Fortune's Haven

How much do you bench? Three-fifteen. Good. So... my refrigerator is broken or something, and it just so happens my neighbor from a few blocks away put a perfectly good one curbside. I'm assuming it works.

Source

someone on reddit explained 😭

—Did you know that Juneteenth is also celebrated in a part of Mexico? Nacimiento Mexico was once home to thousands who escaped slavery in the US. As many as 10,000 slaves followed a clandestine Southern Underground Railroad to Mexico. —To date, many Black Mexicans from the Texas area retrace a portion of the same route their African American ancestors followed in 1850 when they escaped slavery. —Descendants of slaves who escaped across the southern border observe Texas’s emancipation holiday with their own unique traditions in the village of Nacimiento. —Slave hunters would patrol the southern border for escapees, led by the Texas Rangers but the Mexican army would be there waiting for them (the slave hunters) to turn them away.

It wasn't some kind of upswell of American Patriotism and MUH FREEDUMS. It was rich slaveowners deciding they'd rather start a war than give up their slaves.

first it was the klingons—they’re originally supposed to be this cruel, bloodthirsty, war-obsessed people—and then tng comes along and it’s like wait no maybe war and violence is a part of their culture and actually ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies so we have to be woke about it.

hey these are the ferengi and they’re supposed to represent everything we hate about capitalist society; they’re greedy, scheming, profit-obsessed, and they look like ugly little trolls to emphasize how much we fucking HATE capitalism. oh wait fuck here comes deep space nine and we have to recognize that they’re PEOPLE. okok what if the pursuit of profit is actually part of their culture and ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies. so we have to be woke about it.

this is the borg, they’re a hivemind race of cyborgs who have no sense of individuality and their only motivation is assimilating people into their society. they want to assimilate humanity and we are completely defenseless against them because their technology is eons ahead of our own and they’re incapable of being reasoned with. oh sweet we have a borg prisoner this is the perfect opportunity to commit genocide against them. fuck actually we can’t commit genocide we’re woke and communists and in space.

hey these are the cardassians, they’re part of a cruel and vicious empire which is supposed to be a representation of fascism and authoritarian regimes, they’re a cold, bloodthirsty people with no sense of empathy or compassion, their society literally references 1984 on multiple occasions, and they’re known for the insanely cruel and inhumane methods of torture they use against their prisoners of war. we hate the cardassians…….. except, here’s a cardassian kid who grew up on bajor, and……. fuck. he’s a person. now we actually have to consider his humanity. and being racist is actually……. bad.

this is the jem’hadar, they’re genetically engineered soldiers who have no sense of individuality and only live to defend the state. they’re all born addicted to a synthetic drug that’s manufactured by the state and administered by their masters—this is how they’re kept subservient. they’re ruthless and powerful and they’re incapable of being reasoned with because their only motivation is violence and killing. so we should kill them all, right? FUCK….. what if they’re actually people. goddamnit. now we have to consider their humanity.

I've been told that you can switch clients to avoid this, there are a few options other than deer.

so I used to be (still somewhat am, probably??) a part of the "most fandoms are misogynistic because they are so male (character)-oriented, and if in ANY media you consume you only care about male characters, you should probably at least ask yourself why that is".

this is probably projecting on my part, because I grew up in a very misogynistic environment, and, personally, for a long time, didn't give a shit about fem characters no matter how well they were written/drawn, - to me they as well could be cardboard cutouts, because I fundamentally was unable to see women as people.

this is obviously a me problem, and I try not to project my experiences on other people, no matter how common these experiences may be.

obviously there is no right or wrong reason to like male characters and dislike female characters, and nobody owes you an explanation for their preferences so you can make judgment on whether they like your yaoi in the "right", god honoring way or whatever. and in the end, your taste in fiction is just that - your taste in fiction, it doesn't necessarily tells anything about you as a person.

but I can't help but ask myself, time and time again, this old ass question: why is this preference for male characters is so widespread in almost all fandom spaces, when fandom itself is so varied, full of people of different genders, sexualities and backgrounds?

If it's not misogyny, when what is it?

--

A lot of people started out liking m/m because it was at least queer, then finally found f/f they liked and "graduated".

They come back with the passion of the newly converted to preach to the rest of us.

The trouble is, this is exactly like every other time the newly converted are the Very First College Freshman To Ever Discover Philosophy or any other such case.

First, the people you're talking to might turn out to know a million times more than you. Their apparent apathy might be because they're so far beyond the discussion level you're at. (Not just you specifically, but every college freshman who was ever That Person.)

Second, the fact that you find femslash or Christianity or freshman philosophy class deeply emotionally fulfilling does not mean that everyone else will also find it equally fulfilling. If you go too far down this route, you end up in the JKR place where "I was a tomboy because my dad wanted a boy" turns into "You must be a trans man because you hate womanhood because your dad was like my dad".

You can ask why other people find m/m or atheism or whatever fulfilling. There's an interesting conversation to be had.

But when you assume, you just sound like a dumbass and, often, a bigot.

--

I have asked myself.

That's the first thing to understand. Slash fandom tends to be pretty queer, so a decent number of slashers are, like me, bisexual women. It's going to be a rare bi girl who didn't go "Jeez, why don't I like femslash more?" at some point.

Coming in and going "HAVE YOU CONSIDERED?!?!?!" is basically poking a bunch of people right in their biggest insecurity.

Not everyone feels bad about it, of course, but a lot of people do. They try to change what they're unconsciously drawn to and it does not work.

Why the lizard brain likes men so much is complex and varies, but some common reasons include:

Oops, turns out I'm not a girl.

I don't want to deal with the baggage society inflicted on me as a woman right now.

I identify far more with my bisexuality than my gender. Can you stop pretending everyone identifies with gender first, radfem lite?

There are great female characters in media, but they're rarely in the genres I like and/or they're not the horny one, the class clown, the brutal fighter, etc.

Casting directors are allowed to hire men I find hot. Actresses are all a desolate wasteland of size zero, ultra feminine, hetero catching-a-man makeup looks. Where are my butches? Where are my femmes who look queer? Where are my silver foxes? Where are my ladies with an average waist size?

etc. etc.

We've discussed that to death, so I'll leave it at these representative examples. I don't think this is nearly as relevant, however, as the false assumptions that underpin the question itself.

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AO3 looks nothing like other spaces.

What the actual fuck are you talking about with that "almost all fandom spaces" garbage? AO3 is riding that dick hard because it was founded by fujoshi.

FIMFiction is full of dudes who love cartoon lady horsies.

Stop hanging out in fujoshi spaces and ex-fujoshi, I've seen the error of my misogynist ways spaces and go find the rest of fandom.

A few years ago, I got shipping stats for FFN and Wattpad because I was so mad at how many little whiners had been too coddled by the archive I helped build to understand what fandom actually looks like. This required hand-classifying thousands of fics. I have not repeated the experiment. I hoped other people would do it to check my work, but of course, it was too much effort when people want to just say "Fandom only likes slash" whether or not it's true. Here's what I got at the time:

Repeat after me:

A.O.3. Looks. Nothing. Like. Other. Spaces.

--

Het counts as liking female characters.

I know you didn't deny this above. You only said that fandom focuses on men, but... does it?

For everyone drooling over Edward and using Bella only as a placeholder, there's someone who ships Reylo because they're obsessed with Rey and think her most interesting tension was with Kylo. Or, hell, someone who actually likes Bella. Plenty of the readerfic spaces include people who flesh out the female reader and like her as a character. OFC-writing spaces often like each other's OFCs.

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Fandom is varied, your reference sample isn't.

That's really what it boils down to.

Yes, the biggest fandoms tend to come from media with audiences in the hundreds of millions, and because society is sexist, the important characters tend to be men, and where there are important women, all of their important relationships tend to be with men. That may skew things a little if you only look at the biggest fandoms, especially on AO3, home of slash.

There's still plenty of media with interesting female characters, and many fans seek it out and do fandom about it.

If you go look at Witcher game fan art, it's all dudes making horny stuff about Ciri because they love Ciri. If you go look at SpaceBattles, there's little m/m and plenty of plottier stuff focusing on a heroine.

--

If you're like most people who ask this question, you only know two kinds of fans: fujoshi and ex fujoshi with a chip on their shoulders.

The key is that AO3, FFN, and Wattpad all have oldschool URL styles. Works are just numbers that increment.

On FFN and Wattpad, they appear to increment by 1. On AO3, they incremented by 1 until... 2014? (I'm sure James or someone can remind us.) Thereafter, they incremented by 3.

First, you find a recent work and use that as your highest number. You take zero as your lowest number. Use that to generate X random numbers in that range. (4-5k for FFN and 10k for Wattpad should do it.)

Use those numbers to create hypothetical URLs. I do this in a spreadsheet with formulas. You could do it even more efficiently with a script, but I didn't feel like learning how to do that.

Open the hypothetical URLs and record which are a real work vs. deleted/invalid.

Once you have a reasonable number of live URLs, you either scrape them if you have the skill (because shit gets deleted constantly, and they will disappear while you're doing your project), or you start straight in on the hand-categorizing.

Open a work, check the headers. Mark the obvious category if there is one. Read the work if you have to. And on Wattpad, you will have to often. It can be hard to tell if something is even a fanwork, never mind what it was supposed to be about, when the author only got as far as 1/?? and it's like one line of incoherent lapselock. Is it the start of a fic? An epigraph? Them using Wattpad as a notes app on their phone? The world may never know!

For FFN, you can pull full archive size from the index pages. They aren't completely accurate, both because there's rounding and because they don't update exactly in line with deletions. Use your invalid URLs to calculate how much has been deleted over time if you like. I think this will be accurate. FFN does appear to still increment by 1.

For Wattpad, you will have to estimate how many works are on Wattpad in the first place and also how many of them are fic. Use your number range and the proportion of valid to invalid URLs you generated to estimate. After hand-classifying your sample, you'll have a ratio of non-fanwork to fanwork as well.

FFN wasn't too bad to hand-categorize. It has less metadata than AO3, but people usually did and do indicate ships and main characters fairly clearly in author's notes and summaries. (Don't use the ship feature. It was introduced too late and is used too inconsistently to be of much use.)

Wattpad was a nightmare. I chose to err on the side of assuming things are het if the 1/?? nothing of a work seems to mention an OFC and a canon guy even if there's no plot yet and no metadata about what it was supposed to eventually be. You could choose to get a much larger sample and err on the side of leaving more things uncategorized.

Don't do what Toast did while crowdsourcing another Wattpad analysis and tell people to mark 'gen' if they're not immediately sure. Gen-as-default is a terrible assumption for Wattpad.

--

However, if you want data on femslash or on anything that isn't like a third of these archives, I would start with a much bigger sample.

When I originally posted some analysis in 2020, people were disappointed that I wasn't more clearly listing the exact percentages of the tiny slices clearly on the graphs, but that was entirely intentional. I don't think we should be taking the exact fractions of percentage points too seriously here for the samples that might have ended up being like 12 works.

Fans looking at stats love to overestimate their precision.

The one big thing I should note is that my Multi & Other category included anything marked with multiple categories, e.g. tagged with M/M and F/F but not Multi on AO3 or anything with both snarry and snamione in the summary on FFN.

The reason I did this is that there were virtually no works that mixed ship types in my FFN and Wattpad samples.

This is consistent with my experience of older spaces. You even had archives with a slash section and a "gen" section and nothing else. Your m/m/f? Unthinkable! And also unpostable simply by way of hostile or indifferent infrastructure.

Because URLs increment, you can also easily do a secondary analysis on whether the first half of your sample by date shows the same pattern as the second half of your sample. (In this case, I saw less of an obvious trend towards deleting m/m than I would have expected. The two halves were reasonably similar.)

--

Anyway, if you can scrape things yourself, a whole world of other possibilities opens up.

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

summary: Bruce

summary: "Bruce Banner"

summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.