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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36216 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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The great majority of romantic fiction read by women, fan-fiction or otherwise, is heterosexual pairings with the OP, a female character from the setting, or a stand-in for the OP.

My priors were strongly in the opposite direction, at least in the fanfiction space, so I checked the numbers on Archive of our Own, (the most popular fanfiction site).

They confirmed my suspicions: M/M pairings are almost twice as common as M/F (4.7 million fics vs 2.4 million). They're also read a lot more, the most popular M/M fic had 8.2 million hits vs only 2.7 million for the top M/F fic.

I think he's probably right if you count all romantic fiction. Outside of the fanfic niche, iirc the genre of Amazon self-published romance/sex novels is weighted more towards heterosexual stuff.

But yeah, within fandom-specific communities it's a cockslide in favor of gay stuff.

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