not horny on main

I saw people designing Halloween themed pride flags so I thought I'd try it too!! I also posted these to my Instagram @_und3ad :)

Plz give credit if ur going to use these :) <3

Here’s my portion of the GGC fandom stats panel. This is what my charts from a few weeks ago were for.

I’ve gotten increasingly weary of fujoshi-haters moaning about AO3 as though it’s The Establishment and needs to be rebelled against. The preponderance of m/m on AO3 is impressive, but it’s also unusual. Sometimes, people try to pit m/m and f/f against each other, but I don’t think actual site stats bear out that kind of approach.

The reality is that AO3, like parts of tumblr, is a rare island of amorphous queerness, floating in a vast ocean of het-as-default spaces. If I never again see a hand-wringing thinkpiece about what AO3′s m/m percentage meeeeeans and how it must indicate that No One likes female characters, it will be too soon.

Put simply, AO3 is full of m/m and has a high proportion of fics with multiple ship types as well as a higher proportion of f/f than many spaces (though still not a high percentage).

FFN and Wattpad are both popular, both active, and both full of het and gen. They also both have more fanworks, arguably, though Wattpad works tend to be very short, and FFN’s rate of new works is falling behind AO3′s. Some people who prefer AO3 themselves will take this to mean that only AO3 is relevant, but that’s like standing in the gay bookstore going, “Gosh, it sure is sad that there aren’t any STRAIGHT bookstores! Think of the hets!”

Any fool you see doing this is helping the people who hate queer content to shit on that queer content. Anyone who repeats the myth that most fanfic is m/m is furthering an anti-queer narrative whether they mean to or not. (Yes, even those of you complaining about “straight girls” and “fetishization”.) I’m tired of these bad takes being given a pass.

AO3′s metadata is designed to put queer content on the same level of importance as straight content. It also makes it easy to get shipping stats. Other sites don’t give a fuck about queer content and make it hard to get shipping stats. This has led to very skewed understandings of what fic fandom as a whole looks like–skewed understandings that help bullies go after m/m content with the pretense that they’re striking back against The Man.

It’s time those of us who like fandom stats took responsibility for lopsided, AO3-centric narratives and the social damage they can do.

Here is what fandom looks like actually:

Notes on the chart data below the cut:

Incidentally, I ran a multifandom challenge community on livejournal from 2005-2008.   AO3 culture is livejournal culture and we also used to tag pairing types for exactly the reason olderthannetfic describes, to help people who were interested in a certain kind of pairing to find it. 

Anyway this was a tiny comm but here’s the stats:

There’s no meaning to this, I just felt like being nostalgic XD.

But anyway the majority of discourse, like seriously 99.9% of it, is just this:

So, fic that runs afoul of those sorts of restrictions elsewhere is freely able to remain on AO3 and the platform is attractive to people who write such fic.

And y'know what sort of fic has historically run completely afoul of moral purity, anti-obscenity crusades? Like, repeatedly?

Queer fic.

Sure, other fic has as well, but from a strictly shipping perspective, queer stuff gets hit with the “queer is inappropriate by default, regardless of if it’s ~adult~ or not” BS. So a T-rated m/m fic that has some making out and maybe, at most, an implication that sex happened off-screen gets reported and removed for being “obscene” because the fact that it’s m/m automatically makes it considered more ~adult~ than an equivalent fic that’s m/f.

(This is because of homophobia, obviously, seeing as the gender of the individuals involves doesn’t actually have an objective bearing on the appropriateness of a work)

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. The first big f/f fandoms I was aware of for Western live action media were Xena and Buffy. Both had female characters who were allowed to be messy, who weren’t all clones of each other, who had some traits more commonly reserved for male characters, etc. Those women interacted with multiple other women with different dynamics. Both shows were mainstream enough that a good chunk of geeks at the time were watching them. Also 100% of women on Xena are SMOKIN’ HOT and not all in the typical cast-to-appeal-to-dudes way.

You need a decent size audience because only a small subset will care about fic, and out of those, there will be different tastes. But given a big audience and source material that is inviting to f/f, surprise, surprise, we get f/f.

#You’ve got so many female led source media now#With so many female secondary characters for them to play off of#Previously you could only really find this kind of POPULAR SOURCE in very niche markets like Magical Girl Anime#Where you’ll be shocked to discover (sarcasm) that FF has always been a major facet of the fandom

By hand dude.

FFN and Wattpad both have predictable work URLs (so does AO3, for that matter). It’s not like youtube with its randomass URLs: you can just add 1 to an existing work number and get another potential URL.

So you figure out the number range of works, generate random numbers in that range, and use those to make however many URLs you think you need for sampling purposes.

I was screaming into the canyon at the moment of my death; the echo I created outlasted my last breath.