I read this earlier today and tried to ignore it but I just can’t stop thinking about how absolutely terrible it is, so fuck it.
It’s a 16,000 word apologia for fandom’s racism and sexism with a bunch of extremely dubious “statistics” as evidence.
“It’s not unreasonable to think that some straight women are interested in m/m because they don’t find women erotically or romantically exciting. And, look, straight people don’t need anybody’s protection most of the time, but trying to shame straight women for their sexualiy isn’t activism.”
Het romance novels are a billion dollar a year industry. The most successful fanfic of all time is het. Lots of women like het romances. The question isn’t, “Why don’t women like pairings with women?” It’s “Why aren’t women who like pairings with women in fandom?”
“Why Are All The Slashers Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?”
What made the author think this was a good idea. Slash writers are not an oppressed minority. This is pure white fragility and entitlement, to imply that your fan fiction tastes make you oppressed and then take the name of a book about black people to explain why you need a safe space. I understand THINKING of this line. I don’t understand PUBLISHING it.
“Step outside of AO3, and you find a very different story. Media Miner, a major multifandom archive of the 00s that is (was?) a hub of Inu Yasha fandom, is 52% het, 37% gen, and only 10% slash…Media Miner: 52% het; 10% slash
Wattpad: 89% het; 5% slash
FFN: more het than AO3 and less slash, but percentages are elusive”
Media Miner has about 150,000 works. AO3 has over a million, Wattpad and FFN over six million. Comparing percentages across those populations is meaningless. More than FORTY PERCENT of the total analyzed fanworks are filed under “percentages are elusive.” The methodology for generating the stats across archives is not standard or randomized. These numbers are completely meaningless.
Cutting and pasting is a pain on mobile, so double fuck it. The race arguments include that American TV and movies are mostly white, so naturally fanfic and vids are white, but also, all of the shows with popular black actors are 90s sitcoms, and no one likes to vid 90s sitcoms; someone once complained that a vid exchange was too white, even though they themselves requested lots of white stuff, and this chaps the author’s ass because she made a vid of a black dude (as a personal challenge to herself to vid everything her recipient requested, of a canon she only watched for the challenge) and she thought the exchange was fine; diversity efforts in fandom are too “doom and gloom”; black characters like Sam and Rhodey aren’t shipped because they’re too emotionally stable; it’s too scary to write non-white characters because you might mess up and be racist (too late, friend!) and writing CoC is “defined by fear” with “no upside” (that is a really disturbing insight into this person’s writing process, actually) and an EXTREMELY creepy aside about how there aren’t enough hot black guys on OKCupid.
There are also a bunch of weird-ass arguments about het and fem slash that are basically, “Fans should stop complaining that there’s no fem slash in Fandom A because there’s fem slash in Fandom B” and “Fans should stop complaining that female characters in media fandom are sidelined because girls in boy band fandom write a fuckton of self-insert fic.” So I guess people who want to read Natasha Romanov/Maria Hill fic should just go read Xena/Gabrielle fic and readers who want Abbie Mills gen fic should just go read a 1D romance?
This meta is a 13-chapter disaster, is what I’m saying.
Apparently this author has been online for like two decades, which means they should have been here through Racefail 09 and the great interracial pairing slur cockup of 2007, AT THE VERY LEAST, ie, they should know better. And yet here we are. I’m sorry, everybody. This thing sucks.