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)
Thanks for the links! I really enjoyed your presentation. I wish you could focus more on transgender fic because that seems to be on the rise. Along with the genderbending/genderswap fic debate.