Why Isn't There More Femslash on A03?
Hello! I'm not in fandom spaces but I see this question on my dash regularly.
Is the lack of femslash because:
- People are averse to writing femslash? or
- People don't write fics involving female characters as romantic leads?
I know very little about fanfic but I am a trained statistician and this is a question we can answer using science!
The Math
Specifically, we can test whether or not people are writing less femslash than expected, given the fraction of relationship fics with a female romantic lead.
As a toy example, consider a fandom where 20% of relationship fics feature a female character, so say f=20% and m=80%. If people are arbitrarily choosing characters to pair up, then we expect that the proportions of relationship tags are as follows:
- F/F: f²=4%
- F/M: mf + fm = 2fm = 32%
- M/M: m²=64%
So, if this hypothetical fandom were to actually have 10% of fics be tagged F/F, this would mean that this fandom is not biased against femslash, but against writing female characters in general (because 10%>4%).
In general, this is what our expectation looks like:
As expected, when most of the leads are male, we get much more M/M fanfic, and vice versa.
(side note: I work in genetics and this is the same math we use to determine whether a certain base in your DNA is adapting to a new environment!)
The Data
To get data, I got the number of relationship tags for the top 100 fandoms on AO3 (excluding fandoms with single gender subjects, mostly k-pop bands). [source] This resulted in ~10.8 million works, with the following tags:
Obviously, there are far fewer femslash fics than any other relationship category. But is this because people do not write about femslash, or because people do not write about women?
The Results
How often do the top 100 fandoms write about female characters?
The dashed line indicates gender parity, so clearly authors write far less about female characters than male characters. The median fandom chooses a female romantic lead only 25% of the time.
(The top 3 fandoms for writing female characters are Supergirl (92%), The Owl House (71%), and RWBY (71%). The bottom 3 are Blue Lock (8%), Yuri on Ice (6%), and OFMD (4%). It still confuses me that Yuri on Ice is not about Yuri.)
Now, using this data, we can ask the central question: do we see more or less femslash that we expect, given that women are written less frequently than men?
In this plot, each dot is one fandom. The x-position is the fraction of fic characters that are women, and the y-position is the fraction of F/F fics of the total. The black line represents the fraction we expect to see if authors are choosing characters randomly, that is, they do not have a bias against writing femslash. Dots that lie above the line, in the pink region, represent fandoms that write femslash more often than expected, and vice versa. We find that 74/100 fandoms actually write more F/F than expected, given how little they write about female characters.
for the curious:
- the fandom that has written the most femslash, relative to the expectation is Project SEKAI COLORFUL STAGE! (expected: 6344 F/F fics, actual: 11029 F/F fics)
- the fandom with the least femslash relative to the expectation is Love and Deepspace (expected: 5693 F/F fics, actual: 219 F/F fics). i assume this has to do with the fact that it is a dating simulator?
- the fandom closest to perfectly balanced (25% F/F, 50% F/M, 25% M/M) is ATLA (19% F/F, 53% F/M, 28% M/M)
Conclusions
AO3 fics contains very few F/F tags relative to other relationship categories. Through examining the data, we see that this is not because authors have a specific problem with femslash, but because authors do not write fics with female romantic leads in general.
This is where my job as a statistician ends, so I will not speculate on the extent to which this is caused by creators writing shallow female characters (or not writing female characters) versus the fanfic authors' preference toward writing about male characters.