Episode 191: Femstats February

In Episode 191, “Femstats February,” Flourish and Elizabeth welcome back Destination Toast—the Steve Martin of Fansplaining—to talk through their massive stats analysis comparing the F/F, M/F, and M/M categories on the AO3. Length, rating, frequency of certain tags and warnings: What results matched their expectations, and what results were surprising? And what do the differences between them suggest about fandom? (Prepare yourself: armchair theorizing and hot takes abound!!)

---

Show Notes

[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.

[00:01:26] Destination Toast (who can be found on Tumblr and AO3) has come on the podcast to talk fandom stats many times. Their two most recent appearances are “Writing Trans Characters” and “2020 By the Numbers.”

[00:03:43] Our interstitial music throughout is “Here’s the thing” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.

[00:04:40] 

[00:07:04] breathedout was our guest in February 2021, on an episode entitled “Writing Women.”

[00:10:22] Take Toast’s fic recommendations! breathedout on the AO3, and her big F/F Sherlock story is “How the mouth changes its shape.”

[00:11:08] We’ll include some graphs from Toast’s findings throughout the show notes, but be sure to check out the full post for this project on the AO3. 

[00:11:34] 

[00:12:58] A correction re: Toast’s statement that readers seem to like really long femslash but shorter het. They checked their math and found that it’s actually M/M where shorter fic is more likely to get lots of kudos!

[00:20:32] 

[00:23:47]

[00:25:26] 

[00:26:11] Toast has done stats on the Archive Warnings in the past—and we collectively misremembered how that shook out! Major Character Death (at least at the time of these stats) was the second-most commonly used.

[00:26:45] 

[00:36:23] Women just belong in the cottage??

[00:40:00]

[00:53:32] Toast’s ace stats from 2017 (Toast, time for a follow-up!) and Strangelock’s analysis of the Asexual tag from 2013, when 40% of all Asexual-tagged fics on the AO3 came from the Sherlock fandom. Obviously a lot has changed in the past decade—the top fandom currently for the Asexual Character tag is The Magnus Archives, where the protagonist, Jonathan Sims, is canonically asexual. 

[01:02:06]

[01:10:42] That’s episode 133: “Slash: The Discourse.”

[01:14:36]

---

Transcript

[Intro music]

Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth. 

Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish.

FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom.

ELM: This is episode #191, “Femstats February.”

FK: Yeah! And it is inspired by a letter we got.

ELM: Right. Do you want to read it? 

FK: OK. “Hello Elizabeth and Flourish,

“I started listening to your podcast in 2020. Like many others across the world, the pandemic and everything surrounding it hit me hard, and finding your library of episodes about all things fandom first started out as a means of distraction during the worst of it.

“Being able to listen to the discussions surrounding fandom that were so familiar truly helped in a way I hadn’t expected. While I know fandom can and does cause anxiety for so many people (for reasons you have discussed before in episodes), in this instance, fandom and especially your commentary on it, helped me find something enjoyable to focus on during a difficult time.

“So, the first thing I wanted to say was thank you so very much for making this podcast. I still enjoy it immensely and look forward to each new episode. 

“Secondly, and more fandom-based, the episodes where you chatted stats with Destination Toast quickly became my favorites and motivated me to teach myself Python so I could dig into the AO3 fandom pages for my favorite sapphic fandoms. I’ve been in sapphic fandoms since I was a wide-eyed 11-year-old with my family’s first computer, locating fanfic on Geocities pages that have long since disappeared, so combining my love of data and love of fandom has been a lot of fun. 

“I’ve started to look into disability-related tags in sapphic fandoms, and that intersection is another area that I find interesting; especially looking at which disabilities are more likely to be tagged in works, and against which fandoms and characters. Just thinking about my own disabilities (autism and Tourettes), I find it much easier to locate autistic characters both in canon and in fanfic than I ever do finding characters, especially sapphic characters, with Tourettes or other tic-disorders. For example, there are (at the time of writing) just 470 works on AO3 tagged with Tourettes Syndrome, only 31 of those are also tagged F/F, and many of those don’t have a sapphic character as the character with Tourettes. A big part of this is, of course, the lack of sapphic characters with Tourettes in media, but it also seems possible that Tourettes headcanons are less commonly included in fanfic.

“I’ve just seen that Destination Toast has started a series of posts on Tumblr looking at the differences in tags for works in the M/M and F/F categories, and I’ve been very interested in their findings so far. I also greatly appreciate that they have, over the years, taken the time to make sapphic fandom- and ship-specific posts and chapters on Tumblr and AO3. If there’s any chance of these findings or others relating to F/F works being discussed in a future episode, I would love to hear it. 

“I think I’ve rambled enough now, so one final thank you for reigniting my love of fandom and being a bright spot during some very difficult years.

“Many thanks, Cookies Chaos”

ELM: Thank you so much, Cookies. So I sent this to Toast [laughs], hopefully that’s OK [FK laughs], when it came in, and they were extremely moved. And, coincidentally, or like, perhaps not surprisingly, we had already talked to Toast about them coming on to talk about these stats. And so: you’re in luck! Now is the time, just in time for Femslash February, or as we’ve rebranded it, “Femstats February”... [laughing] 

FK: [laughing] OK, should we just get into it and call Toast?

ELM: Yeah, let’s do it! 

[Interstitial music]

FK: All right, let’s welcome Toast back onto the podcast!

Destination Toast: Hello! It’s great to be back. [FK laughs]

ELM: OK, who’s like the SNL guest who’s been on a million times? That’s you. [DT laughs]

FK: It is you.

DT: Omigosh, am I Steve Martin or something? [FK laughs] I am so honored. 

FK: The Steve Martin of the podcast. [DT laughs] 

ELM: I don’t, I don’t think it’s Steve Martin. Oh, I’m sorry to report: it’s Alec Baldwin. 

FK: Oh, well.

DT: Oh. All right, that’s a lot less exciting, but OK. [laughs]

ELM: Oh no, sorry, Toast! Steve Martin is number two. I don’t know why I doubted you.

FK: You can be the Steve Martin. [laughs]

ELM: Yeah, pick that one.

DT: All right. Thanks. [laughs]

ELM: Oooh, John Goodman! Yeah, that’s a fun one, too. All right, great. Those are some older men that you can compare yourself to in the context of Fansplaining. [FK laughs]

DT: Excellent. Thank you, Elizabeth.

ELM: Mmmm hmmm. OK, well—

FK: We are really, really excited to have you, though, because, as always, you bring the stats! [ELM laughs]

DT: Yay! Stats! [FK laughs] I do. 

ELM: OK, so my first question, before we actually talk about the numbers, is I would like to know: Why these stats? 

DT: Yeah.

ELM: What questions were you asking? [DT laughs] Hard-hitting.

DT: So great question. 

ELM: Yeah.

DT: And you all were partly responsible. But basically, you know, I have been writing and reading lots of slash and some femslash and stuff for many years, and also sort of stewing in the general fandom discourse talking about the differences between slash and femslash. And there were a whole bunch of things that people would assert regularly in fandom that I just kind of said, “Oh, OK, that’s maybe...true?” [FK laughs] And didn’t actually go dig up the data before. And it seemed like there were a few beliefs, like, oh, maybe femslash is often, like, really short, lots of drabbles and short fic, and maybe it’s like, sort of softer and sweeter and maybe less explicit and stuff. 

So those were sort of, like, general thoughts that it seemed like people had, and there were some discussions also about, like, why is this? Maybe it’s partly because there’s so many women writers in fandom, and maybe they want to be a little more escapist when they’re writing about women, and not focus so much on hard things that they have to deal with in real life, and maybe not focus on, like, the visceral aspects of bodies and explicit sex and things as much, and maybe they really wanna write about, like, dude bodies [ELM and FK laugh] and dudes doing hard things and dudes maybe having to go through things that they can relate to, because it’s, like, a little more distant, and—I’m saying this funny, but, like, OK, I could buy that that has something to do with some aspects of this. 

But yeah, that was kind of, like, things that I heard a bunch of, and sort of kept thinking, huh, I wonder how much truth there is to that, I wonder if the data supports that. But I think it was really you two having breathedout on to talk a lot more about sort of her experiences being a writer in both a slash fandom and a femslash fandom, and sort of also a follow-up Twitter thread that some of us had about this. We sort of dug in in your episode and then I talked a little bit more with her and with you outside of that, just about, like, she, I think experienced a lot of readers being sort of surprised that she was writing some of the same dark things, or just complex things, messy characters, darker characters, and more explicitness about sex and violence and lots of things, when she was writing sort of similar things, but for different ships, with different genders.

And so that, in particular, was such an interesting contrast to me that I kind of was thinking, “Oh, right, I wonder to what extent you can see that kind of difference in the writing or in reading preferences, and sort of to what extent does it really seem to come down to gender discomfort versus just other quirks of these categories?” 

And so that’s a ton of different questions [all laugh] but really a lot of what kicked me off was the more in-depth conversation that you had with breathedout a couple years ago now, so thank you for being a big prompt that has been sort of—I’ve been turning over in my mind a bunch until, like, a month or two ago, I was finally like, “YES! I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna dig in and go look at the data.”

FK: Yeaaaaah.

ELM: This is great. I’m so delighted. Yeah, and just to specifically say, I remember there were a couple different comparisons she had, because one was, she’s written a very famous genderbent John/Sherlock, where they were both “always a girl,” as the phrase goes.

DT: Yeah. [laughs]

ELM: And so that, she was able to compare with writing “always a boy” John and Sherlock [FK and DT laugh]. Which is interesting, because I feel like, often, you can kind of get into apples-and-oranges comparisons, especially because slash fandoms and the source material for slash stuff tends to be so much more popular, for a variety of reasons, right? 

DT: Yeah.

​​ELM: But then she was also talking about Killing Eve, I remember specifically, and how it’s a, you know, a fairly dark show, with a fundamental, like, the core relationship was a pretty fucked-up one, but people were making it softer and sweeter in...they didn’t lean into those themes the way they might in something like Hannibal, right?

DT: Right.

FK: I mean, this is just bringing up something—I’m really glad that you’ve done these broader things also, Toast, because I totally agree with what you’re saying in terms of the more apples-to-apples comparisons, but then of course my brain keeps immediately going, “Oh, but! Probably there’s a different audience for people who want, you know, were ‘always a girl’ fic in a big slash fandom than—”

ELM: Sure, sure.

FK: “—there would be people who would be into the initial thing.” And so I think really, it’s really interesting to look at those specifics, and I’m also excited to see sort of the broader scope, because that’s gonna give more perspective.

ELM: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. 

DT: Yeah. Totally. And I, I found her stories really sort of compelling to hear about her experience, but I also had some of those questions about, like, how much of that is sort of the anecdotal case of what particular people were looking for who read her awesome stories—by the way, you should go read her stories, everybody who listens to this podcast [all laugh]—but yeah, but like, people who were looking for different things in the “always a girl,” “always a boy,” and not genderbent, canonically femslash sort of pairings, like, maybe just there was a lot to do with the particulars of those ships. 

So yeah, I’ve started to do some case studies and stuff as well, comparing specific pairings that parallel each other in various ways, but really, what I was interested in was to dig into the really broad picture and see what we could say about these shipping categories more overall. 

ELM: OK, well should we—

FK: So what can we say! [all laugh]

ELM: Yeah, let’s get into it. Let’s do it. 

DT: All right. So OK, so one of the first thing that I was actually thinking was, “I should break down and see if the stuff that people think about word count is true,” because one of my thoughts was just, like, “If it’s true that femslash is almost all, like, really short fic, then maybe that kind of helps explain maybe why there isn’t as much explicit sex or darker content or anything like that—if all of those things are true,” which, you know, I didn’t know if any of them were true yet. But I was like, I should first check: how big are the differences in length of fic, because maybe that helps explain everything else. 

So! The first thing I did was just break down F/F, F/M, and M/M and say, “How much do they have that’s like, under 2,000 works—words, sorry,” [FK laughs] “—or, like, 2,000 to 5,000,” or you know, define a bunch of buckets, basically. And I found that, actually, it’s interesting, femslash does have more short fic than the other two categories—not by, like, just huge, huge amounts, but, you know, notably more short fic. However, it also has more long fic, more 50K words or more, than dudeslash does. And so there’s sort of this, like, M/M is very much, has a ton of stuff in the middle, and femslash has a bit more on the extremes. And then the thing that surprised me the most was actually that by quite a bit, het is the longest. The averages are the longest. And it just has a lot more, like, over 20K. 

So het is actually skewed quite a bit longer than the other two, and I’ve just started digging into this, but I was looking at reading preferences, and it’s all, like, different when you look at the thousand most-kudosed fics in each of these categories. And to compare it to what people write, actually people really love long femslash, people really love very short het, and I don’t know! So I’m still sort of making sense of all of that, but like, I want to sort of highlight that what I’m going to be talking about is mostly what people tend to write, but that doesn’t necessarily correspond to what people really tend to like and seek out when they read. And so that’s just something to keep in mind, as I talk about what’s common.

FK: Yeah, that’s a really good note. I mean, to me, the thing that really stands out, looking—I’m looking at the chart that you made—is how similar they are. I mean, it’s true that F/F has probably, in particular the under-1,000 words is like a little bit more.

DT: Yup.

FK: But all of the three categories have breakdowns that I would normally say are about similar. 

DT: Yeah, you’re so right, and I sort of kept doing these breakdowns for different sets of things, and they’re pretty reliable, so I would say, these are real differences that seem to exist, but they are—so they’re significant, in some sense, but they are actually also fairly small. So yeah, you’re right. These are pretty similar breakdowns overall. 

ELM: Can I just ask, for a point of clarification, so we’re talking about the “category” tag, right?

DT: Yes.

ELM: Which is towards the top on the AO3. If something had been tagged M/M and F/F, was that excluded?

DT: Yeah, so that’s a great question. And yes, for almost all my analyses, I kind of excluded almost all multi-category works, because I wanted to look at stuff that I was sure was femslash, where that wasn’t just referring to a background ship.

ELM: Right. 

DT: And same for the other categories. So I excluded everything else except Gen, because sometimes people do tag Gen just to say, “this is less romance-focused” or something, but it’s still mostly about a femslash ship. But all the other ones could potentially mean, “The shipping story is more complicated.” [FK laughs] So basically I’ve thrown out multi-category works and I’m just looking at things we’re quite sure are focused on each of these categories.

ELM: Interesting.

FK: That’s probably also useful because I imagine something that would throw this off really a lot would be if you had, you know, the kind of compilation works where somebody’s putting a bunch of different fics—

ELM: Mmmm.

DT: Right.

ELM: Yeah.

FK: —of different ships into a thing, but that’s gonna reduce the number that you have.

DT: Right.

FK: As somebody—I mean, the other thing I will say, you know, it’s true, the two things that sort of stand out are that there’s a little bit more short fic for F/F, and there’s, I would say, more long fic for F/M, and that, that actually doesn’t surprise me at all, as a person who reads across, primarily F/M and slash, but also some femslash, that doesn’t surprise me, because man, het fandoms love—I mean, I don’t know if they love in the sense of readers love, but [laughs] like, everyone’s writing a romance novel, you know? 

ELM: Sure. Yeah.

DT: Yeah, but that’s fascinating to me, you know, and I read less het, but I’ve read some het, but I read mostly queer fic, and I also love things that are basically romance novels [all laugh], like AUs or whatever, like I look for all sorts of things, but I would have, it wasn’t clear to me that that wouldn’t be the case, for all these categories.

FK: Yeah yeah yeah. That’s true. That’s true.

DT: So that’s just really interesting.

ELM: I also will say, the length thing is really interesting to me, because one thing that I’ve observed—a friend pointed it out years ago and now I can’t unsee it, but to “The Rec Center,” most of the F/F that gets sent to us...whatever, I haven’t crunched the numbers on this, maybe you could do that, Toast. [DT and FK laugh] I don’t know how, that’d be a huge pain in the ass for you to do. Most of the F/F that we get sent is quite short, but explicit. [FK laughs] And that was the joke that my friend brought up, it’s always like, you know, “1.5K words; Explicit,” and you’re like, “Wow, OK!” [DT and FK laugh]

So that’s interesting to me, but also one thing I’ve observed, and I don’t think that we are particularly representative of fandom on a whole, I think that we’re a specific kind of space, with a specific set of people who are sending in recs, but I also observed that the femslash tends to be for, like, kind of things that I think of as somewhat random? And maybe, like, Yuletide-y stuff, just small fandoms, just, like, and—

DT: Right. 

ELM: —I always wonder if the people sending these in are just people who generally like femslash, or writing about queer women or whatever. Right? Whereas a lot of the dudeslash tends to be from, like, ships I’ve heard of [laughs], you know, like big, juggernaut-y stuff—

DT: Right.

ELM: Or smaller ones, right, and I think, it’s probably hard to really drill down into this in stats work, but it is something to think about, like, the different cultures that are coming up. It’s not just about, like, “Oh, all these F/F works you’re seeing are coming from Supergirl,” you know what I mean?

DT: Right.

ELM: The big femslash fandoms, right? 

DT: No, absolutely. I actually thought about that a lot. Because there were some things, like Supercorp, like some ships that are big in the femslash category, and that I did see a bunch of here when I was sampling things. But even when I was taking representative samples—much less if I were to look at, like, rec lists, like for “The Rec Center” or something, just see a lot more ship diversity and a lot more small ships than you do for the other ones. I think that’s just because yeah, there are fewer giant ships that are completely dominating the space, in the femslash space, and I thought about that a lot, as a sort of reason, potentially, that some of the differences that I’m talking about will happen. Like maybe it’s the case, for instance, that when people are first writing a ship, they do write a lot of short fic. 

ELM: Mmmm.

DT: And so maybe there’s just a particular scene, or a particular character study or something that occurs to people a lot when they’re first starting out, and so if femslash ships don’t tend to get as big overall, then that could help be an explanation for why there’s a bit more short fic in the femslash space. I’m not saying that that’s true—that’s a hypothesis here. But I’m just saying those things could actually be connected, and I did think about that kind of factor quite a bit in my analyses.

ELM: That’s interesting.

FK: OK, but you also—I’m gonna, I’m gonna jump back.

DT: Yeah.

FK: Is that, in a technical term, people say, “I’m gonna pop the stack,” is that a thing? 

DT: Oh, yeah. Sure.

FK: Yeah, I’m gonna pop the stack. I used that correctly.

ELM: Who says this? What technical—

FK: Nick says this. Programming people that I know say it. 

DT: I would personally say I’m gonna pop something off the stack, but yeah—

FK: OK.

DT: That might be an East Coast-West Coast thing. [laughs] I don’t know.

FK: Anyway, I’m gonna pop something off the stack, or pop the stack, or whatever we say—

ELM: That’s what the stack means. I understand now. 

FK: Yeah. And go back—

ELM: Wow.

FK: Because you were also bringing up, Elizabeth, explicitness of fic, and that was one of the big things that breathedout, I think, was talking about, was the idea that maybe femslash wasn’t as explicit. Like, what’s going on with that? So I’m curious to know what the stats said about that, if anything.

DT: Yeah, so it was interesting because this was an area where I was like, “Well, if it is more explicit—sorry, yeah, if dudeslash is more explicit, I would expect that’s probably just because, like, there’s more long fic or something.” Like, I very much had some strong assumptions of my own going in, of, like, “OK, I did find a bit of a difference where femslash tends to be shorter. If there’s a difference in explicitness, probably the one thing explains the other.” So I went—

FK: Oh, like, so the idea being that, like, the fic gets longer and so then you’re like, we can put some smut in now that we’ve got like a lot of [laughing] words—

ELM: That’s interesting though, because what about PWP, though, like when I see “1.5K—

DT: No, you’re right.

ELM: —Explicit” I’m like, there’s no—

DT: You’re right. 

ELM: There’s no plot in there, I’m sorry. [all laugh]

DT: I had so many assumptions that weren’t necessarily, like... [ELM and FK laugh] based on anything except, like, my own, “Oh yeah, I don’t know, I like to go read longer fic because a lot of times it’s more complex, and also there’s some good sex in there,” like, I don’t know... [laughs]

ELM: Space for a sexalogue! Yeah. [FK and DT laugh] When there’s only one chapter...

FK: Space for the sexalogue! It’s true, though. [all laugh]

DT: You’re right.

ELM: Just saying.

FK: Gotta get your sexalogue in there.

DT: So my assumptions also turned out to be somewhat not fully correct, [FK laughs] but it’s really good to kind of try and list out, what was I thinking here as I went in and started to look at things. And I, I looked and I did find that F/F is less explicit—

ELM: Hmmm.

DT: —than M/M, and het is in the middle. And I sort of did a ratings breakdown and yeah, there’s sort of an ordering here of femslash—again, the ratings breakdowns are somewhat similar, not quite as much as with the word count breakdowns, but like, they’re not massively off. But like, still, substantially more of the dudeslash is explicit than the femslash. 

And so, like, OK. That’s interesting. Is that just because, was I right that maybe there’s some effect of word count in there, and it’s that people are writing more long dudeslash and therefore getting around to writing sex more? No. That, like, I don’t think that was right. [all laugh] Spoiler. Basically, I went in and I looked, I did this same analysis of how much stuff was explicit at every word-count bucket I’d looked at, and this gap is there in every single case. 

ELM: Hmmm. 

DT: In every case, there’s dudeslash is most likely to be explicit, followed by het, followed by femslash. And so that’s really interesting to me. 

FK: It’s also interesting to me, looking at these numbers, that it’s not just that femslash is less likely to be explicit, specifically—not just mature. Because actually the numbers of mature fics are about the same across all three.

DT: Yup.

ELM: Mmmm.

FK: It’s explicit is less likely to be there, and femslash is more likely to be General Audiences, like the least explicit. 

ELM: Mmmm. Mmmm.

DT: That is true.

FK: Whereas male/male is, like, the least likely to be General Audiences, and—

DT: Yup.

FK: And you sort of get all that back in explicitness, which actually, to me, like, that explains to me why even though these, even though these look actually not that dissimilar as breakdowns, that’s why people are perceiving femslash as, like, so much less explicit, I think. It’s not just—

DT: Yes.

FK: —because it’s less explicit, it’s also because it’s more clean. [laughs] Right?

ELM: Mmmm hmmm. Mmmm hmmm. 

DT: I think that’s such a good description of what’s going on, yeah.

ELM: That’s really interesting. So, I mean, are we gonna sit here and do armchair hypothesizing, like.... [FK and DT laugh] Is that a worthwhile pursuit? I don’t know. I feel like a lot of the things that we could say have already been said.

DT: Yeah. I think let’s—

ELM: In the world, not by us. [all laugh]

DT: Right. So I don’t know, I think this didn’t particularly surprise me, but I didn’t have any, like, real stuff to add at this point, as you say—

ELM: It did to me! I’m the one fielding “1.5K F/F Explicit” [FK laughs] over here, you know.

FK: OK, people who like clean femslash, go send it to “The Rec Center”—

DT: [laughing] Yeah.

FK: Because there’s a disproportionate thing happening here—

DT: That’s so true.

FK: And there has to be people who like clean femslash, or else there wouldn’t be that much of it. [DT laughs]

ELM: I mean, it’s funny, it’s funny because it’s like, what I see as—I mean, whatever. We’re talking about a pool of recs that over the course of six or seven years, we’ve probably had what, like, 2,500 guest fics come in, 3,000 guest fics, you know, at least 1,000 of which we haven’t run yet. One thing that I always notice missing from the femslash stuff we get in is my platonic ideal of a fic is like, you know, 20K word, long title, you know what I mean? Like, oneshot—you know I love a 20K oneshot. Or a 29K oneshot, perhaps. [FK and DT laugh]

FK: I will go find you some Janeway/Seven of Nine that fits this exact remit—

ELM: Femslash February, coming up—but you know what I mean? [FK still laughing] I just feel like there’s so, so much of that in M/M, and we actually don’t, we don’t get very much of that from het, either, from M/F, right? And so it’s notable to me.

DT: Yeah.

ELM: The one place I’ve seen more of it coming in in the last couple of years is in the Gideon the Ninth, in the Locked Tomb fandom—

DT: Ah.

ELM: And you see some of the same sort of summaries that you’d see in your average 20K slash AU oneshot, where they’re like, all dormmates or whatever, you know what I mean? [FK and DT laugh] 

DT: Right.

ELM: That kind of classic thing. So I don’t know, I find that interesting, but obviously this is like a relatively small and definitely self-selecting kind of pool of people sending us recs. It’s like, a lot of the same people rec stuff over and over again, too. So I don’t want to over-index that, but... Anyway, all that’s to say, my perceptions don’t always match what is discussed on tumblr dot com. [FK and DT laugh] 

DT: No, I think that’s fascinating to hear, and I also didn’t mean to say, “Gee, all of this is obvious” at all. [ELM laughs] It was more just, I was setting things up, because I think, like, some of the stuff that surprised me even more, maybe, was sort of in the space of, “What kinds of darkness or tropes get sort of tagged a lot in the different categories?” 

FK: All right, sock it to us! [laughs]

DT: All right. So the first thing that I did to look at, like, which things were more dark and which things were more fluffy, was just to look at the Major Archive Warnings, which, there’s Major Character Death, there’s Graphic Depictions of Violence, there’s Rape and Noncon, there’s Underage. So I wanted to look at whether or not there were differences, and how much each of those got tagged by the different categories.

And it turned out that, indeed, femslash is less likely than dudeslash to use a couple of the Major Archive Warnings, specifically Rape and Underage, which was a notable difference. Dudeslash is, like, twice as likely, about, to use each of those, as femslash is. So that’s interesting. But what also was interesting to me is that for the other two, the Violence and the Major Character Death, there isn’t a ton of difference between the two queer categories, but het is much more likely [all laugh] to use both of those. 

ELM: Fascinating.

DT: I don’t have any story for that at all. [laughs]

ELM: Violently murder that guy. That’s very interesting. I mean, I feel like Graphic Depictions of Violence...do you, I’m sure you’ve done this data before, I know Major Character Death is, like, the least-used of those, right? Which makes sense, right, because—

DT: Yeah...

ELM: I feel like I’ve seen your stats on this at some point. But I wonder, Graphic Depictions of Violence, like...

FK: That feels like it’s gotta be frequently used. [laughs]

ELM: No! I feel like people don’t use it very often, and I see, in normal tags, Canon-Typical Violence, right?

FK: Oh, yeah. That’s right.

DT: Right.

ELM: You know?

DT: Right. Yeah, there’s a lot of Canon-Typical Violence, much moreso, because I think people don’t feel the need to use a Major Archive Warning if the work already has a ton of—the canon already has a ton of violence. 

FK: That’s right.

ELM: And because I think we’re often talking about things where the violence isn’t actually that graphic, like, Star Wars, or—

DT: Right.

ELM: I’ve used Canon-Typical Violence before, because it’s like, you know, Magneto knifing someone through the air, right? But that’s not...but to me, that—

DT: Right.

ELM: I wouldn’t describe that as “graphic”? Maybe that’s just, you know...my warped brain or whatever? I have no idea. [ELM and DT laugh] 

FK: Yeah, I think of Graphic Depictions of Violence as being something that requires you to be, like—

ELM: Like, visceral...

FK: Yeah, like—

ELM: In-depth—

DT: Yeah.

FK: Like it needs to be really described.

ELM: And super violent, you know, like—

DT: No, you’re right.

ELM: Not just Magneto killin’ a Nazi, that’s just, you know, good clean fun!

FK: No, it needs to be, like, Hannibal—describing what happens on screen in Hannibal.

ELM: Yeah, yeah.

FK: You know? 

DT: Right.

FK: As opposed to, like, what happens on screen in almost any other even serial killer television show [ELM and DT laugh] where it’s sort of like a cut-away, right? [laughs]

ELM: Right, right, yeah, yeah.

DT: Right. 

FK: Yeah.

DT: So I went and looked at actually a bunch of the sort of, yeah, freeform tags that are darker, but a bit more descriptive, and yeah, there’s a lot of, like, gore and torture and abuse and whump are things that M/M is very likely to use. Usually the ordering is: M/M is most likely to use these things, then F/M, and then F/F. 

And so yeah, so that’s interesting, given that, like I said, het uses Graphic Depecitions of Violence warning a lot, but still, when you dive down and get into the details of a bunch of specific types of violent acts, or if you look at Dead Dove, which is often about sort of rape and underage and things like that, but a bunch of these specific tags in the freeforms are more likely to be used by dudeslash and least likely to be used by femslash.

FK: So I’m gonna float something that might be...maybe not everybody will like and I also can’t substantiate—

ELM: Hot take. Hot take. Hot take.

DT: Oh boy. Yeah? Yeah? 

FK: It’s a hot take. Yeah. Hot take comin’ in. My hot take is I wonder if this has to do with cultural perceptions of women as being not able to abuse or rape people in the same way as men are able to do. And—

ELM: Wow. I was not expecting that was where you were gonna go.

DT: Oh...

FK: No genuinely!

ELM: You are doing a hot take! [laughs]

FK: And also! And also! And further, not seeing females having sex with females—I just sounded like a fuckin’ Ferengi there [ELM and DT laugh]. Feeeeeemales. But not seeing [laughs] that, not, like, the culture not seeing that as real sex, right? And so you can’t have underage if they aren’t having quote-unquote “real sex,” but it’s still, I mean it is obviously, like, as any, any woman who loves women will say, that’s real sex, but I think even—

DT: Right.

FK: I think subconsciously, even among women who love women, that still is like a functioning bias, and I wonder if it’s taking part in this.

DT: Oh, that’s fascinating.

ELM: Hmmm. Well, OK. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t say, like, no I disagree, I feel like there’s obviously like 17,000 things going on here, right. [FK and DT laugh] But I am thinking about, like, and I’m sure you’ve also both read plenty of stories that involve non-consensual sex, and I, you know, I’d be curious to know the breakdown between, like, two, the two members of the ship, for which the category tag was used, right? 

FK: Right.

ELM: You know, the two men or the two women or whatever. Versus one of them being assaulted by another character. 

FK: True. Yeah, yeah.

ELM: So...

DT: Right. Yes.

ELM: And then I started to think about that, and I’m like, so often, I mean, whatever, I don’t really want to read about one member of the ship raping the other, like, that’s not an interest of mine.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: So it’s often, like, the antagonist doing it, and then I think about all the fandoms I’ve been in, and it’s, like, mostly male characters in the entire world, right? You know?

FK: Mmmm hmmm. 

DT: Right. 

FK: That’s true.

ELM: Some of this I feel like is, as always with femslash, as always when talking about characters of color, as always talking about disabled characters, you can’t understate the knock-on effects of the imbalanced media. 

FK: Right. That’s true.

ELM: You know what I mean?

DT: Right. Right.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: That’s just another, another, like a slight—it’s not like a, “no I disagree,” but it’s also like—

FK: Yeah yeah yeah.

DT: Yeah. Thinking about the effects of canon, basically, on this stuff was something that I was also thinking about here, and then especially in some topics we might talk about more later, like with pregnancy and other things, I was thinking also a lot of these het ships are either canon or, you know, like, will-they-won’t-they or whatever, and have had to deal with probably some of these issues as, like, canon things. 

ELM: Mmmm. 

DT: Maybe there was violence that happened either—not necessarily between them, but like, the guy helping the woman recover from violence, or like, a bunch of these things might actually be more things that het, the characters in the het pairing may have had to deal with on screen, depending.

ELM: Yeah.

DT: I’m not sure. That’s a thing that I can’t separate out here at all. 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: Well, I mean, that absolutely would track with hearing about, like, whump and other things like that, and torture and stuff being more prevalent amongst stuff with men in it, but that’s also, again, partly because, like, think about the massive, you know, the situ—what are the situations that characters are getting in in canon? Like obviously—

DT: Right. 

ELM: You can, you know, put the members of BTS in a kidnapping and torture—I don’t want to threaten them or anything, but you know what I mean? [FK and DT laugh] 

DT: Right.

ELM: That’s not their canonical world, right? Whereas opposed to...you know, like, these superheroes, or...I assume on Supernatural they get into some scrapes where someone could be kidnapped, right? Is there kidnapping on that show?

DT: Right.

FK: Sure. 

ELM: You know what I mean? Those are, that’s media that is dominated by men. 

FK: Mmmm hmmm. 

DT: Yeah.

ELM: All that being said, I do think there is some element of truth to the...the, it’s the slightly 101 argument, but I think there is a reason why it is 101, of the, like, fandom has always seen white male bodies—even if they are queer white male bodies, which, I think is a bit problematic of an assumption—as these blank slates upon which you can rain down any sort of, you know [FK laughs] trauma and pain, right? 

FK: Sure. 

ELM: And you don’t want to do that to a female body, right? 

FK: Right.

DT: Right.

ELM: I do think that is a fundamental part of fandom. 

FK: I think that’s true, and I’m gonna go further than that, too, and I’m gonna say I also think that—

ELM: Another hot take? Please?

FK: Yeah, no, another hot take. Which is that I also, I mean, I don’t know this for sure, but I would be interested, when I think of the really, some of the really big juggernaut male/female ships, a lot of them have, like, particularly with rape or non-con, like, a lot of them have some kind of non-con-y, like, vibes involved with them. You know, potentially—I think about, like, Twilight, right?

ELM: You’re just telling on yourself, Flourish. This is just your way.

FK: No! [ELM laughs] I mean, I thought about that, I really genuinely thought about that, and I thought of all the sort of forced-marriage or whatever fics that exist in male/male, but I think that some of those, I think that there are some of those vibes in particular that are perceived as romantic in male/female relationships that then, like, appear in canon, to some degree.

ELM: Sure.

FK: And that then comes out in fic, especially, you know, like I said, juggernauts like Reylo and so forth, right?

DT: Yup. Reylo and Draco/Hermione, and some other others, were among the top het ships that I was finding when I was doing some breakdowns of specific ships, and there’s a lot of potential for those kinds of dynamics—

FK: Right.

DT: Or a lot of the canon is like that.

FK: Even when it’s not actively canonical—

DT: Right.

FK: It’s like, you can see that it’s, like, over the horizon [laughs] if you just push on it a little bit. 

DT: Right. 

FK: Right? Yeah.

DT: Yeah.

FK: I don’t mean to, like, be laughing at non-con, but also like...man, heterosexuality. It’s the thing that happens like that. [DT laughs]

ELM: Wait, but this is why, I wish you—I mean, whatever, you were not comparing het and slash, but like, Draco/Hermione is, like...it’s not that different from Harry/Hermione, you know? Or not—sorry, not Hermione— [all laugh]

FK: [overlapping] Harry/Draco, yeah, yeah, yeah.

ELM: It’s quite different from Harry/Hermione. 

DT: Right.

ELM: Right, so it’s like, that actually is an interesting sort of, like, you know, maybe not—

DT: Yeah.

ELM: Two different kinds—like a Granny Smith apple and a Red Delicious. 

DT: No, that’s one of a number of things that I want to dive into more. [FK laughs] I’ve started doing bits of case studies, and I, I want to keep doing those, because even though you can’t generalize as much from them, like, you still...you know, can tell a lot of interesting things.

And one of the case studies I did actually start to dig into that reflects a bit on this was I looked at Eve and Villanelle from Killing Eve versus Will and Hannibal from Hannibal, in part because of the conversations that you had with breathedout, and thinking about, like, how similarly do people write about these two ships that are extremely similar in canon dynamics? 

And there are a bunch of similarities, but I did actually see, like, totally vindicating breathedout’s [all laugh] experience here, I saw, I did see a lot more use of things like Soft Villanelle and Soft Eve and more like Dark Will Graham and stuff—

FK: Mmmm.

DT: Even though all of them tend to have a bunch of fluff and things where they take these dark characters and, you know, do fluffy things with them or whatever, like, still it seemed like the Hannibal fandom was a lot more likely to make them at least as dark and messy as in canon, and the Killing Eve fandom was a lot more likely to sort of soften the characters and what they’re doing, so...

ELM: That’s really interesting. 

DT: That was fascinating to me. Also one of my assumptions going in had been, like, well maybe also it’s just like, femslash has a ton of, like, either canon or nearly canon pairings in like, soft, like...cartoon universes and stuff— [FK laughs]

ELM: Yeah, cartoons.

DT: And so maybe that totally explains, like, any differences in, you know, maybe it’s just about genre. But no! Digging into some of these very parallel ships, like, there clearly is some amount of people wanting different things, if it’s two men versus two women.

FK: Hmmm.

ELM: Yeah. That’s interesting. I would love to know—whatever, I always have so many more granular questions for you [FK laughs], you’re probably like, stop it. Like—

DT: Nope! [laughs] All the questions.

ELM: [laughs] I would be interested, like, to see how that changes over time, because I feel like in the last few years on Tumblr, there’s been a lot of discourse and backlash about, like, the sort of, I don’t know, slightly woo-woo, soft F/F aesthetic—not just in fandom, but just in general [DT laughs], right, you know? Do you know that famous post that everyone dunks on, that’s like, "I don’t know what it is but, like, dark academia just seems like M/M, MLM, and cottagecore just seems like WLW." [all laugh]

DT: Nooo! I haven’t seen this. 

ELM: And the tag’s like—

FK: Please! Get out of your house and meet a stone butch! [laughs]

ELM: It’s like, “What in the patriarchy?” Like, the academy just feels like a man thing and the cottage feels like a lady thing? So I feel like there’s been a lot of discourse and backlash against this on Tumblr, and I’m assuming this happens on TikTok and stuff, too, right? Just this kind of idea of, and discourse about younger queer women, or, like, queer AFAB people, framing desire for women as creepy and like “what men do,” you know this kind of discourse?

DT: Right.

ELM: Right? 

DT: Yes.

ELM: You shouldn’t be leering or too horny about it [FK and DT laugh] because then you’re “just like a man.”

DT: Right.

ELM: That’s a huge point of constant discourse going on, right? So I wonder if some of that is reflected, because you want to just write something soft and gentle, so as not to seem too...

DT: Yeah.

ELM: Thirsty. I don’t know, you know what I mean? 

DT: No, that’s really interesting.

ELM: Yeah.

DT: Yeah. Huh. Yeah, it’ll definitely be interesting to look at some of these trends more over time and see what changes and what doesn’t.

ELM: Yeah, it’s interesting. But then obviously, within fandom, I feel like there just also trends that happen, like you know.

DT: Yup.

ELM: As Flourish is someone reading in a fandom that started in the ’90s, I’m still in a fandom that started more than a decade ago, and the kind of fic that gets written now is pretty different—not pretty different, but there were trends ten years ago that are not happening now, et cetera. So.

FK: Absolutely. The further back you go, the more clear it becomes. [laughs]

ELM: [laughing] Oh yeah.

FK: It’s like, I, I...yeah. [laughs]

ELM: But I mean, it’s not always, like, I always joke that when I was sixteen and reading, like, Snape/Harry, Stockholm Syndrome, terrible multi-chapter—

FK: Yeah. 

ELM: And just wears Harry—he’s like fifteen or whatever, right? I feel like we’re always framing it that way, like it used to be wild and problematic and now it’s all buttoned-up or whatever, but I don’t think it’s necessarily just like that, right?

FK: No! I mean, sometimes it was wild, but not problematic, [ELM and DT laugh] such as coming up with every different form of genitalia that Spock could possibly have. 

ELM: Right! Right!

FK: Which now most K/S that I read these days just assumes that he kind of has a normal dick, just a little bit green. [DT laughs] Whereas before, sometimes it was like, “It’s an orchid! How does it work? We’ll explain to you how the orchid works with having sex with a person with a penis or with a vagina. Let’s go orchid spelunking.” [laughs]

ELM: OK, now this is, I’ve got a question here, I—I’m gonna ignore that you just said “orchid spelunking,” I don’t want to hear those two words together ever again. [FK and DT laugh] Um, Toast, you read Good Omens fanfiction, right? I’ve heard that there is, like, some wild genitalia stuff there. Is that an overstatement? 

DT: Um, so, I mean, I kind of haven’t read very much, I read a little bit right at the beginning, and I think fandoms get a lot more interesting in these ways as they age [ELM and FK laugh] from what I can tell, it’s like, one of the things that I’m maybe gonna maybe talk about more. 

FK: But Star Trek is going the other direction. It’s getting less interesting.

DT: No, that’s fascinating. Is that because, like, now we canonically know that Klingons have two dicks or something, so people are like—

ELM: Do they?

DT: Oh, if Vulcans had weird dicks, then we would know it?

FK: Yeah, they sort of do, but I don’t think people write in fanfic Klingons having two dicks, usually.

DT: What?

FK: Even though it is in canon.

ELM: They do?

DT: Why would they not write that? Yes, they do! [laughs]

FK: People also just don’t write Klingons in canon as much as they write Kirk/Spock. 

DT: Oh my God, I don’t understand this. This seems—

FK: A Klingon is not part of any of the major, like, the big, big ships. 

ELM: This is, all right, first of all, that doesn’t seem right to me. [FK laughs] I always thought Worf was very sexy. Second of all— [FK and DT laugh] It is funny to me, because—

FK: You thought Worf, the weeaboo, is—never mind. We’re gonna move on. [ELM and FK laugh]

ELM: I just think he felt very passionate whenever I watched the show in the ’90s, so I don’t really remember very much of it. [DT laughs]

FK: You know what, he is passionate—

DT: Yes.

FK: Like to the point where other Klingons are like, “Buddy, you need to cool it, this is embarrassing us.” [DT laughs] 

ELM: Tellingly, the person who I thought was the sexiest was obviously Data, so like... [DT and FK laugh] You know, it is what it is, right? Toast, you get it. 

DT: Well he is fully functional.

FK: Everyone thought Data was very sexy, and he is fully functioning, just for the record. [ELM laughs]

DT: Yup.

ELM: But it is funny, because it’s like, omegaverse, people go to town describing just things that are not real, you know what I mean? And so why—

DT: Yeah.

FK: And—

ELM: Why do people—

FK: And sometimes that are horrifying. [all laugh] I’m sorry, omegaverse, but some of your descriptions are just...

ELM: Just not your cup of tea.

DT: Aw.

FK: Godspeed. Godspeed to you. [DT laughs]

ELM: Anyway, now we’re just talking about, uh...

FK: Weird... [laughs]

ELM: Nonstandard, fictional genitalia. [DT laughs] So. 

FK: Back to the topic.

DT: So yeah, I kind of actually wanted to take this now and talk about a different surprise that I got coming out of this, like, “Oh, OK, dudeslash is just usually in most cases just kind of the darkest.” So they use those tags more, so I kind of then assumed, all right, well then if I want to find the ones that femslash uses more, probably if I look at Domestic Fluff and First Kiss and maybe some Humor and some Romance and stuff, probably femslash is more like to use a bunch of these things that are just fluffier. 

And there a couple, but no, in almost all cases, I still found dudeslash is most likely to use—some of this, I didn’t look at het yet, so some of this I don’t actually know where het falls in the ordering, but just between the two queer types, dudeslash is much more likely to use some of the Humor and Crack stuff, and also like Cuddling and Snuggling and Domestic Fluff and a bunch of things.

And so eventually I started going, like, “Uh, wait a minute.” [FK laughs] “Are there any tags that femslash uses more, and like, maybe there’s some underlying reason that I’m not finding this.” And so I went and did a bunch of analysis of how many tags each of them tends to use, and dudeslash just uses more tags, on average, than the other ones. And so like there’s this sort of bias in the numbers of just, like, dudeslash is more likely to use most of these because it’s just more likely to use more tags and be more descriptive of things in general.

And so that was somewhat flabbergasting to me. I did find some cases where femslash does use tags more, but my first thought was just, like, “What? Why?” [FK and ELM laugh]  “Why is there this difference?” So I kind of want to hear you two respond to that. [laughs]

ELM: What, um...do you have the numbers? 

DT: Yes. The numbers are that dudeslash uses, on average, close to eleven tags per work, and femslash more like eight tags per work, on average.

ELM: Huh.

DT: And het is closer to femslash, but in the middle.

ELM: This is weird. Now I’m trying to think of how many tags I use. I probably use like a dozen tags in most stories. 

FK: I feel like I use tags more frequently when I feel like other people are also using those tags.

DT: Yeah.

ELM: Flourish, do you use the stupid tags that I hate, like the...Tony Stark Needs a Hug or whatever, like that kind of tag?

FK: No. No, no, no.

ELM: Is that one? I have no idea. [FK and DT laugh] Does he need a hug? 

FK: Probably, sometimes. But no [ELM laughs], I was thinking more like, if I think other people in the fandom are going to be, like, A) if I obviously, I’m gonna tag for things feel like they could be problematic for people, but then B) like, if I feel like other people in the fandom are looking for things via this tag then I’ll tag with it. Otherwise, I might not, right? Like I’m not gonna tag for every friendship that I have in a fic necessarily, unless I think that there are people who are really looking for that.

ELM: Hmmm.

DT: Right.

FK: As an aspect of the fic, and I wonder—

ELM: OK, but we’re not talking about friendship. We’re talking about—that would be in the relationships section. We’re talking about tags.

FK: Sure, sure. No, but I mean, like—

ELM: Yeah, OK, but you’re saying you take your cues from the...yeah.

FK: I’m saying I take my cues from what I think that people are looking for, and I wonder if, if femslash is smaller fandoms, and there are fewer people, then maybe there’s fewer tags that seem relevant?

ELM: Hmmm.

DT: Right. So I had that thought. My other thought about the fandom size is just that perhaps, as fandoms grow larger and people write more and more things, they’re going to maybe tag more carefully what exactly is the niche that this fic is filling, and maybe also write more diverse sets of things and so there’ll be more different stuff to potentially tag.

ELM: Mmmm.

DT: I started looking into that. I also thought, maybe dudeslash, we’ve seen, has more explicitness and more darkness and maybe people do feel the need to tag a lot more, like, what are the exact sex acts and what are the exact dark things and so on. And so those things both seem to, the explicitness and the darkness both seem to partly, like, those ones do have more tags—

FK: [laughing] Yeah.

ELM: Yeah.

DT: —but that doesn’t really explain the difference.

FK: Yes. If your fic includes felching, you’re going to put that in. [all laugh]

DT: Right. Right. Uh, but breathedout said that some of the same sex acts, like fisting or whatever, if she didn’t tag it, she’d get more of a reaction from the femslash readers than the dudeslash readers, and they’d be more surprised by that, and more like, “Oh, I wish you’d tagged so I knew that.”

ELM: Right. 

DT: Some of it may in fact just be cultural, but it does also seem like, I’ve just started to really dig into the “what about the bigger ships versus the smaller ships,” but it does seem like that actually does explain a lot of the difference, is just like the bigger, like, I did some amount of just taking the first 4,000 Will and Hannibal fics, because that’s about how many Eve and Villanelle fics there were, or just the same amount of fics for the two Stranger Things ships I was looking at, and tried to compare what about when these ships are just starting out. And they are a lot more similar in their tagging, and I think the amount of tags does grow more as the ship and the fandom get bigger and bigger. So that’s tentative, and I’m still working on it, but that seems to explain a lot.

ELM: I solved this for you. It’s because the bigger a ship gets, the more those stupid Tony Stark Needs a Hug tags—

DT: Yup. [laughs]

ELM: —get created, and then people feel compelled to use them.

DT: I also think that there is some amount of just that’s a recent trend, because in both the Stranger Things ships, including the smaller one, the femslash one, there was just a ton of those tags being very popular, and very commonly used.

ELM: Well, it’s not recent—that’s at least a decade old. It’s been my enemy for years. [FK laughs]

DT: OK. OK. [ELM laughs] I guess there were actually some of those, I guess Will Graham Needs a Hug et cetera was also common in some of the older Hannibal stuff.

ELM: So many people need a hug! 

DT: Lots of people need a hug.

ELM: Yeah! One of the actual ones from Marvel was the Hydra Trash Party.

DT: Right.

FK: Oh yeah.

ELM: Right? That’s a classic. That’s gotta be a decade old at least, right?

FK: Yeah.

DT: But I think, yeah, I think some of the ones, like the No Beta, We Die Like whatever kind of things, I think those ones were more likely to get used by dudeslash. I don’t know this for sure.

ELM: Hmmm. 

DT: But I think actually some of those, it’s probably another thing where you get bigger and bigger as a ship, and you’re more likely to pick up some of those things, like No Beta and [FK laughs] whatever, the sort of cross-fandom trends.

ELM: Yeah, yeah. Well it also has me wondering, you know, we talk a lot about Migratory Slash Fandom—

DT: Right.

ELM: And obviously I think that there is some, there’s got to be some equivalent for people who go from het ship to het ship, or femslash ship to femslash ship.

DT: Right. 

ELM: But like...

DT: Yep.

ELM: You know, so it’s like, how many of these are coming from the pan-fandom ether.

DT: Yeah. Well one thing though, just to the, there’s also some amount of this that’s maybe just cultural difference between those different migrating groups with different ship-type preferences. I looked at oneshots and drabbles back when I was looking at word count, and dudeslash was less likely to—like, dudeslash actually had a few more oneshots than, like, a bit more of the oneshots, but they were much less likely to tag, use the tag Oneshot and stuff. So there is also just some amount of stuff that you would think would be pretty neutral tags—

ELM: Yeah.

DT: Not corresponding to any of these other things, but just different people have different tendencies, different groups use them more or less.

ELM: Interesting.

DT: So that was interesting.

ELM: I don’t understand why anyone would ever use the tag Oneshot. Like, they can see. [DT and FK laugh] It says one out of one chapters. Like...20K words, long lowercase title. They know it’s a oneshot.

FK: I feel like I would use the tag Oneshot because I know other people use it—

DT: Right.

FK: Just to go back to what I was saying before, right? 

ELM: Yeah.

FK: I would be like, well it seems silly to me, but like, I’m trying to train myself to use tags more, because—

DT: [laughing] Right.

FK: I’m from the, you know, from the past, a time when we did not tag things. [laughs] You know? Still struggling with this one. 

ELM: Really? [DT laughs] 

FK: Yeah, whenever I write a fic, I’m like, “I don’t know what to fuckin’ tag it.” 

ELM: Oh my God.

FK: And I sit there and stare at it, and eventually I do tag it like a moderately reasonable person in 2023, but it takes me a long time. [DT laughs]

ELM: This is not something I struggle with. [laughs] I’m fascinated.

FK: Anyway. Anyway! Anyway. [laughs]

DT: All right, so there’s, like, a couple more things that I wanted to talk about. One is, what are the things that femslash actually does use more, as tags?

ELM: Cunnilingus!

DT: Especially— [DT and FK laugh] So that is true.

ELM: Yes!

DT: And I, I excluded from this, from these analyses, most of the things that are very anatomically focused, and so they’re not—

ELM: Boo!

DT: —particularly surprising that like... [all laugh] But you’re right. I think Anal Sex is used like 48 times more in dudeslash. [all laugh] Even though women can also have anal sex together. And cunnilingus is much more common, despite all of the, like, Crowley Has a Vagina and whatever the different, the different...you know, speaking to the Good Omens thing—

ELM: Mmmm hmmm.

DT: —yes, there’s a whole bunch of different genitals and stuff. But still, cunnilingus is still mostly present when there’s women in the canonical pairing. [all laugh] 

ELM: That tracks. That tracks.

DT: [laughs] OK, so that wasn’t surprising, but I was interested to see that femslash deals more, is more likely to tag many kinds of queer sexuality and gender that are not, again, there’s things like Trans Man and Trans Woman and stuff where you would, you have predictions about where those are most likely to show up. 

But again, not looking at those, looking at, like, Bisexuality and Coming Out and a bunch of topics—sorry, pulling up my stats, yes, so Nonbinary Character, LGBTQ Character, Bisexual, Gay—Gay includes Lesbian in the tagging framework, by the way—and also, like, Polyamory and things that are sort of related to queerness and stuff. There is just a lot more of those, a lot more likelihood to use those over on the femslash side, even though femslash generally uses fewer tags. So this was really interesting to me. 

ELM: Yeah, that’s—

DT: And not particularly something I expected. 

ELM: That’s very interesting to me.

FK: I’m gonna commit another hot take here. 

ELM: Wow! 

DT: Yeah! Please!

ELM: You are full of them tonight! That’s great. 

FK: So I notice here that slash is much more likely to include the tags Asexual Character and Aromantic.

DT: You’re right.

FK: Right? And femslash is much more likely to include Polyamory, but also all of the sort of LGBTQ, Bisexual, Gay, et cetera.

DT: Right.

FK: And that makes me think about how men are assumed to be sex machines and then, you know, have a high sex drive and then so you end up tagging and being like, this is an asexual character, guys, hey over here. 

DT: Oh, right.

FK: Whereas women are assumed to not really have a super-high sex drive to begin with, and so you can write a lot of, like, I wonder if there is stuff that is femslash that is about characters that are not, maybe not aromantic, but that are not particularly sexual, but that are still...

DT: Right.

FK: You know, not getting tagged Asexual, because that’s a normal level of lady desire, right?

DT: Oh, that’s so interesting.

ELM: This is such a hot take! And I don’t think—how much, how much ace fic have you read? 

FK: [laughing] I don’t know if it’s true!

ELM: I think you’re just pulling this out of your ass, Flourish. Like, every single fic I’ve ever read that’s had any kind of ace tag on it, the characters have discussed it, right? Like, it’s not just...like, you’ve, we’ve all read tons of fic where they don’t have sex, right? 

DT: Right.

FK: Oh no, for sure, for sure. But—

ELM: No one’s talking about having sex, they’re just, like in a relationship or whatever.

FK: I think that’s right, but are women, like...like...I don’t know, like...is it more likely that the male characters are being written to talk about it?

ELM: Well, I mean in ace, in fic that’s explicitly written as ace fic, yeah, because it’s usually a conflict.

FK: Right, but I’m saying why are there not the same conflicts in femslash that require the use of ace...

ELM: Because fandom is acephobic and doesn’t wanna write much...you know what I mean? 

FK: Yeah, yeah.

ELM: I don’t know, I just feel...

FK: Well, but it’s proportional, right? I mean, I, I see what you’re saying in terms of total, but I’m wondering proportionally why it’s different.

DT: I also think there’s like a number of popular male characters that—

ELM: Yeah.

DT: —are coded like either canonically coded—

FK: Right.

ELM: Yes.

DT: —or strongly fandom-read as asexual, like there’s some ace fic, ace stats that I did quite a while back, and some other ones that Strangelock and some other folks have done, looking at, like, characters that are commonly coded as ace, and I think there’s a lot more male characters that get read that way.

FK: Yeah.

DT: So if you have a popular male character who’s often read that way, that could skew this all by itself. It could be, like, just a few popular characters, even. 

ELM: I feel like, yeah—

FK: Right.

ELM: I feel like Sherlock alone could account for it. 

DT: That’s true.

FK: But—

ELM: Genuinely.

DT: Yep. Absolutely.

FK: That’s true, but I’ve often wondered why, you know, I mean, I’ve often wondered this, as far as ace representation goes.

DT: Right.

FK: Why it does center around male characters in that way a lot of times. So, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know.

ELM: Yeah, I mean I do think it’s a reflection of the kinds of...I mean, like, you know, that rendition of Sherlock Holmes, too—I mean, whatever, a lot, a lot of Sherlock Holmeses, I think, read as ace, right?

DT: Right.

ELM: There’s also, you know, yeah, there are ace headcanons that people put onto characters that maybe don’t act that way in the canonical thing—

FK: Right.

ELM: But I think that that kind of character is much more likely to appear in mainstream media.

FK: Yeah.

DT: Yeah.

ELM: Similarly, no equating these at all, but I can think of way more examples of, like, autistic-coded male characters in popular media.

DT: Ha!

ELM: Than female.

FK: Which also relates to how autistic people are viewed in general, and the rates that women are not diagnosed, or misdiagnosed, right?

ELM: Right, right, so yeah, this is what I’m saying, in terms of, like, a lot of the, like Sherlock, also—maybe I’m just over-indexing on Sherlock right now. [FK laughs]

DT: Yes. 

ELM: But you know what I mean?

FK: No, no, I don’t think you’re over-indexing. I think this is a real thing that relates to Sherlock fandom.

DT: So yeah, I think you’re right, but the reason that I said “Ha!” [ELM laughs] when you said that was because I actually found something surprising, where femslash is also more likely to use neurodivergent tags—

ELM: Mmmm. Interesting.

FK: Whoa!

DT: —in particular, Autism. And a little bit ADHD. And, like, for most say, mental health things, and a lot of stuff about mental state, dudeslash is still more likely to tag many other things, but when it comes to neurodivergence, I was really surprised. Yeah, Autism is substantially more likely to be used by femslash.

ELM: Huh!

DT: So I don’t have a good story for that.

ELM: OK—

DT: But ha! [all laugh]

ELM: Well, I feel like we just did a ton of armchair theorizing and I’m sure any of it was right. 

FK: Oh, I’m not either. I’m not either. That’s why I preceded this with, “Here’s a hot take that is just a take.” [laughs]

ELM: Yeah, I mean, part of this, too, is I would be really curious to know, because I am now thinking about Sherlock in both of these instances, I would be curious to know what are the actual characters that are bringing this up, and is it coming from canon or not? Because I’ve seen in—

DT: Absolutely.

ELM: —my own fandom, an increase in characters tagged as ace, or trans, or various kinds of non-canonical disabilities, or autism, and it’s, like, total headcanon stuff, right?

FK: Yeah.

DT: Yeah.

ELM: It’s not, like—and I feel like, we’ve talked a lot about that as a more recent phenomenon.

FK: Definitely.

ELM: So I’d be curious to know how much of these tags are—not to say that any character that someone’s headcanoning has no connection to the thig, you know what I mean? It’s not like—

FK: No, no, but, but—

ELM: “You’re just slappin’ a label on them for no reason.” 

DT: Right.

ELM: You know what I—there’s a difference between that and reading Sherlock as ace or autistic or something.

FK: [overlapping] No no, but I totally agree, yeah. Yeah, and you can see that kind of a development in, like, I see it in Star Trek fic, where—

ELM: Yeah.

FK: It’s not just that people were writing characters as not sexually interested in the past, but they didn’t label it ace. It’s like, no, that was never something that came up and was raised up to the level of something that you would highlight in any way. And now there’s people headcanoning all these characters—

ELM: Yeah, yeah.

FK: In this way sometimes. 

DT: Right. 

FK: Not all of the time, you know, but it shows up.

ELM: Sure. Yeah.

DT: Yep. So one final topic that we could maybe have a bunch of armchair theorizing about— [ELM and FK laugh]

ELM: Yeah! Let’s do some more.

DT: You two had asked me about, specifically, I think, is sort of pregnancy narratives. Because this is another area where people kind of talk in the discourse about maybe female, predominantly female writers maybe not wanting to write about female bodies being pregnant, but wanting to write about dudes getting pregnant.

ELM: Right.

DT: And so I did look at both the amounts of pregnancy and at several different sort of difficult pregnancy outcomes, potentially.

ELM: Well, should I, yeah, should I summarize my specific question that I had for you?

DT: Please. Yes.

ELM: OK, so, well, it was…because I think this is an interesting topic in general, but like, it was around the anniversary, what—I mean, I was going to say “what would have been,” it still is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, like the 50th anniversary was last week, and so there was a lot of abortion, there were a lot of abortion stories on the radio. You know, so I was just thinking about how, like, having read a fair amount of mpreg, and I think, Flourish, you’ve read a fair amount, too?

FK: Yup.

ELM: Right, and like classic mpreg, you know—

FK: Oh yeah!

ELM: [high-pitched shocked voice] “Oh, what! I didn’t know this could happen!” [FK laughs] “I’m a man!” You know, that kind of thing.

FK: Classic and omega. [FK and ELM laugh]

ELM: You’ve probably read more omega than me. You know, I’ve read a few that deal with the difficult elements related to pregnancy, but I’ve never read an abortion story in fandom.

FK: Right. Whereas in F/M, there are definitely abortion stories.

DT: Right.

ELM: Right, and so this is what I started to wonder about, like, it’s not just, it’s like, oh, is the argument here that people don’t want to deal with...mpreg is more popular than pregnancy, like, fpreg, I guess we’re calling it [DT laughs] because that’s too close to home, but then you’re not actually writing about the full spectrum of reproductive health and life with these dude characters, you know what I mean? So that was my question about, like, if people even write abortion—if fandom writes abortion storylines at all, you know?

DT: Yeah, no, and I thought that was really interesting, and I don’t have complete answers here, but I did start to dig into pregnancy narratives. [FK laughs] And I found just looking at how many works get tagged Pregnancy and which category is more likely to, probably not surprisingly, given both canon narratives and just biological ease of getting pregnant, het is the most likely to [ELM laughs] to deal, to tag Pregnancy.

ELM: Classic.

DT: But! Dudeslash is like, twice as likely to include pregnancy as femslash, based on the tagging, so there’s a lot more dudes getting pregnant, even though, you know, if, in a femslash pairing, generally, one of those members could get pregnant, from, you know, all sorts of different ways, but people don’t seem to want to read pregnancy as much for two women, or at least they don’t write as much of it. And so that is interesting—

FK: I find that really interesting

ELM: Mmmm hmmm.

FK: Because actually if you think about it, my first thought was, “Oh, well, but maybe people, I don’t know, maybe people associate getting pregnant with, like, the dick, because—” [ELM and DT laugh] Genuinely!

ELM: That is how mpreg happens. 

FK: Right?

ELM: Yeah.

FK: Because it’s actually, it requires much less physiological weirdness for—

DT: Right.

FK: A woman who already has a womb and all of these things—not a trans woman, a woman with those parts, to get pregnant, much easier than having to come up with, like, surprise! It turns out that like your body developed these things—

ELM: Flourish.

FK: Even though you’re a dude.

DT: Right. 

ELM: You know that’s not true. There’s aliens. There’s spells. [DT and FK laugh] There’s secondary mutation. There’s so many simple, simple reasons. There’s, “Oh my God, I didn’t know! Oh I guess the body’s gonna make a hole!” That’s always my favorite part of mpreg.

FK: I...this was always my least-favorite part of mpreg.

DT: Oh, God.

ELM: It’s hilarious. Every single fuckin’ time. 

FK: It’s always just like...I hate this. [ELM laughs] 

DT: Oh God...

ELM: I know, Toast, you’re not an mpreg reader, but it’s often—

DT: I just don’t like pregnancy in general [ELM laughs] and so I have not read, unless canon forces me to deal with pregnancy, I sort of, like—because I say this as somebody who wrote a 90,000-word fic that dealt a lot with pregnancy, but it was only because canon made me do it! And I just avoid it otherwise. So I have no intuitions [laughs] about, like...

ELM: That’s very funny. 

FK: Yeah—

DT: What tropes are common in pregnancy fic.

FK: Whereas I discovered, I have written, in succession, pregnancy in two of the most-common mpreg and then F/M pregnancy fandoms. [laughs] Because apparently I’m obsessed.

ELM: Flourish, you love the zeitgeist.

DT: Wow, and I just totally mis-parsed that for a minute, and thought that you meant you’d written two Succession fics with mpreg [FK laughs], like Tomgreg or something, but no, I get what you’re saying.

FK: Can you imagine? Yeah, no, no. [DT laughs] I wrote in one fandom, and then in another…

ELM: [overlapping] Would it be, it would Tomgreg? There’s gotta be other ships.

DT: It would be Tomgreg. [laughs]

ELM: My, sorry, my slash ship on Succession is obviously Kendall/Stewy. 

DT: Ohhhh.

ELM: I think all you Tomgregs are pretty fuckin’ basic. [FK laughs] That’s the obvious one. Stewy, I love Stewy so much—so much. I think—

FK: Yeah, you would.

DT: Fair enough. 

ELM: I would watch The Stewy Show.

FK: You would. 

ELM: Yeah. [laughs] That’s me. I am Stewy. 

FK: Yeah, you would.

DT: I like all the fucked-up Roman ships, so, you know, there’s plenty of shipping available. [laughs]

FK: Yeaaaaaaaah.

ELM: Yeah, but fucked-up Roman ships are het ships. 

DT: Some of them. [FK laughs] He was totally being flirty with some Nazi guy with the—

ELM: Oh I totally forgot the Nazi guy! With the Nazi guy! That was actually one of the horniest moments on the show. 

FK: True.

DT: Yeah.

ELM: In all three seasons, I would say. 

FK: Yeah.

DT: Right, right. [laughs]

FK: Roman doesn’t know what’s going on. OK but this is interesting to me, because it doesn’t, like back, back, bringing us back, right?

DT: Yes.

FK: This is interesting to me, because it also doesn’t seem to follow the tendencies that I see, admittedly I guess I don’t have the stats on this, but in my own life, which involves many queer people, both men and women, uh...

ELM: Both, Flourish? Way to binary it. [DT laughs]

FK: And all sorts of other genders [ELM laughs] but in this case we are talking in binary terms in this, largely, so I’m gonna not—

ELM: You’re saying in the M/M and F/F ships in your real life.

FK: In my real life, right, and in my experience of that, women are at least as likely, if not more likely, to have a family with kids as men are.

ELM: Well yeah, OK, but how much of it is one partner biologically, you know, like, I have multiple queer couple friends with kids and almost none of them are biological children. We’re not talking about adoption storylines here. So I’m just—

FK: No no no, that’s true.

ELM: If we’re bringing the real world into it.

FK: That’s true. 

ELM: Yeah.

FK: If we’re bringing the real world into, I mean, it’s true that the, I only, I think I only know a couple of male queer couples who have gone the surrogacy-with-their-own-DNA route. 

ELM: Right, right.

DT: Right.

FK: Partially because it’s so expensive. Whereas I know a lot of lesbian couples who have chosen to have one of them be the gestating parent.

ELM: Yeah, sure.

DT: Yeah.

FK: That’s true. 

ELM: Right.

DT: No, this matches up with my real-life experience too. 

FK: But it’s interesting to me, nonetheless.

ELM: We’re talking about mpreg. Aliens. Spells. Secondary mutation. [DT laughs] I don’t know, like why are we bringing the real world into it.

FK: I still think it’s interesting, because here’s something I’m gonna say: if we, like, suggest the idea that people who are writing in het fandoms are trying to work something out about their own relationships to pregnancy, which is not, is undoubtedly sometimes happening, I can say that from people I know and indeed even my own thinking about this...

DT: Uh huh.

FK: Then I would think, “Oh, well maybe if we’ve got lesbians writing femslash, or whatever, any kind of queer person writing femslash, then maybe they will also be working this out about their own thing.” But that doesn’t seem like it’s following. Do you see what I’m saying? 

DT: I think I see what you’re saying. I also wonder, to what extent a bunch of that might be true and pregnancy might be one of these things that is more likely to be written about in a bigger fandom. 

ELM: Mmmm.

FK: Mmmm.

DT: I don’t have the stats on this yet, because I just started digging into this, but I wouldn’t be surprised that if it is the case, if you looked at smaller ships that are more common in the femslash fandom, and limit the het and dudeslash to that, that you would see the dudeslash maybe looking similar, but I don’t know yet. 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: I would be super curious, I mean, this is so hard to actually do, you know, just thinking about all the mpreg I’ve ever read has literally been one of those three things that I was describing. Methods—

FK: Aliens. Spells. 

ELM: [laughing] Yes.

DT: And mutations? [laughs] 

ELM: Yeah. I mean obviously there’s like a whole other subcategory that’s adjacent to omegaverse where—

DT: Sure.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: —some men are “bearers” or whatever—

FK: Yeah, yeah.

DT: Right.

ELM: It’s always some weird dystopia or whatever. [laughs] But just as easily, an F/F couple could have a magical or secondary mutation—you know, like...

DT: Yeah!

FK: Mmmm hmmm. 

DT: Yeah.

ELM: Why...maybe I should be writing that. Hmmm.

DT: Yeah, clearly.

ELM: You know what I mean? 

FK: Maybe you should.

DT: Good prompts.

ELM: Maybe I should. Let’s subvert this one. But it’s funny, and I wonder, I’m dunking a little bit throughout this conversation on the “oh it’s so basic, it’s so 101 to say that people treat these male bodies like the blank slate and they can do whatever and anything with a woman’s body is too close to the body of the author” or whatever, if we’re talking about majority female writers. But it is a kind of fundamental belief, like it is, I think it is a foundation—that’s not the only foundation, but I do think it’s kind of in the bedrock of what fanfiction is. In these fanfiction communities—obviously fanfiction is so many things. You know what I mean, right? 

So it’s like, I wonder how much of that is self-perpetuating. I wonder how much of that is about people feeling like everyone else feels that way, so, they don’t want to read about a woman being pregnant, that’s too uncomfortable, even if they feel fine writing it.

FK: This also makes me curious about how many people are reading across—that sort of postulating, that there’s, like, I mean, and I think that this is true to some extent, that there’s a het fandom community, and then there’s a slash fandom community, which also includes femslash, to some degree, right? That slash and femslash people are, you know, together in queer fandom, and then you’ve got het fandom over here, and that’s a different group of people doing different things. 

And just anecdotally, I think that’s true, to some extent. There’s definitely ships that feel like they’re like that, and that don’t cross over and so forth. But I would love, I mean, I’m really curious to know, you know, someday maybe do another survey or whatever, to see what the breakdown is as far as peoples’ crossing over between those things. 

DT: No, I think that’s really interesting, and I’d wonder also how much that is changing over time, because I do feel like the notion of “slash” as a necessarily sort of different grouping of things that is more stigmatized and whatever has really eroded quite a bit and people are less likely to feel the need to tag something as Slash or Femslash or do the Don’t Like, Don’t Read kind of thing on that. And so maybe people are gonna feel more—and there’s more canon, you know, more canon ships of all the types, and so maybe that will change some, and people will have more overlap between the groups, but that’s very much a hypothesis. I have no idea. It would be cool to see. 

FK: Yeah. And also, just as gender variance becomes—

DT: Yes.

ELM: Sure.

FK: —more and more a prevalent and present thing, right?

DT: Very much. 

FK: What do you do when you’re writing two characters who are canonically male but one of them is now a trans woman in your story. That’s het, that’s also queer, like, I don’t know, how do you slot that in there?

DT: Right.

ELM: I mean, I feel like people often will tag that, I mean, I know there’s a lot of questions about how to tag or whatever, but sometimes people will tag that—

FK: Sure.

ELM: —in the category of the canonical, of the canonical genders, just because...I mean, you know, in always-a-girl genderbent stuff, people are often tagging that...actually no, I feel like it’s mixed.

FK: Right, I mean that’s what I’m saying.

ELM: Yeah.

FK: I don’t think that this is, I think that we have, like, these, you know, the idea of slash as a separate community that’s..that’s from the ’70s and ’80s, right, the idea that these things are going to be kind of sealed away from each other because one of them is, one of them is underground and the other one is, like, licit in a certain sense—

DT: Right.

ELM: Yeah.

FK: And we’re still dealing with some of the hangovers from that, and so it’s not surprising to me that we would, you know, as gender variance has become more and more and more mainstream—

DT: Yes.

FK: We’re still trying to figure out how to make those things work.

ELM: Yeah, you say this and I do think it’s interesting that you framed it as like, slash and femslash as this kind of crossover space. I think a lot of classic femslashers—and I don’t think they’ve gone away—think of femslash as a specific group. And like—

FK: I think that’s also true.

ELM: Obviously, for correct reasons [FK laughs], a beleaguered group, right?

FK: Yes.

ELM: And one that, like, you know—

DT: Right.

FK: Yeah yeah yeah.

ELM: That is always playing, like, third fiddle, you know...

FK: Yeah.

DT: Yeah.

FK: And when you go far back in time, you’re obviously not seeing, right, like you like at femslash people and they’re like, “Yeah Xena is the fountainhead of our—maybe not the only fountainhead, but like, a big fountainhead of femslash culture, and you know, what are you talking about Star Trek as being—”

ELM: Sure.

DT: Yeah.

FK: “The beginning.” You know what I mean? 

ELM: Yeah, right, with—

DT: Yeah.

FK: So it’s true—

ELM: —different narratives and yeah, absolutely.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: You know, we did a slash episode a few years ago, and I remember much of that was talking about—as you were saying a few minutes ago, Toast, whether these categories mean very much to people anymore, right? And got some interesting responses to that, I found.

DT: Yeah.

ELM: Because I definitely have encountered a lot of younger fans who don’t think of slash or femslash as a unifying group meaning anything at all, really.

FK: Right.

DT: Yeah.

FK: And yet, I still feel like I see some of the, like, cultural hangover continuing to exist in younger fans’ work, even when they’re not aware of it sometimes.

ELM: Mmmm. Yeah.

DT: Right. 

FK: Not to say that they’re not right, you know? [laughs] That these are meaningless terms to them. Like yeah, they can be right, but I also still feel like, you know, there is a filtering in of that past that happens.

DT: Right. Well and even ten years ago, when I basically joined fandom, I was kind of like, “Oh, there’s such a big distinction? People talk about slash culture and het culture?” [FK laughs] “I ship Mulder and Scully, and I ship some het things, and I ship some slash things. Why is this such a big deal?” 

And I feel like having learned a lot more history of things, and also having reflected and gone, “OK, I do actually mostly seek out queer fic, that is a special interest of mine in a way that makes sense to call that out,” like, I can see reasons that those are useful categories to people, but also, it is certainly—or that they have been, anyway—but it is also getting to be a significantly more complex landscape as we acknowledge gender complexity...

I wanted to point out also that, like, we haven’t talked about numbers, but just sheer numbers on the Archive, but femslash is increasing quite a lot, even if you rule out everything that might be a background ship, but also Other is incredibly on the rise, and Other is complicated, because it could be aliens, and it could be robots, and it could be Venom’s symbiote and all sorts of things, but it also very much is often used for nonbinary characters and complex gender that is not captured by the three categories I’ve looked at here.

FK: Hmmm.

DT: The het and the two main slash types. [FK laughs] And I do sort of feel bad that this dive that I’ve done here doesn’t capture that gender complexity. I kind of thought about it and was like, “Wow, Other is particularly hard to break down as a tag, and I’m just going to have to do a lot of additional work to dive into that,” and there is a bit of cleanness of being able to look initially and go, “Oh, het is most often pregnant and most often has abortion, so it’s not simply the case that people don’t like writing about women having these narratives and stuff.”

Like, you can sort of see gender, test some hypotheses, about how gender plays into these things, that you can’t do as easily once you bring the complexity of Other into it. But that isn’t to say that I’m not super excited to learn more about how all, sort of, a wider gender spectrum plays into a bunch of these things. So just sort of a bookmark for, yeah, I’m aware this all sounds very binary, but this is the starting point for all of this.

ELM: Sure, right.

FK: It’s also just a reflection of the way that AO3 tags have worked.

DT: Yes. Yeah, that’s a lot of it.

ELM: Right. Yeah, I mean I would be very curious to have an overview of what exists in Other, right? 

DT: Yeah.

ELM: Just like...you know, and I am curious how often genderqueer or nonbinary Tony Stark or—I don’t know why he’s the guy I’ve decided on today, but you know like... [DT and FK laugh] How often that would be in an M/M tag, right? 

DT: Right.

ELM: Or M/F, I guess.

DT: Right.

ELM: As opposed to someone choosing an Other, when they’ve written him as genderqueer.

DT: Yeah. And I do think that also, like, I think there’s a nonbinary character in Our Flag Means Death, and there’s some other ones that are now canonical nonbinary characters, but that’s one of the ones I’ve noticed in a relatively popular ship, and I think ships with Jim in Our Flag Means Death do often get tagged as Other, and so I think there’s also the, “What do people do for canonical characters who are starting to appear?” Versus what do they do when they headcanon someone or they write about someone being nonbinary for the sake of this fic, or yeah, and I...I suspect some of the tagging has changed over time some for those things, but yeah, I have not done a breakdown. I think that’s a very interesting future place to look, but...

ELM: Yeah.

DT: But yeah.

ELM: Will you come back on and talk about that with us?

DT: Absolutely, yes. 

FK: Yeaaaaah! It has been, like, this has been incredible having you on, by the way.

ELM: Yeah, no, I’m so delighted that like a Twitter thread can turn into—you know, I remember that Twitter thread very well, too, it was like... [DT laughs] You know, “In my experience,” and then I was over here being, like, “OK, but in my experience…” and you were like, “Maybe there’s some data here actually.” [DT and FK laugh] So yes, it’s nice, sometimes, to actually have some data.

DT: It’s been really fun to dig into all of this, and I keep finding more things to dig into, but it’s been extremely awesome to talk to you two about it, and sort of talk about what prompted me to look for some of this and how did I find of these things, and hearing you both reflect on it from your experiences has been extremely valuable, like this is going to help me write it up in ways that various people can eventually understand also. 

I do think this is gonna be such a magnum opus for me that I don’t know whether or not it will all be posted by the time the episode goes up. [FK and ELM laugh] But I’m hoping to have a bunch of stats up for people to actually look at as they listen to this. 

ELM: That’s wonderful. Well, that’s all gonna be in the show notes. We definitely will put up the, you know, the data that we discussed, so—

DT: Yes.

ELM: At the bare minimum, I think that’s what we can provide.

DT: Sounds good.

ELM: And then if there’s something bigger that comes out, weeks or months after that, [DT laughs] we will announce it and link to it.

DT: Awesome.

ELM: Cool. OK, well thank you, John Goodman, for— [DT laughs] Unless you want to be Steve Martin.

DT: Steve Martin!

ELM: I just, I just love John Goodman, so...

FK: We’re not gonna try and force you into Alec Baldwin at this stage—

ELM: No, leave him alone—

DT: Steve Martin was a childhood hero of mine, so... [laughs]

ELM: OK, all right, well thank you, Steve.

FK: Thank you.

ELM: As always, a very funny guest in all our sketches. 

DT: [laughing] Thank you so much for having me.

[Interstitial music]

FK: It is always such a pleasure to have Toast on.

ELM: Hard agree. I’m calling Toast “Steve” now. [FK laughs] As for you, I hope that you’ve cooled down a little.

FK: No more hot takes. 

ELM: Those takes were fuckin’ hot. [FK laughs] Steamy.

FK: Thank you. Thank you. 

ELM: Boiling. [laughs]

FK: Well, we’ll see if I get yelled at, uh...be nice. [laughs] 

ELM: No! Look, I mean, look, I don’t think they were offensive, but I do think they were like, “I’ve got a THEORY, I’m comin’ in hot!” You know, [FK laughs] and we’re like, “Oh, wow! All right. All right.” 

FK: Yeah, good, good. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. That’s what it was. [ELM laughs] Well before we go we should probably talk about Patreon. 

ELM: Uh...a pretty cool take, Patreon is...

FK: [laughing] Yeah, very cold, at this point. [ELM laughs] 

ELM: Patreon.com/Fansplaining, how we fund the podcast, how we pay our transcriptionists—if you’re a listener and you weren't aware, you can also become a reader of this podcast, every time we put out the audio we put out the text. And if you become a Patron, you get access to a ton of great things, like 28 special episodes.

FK: Woo!

ELM: Including recent ones on, [laughing] thank you, on Glass Onion—

FK: [higher pitch] Woo!

ELM: —and Interview with the Vampire. 

FK: [even higher pitch] Woo!

ELM: We have a Tropefest episode coming up, we will announce that when that’s, like, in the can. 

FK: Yeaaaah.

ELM: As they say.... [laughing] Thank you, this is very, this is more interactive than normal. I really appreciate the feedback that I’m getting. Or at higher levels, at $5 a month, you can get a really cute pin sent to your house—

FK: Woooooooo!

ELM: At $10 a month, we do... [laughing] a semi-occasional Tiny Zine—

FK: Now I feel obligated to keep responding.

ELM: Stooop. 

FK: I’ll stop. 

ELM: You know, you wanna do it all? At lower levels, at $2 a month, you get access to the podcast one day early.

FK: [quietly] Woo. [both laugh]

ELM: OK, go ahead. It’s your turn now.

FK: Uh, if you do not have money or don’t want to give us your money, both very legitimate situations, you can still support us by writing letters to us like Cookies did. You can send us messages that way at fansplaining at gmail.com; on our Tumblr, which is fansplaining.tumblr.com; or on fansplaining.com, we have a form that you can send; or you can call us at 1-401-526-FANS. 

And if you want to be extra helpful, you could spread the word about the podcast, and especially about our full transcripts to all of your friends… fan...friends… and...neighbors? No, not your neighbors. They probably don’t care.

ELM: Are you doing William Shatner right now?

FK: [overlapping] I don’t know, I’m being weird. 

ELM: What was that?

FK: [laughing] Maybe. Maybe I was possessed. Whatever. It’s over now. He’s gone. The ghost is gone. 

ELM: All right, I’m glad this episode is over now, because I feel like it’s time to let you free. [both laugh] Frolic away from here.

FK: Yeah. Yeah. It may be time to frolic. It was good talking to you, Elizabeth. I’ll see you next time.

ELM: OK, bye, Flourish.

FK: [laughing] Bye.

[Outro music]