something else with the Dragon Age Tournament blog's tumblr census results that strikes my personal interest is how the gender + sexuality demographics looks... because again, it matches up pretty neatly with every other fandom survey/census. Biggest slice of gender demographics is cis women, but biggest slice of sexuality demographics is bi/pan people. And for this census, also interesting that straight is the next-to-least selected sexuality (gay coming in last)
"What's your gender identity?: Cis woman (48.2%), nonbinary (31.5%), trans man (10%), cis man (2.3%), trans woman (1.9%)"
"What's your sexuality?: Bi/pan (48.9%), ace-spec (39.5%), aro-spec (19.1%), lesbian (14.6%), straight (9.1%), gay (6.9%)" + 4.9% total other write-in responses
So the largest demographics of Dragon Age fandom on tumblr (represented only by this census, but no other conflicting sources afaik?) are women who are not straight; so you would think, from this, and from other various fandom polls/censuses/surveys, that tumblr tags and ao3 would be heavy on women player characters/self inserts, but a fairly equal spread of love interests + general characters who are focused on. And yet
A lot of times, when the subject of women characters being underrepresented or ignored in fanworks comes up, there's a response of "What, so you just want everyone to write/draw/enjoy the characters you like instead of what they like?" but come on! by all metrics available, these are all characters everyone should be want to interact with. They're all great characters from the same media franchise, who should appeal to self-professed majority bi women fandoms romantically, sexually, and platonically.
Really, I don't doubt that the people responding to these surveys are being honest. Rather than dishonesty, I think this apparent mismatch of personal identities versus action/attention in fandom just indicates, once again, that a lot of people have a lot of internal biases and misogyny.
This also isn't getting into the issue of race and fandom.
Which similarly, fandom is so generally accepted as being a cozy liberal safe nice space, this should be shocking; but it really isn't. The Dragon Age Tournament census didn't have a race demographic, only location (USA and Europe being the huge majorities at 61% and 31% respectively) but fandom is a very white (esp. American, British, northern European white) space. We know this data-wise from other similar fandom polls/surveys, and anecdotally from using our eyes and brains. This feels different from the misogyny issues, which is predominantly women continuing to propel fandom misogyny via character treatment, because this is really white people making fandom spaces unfriendly or downright antagonistic to fans of color while also ignoring Black and non-white characters.
I don't have any great solutions. IDK. I just wanted to talk about this, since these are more self-reported statistics that align with and add to what we already have and know about fandom demographics and problems.
titsay
areudirty
gracieabrams
snowghoul
amandla
