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

[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]

I can't comment on the first half, because I generally find the male characters (with their unchecked privilege issues) a lot more unlikable than female characters (where even if they're acting in questionable ways, the narratives tend to leave their motivations vague, leaving me to make up awesome ones. ;) However, I can understand why the lack of authorial intent in the case of most female characters can make them seem less...well-defined. And there's definitely a lack of f/f friendships, yes, and it doesn't help that even when they *are* there, they get pushed to the background. I only needed to watch one episode of "Secret Circle" to see how all the epic Diana/Cassie interaction had been replaced by Cassie/Adam now because apparently, that's the interesting and original relationship to explore? Sigh