Poll: Fiction quantity and protagonists

[sqbr]

Via woldy I came across tenwomen and found it a little surreal, since (having counted now) I may have only written eleven non-drabble fics with female protagonists since January, but that's out of thirteen stories total (and the other two are m/m and m/m/f).

Maybe I've been in Dragon Age fandom too long and am just used to female protagonists being the norm! Anyway, I am curious about other people now, not just about the number of female protagonists they've written but how many stories in general. Thus, a poll, and to make it more inclusive I haven't made it just about fanfic.

This isn't meant as a "Wow you people who find making ten fanworks about women hard are weird and bad" thing, you can't help what you're drawn to do and we're all different. For example, I failed pretty badly at 50books_poc and 12films_poc (though they were instructive and rewarding failures) and I'm sure a lot of people manage both challenges without trying. I just find it interesting.

You can define the terms "written", "stories" "focus" etc and decide what to do with numbers ending in 5 however you like, as long as you're consistent. I've asked about m/m relationships since obviously if you're writing m/m it's very difficult to have a female protagonist and I'm curious to see what effect that has on the numbers.

Poll #4399 Proportions of female protagonists in fiction

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

View Respondents

How many prose fiction stories have you completed in the last year? (round to nearest multiple of ten)

View Answers
Mean: 14.00 Median: 10 Std. Dev 13.56

0		3 (20.0%)
10		8 (53.3%)
20		2 (13.3%)
30		0 (0.0%)
40		1 (6.7%)
50		1 (6.7%)
60		0 (0.0%)
70		0 (0.0%)
80		0 (0.0%)
90		0 (0.0%)
100		0 (0.0%)

How many of those stories had female protagonists? (round to nearest multiple of ten)

View Answers
Mean: 10.67 Median: 10 Std. Dev 11.81

0		6 (40.0%)
10		5 (33.3%)
20		2 (13.3%)
30		1 (6.7%)
40		1 (6.7%)
50		0 (0.0%)
60		0 (0.0%)
70		0 (0.0%)
80		0 (0.0%)
90		0 (0.0%)
100		0 (0.0%)

How many of those stories had an m/m relationship as the central focus? (round to nearest multiple of ten)

View Answers
Mean: 1.43 Median: 0 Std. Dev 3.50

0		12 (85.7%)
10		2 (14.3%)
20		0 (0.0%)
30		0 (0.0%)
40		0 (0.0%)
50		0 (0.0%)
60		0 (0.0%)
70		0 (0.0%)
80		0 (0.0%)
90		0 (0.0%)
100		0 (0.0%)

How accurate are your answers?

View Answers

Completely
3 (20.0%)

I know it all averages out but this rounding makes me uncomfortable
10 (66.7%)

I would have clicked "over a hundred" if it was there
0 (0.0%)

I would have clicked "other" if it was there
1 (6.7%)

They're as accurate as I can manage but I'm really not sure of the exact numbers
5 (33.3%)

They're ALL LIES
1 (6.7%)

Other
1 (6.7%)

I realise that dividing the average of the second and third answers by the first isn't quite the same as asking people to calculate proportions themselves, but I assumed people would rather not asked to do maths more complex than counting :)

I create a lot more art and comics than prose, but they're much harder to define the "protagonist" of. Anyway, I'd say I'm more like 50-50 with art, partly but not entirely due to drawing lots of other people's prompts. What about other people?

And for those who create original and fannish works, is there any difference? I'd say my original pictures are more likely to have female protagonists than my fannish ones.

The next question to ask is: what about disabled protagonists? Or non-white/POC, lgbt (especially trans), old etc? I think where I may focus next, artwise at least, is overweight characters, since they are particularly underrepresented in my works and there's this very deep "only skinny people are worth looking at" prejudice especially in comics and other stylised art. Of course there's more to diversity etc than simplistic quotas, but they can be helpful pushes in the right direction.

Comments

[ex_pippin880]

I tried to answer, but it says I'm not allowed to view this poll.

[sqbr]

Oops, thanks. *sighs at self*

[ex_pippin880]

I would say about 3/4 of my stuff has female protags. Some of my flash pieces don't specify gender. Probably no central focus on m/m relationships.

[sqbr]

It looks like most of my dwircle is much the same.

Of course, this includes the people I met through femslash fandom, so it's not exactly an unbiased sample :)

[hl]

Saddest thing is that I don't think I've completed any piece of fiction in the last year. D:

[sqbr]

Yeah, the "making people feel bad about their lack of productivity" aspect of this poll didn't occur to me sorry :/ (Not that there's anything wrong with not having written any prose this year, but I know I would have felt bad about it myself were I in that position)

[hl]

Hey, no, I didn't want to imply you made me feel bad! These sort of inquires are interesting -- I wish I could answer it. (If anything, my lack of productivity makes me feel bad about my lack of productivity. I'm forever thinking about how I'm not writing when I'm not. :P)

[ex_peasant441]

OK, that's weird, the poll says it is viewable by anyone, but when I submit it says I don't have permission to view the poll. Have we found a DW bug?

Anyway, I think there is an important difference between people who write/create just one protagonist for one fandom and people who write/create for lots of different fandoms or at least sub-fandoms and either stick to just one type of protagonist or go for a diversity of protagonist types. Fans are obsessives so it is easy for people to get locked into doing just one thing again and again not because it has anything to do with prejudice but because that is the focus of their fannish obsession. So I'd be more dubious of someone who basically went for a wide diversity but never wrote a female protagonist than someone who never went for diversity at all.

Also I wish to stress that my 0 is the result of rounding down, I have in fact finished one drabble in the last year.

[sqbr]

We found out that it's bad to make polls private and then public (which I already knew but forgot, oops) I've made a new viewable poll.

That's a good point. In general there are lots of perfectly good reasons not to have written any female protags, like all these things it's a useful prod to think about the question for a second, but not a guarantee of badness.

[torachan]

The poll looks like I have 0/10 fics with female protags, but it's actually 1/14 (or 3/14, depending on whether you mean only POV character or if there are two main characters in the fic and one is female, just not the POV character). If I go with 1/14, that's 7% and if I go with 3/14, that's 20%, which sounds a lot better than 0! XD But clearly 3 still rounds to 0 not 10...

So far this year I've written 8 m/m, 1 m/f, and the rest gen.

On the other hand, 10/14 were about trans people... (4-6 had people of color as the POV character; I say 4-6 because one is a manga character from England not said to be ethnically Japanese, but can pass as Japanese in Japan so I'm not sure if he's supposed to be Japanese or not, and the other is a manga set in a vaguely western-influenced fantasy world that does not map to the real world in any way, shape or form.)

And yeah, I agree that one shouldn't be focused on stats, but I always think it is interesting to take a look at your work like this. I would have said off the top of my head that I'd written more het this year, but I think I was misremembering some of last year's fics as being from this year.

[sqbr]

Yes, there's a reason I added "This rounding makes me uncomfortable" as an option :)

I was surprised by the way my art/comics and fic differ so much. But my fic tends to be much more in the head of the main character, and I have trouble getting into guy's heads: the ONLY male protags I've written have been Dragon Age PCs, which I played as first person long enough that I got a feel for them. Which is funny, since I actually often find it easier relating to guys in person and am not a very girly girl or anything.

[sami]

... but if the number is less than 5 it rounds to zero which is VERY MISLEADING

Anyway, you can have a prose answer.

I haven't written that many stories, but of those that I have completed, due to recent work the answers get very odd.

For example, where do you categorise a story where the perspective character - third person limited point of view - is male, but the story is entirely about two women? e.g. Stories written from Snow's perspective, but entirely *about* Fang and Lightning.

(Especially if they're alternate viewpoint tellings of a scene from a bigger story which is written from *Fang's* perspective...)

And even my major m/m stuff, like Veterans, has major female characters. And the most recent work I've done on Veterans for plot reasons currently focusses pretty much entirely on female characters, even though the central characters of the story as a whole are male.

As for disabled protagonists: Not recently, but I have in the past. And if, as you should, you include invisible/mental disabilities, I've done it quite a lot. (Largely because most of the time I'm most drawn to characters who are fundamentally broken.)

LGBT: ahahahaha yes. I very rarely write characters who are *straight*, because heterosexuality is an overplayed paradigm in fiction, because lol fandom, and because I have deep-seated psychological wounds that make me very uncomfortable with some things to do with heterosexuality.

Although I haven't done much with writing transfolk. Partly, I suspect, because I haven't written much for some years until very very very recently, and there are no trans characters in FF13. (But there is an old character. And there's going to be a disabled character in my current fic. He wasn't disabled in the game, but at the last point he's seen in-game he's very, very, VERY injured, and frankly the idea that he will recover to his prior state of sparkly good health stretches plausibility rather far. But he's kind of awesome, so I choose to declare for purposes of my story that he will, in fact, survive his incredibly severe injuries to continue being awesome.)

[sqbr]

It all averages out in the end! Though I've been pondering a followup post which would have a "Have you written any prose?" question and then ask "If you have written at least one prose story.." or something like that.

m/m stories can definitely have lots of quite central female characters, and I think there is a difference between writing male protags because you're writing m/m and writing them because you just don't like writing women etc.

Trans and physically disabled characters are pretty thin on the ground in most fandoms, which is certainly a major reason for why I haven't written many. Of course AUs and OCs give an opportunity to fix that (this is also how I have a POC/non-white protagonist story for Dragon Age)

[naraht]

To start with, I'm kind of amazed that you measure fiction written in a year in tens!

I've finished eleven stories in the past year; three had female protagonists and four were m/m. (So that's not going to look like much on the poll!) One of the m/m pieces was with an asexual character. Two of the stories with female protagonists were f/f. And two of the gen stories also had queer themes.

I've done fairly well in the past with representing mental illness, not so much physical disability. Nor with non-white characters. Older characters interest me a lot and I think I write them fairly frequently.

One of the main characters and love interests in my ladiesbigbang this year is overweight, as was one of the two love interests in my (semi-RPFish) NaNo novel. I think fandom has a very narrow idea of what "hotness" involves and it would be nice to see that exploded.

[sqbr]

My (in retrospect flawed) logic was: I find art much easier than fiction, which is the reverse of most people's experience. I have written 13 stories and uploaded around 100 pictures (though some of those are parts of multi-page comics), so fanwriters will have written up to maybe 100 stories.

Now I feel like making a poll asking people about art vs writing!

I have done ok with physical disability but haven't touched mental disability (at least not explicitly, some of my characters definitely have serious psychological issues), which is something I mean to try and fix. And yes, the narrow fandom ideals of hotness definitely need exploding.

[furikku]

I am guessing I did some drabbles or something an possibly chat RP counts.

Anyway, almost all of my writing (prose or otherwise) has gal protags. I generally just don't care about stories involving guys, at all. (Thus, I have most likely done zero m/m stories, because if there is not a girl involved I almost never give any amount of fuck.)

[sqbr]

I am much the same, I was really surprised at myself when I was inspired to write my one m/m story (plus another m/m comic) But female characters are still fairly central even in that.

[dagas_isa]

I actually find the results of the poll to be interesting, especially in light of other conversations that are happening right now (namely the ones with m/m slashers discussing why they don't write anything but cis white dudes). So I'm left wondering whether the circles between fandoms (those who do m/m slash for western media fandoms exclusively and those who don't) are actually very separate, or if there's something else at work.

[sqbr]

Well, I have a number of people on my dwircle I met through femslash fandom, which is going to skew things dramatically. I think in general people tend to subscribe to those with similar tastes, so you'll get clumps of writers with lots of m/m and clumps with hardly any etc.

[dagas_isa]

Yeah, I know I'm more likely to seek-out people who are into femslash/female characters over people who are more slash inclined.

I think femslash fandom is weirder because there's less clumping around specific fandoms/pairings.

[sqbr]

I think femslash fandom is weirder because there's less clumping around specific fandoms/pairings.

Yes, it's kind of it's own special thing. I like it that way myself, since I'm on the whole very much a multifandom multishipper.

[dagas_isa]

I'm actually trying to feel out a way of asking that question. Is there even a femslash fandom? What is it united around? What is its distinguishing features (besides, of course, an enjoyment of f/f ships)?

Realize this is a bit older!

[dogstar]

But it's still interesting.

I've not FINISHED any prose stuff other than two shorts this year. One is two male characters and a drabble; the other is female viewpoint character and a group of children (slightly tilted towards the female). I have this recurring theme about magic as metaphor for creativity and it's connection with madness- but your survey wasn't about disability, just gender, and I'm wondering what it says that the vast majority of my magic-user characters are female....

Re: Realize this is a bit older!

[sqbr]

Replies on old posts are always welcome, it's nice to know they're still being read!

The complicated intersections between what kinds of characters get written as female etc would be very interesting to explore. Hmm. *ponders how this relates to my own fic*