Discussion prompt

[amaresu]

BigBang: Where are the novel-length stories in femmeslash?

Comments

[sqbr]

Are there less proportionally? Or is it just that there's so little femslash overall?

[angel_negra]

I think it's pretty proportional to the amount of femslash in a fandom, with the odd exception here and there.

[cest_what]

I think less so now, but I feel like there was definitely a period where femslash was more likely to be short PWPs rather than stories with plots and strong romances, and therefore less likely to be longfic? I always interpreted those as being written because the author wanted to try a different kind of porn to their usual, rather than because they shipped the characters. But that may have been specific to the fandoms I was moving in.

[angel_negra]

I do think it depends on the fandom. The few femslash-dominant fandoms I've lurked in tended towards longer fics, or even just fun tropy stuff. And then there's others where, it's been tiny 1-2 people femslash sections and so there's a small handful of fics.

Like, Supernatural - I find - tends towards longer fics in general, so I'm not surprised to find femslash or female-centric work that's long and plotty; granted some of the more vocal sections of Supernatural are very against the female characters, so I'm not surprised to find very little femslash/female centric work when I'm just casually looking for it.

Whereas my main fandom, Power Rangers, rarely tends towards longer fics unless they're gen/Mary Sue focused; plus the slash/femslash sections are super small, so it's rare to find a longfic. But because of the way the show is set up, with the cast changing every year, it's very common to have authors who write multiple pairings and may shift genres depending on the season. But the number of fans tends to change depending on the season, you get people who just started in the current season, or some who've stopped at two seasons ago, etc. So it's harder to get all the femslashers behind one or two pairings, and so it's more likely that you're a "fandom of one" and it makes it harder to motivate yourself to write a lot. (The seasons with a single female in the Ranger roster can be a lot harder for femslash as seasons with two females, for example.) We actually did a femslash ficathon last year and out of 14 participants, we had about 8 totally different seasons far enough apart that not everyone could read because they hadn't seen those seasons - there was a lot of fandoms of two going on there.

[woldy]

Good question! I have no idea. I wonder if it's possible to pull together some stats on the A03...

[sqbr]

Super dodgy stats:
2721 femslash,35 over 50K : about one in 78
15979 slash,345 over 50K : about one in 47

So I guess novel length femslash IS rarer, on average. At least according to this one dodgy test :)

[havocthecat]

Did you, by any chance, run numbers comparing novel length fic for slash, het, gen, and poly? I wonder if there's the same proportion of novel length fic out there for those types of fics. (The stats would, of course, be super dodgy, I'm aware.)

I am also totally aware that might be too much work! I'm not saying "please do this" just asking if you ended up deciding to check out that too.

[sqbr]

(shifting this to the right thread to be less confusing, sorry about that!)

I did not! But if someone else crunched the numbers I'd be curious to see the outcome :)

[woldy]

Excellent A03 wrangling skills! Thanks :-)

Dodgyness caveat noted, but I'm not surprised that there's less very long femslash. I suspect it takes community support (betas, cheerleaders, ongoing comments) for people to write novel length fic, and that support may be less forthcoming for less popular pairings.