me. ;) But continued