An Archive of White Women's Own

On Fanfic's Fear of Melanin

Fanfiction writers say their hobby is a haven for marginalized people. Fanfic, they say, offers a space for diverse writers to be seen and heard, unlike the traditional publishing industry, which is overwhelmingly skewed toward white women.

It’s not. It doesn’t. Fanfic is just as dominated by white women as traditional publishing is.

Who Writes Fanfic?

It’s not easy to collect demographic information on fanfic writers. Most fanfic writers post their work anonymously. Many fanfic writers are scattered across the internet, and it’s beyond me to find them all and quiz them about their identities. 

So for the purpose of this essay, I’ll focus on one major fanfic hub: Archive of Our Own (AO3 for short). I chose this site because it is a juggernaut in the world of fandom. It’s been around since 2009, has millions of users, has won awards, and has been dubbed “a cornerstone of the fanfic community.” It’s also easy to navigate, which makes it ideal for data analysis. The site’s name is a reference to A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s famous essay on the necessity of having a private, quiet space in which to write–and how that necessity was, at the time, widely unavailable to women.

AO3 doesn’t keep information on its users, preferring to let its writers keep their information private. But one investigator conducted an unofficial census of the site’s users. This census surveyed 10,000 AO3 users on demographic information like age, gender, sexuality, race, and content interests.

The survey found that AO3’s community is overwhelmingly made of white women.

Eighty percent of respondents were women. Seventy-six percent were white non-mixed. That’s nearly identical to the gender and racial statistics of the traditional US publishing industry—79% white, 78% female.

The second most common ethnicity on AO3 is Asian, at a much smaller 7% of users. Only 5% of AO3 users surveyed were Latinx, and a mere 2% of respondents were Black. This is disproportionately low compared to the general population. The 2021 US Census found that Latinos make up 19% of the country’s population. Black people make up 12.4% of the US population.

The disparities are stark. In Western fandom, fanfic writers are overwhelmingly white compared to the general population.

AO3 Census Results

Now, this isn’t a perfect survey. This data is self-reported. And the survey is ten years old. (If there’s a more recent survey this comprehensive, I would genuinely be interested to see it.) But AO3’s content—both in terms of what is published and what the community prefers to read—is consistent with these figures, as we’ll discuss below.

Who Is Fanfic Written About?

AO3’s stories overwhelmingly favor white male characters, with Asian male characters coming in second. Black and Latinx characters trail far, far behind. An examination of the top 100 ‘ships’ (fictional pairings) of all time found that the list, once again, skews toward the preferences of white women. Of 200 potential slots, 155 go to male characters—116 of them white. There are 53 slots for Asian characters–only one of them female. The third most common ethnic classification is “ambiguous,” which takes up eight character slots—two of which are Hermione Granger. After “ambiguous” there are four Latinx characters–only one of them female–and then one solitary Black character.

If the 2013 survey’s racial demographics remain consistent, then that’s a lot of white women fantasizing about Asian male characters. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but we must note that when white guys have sexual fantasies about Asian women we do not exactly praise them for celebrating racial diversity.

Media properties centered on non-white characters are strikingly unpopular compared to properties centered on white or fair-skinned Asian characters. As I write this on the afternoon of November 5, 2022, Jordan Peele’s wildly influential, highly lauded 2017 horror film Get Out has only sixteen fics written about it on AO3. 

In comparison, the McElroy Brothers’ podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me has 62 fics written about it.

Disney’s Coco (2017), an award-winning film centered on a Mexican family, has 1363 fics.

Disney’s Zootopia (2016) has 4546 fics. We’re pretty sure this is disproportionate to overall population demographics: surely there are more Latinx people in the world than there are furries.

International mega-hit RRR (2022) has a mere 159 fics, despite immense slash potential. The two leads are astonishingly hunky, have intense and complicated feelings for each other, and there is a scene where one hunk publicly flogs another hunk while crying and singing. 

But AO3 users are more interested in the Try Guys, a group of mostly white (and one Asian) internet guys who… try things. (AO3’s fondness for Asian men appears to be limited to light-skinned East Asian men. Central or Near-Eastern men are a little too brown to be of much interest to the site’s userbase, generally.)

There’s a pretty stark difference between how fanfic writers treat white characters versus Black and Latinx characters within the same fandom, too. Take the case of Blaise Zabini. Zabini was an obscure character in the Harry Potter series who gained surprising popularity among Harry Potter fanfic writers. That is, until Rowling explicitly described him as “a black boy” in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Stitch Media writes:

Until about 2004/5, Blaise was functionally a main character in the Harry Potter fandom despite being little more than a name, a house, and some bad vibes. Blaise had hundreds of stories where he was primarily shipped with Draco, Hermione, Ginny, or Harry. He was to Draco in fandom, what Ron and Hermione were to Harry in canon.

And then he “became” Black and promptly became less interesting to a fandom that had decided the “ethnic” people in the Potterverse were already clearly marked as such and therefore, there couldn’t be any more of them. The Harry Potter fandom, like most fandoms, doesn’t actually have much use for Black characters.

Once Blaise was revealed to be Black, his value to fandom plummeted and people bent over backwards to find excuses for 1) No longer writing him in their fics/not writing new fics with canon-accurate Blaise for the first time ever and relying on their bond with “fanon” Blaise, a character less real than Fandom’s Ben Solo; 2) Why Blaise couldn’t actually be a Black (and Italian) pureblood and so either their default interpretation of him as tall, tanned and handsome pureblood perfection made more sense… or he was actually biracial and a “half-blood” like Snape was

The thing that stands out to me about the notable backlash to Blaise being described as a Black man and then played by one – Louis Cordice in the film series – is that it showed really plainly in the antiblackness from fans in fandom when it came to things like… shipping.

Even in wildly popular media with diverse casts, Black and Latino characters get shoved aside so fanfic writers can obsess over blandly handsome white guys.

What does all this mean?

There’s nothing wrong with being a basic white woman with basic white woman tastes. Many stereotypical white woman interests are lovely. Pumpkin spice lattes are delicious. Yoga pants are comfy and they make your ass look great. “Sweet Caroline” is a banger and you are absolutely right to sing along with every “bum bum bummmmm” in the chorus.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with white women having fun making or consuming smut about blandly attractive white guys having sex with each other. And make no mistake—most male/male slashfic is written by women for an audience of women. Straight guys watch girl-on-girl porn all the time. However, most straight guys have enough sense not to pat themselves on the back for being heroic queer allies for these masturbatory habits. And there have been many, many conversations about the ways straight men fetishize and dehumanize queer women.

Then we must acknowledge that straight women can and do fetishize gay men in dehumanizing, homophobic ways. Quite often slash maps same-sex relationships onto heteronormative templates for the entertainment of straight female audiences, which is hardly liberatory.

You’re not morally or politically obligated to be attracted to any particular type of person. Asking people to equitably redistribute their horniness borders on some kind of weird woke version of incel rhetoric. The heart wants what it wants, and what the heart wants is rarely politically correct. Porn is usually transgressive—that’s why it’s fun. 

But there is something wrong with claiming that your niche, racially-skewed subculture is “a haven for marginalized people” when it excludes the vast majority of marginalized people. If your community is unwelcoming to Black and Latinx creators and even hostile to Black and Latinx characters, you are not a haven for marginalized people. If your community is a place where gay men exist to be consumed, not heard, then it is deeply insulting to claim that your hobby is an essential part of queerness.

Fanfic is not a corrective to the white woman-dominated traditional publishing industry; it’s an extension of it.