Stranger Things Femslash

Tumblr
Name:	Stranger Things Femslash
Date(s):	March 1, 2023 - Current
Submissions:
Type:	gifs, fics, graphics, music, fanart, mood boards, headcanons etc.
Fandom:	Stranger Things
Scope:	Femslash pairings
URL:	Stranger Things Femlash, Archived version Screenshot
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Stranger Things Femslash is a Tumblr blog dedicated to all the femslash pairings in the Stranger Things fandom.

Stranger Things Femslash Week

The first Stranger Things Femslash week ran from April 10-16 2023, using daily prompts voted on by the community on Tumblr.

• Monday, April 10 - Women’s Wrongs
• Tuesday, April 11 - Hurt/Comfort
• Wednesday, April 12 - 80s Gay Culture
• Thursday, April 13 - Soulmates
• Friday, April 14 - Smut
• Saturday, April 15 - Came Back Wrong/Monsters
• Sunday, April 16 - Free Choice

FAQ

Any kind of fanwork that could exist in rebloggable format was accepted for the week — art, fics, gifsets, headcanons, tattoos, mood boards to give just a few examples — and fans who were not creating were encouraged to join in by liking, reblogging, and commenting on people's works.

NSFW and underage were both allowed, but the moderator asked that good faith efforts were made to correctly tag submissions.

This is, understandably, a controversial issue in fandom. However, there is no good way to police morality in storytelling. This is especially true when we consider the history of queer stories. For this reason, I do not feel that our community is made safer by me as a moderator deciding where these lines are drawn. However, I do ask that everyone make a good faith effort to tag triggers where possible.

Genderswapping characters was allowed for submissions, and the moderator posed some discussion points and questions around genderswapping, including why sometimes genderswapping did not always seem to be in the spirit of femslash events.

Read the entire FAQ here

Collection and Event Stats

A collection was set up on Archive of Our Own and 76 fanworks were added to the collection for April 2023[1].

At the end of the event, the moderators released some stats from the event including:

• Dead Girls - Works with one or more of the canonically dead characters: Barb, Chrissy, and Heather.
• Who Got Railed the Most? - Which characters appeared most in works tagged smut or rated explicit.
• Rarepair Stats - Which rarepairs were written about and how this affected their tags on AO3.

Femslash Focused Bookmarks Collection

In May 2023, the moderators set-up Bookmark collections on AO3 to help readers find fics where the femslash pairing were the focus of the story. Femslash pairings in Stranger Things often end up as background pairings; this resource was to help people avoid the frustration that often came with searching for their preferred pairing in works.

Have you ever been wading the tag for Robin/Heather and get stuck in a sea of Harringrove? Praying for an El/Max fic that’s actually about them and doesn’t leave them background to the boys? Searching for Robin/Vickie and simply given up because on any given page you might encounter a single fic? Here at the Stranger Things Femslash hub, we’ve formed a committee to help you through these woes! Brave individuals have waded through the tags, wrangling every fic with femslash main pairings into a bookmark collection for your reading enjoyment!

The Collections

Collections for the following femslash pairings were created:

• Chrissy/Nancy - Collection here
• Chrissy/Robin - Collection here
• El/Max - Collection here
• Heather/Robin - Collection here
• Nancy/Barb - Collection here
• Robin/Melissa - Collection here
• Vickie/Robin - Collection here
• Nancy/Robin - Collection here
• Chrissy/Heather - Collection here
• Joyce/Karen - Collection here

Policy for Inclusion

The collections operated on an inclusive policy with the only stipulation being that the femslash pairing had to be the primary focus of the fanwork. There were no controls around content, quality, happy ends, representation or anything else.

The one change to this came in September 2023, when the moderators updated the policy to exclude Anonymous Explicit rated works.

We at Stranger Things Femslash do not believe that our curation should be used as a judgment call regarding which fics are good, interesting, or ethical, as that is not a role we are comfortable taking on. However, it is clear that the anonymous feature is being used in some cases to circumvent people having muted a specific user. It is important that people be able to curate their ao3 experience, especially when it comes to explicit stories. We do not support the use of anon posting to bypass people’s boundaries around the stories they see.

This was almost certainly in response to a very prolific poster in the Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler tag who had recently begun to post anonymously. Many of the fandom had muted them due to feeling that their works overwhelmed the tag and indications that many of their works were plagiarised, so they felt that this move to posting anonymously was an effort to get around this muting.