Someone give me the strength of will (and/or wisdom) to resist the urge to argue with the post saying that M/M slash is more popular just because men are more common characters and they’re just better written, and writing women is so much work.
Okay. So. People want the explanation, so here we go:
Basically, yes, part of the reason M/M ships are so popular is that there are more male characters in canon. But the idea that it’s proportional to the number of male characters is just actually incorrect. In most cases, the number of M/M ships is way disproportionately more than the number of M/F or F/F ships, and often, a lot of that is pulled directly from the number of F/F ships. That is, F/F are nearly always way underrepresented, while M/F is usually a lot closer to the expected number, proportionally.
However, when you’re looking at proportionality it assumes a somewhat regular distribution, and that’s not what happens even a little. Most fandoms have 1-3 main ships, largely though not always represented by who the “main” characters are. For example (I’m not looking at the number, so this is a little off the top of my head), Sherlock/John makes up something like EIGHTY PERCENT of all of the ships in the Sherlock (TV) fandom. Most of the rest consist of Mycroft/Lestrade. In Harry Potter, a huge percentage is Harry/Draco, so even though there are way more male characters than female characters, most of them aren’t actually shipped all that often either. You don’t see a lot of Neville/Ron or Blaise Zabini/Theo Nott. These characters exist, but they don’t really move the needle.
What happens in shows where the numbers and QUALITY REPRESENTATION of men vs women are fairly equal, you ask? Because quality representation is one of the other things that’s pointed to–oh, women just aren’t written well, so it’s more work to write them in fanfic (as though people don’t love a blank slate), so people don’t bother. This is where Avatar the Last Airbender comes in. ATLA is actually a weird case because the percentages have shifted DRAMATICALLY over the last few months (I don’t have September data, sorry, I only have April-August). But the gist of it is, even with almost equal numbers of shippable main and secondary characters (10 characters—4 boys and 6 girls), F/F is both a very small percentage in absolute numbers of ships (~10% as of the end of August), it’s also much smaller than the expected percentage if you expect a fairly equal distribution (about 33%).
Basically, people have their favorites in terms of characters and ships. But those favorites are often not actually reflective of how well a character is written, how much backstory we’re given for them, or even how often they appear on screen individually or with the person they’re being shipped with. Clint Barton/Phil Coulson continues to be in the top 5 romantic ships in the MCU despite them never being on screen together. Peter Parker/Harley Keener is an increasingly popular ship despite them only being in the same space once at a funeral. I am not sure if Greg Lestrade and Mycroft Holmes ever interact on screen, yet they are the second most popular ship in the Sherlock fandom.
What all of these ships do have in common is they’re male and they’re white. Black characters and characters of color are shipped at a FAR lower rate than white characters, and in cases like Peter Parker/Harley Keener, we see characters of color like Ned Leeds (the main male character we see interacting with Peter, in a very buddy-cop sort of relationship) being ignored in favor of a white character who showed up in one Iron Man movie SEVEN YEARS AGO as a child.
Male characters, on average, do show up more. They are more likely to be the main characters, and they are more likely to be written well. But even in shows when this isn’t the case, it generally takes either all of the major characters being female or a canon F/F relationship for F/F to be the most common set of ships. And the argument that nobody wants to bother with blank slate female characters is absolute BS if we consider the brief popularity of the MCU’s Darcy, the ultimate blank slate who could act as a fan insert to sleep with all the guys. Or Hawkeye, a man given almost zero characterization and little screen time for the first few films he’s in.
To some degree, I think it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. People are used to reading white guys so they write white guys, so more people get used to reading white guys. They understand how to write cis men having sex because they’ve read it, so that’s what they write. We are used to looking for ourselves in white men, so we do it.
But also, fandom is not some utopic mirror of an imperfect world. People who write fic are just as capable of racism and misogyny and bias as people who publish media. Just because you’re not getting paid for your work, it doesn’t mean you’re somehow above those who are. We all live in society, with all of its ills, and we are generally all complicit in perpetuating those ills, to some degree. For a group of people who talk a lot about how we’re all complicit in racism, we sure like to pretend that our fanfiction can’t be.
There are more men in fic because there are more major men in canon. But there are more men in fic because we, as a society, prefer white men.
