Over the weekend, someone was arguing with me over how slash is really a small subsection of fandom and isn't really the new fandom majority. I know from experience that that's not true, but could not find any stats. But then it occured to me that a good way to break down the numbers would be to search for these cateories on AO3 and analyzing the numbers that get returned.

I think AO3 is a good archive for this sort of research because FFN has been around for a very long time, but slash proliferation has mostly occursed in the last ten years or so. So AO3 is a good reflection of current trends.

Here are the numbers, mostly so I can link people to this when this happens again.

Femslash: 1930 fics. (14.8%)
Het: 2167 fics. (16.6%)
Slash: 8924 fics. (68.5%)

So slash amounts to more than twice the amont of femslash AND het put together, as indicated by the authors in their fics' keywords, which ends up being nearly 70% of the relationship-tagged fic. Those percentages don't exactly add up to 100% because I rounded to the nearest single digit after the decimal, so there's about a 0.01% discrepency there.

I am also interested in how femslash and het amounts to roughly the sameish percent. I don't want to draw conclusions here, but in my experience, women-positive readers are equally open to het and femslash? But I also wonder if the results are not entirely accurate because I...would've expected het to have been significantly more prominent than femslash.

Then I did a search for terms m/m, f/m, and f/f, and results are a bit better, but still show slash outnumbering both by a good margin. Percentages rounded to the nearest second digit after the decimal because I apparently have no respect for consistency:

M/M: 165554 fics. (58.97%)
F/F: 62341 fics. (22.20%)
M/F: 52832 fics. (18.82%)

And here femslash outnumbers het, so I really am wondering about these numbers and would love some insight. Of course, this does not include gen fic, and it probably includes fic that has both or has one or the other as a secondary ship, but unfortunately, there's no way to filter for that that I know of. But this still presents a rough estimate, I suppose.

Are there other archives/communities where I can do this sort of data collection, friendslist? Feel free to post numbers from ficathons and archives you're familiar with in the comments. I would love some more data on this.

ALSO! These numbers make me want to have a "Raise the Percentage" femslash ficathon. Because, you know, it'd be awesome if we could.

In other news, I see that my last post has gotten linked on tumblr and is being taken out of context and apparently, I was complaining about m/m relationships in fiction (I was not.)  When it was mostly about how the only role women seem to have in most popular narratives is to be the romantic interests. I think it's a good thing that fandom, in general, has gotten less homophobic, but it would be lovely if we could see some of that come out without an exclusive preference for white male characters and if some of that led to femslash.

Dear fandom, reading/writing fanfiction that turns white, heterosexual men into gay men while ignoring and writing out women and people of color is, in fact, not primarily about gay rights or feminism, no matter what you tell yourself. We can talk about intersectionality of slash fiction when, you know, slash starts being about people other than pretty, white heterosexual men with positions of power and agency within their own narratives. Or, you know, when femslash isn't something you actively have to hunt down. Meanwhile, I'll continue to see the proliferation of slash (and not slash as a genre itself) as a manifestation of how patriarchal narratives train women (and men!) to mostly care about and identify with (white!) male characters while writing women and people of color out.

Honestly, other than the actual sex, it's not very different from early American fiction? Which, in fact, was interpreted as subtextually homoerotic for its deep bonds between men and no presence of women by Leslie Fiedler, who was then happily shunned from the literary society of his day. So the only thing that's changed is that fandom isn't afraid of sex or homoeroticism, while the rest of the society (and most notably Hollywood) hasn't progressed much beyond early American fiction where women still continue to be marginalized in almost all but the romance-centric narratives. Which pretty much means that the ONLY thing a lot of fiction needs women for is, well, sex. /bitter

In case you haven't heard, there's been talk of a Buffy reboot in the form of a movie franchise that's going to keep the core idea of the 1992 movie, and go with that premise but reimagine it. As suspected, fandom is not happy.

If you've ever had a conversation with me, you may already suspect that Buffy is, like, my life. ;) It's a very strange love given that I'm not too fond of most of the core characters and I'm usually incredibly character-oriented in approaching fiction. But I sort of think that Buffy is a perfectly told narrative up till season 5 (good thing it ended there, really). The plots, character arcs, themes introduced in season one are all leading up to that perfect final moment in "The Gift." I love how everything...fits, when so few shows manage to keep their awesome and their continuity past the second season these days.

Part of what I love about Buffy is how...mythic it is. I know a lot of people dislike season five, but for me it's a perfect conclusion to a heroic journey that borrows much from world mythologies. So she gets to fight a god. In the tradition of Gilgamesh, the earliest extant myth we have in writing. And that last season? Totally parallels "The Iliad" wonderfully, and there's just...so much that's right there as far as themes and the narrative structure goes that I kind of find it hard to find flaws with it.

So I should totally, totally *hate* the idea of a remake, yes or yes? But let me go on record as saying that I'm so fully behind this remake that I will scare you with my enthusiasm for it. Like, I might cry emo tears if it doesn't go through, people.

Buffy is mythic, yes? Mythology is supposed to evolve! Have versions, canons, different variations. It is supposed to become...cult, religion, something completely new and awesome and resurrected. This is why I love fandom, essentially. I love that we create our own texts and add to an existing canon. This is the closest thing we have, in the modern world, to an evolving mythology consisting of superhuman figures with destinies and superpowers. (I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that often the fandoms with the most cultic/productive fanbases are the ones with mythic themes/supernatural figures/heroes in them.) This is why I fell so deeply in love with comics despite the fact that there's so much wrong there. I love the X-men and love how they exist in so many different variations. I love the fact that I can ship Scott/Jean madly in three different verses but be totally put off by them in another verse. They're different Scotts and different Jeans, but they all have the CORE of the same person. I don't expect my Evolution!Kitty to be the same person as the 616!Kitty, but I can love them both. Love them differently, though.

And I think this is where I get into some disagreements with the comics fans. Emma is a bitch, Emma is nice, good, evil or Kitty is smart or ditzy, etc, etc, and people see inconsistencies in their characterizations, but I see...versions. Different versions of the same story. I don't have to like them all. I don't like all the versions of Helen of Troy. I hate versions of Achilles. They can all be true and I can choose and shun parts of my own canon, just as the Greeks did! <3 I approach fiction that I consider to be mythic very differently than I approach original narratives.

I must now share a brilliant quote from Roberto Calasso's lovely "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" where he shares a definition of myth: "Mythic figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth."

I don't think the new Buffy will be a different Buffy because she will still have been a product of the original. There will be that mythic echo. Someone is always talking about how Buffy inspired the creation of Veronica Mars, Kara Thrace, Sidney Bristow, or whoever happens to be the Buffy-analog of the moment, but now? We'll have a Buffy who will be influenced by Veronica, Kara, Sidney, and others who came after her. Like how Kitty inspired Buffy's characterization, at one point. And then we had a Kitty being influenced by how Buffy was written. I love seeing these stories evolve in a way where they're a continuous cycle and not a liner list of things that start and end. This is what crosses that threshold of myth.

So bring on another version of Buffy. I am ready to love (or hate as the case may be!) this verse in a new form because it just lends more to its mythic value for me. I will not compare it to the original and will let it exist on its own (just as I do with each different version of the X-men!). If it gives me a good story? I will love that and not care if it doesn't compare to the original. Although...I would be very interested in seeing what kind of a supporting cast we get. Would it be Willow, Xander, and DARE I HOPE, Cordelia? Or new people? Or versions of the same old characters, but with new names? And given that I'm not entirely in love with the original Buffy, I might even love this new version better (as a character if not as a myth.) Here's hoping she's slightly insane.

IS NO ONE ELSE EXCITED ABOUT THIS? Don't fail me, friendslist.

( The Very Important Buffy Poll under the cut.Collapse )