Centrumlumina dropped her 2023 AO3 stats post and I of course have thoughts.
For starters, this kind of once again reaffirms the fact that you can’t use AO3 to get meaningful data on the popularity of Black characters in fandom. Specifically, you can’t say that the three Black characters on the first list are popular characters because they’re in X amount of fan fiction because… They’re side pairings in the background of what fandom actually ships more: usually a white m/m pairing.
(It’s like how the Teen wolf fandom has always insisted that the number of Scott/Allison fics meant that Scott wasn’t hated but… They were usually tagged as background to Stiles/Derek and Scott still was vilified or mocked in those tagged stories.)
Next, I’m gonna be real… I thought Namor/Shuri would be more popular? At the same point post-The Force Awakens, reylo had 2k fics on the same site. Nashuri currently has less than 900.
The fandom should benefit from the fact that the pairing has visible chemistry, a built in “enemies to lovers” fandom migration as darklina and reylo shippers clearly crave more content, and they’re both alive in their canon… But it doesn’t feel like they are benefiting from the same fandom spaces. (While it may not be entirely racism, it is a well-known fact that fandom really doesn’t put energy towards Black women unless it’s negative.)
Third, I continue to dislike centrumlumina’s use of “ambiguous” to label some of the character’s ethnic/racial identities because it doesn’t really count and obscures what fandom is actually doing with those characters and how they’re racialized (or not!).
For example, the characters she lists as AMBIG on the first list are Hermione Granger (Harry Potter), Vash the Stampede (Trigun Stampede/Trigun), Evan Rosier (Harry Potter), Kaeya (Genshin Impact), Joel (The Last of Us), Raine Whispers (The Owl House), Mary Macdonald (Harry Potter), the unnamed and supposedly unraced Reader in Dean Winchester/Reader stories and Eddie Munson/Reader stories (Supernatural and Stranger things.).
I actually want to start with the Reader fics. The reader isn’t ambiguous. We know, from the years of people of color talking about this, that the majority of reader insert stories involve a reader that’s supposed to be ambiguous but is actually white.
The reader is not accessible as a character to the majority of people of color in fandom because they are supposedly ambiguous but written in a way that’s hard to see as anything other than white. Black people in particular have brought up how exclusive Reader stories are… and have been beaten down (metaphorically) for raising awareness of how we’re erased from the Reader fics, mocked when we write our own, and accused of entitlement for pointing any of it out.
Then, let’s talk about how some of the ambiguity isn’t… really that.
For example: if Marceline the Vampire Queen (who has a Black mother) gets labeled as Non-Human… Vash the Stampede should be as well? Not ambiguous.
I get that he is racialized in the context of the show as a sentient plant but… that… is a stretch to apply it to AO3 stats.
Also, the first time I saw the list I thought Wolfwood was who was being listed as AMBIG because the fandom is really big into reminding you that Wolfwood isn’t white (both in positive and negative ways because wow do they get real weird about Wolfwood as a POC).
Finally, let’s talk about the lack of ambiguity with characters who are white in 99% of their canons and fandom appearances. Like, let’s be real… the vast majority of people who have written and are still writing Harry Potter fanfic… Don’t see Hermione as a Black woman. They’re not writing her as ambiguous and neither was Rowling way back when. Eponine from Les Mis is racialized in her narrative (it’s difficult to explain but she and her family are racialized), but that isn’t tied into the Black actress who played her in the latest miniseries. It also doesn’t influence her appearance in the majority of her fanworks.
I will always think of Centrumlumina’s statistics as useful for a baseline understanding of what fandom is into but… there are problems those statistics have and reveal.
The last time I talked about her stats was in Lies Fandom Tells About Why Black Characters and Celebrities Don’t Get Shipped and I still stand by everything there, of course. Because we’re told that the reason why there are never more than three Black characters on stats like Centrumlumina’s are because Black people just aren’t in media fandom cares about. And instead of people thinking about their own interests or the fact that when mainstream media producers aim a product towards fandom… it’s not Black fandom or Black characters for fandom broadly… they just… handwave their own inability to give a shit about Black people and decide it’s not racism at all because they can gesture at all of the East Asian characters and celebrities they create and consume content for as if that… negates the many truths about racism in fandom.
(Racism, by the way, that shows in how these East Asian characters are treated like fantasy figures and divorced from their source cultures to the point where even East Asian fans who gently try to educate fandom on how to write these characters in their cultures get harassed for “making everything about race”.)
Anyway, I’m trying to figure out how to talk about fandom again and it’s hard… but seeing Centrumlumina still at it… helps.
Stitch's Media Mix 