Here’s my portion of the GGC fandom stats panel. This is what my charts from a few weeks ago were for.
I’ve gotten increasingly weary of fujoshi-haters moaning about AO3 as though it’s The Establishment and needs to be rebelled against. The preponderance of m/m on AO3 is impressive, but it’s also unusual. Sometimes, people try to pit m/m and f/f against each other, but I don’t think actual site stats bear out that kind of approach.
The reality is that AO3, like parts of tumblr, is a rare island of amorphous queerness, floating in a vast ocean of het-as-default spaces. If I never again see a hand-wringing thinkpiece about what AO3′s m/m percentage meeeeeans and how it must indicate that No One likes female characters, it will be too soon.
Put simply, AO3 is full of m/m and has a high proportion of fics with multiple ship types as well as a higher proportion of f/f than many spaces (though still not a high percentage).
FFN and Wattpad are both popular, both active, and both full of het and gen. They also both have more fanworks, arguably, though Wattpad works tend to be very short, and FFN’s rate of new works is falling behind AO3′s. Some people who prefer AO3 themselves will take this to mean that only AO3 is relevant, but that’s like standing in the gay bookstore going, “Gosh, it sure is sad that there aren’t any STRAIGHT bookstores! Think of the hets!”
Any fool you see doing this is helping the people who hate queer content to shit on that queer content. Anyone who repeats the myth that most fanfic is m/m is furthering an anti-queer narrative whether they mean to or not. (Yes, even those of you complaining about “straight girls” and “fetishization”.) I’m tired of these bad takes being given a pass.
AO3′s metadata is designed to put queer content on the same level of importance as straight content. It also makes it easy to get shipping stats. Other sites don’t give a fuck about queer content and make it hard to get shipping stats. This has led to very skewed understandings of what fic fandom as a whole looks like--skewed understandings that help bullies go after m/m content with the pretense that they’re striking back against The Man.
It’s time those of us who like fandom stats took responsibility for lopsided, AO3-centric narratives and the social damage they can do.
Here is what fandom looks like actually:
Notes on the chart data below the cut:
