ibelieveinthelittletreetopper:
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise – female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship – and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios – this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3
Possible F/M ships: 27
Possible M/M ships: 36TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming – again, for the sake of simplicity – that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom – and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women – for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. 🙂
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
Obviously my recent analysis of expected pairing types is relevant here.
What I found interesting about the results is that there is a clear bias – fandom prefers M/M over F/M ships. I’ve seen many fans complaining about the over-abundance of F/M in the media before, so perhaps that makes sense, but it’s worth noting that it’s only M/M that gets the boost – F/F remains at about what’s expected from a random choice of pairings.
Tag: fandom
Fanfiction and Tumblr
True story: I’m a professor, and when I make up my syllabus I’m like, “Ugh, is 30 pages too much reading for one class?” And then I remember that I stayed up all night reading a 200,000-word fic and I’m like, “Yeah, we’re doing 30 pages.”
(Sorry, students!)
You ship sherlolly? That’s okay. Molly is a babe.
You ship sheriarty?? That’s fine. Cute lil consulting boyfriends.
You ship johnlock?? Good for you 😀 you have company, don’t you love?
You ship sherstrade? Good on you. That’s very sexy isn’t it?
You ship adlock?? Fine, fine. Lara Pulver is a goddess.
You ship mystrade?? Perf. Greg can make Myc some cakes 🙂
Ship whatever you want, just don’t be shitty to people that ship what you don’t.
when a fic author you like starts writing for other fandoms
fandom hates characters of colour having their own narrative, having their own character arc and development.
fandom hates it when poc are the heroes for once, and don’t fit into any stereotype, or any racist trope.
fandom hates scott mccall, princess tiana, skye and melinda may whilst simultaneously raising their white friend to levels of adoration and constant celebration. see: stiles stilinski, charlotte la bouff and jemma simmons.
fandom always find an moc, most of the time, black men, to be suspicious of. see: alan deaton, sam wilson, nick fury, antoine triplett. and these are just a few of the countless others.
fandom hates it when woc are paired up with white men on anything. ‘why can’t they just be friends?’ ‘she’s a strong female character, why does she need a relationship?’ they all say without realising that woc are severely underrepresented and we are rarely cast as lead roles. see: abbie mills, mako mori, reboot!uhura, gwen from merlin and joan watson. we need to note that most of the time this occurs exclusively to black women. fandom stamps a ‘brotp’ label on their forehead and desexualises them.
fandom makes countless photosets ‘celebrating female characters’ but all of these characters are white.
fandom loves m/m slash but don’t give a shit about it if it involves moc. for them, it is exclusively for cishet white guys. see: more fics for ‘stony’ than tony/rhodey despite the fact that rhodey and tony have known each other longer, have a close connection and are best friends.
Um, just wanting to provide a little help here:
for moc m/m white guy, go to Criminal Minds fandom and look up Morgan/Reid- that’s the biggest one, or Morgan/Hotch.
for moc het with white girl, again, CM fandom look up Morgan/Garcia or Morgan/JJ.
Morgan is a man of color, and Reid, Hotch, Garcia and JJ are white. Garcia and JJ are even blonde, unless Garcia has dyed her hair again. JJ’s the ‘sterotypical’ petite blonde/blue-eyed sweet girl. Who’s also tough as anything, but yeah.
Don’t know that anyone will care, but just putting this out there.
tjlc:
dry:
“If certain details are spoiled because of people who think about nothing but Sherlock, you can’t do anything about that.
They’ll find out somehow, but you can’t think, ‘Oh, that’s ruined now’, because ten thousand people know that secret.
It only matters if the big audience knows.”
– Mark Gatiss, on keeping show secrets.
(DenOfGeek, January 2014 [x])
💀💀💀💀💀
@ME NEXT TIME
Hey that’s nice of him, knowing there’s people out there who can’t do anything but think of Sherlock…
wait, hold on a second..
everybody freeze now…
WHAT??
erm, doesn’t this mean that we’ve hit right on on some pretty important plot points…?
I think so, at any rate.
whimsysmayhem 