Poll: Fiction quantity and protagonists
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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
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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.
How many prose fiction stories have you completed in the last year? (round to nearest multiple of ten)
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)
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)
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?
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
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)