Because it’s fascinating really. I retroactively tagged some of my fics with “trans character” because they were written ambiguously enough for it to be a viable possibility, then I have fics that have been tagged as such from the start because I either didn’t leave any room for doubt or I just wanted to have that intent known. Now those fics have nowhere near the amount of kudos as the ones I tagged retroactively or that were written back when I thought I had to give everyone a cis-looking body.
So for fun, I went ahead anyway and crunched some numbers, because I’m terrible. All values are current as of the time of posting. [there is a read more here which for some reason I can’t see on mobile.]
Highest number of kudos: 111, on a cis-assumed fic.
Second highest: 99, on an ambiguously written fic that I retroactively tagged with “trans character”, but only months after posting.
Third highest: 85, featuring one nonbinary character but written in a way that just reads as two cis dudes anyway. Mea fucking culpa, to be honest.
Fourth highest: 77, on a cis-assumed fic.
And fifth highest, I’ll be calling that a tie between 72 kudos on a cis-assumed fic (same as the third place here) and 71 on an ambiguous, retroactively trans-tagged fic.
After that I got bolder and started writing them as trans explicitly. What’s the highest number of kudos I’ve got on a fic where the transness is in your face?
30.
30 kudos since March.
Let’s be clear on this, I am not saying “wow you’re so bad for leaving me all these other kudos”. I have about a million achievement-related complexes and I’m genuinely happy about every single sign of approval I get on something I’ve created and put up in public. But to see in numbers how much fandom prefers to read about cis characters, or at least characters they can pretend are cis (and cis men in particular) because nothing in the fic explicitly contradicts it, well that’s an experience. All these are broadly the same few fandoms and pairings, so it can’t be explained away by some more obvious popularity difference. I know what an unpopular ship looks like by comparison.
And it makes me wonder how much I’ve contributed to that status quo myself, ironically. I mean, I put that balance of fics out there. I took ages to start thinking critically about defaulting. And ultimately none of this is that many kudos, so maybe I should be glad people even read any of these. It would probably take a super popular author to embrace the concept of openly trans representation to make fandom at large accept it more, and I’m just not that popular,* so oh well.
(*I literally can’t tell whether my fics are popular. I have a massive self-deprecating complex when it comes to this and I should probably get help for it.)
