Femslash week in review: 2019-07-09 - 2019-07-15

High-level stats for week of 2019-07-09 - 2019-07-15

• Total works categorized F/F on AO3: 4109 (-47 from last week)


• Works I classified F/F: 2485 (-17 from last week) (1119 new, 1366 continued)


• 0.92% of all 269532 AO3 works I've classified F/F were updated this week

A few callouts this week:

• This may be the first time we've had zero movement in the top five week-over-week; certainly the first time in the past several months, though obviously having Supergirl and RWBY camped out in the top two is incredibly usual.
  
• I suggested a few weeks ago that Life Is Strange might be down for the count, and now it is back at number 7, so I have no theory. Anyone familiar with the game or with the fandom want to speculate on its activity level over time?
  
• Another fandom I don't follow that's having a good run is My Hero Academia.
  
• As a side note, I've mentioned before that I'm not sure F/F:M/M ratio is actually a good stat, but I'm amused that the top three male-dominant fandoms in the stats have the same 1:8 ratio. Maybe we've accidentally discovered an important magic constant related to sexism of representation in large media properties. I want to hear everyone else's armchair theory too, but I'm just going to go with combinatorics. Suppose a property is setup so that one character in four with a significant emotional arc is non-male. If a property has N characters, the number of possible ships is choose(N, 2). Our hypothetical property has 3 male characters to every 1 non-male characters, so that means choose(3N, 2) M/M ships to every choose(N, 2) F/F ships. If you look at that ratio as N gets large, it winds up being 1:9. So I think my guess is pretty good: in major media properties like MCU, Harry Potter, and My Hero Academia, slightly over one important character in four is non-male, and that gets us this 1:8 ratio.
  

( Full top-20 table and description of methodology after the jump )