Looking at the Supernatural femslash on AO3: numbers, tags, etc.
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| Title: | Looking at the Supernatural femslash on AO3: numbers, tags, etc. |
| Creator: | fenellaevangela |
| Date(s): | August 5, 2011 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Supernatural |
| Topic: | Femslash |
| External Links: | Looking at the Supernatural femslash on AO3: numbers, tags, etc., Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Meta! Sort of. Looking at the Supernatural femslash on AO3: numbers, tags, etc. is a meta post by fenellaevangela on Supernatural's femslash community on AO3
Excerpts
Supernatural is the first big fandom where femslash has been a major part of my fannish experience. I have (and still do) read femslash in other fandoms, but either the fandom is small (St. Trinian's) or femslash was a minor part of my experience in that fandom (Harry Potter). I suppose this is actually interesting, since SPN is often criticized for killing off all its female characters (yes, that means most femslash is about canonically dead characters. Sometimes they've never even met on the show).Anyway, my interest has lead to this post. Using archiveofourown.org, because it's a large archive with lots of tags, I decided to take a look at the amount of femslash in SPN fandom and analyze some of the tags. Numbers and some commentary under the cut.
There are 10,275 works for Supernatural on AO3, and 138 of those are categorized as F/F. That is 1.34% of the total SPN fics. 77 authors contributed to that number, but 33 of those fics were written by a single author, [archiveofourown.org profile] EllieMurasaki. That's not a lot of fic, although there are other stories out there not archived at AO3.12 authors (15.58%) also chose to tag their stories with "femslash", resulting in 15 works with that tag, or 10.87% of the F/F fic.
(While checking the above number, I noticed something about AO3 that I had never had cause to notice before: the tag "femslash" has been wrangled as a subcategory of the tag "slash". While quite logical, I don't find this particularly useful in practice; slash tends to overwhelm femslash in numbers (making it hard to find femslash by using the "slash" tag), and when I search for slash I am specifically searching for M/M. Other people probably find it useful, though.)
19 of the 138 fics (13.77%) are tagged "gender related", and they are the work of 16 authors (20.78%). "Gender related" is an umbrella tag that encompasses the following tags (and their variations): genderbending, genderfuck, genderswap, alternate universe - gender changes, and character tags marking the female form of a canonically male character.
Comments
[naraht]: Very interesting analysis, thanks. Strikes me that the percentage for SPN femslash fics is much, much lower than the percentage of femslash in the archive as a whole, low as that number is in itself. But it's such a big fandom that you can find the stories anyway.