I ultimately agree with the premise here, as fandom has always been super white. I don’t think I knew people thought/pretended otherwise, although admittedly I’ve been way less active than I was when I was younger. I will say a few things that occurred to me as I read this:
1) “Fanfiction writers say their hobby is a haven for marginalized people.” Which fanfiction writers say this? Are you quoting someone here? Is it a majority of them who say this? Or is this an impression you have? It’s fine if it is, but you should say that. Or if you have specific examples, maybe mention them?
2) That survey being 10 years old probably is a minor issue, although likely not on the whiteness front. I’d be willing to bet a decent portion of those people no longer identify as women, now that we have a lot more language for/understanding of non-binary identities, particularly in online spaces. (This is not to say they didn’t exist before, just that I think more people are more comfortable with themselves/aware of the different options. I can think of several people off the top of my head who would have chosen “woman” in 2013 and would not now, so I’d be super interested in seeing how that has shifted. I’m sure it’s still majority women, but would be interesting to see.)
3) The comparison to straight men is… odd, given that the majority of fandom is queer. There are no weird ally points to score in that case.
4) At the very least, and maybe just in the circles I ran in, the people who acted like they were some sort of super crusader for gay rights or whatever were looked at with no small amount of disdain. I distinctly remember a loooot of internal fandom discussion about this point specifically. It was far more common, at least in my experience, to view writing and reading fanfic as… just a fun hobby? Which is not to say we shouldn’t discuss how white it is and how creators of color get marginalized, but it’s a bit odd to me to act like it’s a common thing to think of it as some kind of activism. Some people might do so; people do all sorts of strange things. But not sure it’s enough to speak of it as though it’s a consensus.
5) Get Out is I think an odd choice to look at for fic count. For one thing, long-form stuff like shows, book series, and movie series almost always have more fic than one off movies just in general, since there’s more material to work with. But the reasons people write fic, while yes often have to do with porn, also have to do with continuing to explore a world and its themes. That movie to me just felt… narratively extremely complete? It’s not one where writing fanfic would occur to me. What else am I going to say in that world that wasn’t already said far better by the work itself?
6) The Blaise point is a really good one. I remember well when his gender/race got confirmed and it was madness.
7) The source material a lot of fanfic is based off of is also very white and very male. It was a big reason a lot of canon girlfriends got shoved out of the way for slash ships, too—they were frequently terribly underwritten and uninteresting as characters. Fandom for sure in general focuses on white male characters, but some of that is a reflection of media in general. Look at a show like Community and you can see there’s nuance here: Troy/Abed beats out even Jeff/Annie. Or a movie like Encanto, which has over 11,000 fics.
I think the underlying point here is a good thing to keep in mind, but it’s being presented here in a bit of a strange way. Almost confrontationally? Not sure why. Fanfic writers don’t have a lot of institutional power. It’s still largely looked down on as a hobby. What’s the goal, here? To start a conversation, or to provoke people? It feels like the latter, IMO. Which is a shame, because it’s a conversation worth having.
I'm reading this article a year after it was posted (mostly because I'm gathering material to make a bigger statement on ao3 in general), and to your first point ("“Fanfiction writers say their hobby is a haven for marginalized people.” Which fanfiction writers say this?"), you seemingly have never interacted with the very staunch ao3 site lovers and defenders. If you go on r/ao3 for any of five minutes you will be met with dozens of people saying exactly this.
To this point as well: "Which is not to say we shouldn’t discuss how white it is and how creators of color get marginalized, but it’s a bit odd to me to act like it’s a common thing to think of it as some kind of activism. Some people might do so; people do all sorts of strange things. But not sure it’s enough to speak of it as though it’s a consensus."
God bless you because there are, unfortunately, too many people that can be found in fandom spaces on both tumblr and reddit who DO view fanfiction as activism. It may not be an entire consensus, but it is a very, very large fraction of people.
I ultimately agree with the premise here, as fandom has always been super white. I don’t think I knew people thought/pretended otherwise, although admittedly I’ve been way less active than I was when I was younger. I will say a few things that occurred to me as I read this:
1) “Fanfiction writers say their hobby is a haven for marginalized people.” Which fanfiction writers say this? Are you quoting someone here? Is it a majority of them who say this? Or is this an impression you have? It’s fine if it is, but you should say that. Or if you have specific examples, maybe mention them?
2) That survey being 10 years old probably is a minor issue, although likely not on the whiteness front. I’d be willing to bet a decent portion of those people no longer identify as women, now that we have a lot more language for/understanding of non-binary identities, particularly in online spaces. (This is not to say they didn’t exist before, just that I think more people are more comfortable with themselves/aware of the different options. I can think of several people off the top of my head who would have chosen “woman” in 2013 and would not now, so I’d be super interested in seeing how that has shifted. I’m sure it’s still majority women, but would be interesting to see.)
3) The comparison to straight men is… odd, given that the majority of fandom is queer. There are no weird ally points to score in that case.
4) At the very least, and maybe just in the circles I ran in, the people who acted like they were some sort of super crusader for gay rights or whatever were looked at with no small amount of disdain. I distinctly remember a loooot of internal fandom discussion about this point specifically. It was far more common, at least in my experience, to view writing and reading fanfic as… just a fun hobby? Which is not to say we shouldn’t discuss how white it is and how creators of color get marginalized, but it’s a bit odd to me to act like it’s a common thing to think of it as some kind of activism. Some people might do so; people do all sorts of strange things. But not sure it’s enough to speak of it as though it’s a consensus.
5) Get Out is I think an odd choice to look at for fic count. For one thing, long-form stuff like shows, book series, and movie series almost always have more fic than one off movies just in general, since there’s more material to work with. But the reasons people write fic, while yes often have to do with porn, also have to do with continuing to explore a world and its themes. That movie to me just felt… narratively extremely complete? It’s not one where writing fanfic would occur to me. What else am I going to say in that world that wasn’t already said far better by the work itself?
6) The Blaise point is a really good one. I remember well when his gender/race got confirmed and it was madness.
7) The source material a lot of fanfic is based off of is also very white and very male. It was a big reason a lot of canon girlfriends got shoved out of the way for slash ships, too—they were frequently terribly underwritten and uninteresting as characters. Fandom for sure in general focuses on white male characters, but some of that is a reflection of media in general. Look at a show like Community and you can see there’s nuance here: Troy/Abed beats out even Jeff/Annie. Or a movie like Encanto, which has over 11,000 fics.
I think the underlying point here is a good thing to keep in mind, but it’s being presented here in a bit of a strange way. Almost confrontationally? Not sure why. Fanfic writers don’t have a lot of institutional power. It’s still largely looked down on as a hobby. What’s the goal, here? To start a conversation, or to provoke people? It feels like the latter, IMO. Which is a shame, because it’s a conversation worth having.
I'm reading this article a year after it was posted (mostly because I'm gathering material to make a bigger statement on ao3 in general), and to your first point ("“Fanfiction writers say their hobby is a haven for marginalized people.” Which fanfiction writers say this?"), you seemingly have never interacted with the very staunch ao3 site lovers and defenders. If you go on r/ao3 for any of five minutes you will be met with dozens of people saying exactly this.
To this point as well: "Which is not to say we shouldn’t discuss how white it is and how creators of color get marginalized, but it’s a bit odd to me to act like it’s a common thing to think of it as some kind of activism. Some people might do so; people do all sorts of strange things. But not sure it’s enough to speak of it as though it’s a consensus."
God bless you because there are, unfortunately, too many people that can be found in fandom spaces on both tumblr and reddit who DO view fanfiction as activism. It may not be an entire consensus, but it is a very, very large fraction of people.
Maybe it's me, but I'm glad a bunch of White women didn't write a lot of fanfic for Get Out.
It genuinely boggles my mind. How are the Try Guys hotter than Ram and Bheem???