the thing that gets me about all these people who are furious that there’s more content for gay ships than their het ships is just how often they’re plain wrong
i mean, take dragon age for example where the fandom is notorious for making post after post about how maligned their precious f/m is because people dare to prefer the m/m version of the romance. by the way they’re talking you’d think het ships would be sinking under the m/m juggernaut.
yep. there’s literally more het fic for dragon age than m/m and f/f combined.
why does this happen? why is it such a phenomenon that people whine and scream and cry about how much the mean gays are taking over fandom when the reality is that gay people still draw the short end of the stick on top of getting yelled at for it?
imo it’s because hets don’t notice het content because they subconsciously categorize it as Correct and Natural but are hyper aware of gay content because they feel it’s somehow the opposite of that.
part of that is probably because of how often het content is canon compared to gay content– so many het ships aren’t even counted as het but are seen as “gen” just because they’re canon compliant. and making content for the actual happenings of the narrative is seen as somehow different than inventing content. so it slips under the radar.
the other is obviously that they’re much more likely to discount gay subtext and validate het subtext due to heteronormativity. the smallest scene is proof that a het ship is real and ~obviously people would create content for it but gay subtext is far fetched and outlandish and therefore worthy of special attention.
the other side of the equation is the way fanfic is seen as the be-end-all measuring stick of fandom content output. i know it’s because ao3 with its nice screenshottable numbers is easiest to use as a reference point (i did it myself). but that’s inherently a flawed metric because
a) canon ships are much less likely to have the same fanfic output than non-canon ships for the simple reason that less wish fulfillment is needed if the canon is giving you the content you want. guess hard whether het or gay ships are more likely to be canon
b) ao3 skewing gay is not a surprise considering it was partly intended specifically for the gay fic that was banned on other fanfic archives (have you never wondered why it’s called ‘an archive of our own’?). you used to get deleted for posting gay stuff on ff.net (idk if it still happens i haven’t posted there in ages), and fandom-specific fic archives and later LJ/DW comms were (and, tbqh, still sometimes are) rife with homophobic rules banning or heavily censoring gay content. if you visit any other fic archive the numbers will look a lot differently, i assure you (and yes, they /are/ still active), people just can’t get statistics as easily from them.
c) tangentially related to the above point, people forget that fandom isn’t just the people they follow on tumblr. using dragon age as an example again, reddit, the BSN boards, ff.net, etc are all part of the dragon age fandom and as someone who spent a lot of time i should have honestly applied better on the BSN boards i can tell you they were suffocatingly heterosexual (and homophobic!). i can’t vouch for reddit personally but i have friends who can and who had the same experience there. the fact that gay people have to cluster in specific spaces like tumblr tags and ao3 because they’re entirely unwelcome in literally every other general fandom space is not some sort of privilege, lmao.
d) and honestly most importantly: fic is not the only fandom output. like, i can’t believe that even has to be said but fanart, gif sets and graphics, fanmixes, meta, fanvids, even shitposts! are all also fandom output. they just don’t get counted because they’re much harder to quantify. but if you look at e.g. which tumblr tags are most active (as for example curated here) there is quite obviously a ton of het shipping happening on tumblr (the most popular ship last week was a het ship– mike and eleven from stranger things). you just don’t recognize it as such because the medium isn’t fic. this is again related to how likely gay ships actually get satisfying in-canon content– the fact that gay ships often get a lot of fic is because we gay people have to turn to fic for what canon refuses to provide for us. het ships have tons of content and active tags, but it often consists of e.g. gif sets or meta because they are far more likely to have canon content to rely on with no need to invent anything on top of it.
the reason why f/f sometimes runs counter to that rule and produces a lot of fic for canon ships is imho because quite frankly… canon f/f ships make up most of the rare occasions in which two female characters get to have a complex, interesting and well written relationship that isn’t almost entirely overshadowed by how their narrative revolves around a man. there’s also a lot to be said about why the numbers for f/f are small most of the time that would require a whole huge ass separate post and i am a tired lesbian and do not have the energy.
i also don’t really wanna get into why these accusations are often hurled at gay people. i’ve been called a misogynist for not giving a shit about het one too many times by people who can’t fathom that a lesbian might find m/f content a hundred times more alienating than any m/m content could ever be. but the fact is that it’s all too often based on an entirely fabricated idea of how the fandom landscape actually looks like, and i just wish we could stop entertaining that lie.
Lady Jace Of The Fae 