Genre TV Character Diversity Project Index Page
In my series on genre tv character diversity, I’m moving on to how fandom represents character diversity. To start, I went over to archiveofourown.org to check out what characters and relationships are popular in fan fiction. You can check out my data spreadsheet with all the info that went into the charts here.
For the first set of pie charts, I look up the top 10 relationship tags for each tv fandom on ao3 and count up how many fics among that group have relationships that are canon or slash (non-canon), and male/male, male/female, or female/female.*
Next, I show the most popular ships, as main or side pairings, among all the fandoms. Since some of these shows have been on the air for many years whereas others are just starting, I normalize by the number of episodes the characters appear in instead of taking the raw number of fics.
Then, I present a second set of pie charts showing the main pairings in the top 100 fics for the most prolific fandoms. This does not include side pairings, but you can see those too in my data spreadsheet.**
Finally, I count up the number of fics that include each main character in a show. In the bar charts I show which fandoms have a greater emphasis on white, male, straight characters than the show itself does (e.g. Dominion), and which fandoms write more fics about characters that are POC, female, queer (e.g. Once Upon a Time).***
Some comments:
- I was surprised by how much the fan fic landscape is different across fandoms. Maybe it’s the online circles I travel in, but I mostly see slash m/m shipping, and to a lesser degree canon queer ships.
- Supernatural and Teen Wolf dominate fan fic, specifically the non-canon male/male Dean/Castiel (36k) and Stiles/Derek (31k) ships, both of which have been at the center of queerbaiting controversies on their shows.
- When a show does have a queer lead character, fans run with it. The same sex relationship(s) of the leads are the most popular to write about within the fandom (e.g. Lost Girl, In the Flesh, Orphan Black).
- When a show has a classic Will They Won’t They pairing for the lead, that ship is generally the most popular within the fandom (e.g. Oliver/Felicity on Arrow, Ichabod/Abbie on Sleepy Hollow, Damon/Elena on The Vampire Diaries).
- In all of the above cases — queerbaiting, queer lead, hetero ship teasing — fans write most about the lead characters who have romantic tension.
- Every now and then though I run across crack pairings, meaning characters that have little to no interaction in the show or basis in canon for hipping. For example, in the Agents of SHIELD fandom, the most popular ship was Phil Coulson/Clint Barton, even though the latter isn’t even in the show. (I didn’t count those.)
- Fandom has a race problem. Sorry, but it needs saying. All but 2 of the shows (Once Upon a Time, Sleepy Hollow) put white main characters into fics at a higher rate than those characters appear on screen. In some cases, the show has not written its POC characters well enough to make them interesting fodder for fan fiction. For example, Sembene in Penny Dreadful has hardly any lines. In other cases, it seems to me like fandom has ignored compelling POC characters who have important roles in the plot and sometimes even prominent romantic relationships on the show.
- Some POC characters that aren’t getting the love they deserve: Tommy LaSalle on Defiance, Kevin Tran on Supernatural, Sarah Essen on Gotham, Arika on Dominion, Frank Irving on Sleepy Hollow, Antoine Triplett on Agents of SHIELD, Jack Crawford and Beverly Katz on Hannibal, Hale on Lost Girl, Maxine Martin on In the Flesh, Cisco Ramon on The Flash, Art Bell on Orphan Black, Lafayette Reynolds on True Blood, Michonne on The Walking Dead, Melissa McCall on Teen Wolf, Drew Wu on Grimm, and Danny Pink on Doctor Who.
- On the other hand, some POC characters are relatively popular in fan fiction: Abbie and Jenny Mills on Sleepy Hollow, Skye on Agents of SHIELD, John Diggle on Arrow, Iris West on The Flash, Tara Thornton on True Blood, Regina Mills on Once Upon a Time, and Scott McCall on Teen Wolf.
- Despite what you may have heard, fans do write about female characters that are given good material in the show: Regina Mills, Emma Swan, and Belle on Once Upon a Time; Sansa and Arya Stark on Game of Thrones; Skye and Jemma Simmons on Agents of SHIELD; Felicity Smoak on Arrow; Abbie Mills on Sleepy Hollow; Elena Gilbert and Caroline Forbes on The Vampire Diaries.
- A few secondary characters loom larger in fic than they do in the show itself: Castiel, John Winchester, and Charlie Bradbury on Supernatural, Felicity Smoak on Arrow, and River Song and Jack Harkness on Doctor Who appear in a greater percentage of fics than they do episodes of the show.
- We can speculate for ages on why white male slash pairings are hugely popular, but I’m not going to get into it much here because this is all about the data. Briefly, in my opinion it’s a combination of show and fandom factors, such as tv writing better parts for those characters, casting with a certain aesthetic, fan fic writers/readers being mostly women who are attracted to men, ingrained cultural emphasis on white men as desirable, etc.
Don’t forget to check out the rest of the series on genre tv character diversity here. Next up I’ll be looking at tumblr. As always, feel free to contact me with questions or comments via tumblr or twitter. And if you’re looking for shows with representation, go over to genretvforall.
Some notes on methods after the jump…
(via babbleonproject)
