{"id":140191,"date":"2015-08-21T09:58:27","date_gmt":"2015-08-21T09:58:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2015\/08\/21\/evalilith-destinationtoast-lierdumoa\/"},"modified":"2015-08-21T09:58:27","modified_gmt":"2015-08-21T09:58:27","slug":"evalilith-destinationtoast-lierdumoa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2015\/08\/21\/evalilith-destinationtoast-lierdumoa\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

evalilith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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destinationtoast<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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lierdumoa<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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slitthelizardking<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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ainedubh<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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observethewalrus<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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prokopetz<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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ibelieveinthelittletreetopper<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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veteratorianvillainy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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prokopetz<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s like, what did they expect<\/b>?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios<\/a>#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters<\/a>#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable<\/a>\u00a0(via sarahtonin42<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to \u2018explain\u2019 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\u2019re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Totally.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

(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.)<\/p>\n

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 \u201cselfcest\u201d-enabling scenarios – this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:<\/p>\n

Possible F\/F ships:<\/b> 3
Possible F\/M ships:<\/b> 27
Possible M\/M ships:<\/b> 36<\/p>\n

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS:<\/b> 66<\/p>\n

Thus, assuming – again, for the sake of simplicity – that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women – for creating<\/b> a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This doesn\u2019t even account \u00a0for 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don\u2019t understand women vary well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yay, mathy arguments. \ud83d\ude42 <\/p>\n

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\u2019t think it\u2019s the sole reason, but I think it\u2019s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs. <\/p>\n

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). \u00a0(e.g. femslash in female-heavy media<\/a>; femslash deep dive<\/a>) I\u2019ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom\u2019s M\/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I\u2019m periodically tempted to try to do so.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Also, the more a certain type of interaction is already in a series, the less people feel the need to write fic for it. Guess which ships are more likely to already be canon?<\/p>\n

The level of disproportion in characters, particularly developed characters, is so great that even homophobes sometimes see\/enjoy the chemistry between two characters of the same gender; this is where you get pairings where one of the couple is cisswapped (or, if a male character is \u2018effeminate\u2019 enough, misgendered). There literally aren\u2019t enough straight ships to go around, <\/i>because there aren\u2019t enough female characters in proportion to male characters.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

evalilith: destinationtoast: lierdumoa: slitthelizardking: ainedubh: observethewalrus: prokopetz: ibelieveinthelittletreetopper: veteratorianvillainy: prokopetz: 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\u2019s like, what did they expect? #friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to … <\/p>\n

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