IF YOU'RE A PART OF ANY FANDOM, YOU SHOULD SEE THIS
The 2023 AO3 stats just came out, and it doesn't look great diversity-wise. User centreoftheselights/@centrumlumina has conducted yearly reports on the top 100 ships, the characters in them, and amount of racial and gender diversity overall. She also included one for the top 100 femslash ships, and conducts a census on ao3 users themselves. Below is a direct quote from the overall August 2022-August 2023 study:
"There are 58 M/M relationships on the list, 11 F/M, 8 F/F, 18 Gen and 5 Other... Of the 204 names on the list, 30 are women, 2 are non-binary, and 3 are characters of ambiguous gender, compared with 25, 1 and 6 in the 2022 list. In total there are 102 white characters, 67 Asian characters, 6 Latino characters, 6 Middle Eastern or North African characters, 4 Black characters, and 2 Indigenous characters, as well as 10 racially ambiguous characters and 8 non-human characters. There are 84 total Characters of Colour, which is 13 more than the number listed in 2022."
I'm pretty bad at analyzing but I also know this means we need to do better. Only 8 F/F relationships? POC ships in the minority?? There are more non-human characters than the total number of black and indigenous characters COMBINED. We need to uplift media and fandoms that cater less to a white, privileged audience and support small projects that maybe don't star A-list celebrities. Also, support the strikes- there would be no content without our working class writers, actors, and artists. Fandoms aren't for everyone if they're not about everyone.
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