DJHSJFHJSHJFHJSHFJS I LOVE A MAN

Fuck You Verizon

if posts that are in favor of net neutrality are really being deleted, pls screenshot every single one you see and keep track. i have screen shot every single one i can find so far in the net neutrality tag. if Verizon is suppressing free speech, proof needs to be documented. everything in these dark and uncertain times need to be documented.

good good star wars boys [x]

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

Totally.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

This doesn’t even account  for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well. 

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het).  (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

This, omfg.

Most of the characters in my fics use he not because gay men are my babies uwu uwu, but because canon made a conscious choice to make all the characters dudes thirty-whatever years ago, and things are just now changing.

But fetishization, amirite?

This is why my response to people talking about the prevalance of slash and femslash in fandom will always be “which fandom?” “well, all of them” no, you can’t do that.

The Supernatural fandom - glutted with slash, because every female character who shows up dies. The Star Trek fandom - same thing, Uhura is (in the original series) the main character with the least number of lines. 

Compare that to the Avatar fandom, where half the main characters plus a good number of villains are women, and they’re all written with pretty much the same care as the male ones, and het is much more prevalent.

Of course, it gets really interesting if you compare Avatar to, say, Dragon Age - where the split is still about even in number of characters, but slash and femslash both are much more common. My guess is this is because Dragon Age appeals to people who like playing games but don’t like being straight all the time, so the fandom is largely made up of bisexual and gay people.

The saddest thing about Rogue One team deaths?

They didn’t know for sure if they succeeded. Chirrut and Baze died hoping that Bodhi managed to get in touch with rebel fleet. Bodhi died hoping that rebel fleet managed to break the shield and that Cassian and Jyn managed to transmit the plans. Cassian and Jyn died hoping that anybody listened to their transmission. All they had is hope that their death wasn’t in vain. That they made a difference. The rebellion is built on hope.

round two moodboard

the fact hayden christensen said he didn’t know he was still being remembered by sw fans…. i’m so heartbroken protect this sweet man

Just love his sincerity @greenlightsaberluke

mood: when they merged the force theme and rey’s theme in the last jedi trailer (2017)

A New Hope (1977) | The Last Jedi (2017)

optimistic liberal reformist college freshman luke who believes the jedi order can be rebuilt once again if we all follow the light side this time

vs

radicalized anarcho-marxist retired professor luke who knows that reform won’t solve the problem that jedi ideology is fundamentally broken and will continue to repeat a cycle of boom and bust

40 years ago