Thoughts about shipping categories and AO3 self audit

[obstinatecondolement]

I used to get very preoccupied with the idea that I was personally responsible for increasing the representation of f/f and f/m fanworks through my output, largely because of moral scrupulosity OCD brain. I don't feel the same way anymore.

That said...

However, I do think, "I just coincidentally only ship m/m ships ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" can be a cop out and attempts to explain m/m's overrepresentation in the works posted to AO3 as, "male characters are typically the only ones given the depth and dimension which lends itself to shipping" is, in my opinion, disingenuous when you consider how ready, willing and able fandom is to invent characterisation out of whole cloth for minor male characters and shippable dynamics between male characters, who may never share screentime together or reference each other in dialogue, that just do not exist in the source material. I would like to clarify: I do not think this kind of transformation of the source material is sinister! I just think that since we can do that and we often do do that, we can, as a community, also do it for characters who are not male and ships that are not m/m more often.

I think it's worth thinking about how and why we ship what we ship and if we might have unconscious biases that make us overlook characters who are not men or ships other than m/m ships. Just so I'm not misunderstood, I'm certainly not saying that any individual has to ship things they are not enthused by or that they are obligated to Blorbify characters who do not speak to them. I'm also not saying that individual fans have to meet a quota of different ship categories or that they are personally responsible for increasing the representation of a diverse category of ships on AO3. Additionally, I'm not saying that the answer to the question, "Why do I mostly ship m/m?" is always, "Because I overlook and undervalue characters who are not men." Sometimes it's, "because I am primarily or exclusively attracted to men and ships featuring characters I am not myself attracted to do not interest me" or, "because I mostly read/write explicit fic and explicit fic about women makes me dysphoric" or, "because the kinds of characters I tend to be drawn to are seldom not male" or any number of other perfectly valid reasons. Again, this is a big picture issue, not a problem with individual fans' preferences. Note: the focus of this post is gender, but there are obviously many other forms of diversity that can be represented in fanworks. I took this as my primary focus mainly because the default ship categories make it easier to look at numbers for this particular kind of diverse representation.

[EDIT Jan 22 2023: I think that I could have expressed myself better in the above here. For one, I think that my use of the word "we" implies that I think everyone reading this post is primarily an m/m shipper or someone whose favourite characters are all men, which is obviously not the case. I meant "we" in the sense of "transformative fandom on AO3 collectively" which does disproprortionately favour m/m and male characters. I think I also neglected to say that people should create for and engage with ships and characters that they like! I said that no one is obligated to create for or engage with things they don't like, but that still leaves room for the interpretation that it would be a good thing for them to prioritise increasing representation at the expense of having fun anyway even if they chose not to do it. That's not at all what I want! I think that we could all be having even more fun, basically, and that people who primarily or exclusively like m/m ships and male characters are potentially missing out on fun that they could be having. Also, that people who like ships involving characters who are not men or fans of non-male characters are potentially missing out on friends, community and fanworks that they could have if transformative fandom as a whole was less weighted towards m/m ships and male characters.]

All that preamble out of the way, out of curiousity, I have looked at how my driving has been with regards to this on AO3.

Important disclaimer about my pre-AO3 work

Most of the works on my AO3 page were created after I joined AO3 in late August/early September 2012 and the fanworks I created prior to that are largely not yet uploaded. Most of what I created between 2008, when I started posting fanworks online, up to when I joined AO3 was m/m. There was some f/f for a femslash ship I was into, maybe some(/one?) f/m work(s), at least one f/m/m work and possibly more that are slipping my mind and one (gen) fic involving a character who was not male or female, but it was not handled sensitively and I would not happily claim it now. I created a certain amount of other gen works too, but they were very much a small minority of my overall output during that time.

On my AO3 account currently, when you look at all the works, these are the numbers:

• m/m: 118
• f/m: 34
• gen: 22
• f/f: 18
• multi: 10
• other: 4

or:

• m/m: ~72.5%
• f/m: ~20.7%
• gen: ~13.4%
• f/f: ~11%
• multi: ~6.1%
• other: ~2.4%

When I filter out Daniel LaRusso/Johnny Lawrence, John Kreese/Terry Silver and Wee John Feeney/Frenchie, who are pretty overrepresented, I get:

• m/m: 39
• f/m: 25
• gen: 21
• f/f: 18
• multi: 6
• other: 3

or:

• m/m: ~44.3%
• f/m: ~28.4%
• gen: 23.9%
• f/f: ~20.5%
• multi: ~7.1%
• other: ~3.4%

When I filter out the fandoms Cobra Kai, Karate Kid and Our Flag Means Death entirely I get:

• m/m: 34
• f/m: 24
• gen: 17
• f/f: 17
• multi: 6
• other: 0

or:

• m/m: ~43.6%
• f/m: ~30.8%
• gen: ~21.8%
• f/f: ~21.8%
• multi: ~8%
• other: 0%

So, at a casual glance, it would look like the overall trend here is that I typically favour m/m but not the degree that the current overall numbers suggest. Notably though, when Cobra Kai, Karate Kid and Our Flag Means Death are excluded, I have no works in the "other" category. Of the four works in that category I have overall, two feature a canon non-binary character, Jim Jimenez from OFMD, and two were genderqueer interpretations of Daniel LaRusso from Karate Kid/Cobra Kai.

However, this still isn't the full picture! Many of the works I have uploaded to AO3 were created for trek-rarepair-swap or other events and I may not necessarily have shipped the ships in the fanworks I created for those initially, because I generally select "any" for relationships when I sign up to an exchange, unless I have very strong feelings against the ship. I typically did ship these things by the time I had finished my assigment, but is unlikely that I would have created fanworks for those ships without having an assignment to complete. Note: this does not mean that I do not like these works! Some of them are my favourite things I've ever created and many have introduced me to new ships that I very much ship now.

So, for the sake of getting a better look at what my output would be when you exclude things that I wouldn't have created if not for an exchange, I went through my works on AO3 and tagged things with Gift Work, Trek Rarepair Swap and Gift Exchange as appropriate (I removed that Gift Exchange tag after I ran these numbers, because it appears to be about in-character gift giving within a work). I did not add these tags to works that I feel I would have created even if they were not a response to an exchange request, because I already shipped them.

With those exclusions, my numbers are:

• m/m: 107
• f/m: 28
• gen: 15
• f/f: 7
• multi: 8
• other: 4

or:

• m/m: ~80%
• f/m: ~20.9%
• gen: ~11.2%
• f/f: ~5.2%
• multi: ~6%
• other: ~3%

With those exclusions, plus excluding my top three ships, my numbers are:

• m/m: 28
• f/m: 19
• gen: 14
• f/f: 7
• multi: 4
• other: 3

or:

• m/m: ~52%
• f/m: ~35.2%
• gen: ~26%
• f/f: ~13%
• multi: ~7.4%
• other: 5.6%

With those exclusion, plus excluding Cobra Kai, Karate Kid and Our Flag Means Death completely, my numbers are:

• m/m: 25
• f/m: 18
• gen: 11
• f/f: 18
• multi: 4
• other: 0

or:

• m/m: ~54.3%
• f/m: ~39.1%
• gen: ~23.9%
• f/f: ~13%
• multi: ~8.7%
• other: 0%

Now, the data here is not so complex as to need a spreadsheet to draw conclusions from it, but a spreadsheet is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, so I went ahead and made one anyway and used it to create these graphs:

graphs of above data

And here it all is in a table

Numbers   of works	m/m	f/m	gen	f/f	multi	other
overall	118	34	22	18	10	4
w/o top   3 ships	39	25	22	18	10	4
w/o top   3 fandoms	34	24	17	17	6	0
w/o   exchange works	107	28	15	7	8	4
w/o   exchage works or top 3 ships	28	19	14	7	4	3
w/o   exchange works or top 3 fandoms	25	18	11	18	4	0
As a   percentage	m/m	f/m	gen	f/f	multi	other
overall	72.5%	20.7%	13.4%	13.0%	6.1%	2.4%
w/o top   3 ships	44.3%	28.4%	23.9%	20.50%	7.1%	3.4%
w/o top   3 fandoms	43.6%	30.8%	21.8%	21.8%	8.0%	0.0%
w/o   exchange works	80.0%	20.9%	11.2%	5.2%	6.0%	3.0%
w/o   exchage works or top 3 ships	52.0%	35.2%	26.0%	13.0%	7.4%	5.6%
w/o   exchange works or top 3 fandoms	54.3%	39.1%	23.9%	13.0%	8.7%	0.0%

So when I look at this, it looks like, left to my own devices, I still favour m/m overall, although, again, when you exclude my three biggest recent ships this difference is not as pronounced.

Now. It was at this point that I decided to make sure I hadn't made any typos transcribing any of my percentages (as I had done once when gathering the data intially, typing a 3 instead of a 2, but I caught myself as I did it) and summed the first row of my overall percentages, which came to 128.1%. I immediately felt very foolish, remembering that several works were tagged in more than one category, so obviously it was going to come to something over 100%. But that got me to thinking: what if I excluded m/m from the dataset?

So we got these additional two graphs

And if you prefer data presented less visually, here are the numbers in a table

Number of works	f/m	gen	f/f	multi	other
overall	18	17	18	2	3
w/o   Daniel/Johnny	18	17	18	2	2
w/o top   3 fandoms	17	15	17	2	0
w/o   exchange works	12	11	7	3	1
w/o   exchage works or Daniel/Johnny	12	11	7	1	2
w/o   exchange works or top 3 fandoms	11	9	6	1	0
As a   percentage	f/m	gen	f/f	multi	other
overall	36.7%	34.7%	36.7%	4.1%	6.1%
w/o   Daniel/Johnny	37.5%	35.4%	37.5%	4.2%	4.2%
w/o top   3 fandoms	39.5%	34.9%	39.5%	4.7%	0.0%
w/o   exchange works	44.4%	40.7%	25.9%	11.1%	3.7%
w/o   exchage works or Daniel/Johnny	46.2%	42.3%	26.9%	3.8%	7.7%
w/o   exchange works or top 3 fandoms	52.4%	42.9%	28.6%	4.8%	0.0%

All the percentages I have given as part of this have been rounded to one decimal point (unless I messed up in the first two datasets with my rounding—I had not yet broken out Excel at that stage of the proceedings). I have not checked my work for transcription errors and I probably won't in the near future because I'm trying not to go too far down the rabbit hole on this.

Could this data be more precise or useful? Absolutely! I haven't controlled for the medium of the fanwork or things like length, where relevant. Also, while part of the bigger output for my top three most represented ships has been that I've been more productive with creating fanworks generally since October 2020, I do think it's not to be discounted that I have specifically gone the most bananas about three m/m ships rather than any other category of ship between 2012–2023, at least as far as that is reflected in the fannish output that I archived on AO3. Of course, three is not a huge sample size, so who knows if it is or is not truly significant.

But, again, I'm trying not to get too obsessive about this... which may already be too late, but better late than never.

A final note: I in no way would expect anyone to examine their fannish output in this level of detail I have here, or at all, and I don't think that I'm being morally virtuous by doing so myself. I'm just really fascinated by data and this kind of thing is interesting and fun for me. Also, to reiterate, shipping is not activism and your fannish output is not necessarily a reflection of your politics or values. While I would personally like to diversify my output in the future, and I think that as a community transformative fandom would be better served by a more diverse offering of fanworks, I don't think that anyone is bad or wrong for liking what they like.

Comments

[flamingsword]

I have 2 f/f and 2 other. But then I have similar thoughts on writing in backstory and characterization for characters that other people don't really understand or put thought into.

(i.e., "BLACK WIDOW WAS A CHILD SOLDIER SHE WOULD NOT DO HALF THE THINGS SHE DOES IN THIS FIC!1!!" etc.)

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah, that's just how it shakes out sometimes! And, honestly, fair. When I write Trek fic I usually try to keep it very canon compliant (or at least I did pre-new Trek... maybe I'd take a different approach now) so, for example,

spoilers for DS9

even though I ship Kira/Jadzia, it's unlikely that I'd ever write it, because Jadzia dies before the series ends and I tend to write post-canon fic rather than something that's set in, like, season three and is canon divergent. So if I did write it, it would probably be about grief, which is not necessarily what I'd want to write for them.

[rekishi]

I used to ship exclusively f/m until oh....the mid aughts, I think. I actually actively disliked non-canonical slash until then.

I'm not sure what exactly caused the shift, but since then I do happen to ship only m/m ships, canonical or not. This is also in part because f/m ships in canon often follow a pattern that just isn't very interesting to me.

However, I did (in the last few years) write genderbent f/m (where one character is canonically male) and I also wrote in the same timeframe another related f/m story. And here's what I found: Writing explicit sex with one party who has my own equipment is incredibly awkward and I don't enjoy it. This gets even more awkward, to me, when both people have the same equipment as I.

I'm generally of the ship and let ship opinion. I do understand that f/f is underrepresented, but I personally also don't read f/f ships, partially for the reasons above, partially because I just don't get women. I've never fit well into the female mould myself and most women in fiction are not presented to not fit that mould, so why would I bother with them fictionally. Now, as I said yesterday, the older I get the less I care about writing or reading explicit sex - let them kiss and cuddle, but I've been pretty tired of tab a in slot b for a decade already, unfortunately that's what draws readership and some fics need it for relationship dynamic reasons as well - so this may shift again. But I'm not sure.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah, I'm totally ship and let ship! I don't think it's A Problem what individuals like to create or enjoy at all (and I don't think that ships with women are more progressive than ships with men, just in case that was the vibe at any point). I think that the kind of discomfort you're describing here is really normal for a lot of people and it's the opposite of a problem to refrain from reading or writing things that make you uncomfortable. I also hear you on explicit fic being less interesting as the years go by. I really find writing explicit fic to be quite boring a lot of the time and, when I read it, it's generally for the story—I mean, I'm not un-affected by it, but I also prefer narrative satisfaction rather than any other kind with fic.

I hope that, even with my disclaimers, the fact that I went to such lengths to look at my own numbers didn't implicitly imply that I think writing/reading m/m is indulgent and bad and writing and reading other kinds of fics is virtuous and good. For one, I think that's a pretty shallow way of looking at non-male characters: they are not Our Vegetables.

[rekishi]

Oh yeah no, don't worry. I was just trying to provide a better explanation than "I just happen to ship m/m", which may just be shorthand for parts of the same aspects.

I often skim over the sex parts when reading, unless the sex has some important dialogue or it's somehow plot relevant. Also.... God. With Tatort, I'm not currently reading but I should, anyway, the German words for genitalia both male and female are terrible. dnw. ugh. English is the porn language, thanks, the German words squick me.

[obstinatecondolement]

I've heard that from a few fans who speak English as an additional language! That smut in their native language is embarrassing or squicky in a way that English language smut is not, I mean. I wonder why that is? As someone who is mostly monolingual, I'm always very interested in the way people who are multilingual relate differently to their different languages and how different languages open up different facets of their own personalities sometimes. I have a friend who is a native English speaker who says they can only express themselves emotionally in Russian and I recently met someone from Brazil who said they could never date someone who only spoke Portugese, because they can only be honest about their feelings in English.

[rekishi]

I think language theory goes into the direction where those words in the mother tongue are connotated with shame, while in another language they are less so. Since often, genitalia is not something talked about much and porn is also not really something discussed at the dinnertable, so even in open minded people, there's an aspect of shame.

Same for feelings. The native tongue is connected with things like puberty and first loves, first broken hearts, etc, the vocabulary in the non-native tongue is further removed from that and easier to access.

However, this doesn't explain why multilingual people gravitate towards English being the porn language as well, that's anyone's guess.

But yes, personalities definitely also switch with languages.

[obstinatecondolement]

That makes a lot of sense! This is very interesting stuff. It's funny how mutable the 'self' really is.

[adriennefae]

A little more than half of my fic on AO3 is gen; of the shipfic, about 80% is F/F. In addition, if you look at my top ten most written characters, nine of them are women. (And eight of them are from Star Trek Discovery. If you exclude Discovery, you're left with an even split between gen and F/F with only a few fics that are neither, and a top characters list of eight women, "original non-human character(s)", and the goose from Untitled Goose Game.)

It actually used to be true (this was before I was posting fic on AO3) that most of my favorite characters were men. I think that was because, at the time, I was mainly picking favorite characters because I could relate to them in some way, and gender was less relevant to that than the fact that they were aliens or artificial beings or in some way fundamentally different from those around them. While the female characters I felt like I was expected to relate to were ones who were shy and insecure, except all their insecurities tended to revolve around their looks and oh no the hot guy will never notice me, and that just didn't interest me at all.

What changed was mainly realizing I was gay and starting to look at female characters through the lens of being attracted to them rather than just whether or not I related to them, though I have also found a few more female characters who fit into that "different from everyone else, struggles with emotions" category, and also added additional categories of female characters I really enjoy. I never felt like I was making an intentional effort to consume more media with women or write more F/F or female-character-centric fic because feminism or anything like that.

[obstinatecondolement]

Oh yeah, I think I represented myself a little clumsily in this post. I didn't mean that the chief, or only, reason for writing or reading about women and other non-male characters was like... because it was The Right Thing To Do. Most of the femslash shippers I know are bi women and lesbians and they read and write femslash because that's what interests them and the thought of someone gritting their teeth and writing their ships out of a sense of duty is actively repellent to them. I meant more that people who are primarily m/m shippers or whose favourite characters are all men might benefit from thinking about why that is (and, as I said, I don't think that the only explanation is that they're secretly anti non-men or that it's Problematic to like m/m or male characters) and that they are potentially cutting themselves off from other kinds of ships and Blorbos that they would really like. And that, in turn, could be good for the existing shippers and appreciators of those Blorbos because there would be more fans and fanworks for the things they liked.

I really dislike the idea that certain characters are only interesting or worth engaging with because they belong to marginalised groups, because I think that's inherently dehumanising to real people who are members of those marginalised groups. I guess what I meant was that diversity leads to a better fandom experience for everyone.

I think I definitely muddied the waters by doing such a deep dive into my own navel wrt a breakdown of numbers like I did, but honestly that was just for fun because I like this sort of thing—in 2021 I made a spreadsheet tracking the growth of the John Kreese/Terry Silver tag over the year, because I was very excited to see more people getting into the ship. But, like, again, individual people's ships and favourite characters and what they like to create and engage with is not even remotely an issue, in my opinion.

[adriennefae]

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that you were doing anything wrong by making the post or anything like that. I just wanted to share my experience and reasons for my different preferences at different times. And I definitely understand wanting to get into the numbers - I just made that post a couple weeks ago on most popular ships in the Trek fandom on AO3 over the past year, for example, and have also made other spreadsheets about fic numbers in various fandoms etc. just for fun.

[obstinatecondolement]

Not to worry, I tend to get very concerned about being precise with how I communicate ideas, which can lead to axiety about potentially having expressed myself badly. Which is absolutely a Me issue and not anything you did. I don't think you were accusing me of treating things that weren't m/m or male characters as being, like, fandom's Vegetables that they should engage with even though they didn't like them as much as the dessert of dude slash and male characters and that everyone felt this way and people were only pretending to like, say, femslash on its own merits. But anyway, lol, sorry for unleashing my own brain weasels into the conversation.

There really is nothing like a spreadsheet! I find them so soothing.

[amado1]

This was a fun read! I liked your point early on re: moral scrupulosity. I struggled with that growing up, and I still see small remnants of it as an adult -- one of those remnants, for me, is also shipping categories on AO3! Actually, when I first started posting on my current AO3 account, I was careful to make sure that the shipping categories were perfectly even at the end of the week. IIRC I decided that 2 M/M, 2 F/F, 1 M/F, and 1 GEN fic per week was the magic number. I maintained that system for probably a year and a half before the intense need to keep them even faded, and M/M gradually took over.

(Luckily, thanks to events like Femslash February and my resurgent interest in Riker/Troi, I've been able to up the F/F and M/F numbers again 😆)

[obstinatecondolement]

Thank you! And yes, it's such an easy pitfall to stumble into if you're disposed to moral scrupulosity, unfortunately! I'm impressed that you manage six AO3 uploads a week, but I'm so sorry that your brain made you think that you had to keep up with that and keep everything even.

I do like focused events like that! I think, like with Yuletide for small fandoms, it's a good way to encourage people to create some more femslash. And, I find, an event like that encourages readers (etc.) to comment more, which is itself encouraging to creators. Re: specific ships, I've recently succumbed to Gerri/Roman from Succession, so my kinky f/m count is ticking up, haha.