Fandom is NOT mostly slash
A sentiment I’ve seen going around a lot lately is that fanfic is predominantly slash. You see it in every “Why so much m/m?” rant and in most meta about AO3. I’ve heard versions of it on Fansplaining and much more blatantly and egregiously on One True Podcast.
But if you bother to look at FFN where shipping statistics are harder to generate, you see that het still outnumbers slash in most fandoms, and even the big slash fandoms often have more het than they do on AO3. If you look at Wattpad, Mary Sue/1D guys vastly outnumbers 1D slash. Twilight is a het juggernaut fandom, and it’s far from alone. It’s just AO3 where slash is king. That’s because AO3 was founded as a reaction to slash being less welcome elsewhere. AO3′s ship-centric structure that makes it so easy to get statistics you guys use to shit on slash was created because it was hard to search for slash on previous websites. Those sites were run by people who didn’t think it was important because they assumed most stories were the default, “normal” type: het. (Or, in many cases, “gen” with canon-ish plots with canon-level het content.) Complaining about AO3 being slash-heavy is tantamount to saying that people with similar tastes aren’t allowed to group themselves by those tastes. It’s saying that it’s not okay for there to be even one place where slash outnumbers other things.
It makes me angry that many of the big purveyors of meta in this day and age are so ignorant of recent fandom history that their arguments start from the blatant falsehood that most fic is slash. If most fic around you is slash, it’s because you’ve chosen to surround yourself with like-minded fans. Love AO3. Hate AO3. It’s up to you whether you use it at all. But don’t use it as a weapon just because you’re insecure about your own tastes or angry that nobody is spoon-feeding you longfic of your favorite ship.
This thought brought to you by marathoning a lot of old One True Podcast episodes while driving home for the holidays. (Seriously, guys, way to disrespect other fans.)
Next time you see someone’s meta starting from this assumption, call them on it.
I mean seriously, I remember a time when finding an M/M pairing was rare as fuck and the author felt compelled to put a whole bunch of warnings on it just to make sure people went into it knowing full and well that two guys were gonna kiss and might actually have sex, lest they be yelled at for inadvertently tainting the reader with gay cooties forever.
“this is a LEMON fic w/ 2 guys, don’t like don’t read!!!”
yeah this is like ‘within living memory’ kind of stuff for people who aren’t even 30 yet. like even ten years ago it was still an issue. when FFN decided explicit smut was against their rules, you can fucking bet the people who were getting their smut reported and deleted were first and foremost the slashers. when livejournal was wholesale purging ‘pedophiles’, they started with queer communities and gay ship communities.
hence: AO3, which protects users from harassment, targeting, or unfair deletion. and which has a whole lot of slash, not at all coincidentally.
I run an entire panel on this! Specifically, I run a panel called “Don’t Like, Don’t Read: A Queer History of Fandom.” I’ve run it once, so far, but I’m doing it again at Sacanime Winter 07 (just a few weeks away), and I’m hoping to get in at YaoiCon and Fanime.
If anyone is interested, here’s links to my slideshow and my speech itself. Sorry that the speech is a bit poorly edited.
The slideshow (on Dropbox)
The speech (on Google Drive)
That’s a great talk! I love the look at femslash in zines. It does feel like it is specifically aimed at femslashers and designed to be given at a femslash con though, and it sounds like that’s not the case?
It feels like you’re positing a trajectory of fannish enlightenment that goes from starting at m/f, transitioning to m/m, and ending up at f/f. It works that way for some people, but it’s a mistake to posit this as the path to self awareness for the queer female fic fan, which is what the subtext here feels like to me. It’s just like that annoying thing slashers do where we pretend that slash is somehow more advanced than het, and any sufficiently mature, experienced fan will have “graduated” to it.
For me, types of pairing are more like flavors at the ice cream shop. I may or may not feel like pistachio today, and I’m annoyed that few places carry red bean or black sesame, but I didn’t find myself and suddenly stop ordering chocolate. I realize it’s a talk on queer fandom history, not just queer pairing history, but there are plenty of queer fans whose fic tastes never do end up aligning with their real sex lives. There’s no unidirectional “progress” here.
“Now, for those of you who have never seen Robin of Sherwood, which is probably everyone”
Hahaha. That is so true! Poor RoS fandom. If only it had been more easily available on VHS in the 90′s, it probably would have had a resurgence. Same with The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. Time was, Michael Praed was to fandom like Richard Armitage is now.
“You’ll notice I didn’t really talk on “The Man From UNCLE,” which was an early fandom based around a British television show.”
MFU is a U.S. show staring an American actor playing either an American or Canadian agent (depending on whether you count tie-in materials as canon) and a Scottish actor playing a Soviet agent with an accent that wandered from the UK to the USSR and back again. The boss is British (essentially reprising his role from North by Northwest, not that anyone ever said so on the show), but it’s definitely not a British television show. The Professionals was the UK show that had an early slash fandom. Blake’s 7 was another big zine fandom, though not wall-to-wall slash like Pros fandom was.
“The Uber novel. Kind of a step up in quality from zines.”
This is a bit of a headscratcher for me. Ubers were certainly a massive step up in the availability of long, quality f/f fanfic. Zine novels were a thing long before Xena premiered. 80 pages isn’t anything new or special for fic by the 90′s. Again, I get the sense that this talk is specifically addressed to a femslash con crowd?
But, overall, great talk! Brava!