[ID: The words “Fandom is NOT mostly slash” angled on a blue gradient background patterned with pairs of male signage figures holding hands. The O in not has been replaced with the male gender symbol (♂) and a white line bisects the image at an angle. /End]
“Why so much m/m?” is a recurring discussion within fandom, but is this debate really relevant? For this week’s Meta Monday, we’re looking at a Tumblr post where olderthannetfic argues that fandom is NOT mostly slash. One of her main arguments is that shipping statistics are usually taken only on AO3 where they are easily accessible, but that there are other fanfiction sites where slash is less popular. She also offers ideas about how and why this assumption started circulating in fandom communities
Come and read the original post, along with the interesting conversation on F/F pairings that took place in the comments, on Fanlore and tell us what you think!
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1) especially relevant bit from the original post:
AO3′s ship-centric structure that makes it so easy to get statistics you guys use to shit on slash was created because it was hard to search for slash on previous websites. Those sites were run by people who didn’t think it was important because they assumed most stories were the default, “normal” type: het. (Or, in many cases, “gen” with canon-ish plots with canon-level het content.) Complaining about AO3 being slash-heavy is tantamount to saying that people with similar tastes aren’t allowed to group themselves by those tastes. It’s saying that it’s not okay for there to be even one place where slash outnumbers other things.
Aside from the AO3 phenomenon, and the self-segregation phenomenon, I also think one of the reasons we tend to think of M/M content as “dominating” fandom is that that is the practice that is often considered most DISTINCTIVE of (and therefore representative of) transformative fan communities, even if it is not the most common. Slash has often been treated as the most interesting/‘exotic’ aspect of transformative fan activity, by academics, by journalists, even by fans themselves. It’s not necessarily that fans do it more; that’s just what people tend to fixate on when talking about it because its seems novel and curious and ~weird~, in a way that people shipping Ross and Rachel simply does not.
There is also the more complicated argument to be made that slash has been more influential in the construction and maintenance of certain fan practices, infrastructures, networks, histories, etc over time… Slash also arguably was a big force which incentivized fans to avoid “official” forms and domains of fannishness and attempt to maintain independence from corporate (or other commercialized) sites of potential fan activity… It has influenced the sites fans have tended to gather on (in the internet era) and how they use them, which has in turn has influenced what kind of fan activity has happened. The “is it safe for slash” question has probably motivated a lot of where fans ended up over the years, and how they ended up communicating with each other and circulating content, which has most definitely influenced the kind of content that gets produced and circulated
am definitely getting a sense, more and more, of how the fandom history of slash fic is absolutely integral to how/why AO3 culture is the way it is. see: this 1991 article on ‘slash’ fanfiction and how it is different from “regular fan fiction” – !
not (directly) shippy stats, but oooo, this was good to know:
It turns out that sample sizes don’t infinitely scale with population size. I used the calculator here. For a population in the millions, to get a 99% confidence level +/- 5%, you need a sample of just 666.
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3) a more recent post by @olderthannetfic, a response to the (not invalid) point that ‘but het m/f can be queer (as in, bi4bi) too’ !
I love Toast, but I think those gen-on-Wattpad numbers are massively high.
It’s because the people helping with data collection were supposed to mark ambiguous cases as “gen”, but Wattpad contains a majority of works so incoherent that you can barely tell if they’re fanworks, never mind what sort of shipping they’re supposed to contain.
If you look at works where you can tell what’s what, it’s het, het, HET, HET HETTTTT.
Discussion ¬