Meta! Sort of. Looking at the Supernatural femslash on AO3: numbers, tags, etc.

Aug 05, 2011 17:59

Supernatural is the first big fandom where femslash has been a major part of my fannish experience. I have (and still do) read femslash in other fandoms, but either the fandom is small (St. Trinian's) or femslash was a minor part of my experience in that fandom (Harry Potter). I suppose this is actually interesting, since SPN is often criticized for killing off all its female characters (yes, that means most femslash is about canonically dead characters. Sometimes they've never even met on the show).

Anyway, my interest has lead to this post. Using archiveofourown.org, because it's a large archive with lots of tags, I decided to take a look at the amount of femslash in SPN fandom and analyze some of the tags. Numbers and some commentary under the cut.

Note: There will be statistical errors based on crossovers and related tag overlap. Just FYI.

Numbers and tags

There are 10,275 works for Supernatural on AO3, and 138 of those are categorized as F/F. That is 1.34% of the total SPN fics. 77 authors contributed to that number, but 33 of those fics were written by a single author,
EllieMurasaki. That's not a lot of fic, although there are other stories out there not archived at AO3.

12 authors (15.58%) also chose to tag their stories with "femslash", resulting in 15 works with that tag, or 10.87% of the F/F fic.

(While checking the above number, I noticed something about AO3 that I had never had cause to notice before: the tag "femslash" has been wrangled as a subcategory of the tag "slash". While quite logical, I don't find this particularly useful in practice; slash tends to overwhelm femslash in numbers (making it hard to find femslash by using the "slash" tag), and when I search for slash I am specifically searching for M/M. Other people probably find it useful, though.)

As I mentioned in the intro, SPN isn't exactly swimming in living female characters. So I decided to see which percentage of the F/F works on AO3 aren't working (exclusively) with the canonically female characters.

19 of the 138 fics (13.77%) are tagged "gender related", and they are the work of 16 authors (20.78%). "Gender related" is an umbrella tag that encompasses the following tags (and their variations): genderbending, genderfuck, genderswap, alternate universe - gender changes, and character tags marking the female form of a canonically male character.

Authors often use multiple tags to mark stories where one or more character has a different sex or gender than canon. The following combinations were used on the 19 fics mentioned in the previous paragraph:
Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Genderswap, Genderbending, Genderfuck
Genderbender
Genderswap, Genderbending, Genderfuck
Genderswap, girl!Sam - character
Genderfuck, girl!Dean Winchester
Genderfuck, girl!Dean Winchester
girl!Sam
Genderswap
girl!Adam, Genderswap
girl!Dean Winchester, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Genderswap
Genderswap
girl!Sam
girl!Dean - character, girl!Dean
Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, girl!Sam
Genderswitch
Genderswap, Winsisters*
Alternate Universe - Gender Changes
Genderswap, girl!Dean
Genderswap

*Okay, "Winsisters" is awesome and should be used more :-P

Two authors tagged their work with both femslash AND a "gender related" tag (2.60% of SPN F/F total). This is possibly because the pairing tags, containing the names of two male characters, could otherwise mislead readers - but that's just conjecture.

Despite the number of F/F fics tagged "gender related", there are no stories categorized as F/F that note a trans character in the tags; there are a total of 7 SPN works on AO3 tagged with "transgender" (0.07% of the total SPN works) but 5 are categorized Gen, one as F/M, and one - a massive crossover, so the relevant characters may not be from SPN - as both Gen and F/M. Interesting note: both the "transgender" F/M fics are also tagged "gender related", but the Gen fics are not.

Actually, 180 of the total SPN works use the umbrella "gender related" tag. That's 1.75%, which is more than the amount that are categorized as F/F. The breakdown of "gender related" fic is as follows:
F/F 19
F/M 117
Gen 31
M/M 24
Other 13
(8 are Multi, i.e. a combination)

But that was a bit of a tangent, wasn't it? Let's get back on track. 13 of the F/F SPN fics on AO3 (9.42%) are tagged with "crossover". In most of those, the F/F pairing is a crossover pairing, but one fic has no SPN character in the listed F/F pairing.

Let's look at the pairings, then, shall we?

Pairings

There are 114 pairings associated with the SPN F/F category on AO3. This includes a lot of non-femslash pairings, since many of the fics contain multiple pairings. In addition, some of the pairings do not include SPN characters at all. As such, I won't be comparing any numbers to the pairing total, but instead I'll look at the top pairings and characters.

The top pairings, regardless of composition, are:
Ruby/Anna Milton (14)
Castiel/Dean Winchester (8) (At least one of them is female in 2 fics)
Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester (7) (Sam is female in 3 fics)
Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester (6) (At least one of the them is female in 2 fics)
Jo Harvelle/Original Female Character (6)
Ruby/Bela Talbot (6)
Ellen Harvelle/Mary Winchester (5)
Jo Harvelle/Anna Milton (5)
Jo Harvelle/Ruby (5)
Lilith/Ruby (Supernatural) (4)
Lisa Braeden/Dean Winchester (4) (Dean is female in 3 fics)

Only 109 of the 138 SPN F/F fics are categorized only as F/F, thus explaining the presence of slash and het in the top pairings. Femslash, after all, is often a supporting pairing. The most common pairing is femslash, though! Ruby (a demon) and Anna Milton (a fallen angel) do actually meet and interact in canon, so I guess there's no reason to be surprised that they would be 'shipped together more often than other F/F pairings.

Ellen Harvelle/Mary Winchester is an interesting pairing to see among the top contenders. It most often occurs in AUs where John Winchester, not Mary, is the one that died; in some ways it's a parallel to those pairings where John is 'shipped with a fellow hunter (like Bobby). Not that I don't love Ellen, but my preferred Mary Lives femslash 'ship is Mary/Karen Singer, where Karen was forced to kill a possessed Bobby instead of the other way around. Now, if only there was fic of that . . .

Interestingly, it's Jo Harvelle (a hunter) who is paired up the most often. Jo appears in 19 pairing tags, often with only one or two uses each:
Jo Harvelle/Amita Ramanujan (1) (crossover)
Jo Harvelle/Anna Milton (5)
Jo Harvelle/Ashley Magnus (1) (crossover)
Jo Harvelle/Ava Wilson (1)
Jo Harvelle/Bela Talbot (5)
Jo Harvelle/Chloe Sullivan (1) (crossover)
Jo Harvelle/Dean Winchester (2) (Dean is female in one, female-bodied [sex switching spell] in the other)
Jo Harvelle/Faith Lehane (2) (crossover)
Jo Harvelle/Jessica Moore (3)
Jo Harvelle/Kat (3)
Jo Harvelle/Meg Masters (1)
Jo Harvelle/Original Female Character (6)
Jo Harvelle/River Tam (1) (crossover)
Jo Harvelle/Ruby (5)
Jo Harvelle/Tamara (Supernatural) (1)
Jo Harvelle/Tessa (1)
Kaylee Frye/Jo Harvelle (1) (crossover)
Loren Hansett/Jo Harvelle (1) (crossover)
Pamela Barnes/Jo Harvelle (2)

Jo was a recurring character, one of the good guys, pretty awesome, and young and pretty. This probably won't surprise anyone.

That's all the numbers and analysis from me. Considering the topic of this post (and the fic reading mood it's gotten me into), I'm going to leave some related fic recs here at the end. Feel free to leave your own in the comments, if you are so inclined, or throw your own SPN femslash thoughts at me.

Fic recs

This is far from exhaustive, FYI.

[dreamwidth] Take Me For What I Am, a project by
elliemurasaki
I mentioned that
elliemurasaki has written the largest number of SPN F/F on AO3. That's because of the above project, where she is writing a fic for every episode of Supernatural with the intention of making it pass the Bechdel Test. Sometimes that ends up in femslash.

[AO3] She Walks Like She's On A Mission by
keysmash, Jo Harvelle/Pamela Barnes, Explicit
This is a big bang from last year. It focusses a lot on the gradual development of their relationship, shows both women being their awesome selves, and fits nicely into canon.

[dreamwidth] Holy Clockwork Angels, by
ghostrunner, Jo Harvelle/Ruby, R
I have three words for you (well, two words and an initialism): Steampunk femslash AU. This is a plotty fic with interesting worldbuilding. It really pulled me in.

[livejournal] From Duluth to Cold Oaks, by falling_dominos, Jo Harvelle/Ava Wilson, NC-17 (I'd say the rating is a little higher than needed)
This is another fic that fits right into canon, which is of course bittersweet. Ava has a vision about Jo and goes to warn/save her.

[AO3] Four People Ruby Seduced & One She Actually Fell For (Or: Ruby's Epic Love Affair with Humanity in General and Sam in Specific), by
tuesday, multiple pairings, Explicit
This is a good example of femslash in a supporting context. Plus,
everysecondtuesday's was the first Supernatural fic that I read, so I have a fondness for her characterization and style. Her Ruby is great.

meta, fandom, rec: supernatural, femslash, supernatural

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