taking a little tumblr break to further conduct experiments on my brain. take care byeeeee 🖖
Get you a girl who speaks in parentheses. Get you a girl who includes information in a sentence that isn't necessary but adds additional context or commentary.
im going to throw a bunch of words out here if you have got any music that comes to mind with them tell me Please ive been scouring
60s-80s sci-fi upa animation mid century modern hanna barbera jetsons campy rankin bass space race cold war lustron flying saucers moog synth theremin
things like les baxter, al caiola, the tornadoes, raymond scott.. alas i cannot hardly find anything with vocals
Add one to the list:
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3
Possible F/M ships: 27
Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
And then we will ship an OT3.
I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.
As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.
In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.
And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.
And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.
When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.
And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.
It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.
They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.
And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.
Not only are male leads more common across the board, but, theory: the genres fandom tends to pool around are particularly gender biased.
To test this, I took @destinationtoast’s Top Ao3 Fandoms in 2023, went down the line, and wrote down their genres based off imdb pages, Wikipedia, publisher’s profile, & amazon listings. To avoid letting one IP skew the results, I removed offshoot fandoms (kept MCU, removed Iron Man) and different adaptations (kept good omens (tv), removed good omens (book)).
Other “unclassifiable” fandoms removed: Video Blogging RPF, Original Work, Minecraft (Video Game), Sanders Sides (Web Series), Virtual Streamer Animated Character
From here, I had an even 100 fandoms, and this was how often the genre tags appeared:
Gender disparity studies in movies don’t usually account for Fantasy/Sci-Fi (idk why), so let’s hop over to the second most popular genre, Action, which we do have data for. Now, Women and Hollywood keeps track of some useful statistics. Let’s look at some of their most recent genre data. Of the top 100 grossing films in 2021:
“41% featured a female lead/co lead driving the plot” but “85% of films featured more male than female characters.”
“Female protagonists were most likely to appear in dramas (36%), followed by horror features (21%), animated features (18%), action features (14%), comedies (7%), and documentaries (4%)”
So, in 2021, women were action movie protagonists 14% of the time. (And still not likely to be surrounded by other women.) This is actually, historically, a pretty high percentage.
See, UsDirect’s study of gender disparity in the top 50 grossing movies from each decade stretching back to 1950. Taking history into account, only 9% of action movies have a female lead.
tldr; people at large favor the action genre, fandom included; action is genre that really prefers male characters.
I’d be very curious to see data regarding gender disparity in fantasy/sci-fi, esp controlling by media (books vs movies vs video games).
Another interesting think to investigate, re: fandom bias, would be: how often is a series’ female protagonist not the most tagged character. If not most tagged, has she been supplanted by a male character? How does this compare to the rates male protagonists are less popular than another male character? Ex: Aang is the protagonist of ATLA, but Zuko is the most tagged character. Does the percentage of outshined female characters change if you control for the gender of the author (for series that even have a primary author)?
Francis Dodd - An Operation at the Military Hospital, Endell Street - Dr L Garrett, Dr Flora Murray, Dr W Buckley (1920)
what did you create today bud? maybe you created a thought about a balloon? maybe a breakfast this morning? maybe a look at a dog trotting by. maybe a heartbeat? it is incredible how much art you are making all the dang time. you are SO prolific
flippyspoon
the craziest picard move ever is when that guy who drives troi nuts with the music box (so she won’t realize his wife isn’t real) confesses to picard that he genocided a planet to extinction.
and picard is like, “oh…wow…..we…don’t have a form for that… i guess we’ll just…leave you here then…anyway nice talkin to ya byeee.”
