sqbr: pretty purple pi (femininity)
Sean ([personal profile] sqbr) wrote2010-09-16 01:08 pm
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Poll: Fiction quantity and protagonists

Via [personal profile] woldy I came across [community profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 50books_poc and [livejournal.com profile] 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


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.
sami: (Default)

[personal profile] sami 2010-09-16 11:53 am (UTC)(link)
... 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.)