milenab:

fireintheimpala:

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’s like, what did they expect?

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

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?

And these are the numbers without even taking into the effect plot allocations have on story appeal! 

Beyond being categorized by recurring speaking roles, I’m pretty sure the numbers would look even more grim if one were to quantify plot importance and character agency and developments. Who are the leads? Who are the deeply developed characters? Who is provided with a wealth of character traits and backstory?

With that in mind, why is anyone surprised that people are, for instance, more compelled to write stories about Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, than they are Sherlock and the side character Molly? Or about Dean Winchester and angel of the Lord Castiel than Dean Winchester and the yoga teacher from a few episodes Lisa? Or Kirk and Spock rather than Kirk and random episode lady? That’s not internalized misogyny…that’s people preferring to write about characters with real meat.

I can never reblog this enough.

I think an especially telling data point is Once Upon a Time, where the most popular ships are F/F because the show focuses on female characters