#but also unsurprising given the demographics of fandom

[not-poignant]

Hurt/comfort is such a restorative genre to me, I genuinely can't imagine many stories that wouldn't be benefited by its presence in some way. I'm biased, because that's my genre, it's what I want to read and it's what I want to write for the most part.

But it's a genre as a writer that let's you break and mend (even if your breaking is just the flu or something), and as a reader you can trust that there will be mending. We all need restoration in some parts of our life, or comfort, or care, or a sense of healing. Some of us need it a lot more than others (it's an amazing genre for lonely people).

As I shift in different publishing spaces I've felt pushes to pigeonhole myself as like a 'fantasy romance author' or whatever, but the truth is I'm a hurt/comfort author, and every other genre is secondary to that and always will be. The thing that makes me angriest, honestly, is how rare genuine hurt/comfort is in published stories (though the ratio is going up), and how stingy the comfort is whenever it tends to come, as though it's somehow more valid in a literary sense to be cruel, cheap and spare with the mending. As though it's somehow more elite and accomplished to leave the thing you broke in many pieces, just in case it leads to a sequel, or leaves the reader 'thinking or feeling deeply.'

(And I don't mean 'thinking about the story' - I mean 'thinking about a deeply broken world where no one gets any kind of meaningful succour and the pain and agony is the point' or 'feeling deeply that life isn't worth it and even after extreme trauma and a 'hopeful ending' you will still feel like the world is a terrible, unsupported, empty place.')

I don't mind that some books do this to make a point, but you can tell some books actually did want a somewhat hopeful ending but the authors just never learned the technique of how to provide comfort across all its spectrums to a character who need/s it, because it's so rare to see it done neatly in published works.

Romance probably has the best examples but imho, I don't see any reason why we also shouldn't be expecting more of it from every other genre, from hard science fiction, to horror. It doesn't have to be in everything, but why isn't it more prevalent?

(I have many theories as to why, mostly around misogyny and patriarchy and ruined intimacy culture/s and more, I'm just frustrated with it).

#personal #pia on writing #hurt/comfort #everyone's ratio is different #i know i don't write enough comfort for some people #but anyway i think it's shitty that this is a 'fandom genre' #but also unsurprising given the demographics of fandom #vs the demographics of who is at the top publishing books in the Big 4

[melodioustear]

Fanfic & Mental Illness Survey Responses 1 - Demographics

As I've said elsewhere, the bulk of my analysis of the survey will focus on the qualitative questions - those are the ones that are most relevant to my thesis. But given the intersectionality of both my thesis and fandom in general, it's also super interesting to look at the demographics.

So today both for your interest and my benefit, I'm going to go through the demographics questions and chat about each of them in turn, especially (but not purely) with reference to what it could mean for my research.

For the purposes of this initial post I am just using the infographics generated by Google Forms - I'm working on putting together better ones which I will share later on.

Enjoy!

Q1: Do you experience or have you ever experienced any kind of mental illness or similar? 

It is unsurprising that in a survey about mental illness, most people who completed it have experienced it. 443 of the 488 respondents answered yes to this question for a total percentage of 90.8%. There's not a ton of fandom demographics out there on mental illness, so we can't quite know what this is like in comparison to the general fandom population (shoutout to @ao3demographicssurvey2023 for the data we will hopefully have soon!) - but it's reasonable to presume these figures are higher than normal given the topic of the survey.

Q2: Do you have any kind of disability, chronic illness or similar?

This is the first select all that apply question, so this chart is a little more complex to read. To just look at disabled vs non-disabled, we can see that 20.5% declare themselves to be non-disabled, with the remaining 79.5% being disabled. The %s we can then see in this chart by the disability types are a % of the total.

We do have some general disability demographics, though they are also from more niche surveys, like Renée Nielsen's 2021 survey on Whump which puts disability % as only 16.9%. However it's important to note that Nielsen queried neurodivergency separately, and saw 46.3% identifying as neurodivergent. So when you take that into account these figures aren't quite as radically dissimilar as they might otherwise appear. (Obviously some people in Nielsen's survey will have said they are both ND and disabled so this isn't exact, but it's a general idea).

As someone who has a chronic pain condition, it was very interesting to me that so many people identified with that. I hadn't originally intended to list chronic pain separately (as it's so often caused by something else, like a physical disability or chronic illness) - but in discussion with people on the Discord for the above mentioned AO3 Census, decided to do so, and I'm very glad I did. I'm super interested to see what these figures come out as for the 2023 Census.

Q3: If you experience mental illness, do you consider your mental illness to be a disability? 

Firstly a shoutout to my past self for somehow not ticking 'required' on this question and allowing two people not to complete it. Oh well. It is likely they fall into the "I do not experience" category anyway, or they are people who prefer not to disclose.

So, this question was one I was most excited about, because it's such an interesting thing as someone who's approaching mental illness at least in part from a disability studies perspective. One of the critiques of disability studies is that mental illness is often either an afterthought or not considered at all. (In her incredible book black madness :: mad blackness, Pickens points out that disability studies has inherited some very ableist assumptions of 'mind', calling back to the awful Cartesian duality).

Therefore it's not really surprising that so many people have complex feelings around whether their mental illness is a disability or not - especially with a high % of neurodiverse people. Whilst I included neurodiversity in the disabiility question and not separately, many people do not prefer to consider their neurodiversity to be a disability.

The question of whether mental illness and/or neurodivergence are disabilities is a very loaded, very personal thing, and I feel super strongly that we should all use the terminology that we prefer for our experiences - especially in a culture where the terminology is so highly medicalised, pathologised and curated by bias and marginalisation - but we're not here for my anti-DSM rant today.

I think this question really highlights that complexity and it's that ability to rest in vagueness and uncertainty that characterises Mad Studies for me, and is super interesting as a result.

Q3: How old are you?

Yes, the legend for this one is so long it had to go over into two images.

Here's the fun thing about this question - you can see fandom aging. In the 2013 AO3 Census, the biggest categories were 19-21 at 23%, 22-24 at 20%, and 25-29 at 19%. In this survey, we have 30-34 at 23%, 25-29 at 20.3%, and 35-39 at 16.6%. I'm very interested to see what the 2023 Census figures come out as and whether they display this trend of the dominant age group shifting upwards.

Having gone through a lot of work to be allowed to survey people 13 years and older, it was also notable to me that only 2 people aged 13-15, and 14 people aged 16-18 responded. This may well be a product of where and how I shared the survey, as well as the age shift in general, which is why I suspect we need a comparison like the Census to see the difference.

Q4: Which geographic region best describes your current place of residence?

No surprises here, I'm a European person who shared the survey only in English and on Anglocentric platforms - the more influential people and groups that shared the survey were also strongly US-centric.

Having said that it was lovely to see we got some representation from all of the options, even if only a few from some.

Q5: What is your race? Select all that apply.

I'll be honest, this is one of the first demographics that disappointed me. Whilst I cannot of course fully control the survey's reach once it's on social media, I'd hoped to see a more representative group from a racial perspective.

There's a huge intersection with mental illness and race. BIPOC are not just more likely to experience mental distress, they are also more likely to have one or more of the other factors that make you more likely to experience it - such as poverty or housing insecurity. So it's definitely a weakness of this survey that such a huge % of respondents were white.

I do wonder whether it has anything to do with the ongoing racism present in the AO3, and on social media in general - whether that's made people less inclined to engage with fandom spaces that might harm them - but it may equally just be that I am white, my personal and professional circles are predominantly white, and thus those circles are more likely to have the same white bias.

Some of it will likely be language barriers too, but when you have no funding it's basically impossible to conduct this kind of research across languages.

I hope that future research can be conducted to properly elevate BIPOC voices and make sure their perspectives on fandom and mental illness are heard too.

Q6: Do you identify as any of the following [queer identities]?

This was an optional question, so bear in mind the %s here will be skewed. This is one of those situations where my lack of experience came into play - if I was doing it now, with the wisdom of having started to want to analyse things, I would definitely have made all questions mandatory and always had a n/a option.

Nonetheless we can see here the usual strong weighting towards queer identity in fandom. I was especially delighted to get so many trans perspectives, which as we'll see in the next question included a really diverse selection of gender identities.

Something my supervisor encouraged me towards in my previous supervision was to look at the queer studies work in fandom and consider how that overlaps with my work. I have a strong background in gender studies and that's evolved into a love for queer theory and especially trans theory. Whilst I'm cis myself, trans theory has huge overlap with disability theory, especially in terms of self-identity and the need to constantly come out or reaffirm/redefine your disability.

Q7: What is your gender identity?

This was another select all that apply question and it is our first question that allowed write-in answers. This means this graph is a bit messy but as you can see people listed personal gender labels (some of which cross over with the given categories) as well as some longer reflections on their gender identity.

The two cut off, longer write-in questions were "I do not label but present masc" and "I am still discovering and questioning myself but this is how, for now, I identify as" - this second respondent obviously gave other options too.

As mentioned above I'm really delighted we got so many gender diverse responses. Being of a marginalised gender is also likely to lead to experience of mental distress (you will have noticed by now that all kinds of marginalisation do, goodness me, I wonder why) so it's great to have these perspectives included.

Q8 & Q9: What is your sexual orientation and what is your romantic orientation?

I've included these together so you can see them side-by-side as I think that's very interesting. Like before these are select all that apply questions with write-in options.

Longer write ins for sexual orientation were: - I don't distinguish between sexual and romantic orientation for myself. [a more specific version of the given I do not label] - Like before, I am still learning and questioning myself, but for now this is what I'm sure of about my sexual orientation. - Somewhere between demisexual and whatever the opposite of asexual is, like 3/4sexual?

And longer write-ins for romantic orientation were: - And once again, I'm questioning myself, still learning, but I think what I marked fits well enough for now, learning myself has been kind of chaotic

Shoutout to the person who has clearly gone on a journey with learning themselves lately and has given write-ins for all of these last few. I hope you keep your wonderful open-mind and insight into yourself!

Nothing here is surprising - we all know that fandom is heavily queer leaning, and it's not surprising that so many people identified as some form of queer. So whilst marginalised sexuality is also commonly alongside mental distress, I don't think for a fandom survey this will make as huge a difference, since fandom is so queer as it is.

Q10: Which religious or spiritual traditions do you believe? These options include all denominations.

Now this is where these graphs start to get really messy.

I'd first like to give another shoutout to the AO3 Census team who recommended including Folk Religion or Spirituality and Modern Paganism or Wicca, as these were things they had as common write-in responses in the 2013 Census. We can definitely see here that it's well represented too.

This is also a select all, so many of the write-in options (which I won't list this time as there's so many) were people clarifying exactly what their selections meant - such as saying I'm not sure so I picked X. I will say my favourite was "I honestly could not tell you. I've got schrodinger's religion at this point", because I think many of us have been there.

A couple of people did note that they were culturally affiliated with a religion even if they didn't believe.

Summary

And that's it for the biodata/demographics questions!

I apologise for the infographics not being amazing, this is as I've mentioned elsewhere my first time working on a project like this and whilst my graduate school offers access to software and training, it's still not something that I've got tons of experience in as a humanities scholar. With that said, I've loved the challenge and I'm very excited to get into coding the long-form responses.

What I've come away with is very much mixed - it does highlight the weaknesses of doing a specialised survey like this, and of only being really able to get it out there via social media (which means I've inherited the racial and geographic biases of my circles especially). That said I'm so happy we have so many disabilities represented, and that we have any disability data about fandom at all, even if it may not be fully representative of fandom as a whole.

I'll be doing a post next week looking at the quantitative questions around fanfiction practices, so make sure to follow and keep an eye out for that if you're interested!

#fan studies #fandom studies #fanfic #mad studies #fandom research #fanfiction #phdresearch #fandom #fandom stats #mental illness #infographics #research

[cookiepotofchaos]

Part 1 Here

Part 2 - Getting into the Tags

Tags, tags, tags... Such a key part of AO3 and how many of us navigate finding works we might enjoy (apart from those of us in tiny fandoms who have already read everything. Thrice. Even our own stuff)

Also quite fiddly to match up and combine given differences in spelling, tagging styles, and due to evolving information like learning Surnames! I have a new-found admiration and sympathy for the volunteer tag-wranglers at AO3.

Anyway, onto the character, relationship and freeform tags of The Bletchley Circle works.

Character Stats

Camilla "Millie" Harcourt was the most tagged character, being tagged in 160 (85.11%) of works, followed by Jean McBrian in 127 (67.55%) of works. However, Jean McBrian's popularity only took off after 2018 and the release of The Bletchley Circle: San Fransisco. Prior to this, Jean was the 3rd most tagged character behind Susan Gray.

The four leads of the original series were, unsurprisingly, the most tagged characters before 2018, as follows.

Millie Harcourt - Tagged in 64 works

Susan Gray - Tagged in 44 works

Jean McBrian - Tagged in 31 works

Lucy Davis - Tagged in 30 works.

96 of the 127 works tagged with Jean were written since the San Francisco continuation series came out, whereas Susan has been tagged in 30 works since then and Lucy in 27. As Millie and Jean were the two characters from the original Bletchley Circle who continued onto the San Francisco series, this is unsurprising.

After Millie and Jean, the 8 most tagged characters are: Susan Gray (39.36%), Lucy Davis (30.85%), Hailey Yarner (12.77%), Iris Bearden (9.57%), Alice Merren (6.38%), Claire Gray (3.72%), Timothy Gray (3.72%), and Original Character (3.19%).

All the leads from both series featured in the top ten, which was also unsurprising. The popularity of the original 4 main characters has persisted beyond the release of San Francisco, with both Susan and Lucy being tagged in more works than Hayley and Iris after July 2018.

As 'Original Character' is multiple different characters, this tag is excluded from the demographics information below. Of the remaining 9 characters:

8 are female (Millie, Jean, Susan, Lucy, Hayley, Iris, Alice, Claire)

2 are canonically sapphic (Millie Harcourt - Bisexual; Hayley Yarner - Lesbian)

8 are white (Millie, Jean, Susan, Lucy, Hayley, Alice, Claire, Timothy)

1 is Black (Iris Bearden)

2, arguably 3, are canonically Disabled (Jean - Canonical physical disability; Timothy - Canonical physical disability; Lucy arguably neurodivergent, through portrayal only as language for this was limited in the 50s)

Ships - Platonic and Romantic

There are two Ship tags that are far ahead of the rest, no doubt quite easily guessed from the character tag data and both featuring Millie Harcourt.

Camilla "Millie" Harcourt/Jean McBrian with 53 works.

Camilla "Millie" Harcourt/Susan Gray with 47 works.

In a distant third with 15 works is Jean McBrian/Hailey Yarner

Prior to July 2018, as with the character tags, Jean featured far more rarely in ship tags. In fact, pre-July 2018, there was a single Millie/Jean fic and 27 of Millie/Susan. Post-July 2018, 52 Millie/Jean works were written, overtaking Millie/Susan, though a further 20 were produced in that pairing as well.

The single M/F ship in the top 10 ships (otherwise consisting of F/F or F&F) was Susan/Timothy, and most of these works were also tagged with Millie/Susan.

There were 67 unique ships tagged across all The Bletchley Circle works, including characters from other series in crossovers/challenge combination works.

No Relationships Tagged: 35 works (18.62%) had no ships at all tagged.

Platonic Ships Only Tagged: 10 works tagged 1 - 3 platonic ships.

Romantic/Sexual Ships Only Tagged: 130 works tagged 1 - 4 romantic or sexual ships. 4 works focused on 5+ romantic or sexual ships, these were all crossover fics.

Both Ship Categories Tagged: 9 works tagged both platonic and romantic/sexual relationships.

Considering the 6 main characters again, they appeared in this many works tagged with ships each:

Millie Harcourt - In 149 (62.87%) of ship tags.

Jean McBrian - In 91 (38.40%) of ships.

Susan Gray - In 66 (27.85%) of ships.

Lucy Davis - In 27 (11.39%) of ships.

Hailey Yarner - In 17 (7.17%) of ships.

Iris Bearden - In 1 (0.42%) of ships.

Freeform Tags

There were 609 freeform/additional tags used, covering 404 different tags. After much back-and-forthing (and silent praising of the AO3 tag wranglers once more!) I did my own form of wrangling into 34 distinct categories of tags that I can (hopefully) use as a template going forward with minimal expansion.

In terms of the exact tags, as used on AO3, the top 5 free-form tags were as follows:

Fluff - 19

Femslash - 13

First Kiss - 9

Misses Clause Challenge - 8

Romance - 8

What a fluffy bunch of authors and video creators there are in this fandom 😄 The source material did touch on difficult topics, given its post-war time setting, so Fluff being the most used freeform tag is not a surprise. They dealt with a fair bit in-canon; people just want to see them happy.

There were also 15 Alternate Universe tags (when combined) associated with works, which surprised me because I didn't remember there being that many, though it has been some years since I read a number of the works in the fandom.

When moving onto looking at the top categories in my own tag wrangling, Fluff does fall out of the top five, though it does remain in the top ten.

Commentary - 71

Romance - 59

Sexual - 57

Context Tag - 54

Content Warning - 49

Commentary tags are those the "chatty" sort of tags that are similar to many Tumblr tags. Some of my favourites from The Bletchley Circle included:

"Being a Lesbian is Fucking Beautiful and SOMEONE Needed to Say It" - And the fic this tag is attached to, blood under the bridge, is equally beautiful.

"I am trash for vintage lady loving ladies" - You and me both, dear author.

"Jean is done with their nonsense" - I mean... fair.

Context Tags were tags which broadly "set the scene" (and I may change the name to that later) so for example "Picnics" or "Late Night Conversations" or "Hijinks & Shenanigans". Kind of a catch-all tag, I have to admit.

I also think that Jean's cane should get special mention since it was explicitly tagged in a number of fics, though not enough to break the top ten by any means. When it was tagged, it was being used almost exclusively for Millie's pleasure. I see you and your love for a strict(ish), grumpy Scottish code-breaker, dear fandom.

So that is the broad overview of the tags associated with The Bletchley Circle! I was going to put some recs at the bottom, but decided they would be better served in a post of their own. So I'll get around to that in the next few days.

In the meantime, I will be getting to work on the next fandom.

#the bletchley circle #small fandoms #Cookies Sapphic Fandom Stats #sapphic fandoms #AO3

[avi17]

I normally wouldn't do this but you chose to put your hate and your demands in a bunch of character tags so it would spread, so:

1) No matter how angry you get about it, they're still not blood related. Yes, that includes the new movie. The word they subtitle as cousin means something else entirely, and Liu Kang explicitly says that he is an orphan who didn't meet Kung Lao until after he was brought to the Wu Shi Academy. That may have been a handy marketing line, but the characters as they are actually written in the movie cannot be related.

2) You know that generally nothing beyond first cousins is actually considered incest right? Words have meanings. Even if they did have a common ancestor 500 years (roughly 20 generations) ago, that would not make them related in any way that would actually matter. Do you even know your family tree and every branch that came from it 500 years back? I doubt it.

3) I would dearly love to know what "plenty of canon gay ships" we have. I know tumblr tends to consider it the Acceptable Gay Ship, but y'all do remember that subscorp isn't canon, right? Literally the only gay ship that can MAYBE be considered canon is Mileena/Tanya, though the one place that seems to be confirmed is in a noncanonical tower ending. Kung Jin is a canonically gay character, which is great, but he does not have a canon love interest. There may be other gay ships you personally prefer, but there are literally zero canon M/M couples in this series- which is unsurprising given that its primary target audience is still straight boys.

4) The question of how the characters see each other is a valid one, but people change the dynamics between characters in fanworks or interpret them differently every single day, including in plenty of other ships in this fandom. Saying "what if it was this instead?" is part of the appeal of creating fanworks. You're going to have your work cut out for you if you want to police all of that.

5) Stop accusing LGBT+ people of literally fetishizing themselves 😂 As pointed out above, this game in a genre that still considers straight men its main demographic does not represent us. We're not fetishizing by interpreting relationships in it to better do so.

6) .... Fetishizing race? Because the characters are Asian, in a series about martial arts with a bunch of Asian characters? Kitana is also Asian, if you ship her with Liu Kang the way canon obviously wants you to, is that fetishizing their race? There are many legitimate discussions to be had about racism in fandom but that is one of the silliest things I've ever heard.

In conclusion:

#Liu kang #Kung lao #mortal kombat #mk11 #mortal kombat 2021 #mk 2021 #mortal kombat 11 #for real friend your best option here is to just mind your own business

[justawordwright]

The Mechanisms and Exponentially Growing Fic Archives

So, I started reading Mechanisms fanfic probably around mid 2014. It was a fairly quiet time for the Tag – there were maybe fifteen fics in total and it was generally about a year between each new fic. Subjects were biased towards the Crew and the first two albums (High Noon had only just been released).

Cut to the last couple of weeks. There are 164 works in the tag as of me starting writing this (I was grabbing data at 2-3pm GMT 08/03/2020), with a number of other works under the Bifrost and OUTIS tags but not the umbrella Mechanism tag.

In the time it took me to grab the data and write this, four new fics were posted. (Last I checked, there are more every time I check)

It feels a little like I’ve blinked and the fandom has exploded with new work.

Anyway, that left me wondering just exactly what the data looked like, and whether the Magnus Archives has had much of an effect. Thus, I’ve compiled the data below. The graphs are here, go see it on AO3 here for the numerical data.

The Fic Explosion

Here you can see the timeline of the growth of the fandom, and the effect the Death to the Mechanisms gig had.

Death to the Mechanisms was announced on July 30th 2019 and led to a small but steady amount of new fic being posted. The gig (split over the 18th and 19th of Jan 2020) itself has led to a more-than-exponential growth in the number of fics – there were 54 prior to the gig, there are 164 now so that the number has tripled!

I wondered if the Magnus Archives were having a knock on effect into the Mechanisms - TMA is a lot more popular (probably due to its distribution method and being a lot less niche than steampunk pirates singing concept albums) and it does seem like some fans are looking into Jonny’s back catalogue. However, while the Mech fic numbers show the same growth the Magnus Archives fandom is showing, there is no real jump in the number of Mechanism fics being posted when the Magnus Archives saw a sharp increase in its posting rate in late 2017. 

There are a number of 21 crossover fics between TMA and the Mechanisms (about 1/8th of the total Mechanism content), which vary in being crossovers between the two universes or just have the Mechs band as part of Jon’s backstory, while 12 TMA fics are tagged as having Jon/Basira as having been in the Mechanisms as a Uni band (there is some intersection in these two sets, and the 12 fics has to be an estimation as there is no agreed upon tag, and none of the ones in use are large enough to have been synonymised). So there is definitely evidence in the fic that there’s a fan crossover (which is also well documented pretty much everywhere else in the Mechs fandom now as well).

Furthermore, taking a random sample of 15 of the 100 most recent Mechanisms fics (and luckily getting no author repeats), 8 of those authors also wrote for TMA, and of those 8, 6 wrote for the Magnus Archives first, with one doing a TMA/Mechanisms crossover. This isn’t a sufficiently large data set to get anything statistically significant out, but it is possible that the TMA fans are of a demographic more likely to write fanfic, and are making up a large quantity of the new fic. If so, I’m not sure why this didn’t trigger earlier, but it may be down to the fact that Death to the Mechanisms is the first (and last) of their big gigs in two years, so the first TMA fans got a chance to go to.

The fact that Bifrost is the most popular of the albums, and the popularity of Lyf’s character may also be an indicator of this, given the album’s similarities to TMA. The amazing thing about this data though, is that if the current growth rate is sustained, the prediction is that there will be 400 fics by the end of the month, and 500 by the first week of next month... 

Fic Topics

Mech fic is either about the Crew or about one of the albums. Early on, things skewed towards OUTIS space content, but Bifrost seems to have grown rapidly, and of course now the TMA crossovers are occuring. More crew-fic is being written, and this also seems to include a number of people’s ‘mech-personas’ or collective OCs.

This is backed up relatively well by the characters involved,

with Jonny being the most popular crew member and Lyf being the most popular of the non-crew characters.

Other Fun Facts

- Once Lyf/Marius gets properly cannonised as a searchable tag, they will equal the amount of Auroa/Nastya fic on the Archive, the current most popular relationship tag.

- The most common tag is Canon Typical Violence (36). Unsurprising.

- Then Angst (17). Also unsurpring.

- Then Hurt/Comfort (15). Then Fluff (13). This says a lot about the fandom, probably. 

Conclusions

This was mostly done for personal satisfaction, but I’ve posted as others will probably also find it interesting. There was no computer aided data grabbing, so I’ve almost certainly made a few mistakes combining different tags together given that AO3 doesn’t filter out all the crossovers in the umbrella tag for the smallest albums. At some point I may come back to revisit it with a proper data trawler and more thorough stats, but that will likely be once we’ve had chance to see if current posting trends sustain themselves or not.

#the mechanisms #fandom stats