#bashing fics

Inspired by @beforeastorm‘s very neat look at 9-1-1 bashing fics in August and in September 2024, I took another look at the numbers yesterday (23rd January 2025) and… it’s been interesting.

Methods and materials:

For that I selected the 9-1-1 (TV) tag on ao3 while logged into my account and thereby ensuring I would see both public and locked fics; beforeastorm only considered public fics so by god I hope that some of the increases can be explained by that. Then I used the Include filter function to search for [Character Name] Bashing. Where this returned nothing I employed the Search within result function to search for “[character name] bashing”, trying out variations (last or first or nickname). To double-check I also did this search for characters with established bashing tags, using the Exclude filter to ensure that I would not count any fic twice.

Some characters have a bashing tag for themselves and a couple bashing tag. For example: if you search for Margaret Buckley Bashing, you will be offered two tag: Margaret Buckley Bashing and Margaret Buckley and Phillip Buckley Bashing. As far as I could tell, searching for the individual bashing tag also always counts the couple bashing tag, so the couple bashing tags could be disregarded. A list of the characters I looked at is under the cut.

The numbers were collected in an excel file and assigned the characters categories: main (meaning main adult character), family, love interest and other. I also took note of the gender. I did some analysis in excel before having the smart idea that I might as well use this as a training exercise for R (and I am very bad at R).

Disclaimer: this will not include all bashing fics because sadly some people are not familiar with tagging or love letting people run into a fic they will not enjoy. Also while I much prefer it when people tag bashing, some are overly careful and may use bashing tags when not really needed. Still, I much prefer that to people not tagging.

Results:

Disappointing but hardly surprising at this point: the extremely dubious honour of being the most bashed character goes to Tommy Kinard with 660 bashing fics to his name. That obviously makes him the most bashed character of the love interest category, followed by Ana Flores (241) and then Taylor Kelly (118 ^^). The most bashed characters of the family category are the Buckley parents (347 and 325) followed by the Diaz parents (238 and 176), with the mothers being given more bashing fics than the fathers. In the other category, Vincent Gerrard leads with the 66 times his bashing tag was used. Chase Mackey is in third place with 26 fics, and in second place is the Firehouse 118 Crew (45) which probably could be rather counted to the main character category.

Which brings us to that category. Chimney has been bashed in 317 fics, making him the most bashed main character. Followed by Maddie with 223 fics and Bobby with 163. Out of all the main adult characters, Buck is the only one without an established bashing tag. There are 7 fics out there that you can find if you employ a variation of queries with his name + bashing; that is if I have made no mistake. Because honestly? Finding Buck bashing fics is hard. Athena and Buck are the only main characters with less than 10 bashing fics to their name.

Fig. 1: This fucking barplot was a pain to make but here we are! Characters on the y-axis and number of fics that use respective bashing tag on the x-axis. The total number of respective fics are shown next to the bars; colour indicates the category the characters have been placed in. Top: continuous x-axis to allow for an easier overview of the proportions of the bars, bottom: x-axis with a break to allow a closer look.

Dishonourable mention: why the fuck would anybody write a fic with Christopher bashing?

Honourable mentions: Boeing and dolphin bashing. It did make the otherwise pretty depression task of data collection much better.

Gender-wise there are more bashing fics about men (54.3%) than there about women (44.3%) (of course I did not look at every character so I will have missed a few bashing fics). If nobody was writing Tommy bashing fics, that would be flipped (male: 43.0%, female: 55.3%).

Fig. 2: A lovely pie-chart showing the bashing fics per gender, with male subdivided into Tommy, and the other male characters.

Which brings us to the tragedy that is the hate this fandom has for Tommy Kinard. If you add up all the bashing tags I found (which does not equal fics, some people are happily bashing away in their fics), then his account for about 20%. Which is insane, wtf.

Discussion:

This was really depressing tbh. I showed the bar plot to my sister and she asked me what bashing is. She’s been in fandom for years; she was in the supernatural fandom and has read fics and somehow I still had to explain bashing to her. So really: yay for us, this fandom really is something.

 If you look at beforeastorm’s tally from August, you’ll see that Tommy bashing fics began popping up in April 2024 and since then he has become the most bashed character (out of those I looked at, I’m pretty sure that this holds true).

Now you may be wondering why these characters are being bashed. Warning: the following part is based on my opinions. I did not read the fics of all 3291 bashing tag instances that I found.

In some cases it seems pretty straight forward: Vincent Gerrard, Chase Mackey, Doug Kendall and Olivia Ortiz need no further explanation. Other “villains” such as Jeffrey Hudson and Jonah Greenway have no bashing fics that I could find though.

The Buckley and Diaz parents getting bashed is also not surprising. Can’t say that I’m wild about it since my experience with reading fics that tag bashing was usually “here’s a random evil person I made up and then gave the name of an existing character”, but I understand where people are coming from.

Now the main characters… I’m just gonna say it: it’s people who have wronged Buck – according to some of the fandom at least. Chimney’s crime: the punch (no, I’m not defending it, but some people really have run with this). Maddie’s crime: not telling Buck about Daniel and then wanting to talk to him about it when he didn’t want to. Bobby’s crime: not allowing Buck back to work. Hen’s crime: idk, being Chimney’s bestie?

As for Eddie: I guess he’s a misogynist now, if you ask some people? Idk, it’s not like I read the summaries of all the fics because there are too many and also just no.

The love interests – which yes, in this case all happen to be Buck and Eddie’s love interests, imagine my surprise – happen to be “in the way” of shipping I guess. I did look at other love interest or ex-relationships and could find nothing.

Tommy’s crime: loving Evan.

Conclusion:

If you write bashing please keep tagging it.

"Canonical character had some bad moments and author took those and blew them up like a pool floatie"

“Canonical character sucks and author made them worse”