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It'd be nice to have some stats on this, and I'm not broadly in contact with teenage girls but interacting with the younger generation of women in my family (nieces and some considerably younger cousins) I was taken aback by the interest in "nerd culture". There was always a contingent of women into anime and they're into the cosplay scene a bit, but the rise of D&D youtube/podcasts seems to have gotten a couple of them playing 5th edition. The mainstreaming of nerd culture and a good representation of nerd IP like Dune means that a lot of them went out and gave Dune or Lord of the Rings a read even if none of them read the Silmarillion or the Dune sequels.
It's just finding their niche as a large fish in a small foul fond. The quality of the men simping over them is abysmal, but the sheer quantity per one woman does translate into a quality of its own. I don't think I've ever seen female enjoyment of a hobby disentangled from social and status reasons.
Kids like wearing costumes. People who start cosplaying at like 11 or 12 because they like the costumes in the manga they read in the school library aren't in it to get simps.
It's difficult to fully disentangle any human behavior from social and status reasons, and anyone who has a hobby that's more popular with the opposite sex will have some dating advantages. Asserting women have no intrinsic enjoyment of hobbies is a misogynistic generalization.
I try very hard to bring my empathy for the opposite sex to the level they have for mine, thank you for noticing!
Low effort, not really an argument, excessively sarcistic
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I'm pretty young, clearly younger than @WhiningCoil and probably younger than most people here. I know like maybe three actual Star Wars fans, as in, are genuinely fans of the series, read fanfiction and expanded universe books, name their pets after characters from the films, not just 'oh yeah I watched it when I was a kid, it's cool', and all of them are girls. There are also tens of thousands of pieces of Star Wars fanfiction on archiveofourown.org and I think probably 80% of it is written by women and girls. I did just make that number up, but it feels right and there's absolutely no way it's less than 50%.
Entirely possible, even likely, that this was not the case a few decades ago.
This is distorted by the fact that most fanfiction period is written by women and girls, so it's not evidence of the gender ratio for the fandom itself.
I wouldn't count "Anakin thinks it's a great idea to spend the day at an amusement park, also having something else up his sleeve. Confessing his love to Obi-Wan!" as being genuinely a fan of the series.
The woke trend is clearly not what appeals to them about Star Wars. Look how few of them have Rey as a main character, for instance.
Since many of the writers are kids, "I watched it as a kid" isn't ruled out. Are they still going to be fans come next year?
The point isn’t the proportion of fanfic writers but that there is a lot of SW fanfiction and the majority of it is written by women, so clearly there are a lot of female SW fans.
I don’t see how writing Anakin/Obi Wan fanfiction makes one not a real fan. Elsewhere you call it a superficial engagement with the series but I’m not sure what a non-superficial engagement with Star Wars looks like. SW is about the good guys beating the bad guys with lasers, it’s not exactly Tolstoy.
Also, I think you picked the least ‘Star Wars-y’ story on the front page of Ao3 as an example.
Star Wars also isn't about hot young men having romantic relationships with each other. For most of the fanfiction that's being talked about here, someone who enjoys such fanfiction might be equivalent to someone who produces or consumes a porn parody featuring actors who look like Carrie Fischer or Mark Hamill boning each other while wearing costumes while being on sets that look like Star Wars. Producing or enjoying such films doesn't preclude one from being a "real" Star Wars fan for whatever "real" means (or more broadly fan of any particular franchise, with Star Wars just being the example here), but it's also not what I'd consider a particularly meaningful indication of being one, either. Particularly if it's their primary interaction with the Star Wars franchise - it's impossible to know how much this applies to fans of Star Wars fanfiction, though, of course.
Elsewhere in the thread people have talked about the SW fandom as people who play X-wing flight simulators or game out whether this or that piece of fictional tech would beat this or that piece of fictional tech. This sort of hard, numbers-crunching stuff may be more masculine-coded, but it isn't really any more Star Wars than writing about Luke and Han Solo making out. SW isn't a hard sci-fi pseudo documentary about Imperial military hardware. Nobody would have gone to see that movie. Lucas and his crew didn't put a fraction of the thought that 90s teenagers did into the actual mechanics of an AT-AT or the military doctrine of the 501st Legion. All that matters is that the empire are scary bad guys with big scary weapons. The fans have made that stuff up, as much as the fans have made up romances between Anakin and Obi Wan.
I'd argue that since space battles are a central theme to Star Wars while romantic or sexual relationships are, at best, tangential, that there's actually something more Star Wars about obsessing about power levels of fictional space fighter tech than about writing slash fiction of 2 or more of its characters. That said, indeed Star Wars isn't hard scifi, and I'd also argue that delving into the hard scifi aspects that it does have isn't automatically a meaningful indicator of being a "real" fan for whatever "real" means. If there were some massively popular website that hosted millions of fictional diagrams and spec sheets of fictional tech from thousands of fictional franchises, which catered to people who get great enjoyment out of seeing carefully laid out diagrams and pictures of screws and circuit boards and tables of numbers, then I'd argue that the being a consumer of Star Wars content in such a website doesn't meaningfully indicate being a Star Wars fan; rather, it'd be a greater indication of being a diagram fan. It could be either for any individual case, of course, and whatever website like this might exist, there isn't nearly the same volume of fans of fictional diagrams as fans of slash fiction, and as such the route that almost everyone will follow that ends with them obsessing over X-Wing fuel tanks or whatever is through being fans of Star Wars itself. The world of fanfiction, like with porn parodies, lends itself better to people who enjoy the genre of fanwork for its intrinsic qualities, with the specific franchise being spice that adds extra flavoring.
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My impression w/r/t fanfiction is that it runs kinda "orthogonally" to being a fan of a specific franchise: people doing it are fans of a specific modes of expression and specific story tropes, and they move across franchises an communities squashing the characters as they're actually written into their preferred archetypes, AUs and story beats. (As opposed, in the other extreme, to an obsessive curator on a spectrum who spend time cataloguing all eleventy gazillion kinds of spaceships that appeared tn the screen for 5 seconds in one episode in 1974.)
The publishing model of contemporary "young adult" book series and netflix shows seems to cater to such audience. I see it on my sister-in-law's tumblr - every other month there are new gifs with a new cast of completely interchangeable Blorbos, and the show inevitable won't be renewed for the 3rd season, but it doesn't matter, the viewers did their share of shipping and moved on. These days the viewers/readers don't even have to hallucinate homosexuality like they did in the case of Kirk, Frodo or Steve Rogers - the shows come with the batteries included, so to say.
I don't know if I agree with this. Now it's true that people who write fanfiction for one thing probably also like other things, and if they're the type of person who likes to write and read fanfiction then they will probably also write and read fanfiction about the other things they like, but that doesn't make them fans of fanfiction rather than fans of those particular stories. Obviously it varies from person to person, and some people have a deeper attachment than others, but my experience is that people who write fanfiction do it because they genuinely love the story and the characters, they've seen all the episodes/movies several times, they want to see those characters in new situations. Some people just move on when the show doesn't get renewed, but some people complain about the cancellation for months and years and keep watching the old episodes over and over.
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That probably heavily depends on the type of fanfiction, and that depends on the audience and the series.
I actually write for Worm, which as fanfiction is very unusual. It has a majority male fandom doing the writing and even though there's a noncanon (female) gay couple that appears in a lot of fanfic, I've never seen a fic which is mainly based around shipping them.
Out of curiosity, what is the general direction/thrust of Worm fanfic?
"author did it wrong, I'll fix it"?
"explore another character's perspective"
"I just want to play with these toys some more"?
Recommend any high quality ones?
1 and 3 mostly, but you see everything. Worm is also a very pessimistic setting so you see lots of stories that import powers from other series, or other kinds of overpowered ideas. Worm fanfics notoriously focus on Taylor a lot, though sometimes you'll see someone else.
Recommending anything would be controversial, and there are a couple of notorious cases of very long, popular, fics where nothing happens.
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Why not?
Granted it's not absolute proof that someone is a "real" fan of the series - they could just be using the characters without knowing much about the wider series itself - but it certainly doesn't count against them being a real fan either. In general I'd say that writing fanfic about a series does count as evidence for being a fan of the series.
Because it's inherently engaging with the series on a very superficial level.
Is it possible that they're a fan of the series anyway? Sure, but it's not the way to bet.
The girls who write that stuff have pored over thousands of Star Wars Wiki articles, watched every show and movie and combed through comics and books to get even the most obscure incidental backstory elements of their fanfic correct.
There's a spectrum. On the other end of that spectrum are those who put generic yaoi characters into SW skinsuits.
It happens with straight porn writing too and I don't assume that gay porn fics are any better about it.
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I'd say if you're at the point of writing fan fiction about a setting you're past the point of being "superficially" a fan of something.
A fan is not defined by how much they "get" their chosen obsession, it is defined by the level of enthusiasm/passion for it.
Being moved to write gay fanfiction that completely misses the point of the setting makes someone as much a fan as a person that memorises pointless trivia (who also misses the point of the setting, but in a male way rather than a female way).
See my other comment - I'd say that they are not superficial, but fanfic writers engage "across" the media, not "with" the media.
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Are they fans of Star Wars or are they fans of romance between attractive famous male actors that take place in an exotic setting? Star Wars, or any other IP, may be the vehicle here, rather than the object.
"Are they fans of Star Wars or are they fans of explosions and swordfighting?"
What exactly constitutes really liking Star Wars?
Once upon a time, I would have said it requires meaningfully engaging with the core themes of the work. The Zen-like sayings of Yoda which are some of our only glimpses into Jedi philosophy. The broad conflict between the light side and the dark side, and all the things those sides represent. With the light side representing love, friendship, individualism, courage and heroism, and the dark side representing fear, anger, hate, conformity and cowardice.
Star Wars wasn't queer. Star Wars wasn't commie or capitalist. Star Wars wasn't feminist and/or against the patriarchy. I get that people point to certain lines or characters and try to spin it at "Star Wars was really X" all along. But no. They were not core themes of Star Wars. You can see anything in anything if you are willing to squint hard enough at 6 hours of footage.
I do wonder sometimes what made Star Wars nerdy. In the sense that when I was a kid in the 90's, being a Star Wars fan was weird. I wasn't alive for it, but it was a massive nationwide phenomena when it came out. It's not like only nerds saw it. But I guess it was the nerds that stuck around for 20 years, watching the original Trilogy over and over again. Playing the West End Games RPG because they just didn't want to let go of the world. The EU didn't really start proper until the 90's. Return of the Jedi came out in 83! None of the Video Games were that good until Lucas Arts was finally allowed to make some, and that was in the 90's as well. Being a Star Wars fan in the late 80's and early 90's must have been profoundly lonely and boring.
I mean, Christ, I was hoping to find some documentation, but look at this downright quaint blog talking about Star Wars Celebration in 1999. Or this threadbare article about a 10 year anniversary convention for Star Wars in 1987.
Anyways, the point I was winding to, is that Star Wars has no core themes anymore. There is no longer anything there for a true fan to intellectually engage with. So the teen girl diddling herself to 80's Luke and modern Kylo Ren dicking down may as well be just as much a fan as anyone else geeking out over laser swords, cool looking space ships, or pausing the VHS at their favorite frame of the Twilek in the slave dress dancing and rubbing one out.
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Maybe you need to like the unique aspects of Star Wars to count as a Star Wars grognard. Telepathic monks with laser swords? But then there's the rest of the setting that doesn't feature Jedi at all.
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They are now. Which is why I'm not.
Back in my day, Star Wars fans played the West End Games version of the Star Wars RPG, the miniatures game, and fantasized over the source books. The latest and greatest Star Wars video games were X-Wing and Tie Fighter, which were super nerdy and demanding flight sims. Dark Forces had just come out too, and was super heavily teen boy coded. It was a 90's FPS after all.
That was the fandom.
Funnily enough, all the source material written for West End Games Star Wars RPG was sent to Zahn, and he used it to bootstrap his Thrawn trilogy.
So yeah, there was no "slash fiction". A lot of the creativity of the young fans I interacted with as a young fan myself was spent coming up with RPG ideas, sharing Star Wars total conversion WADs for Doom, using the source books to try to game out if a Wampa could defeat an AT-ST walker, etc. Or, since nobody had read all the EU fiction because there were no online book stores, or ebooks, or even a wikipedia of what all the EU books even were, we'd hear tales of this or that awesome droid or alien from the random jumble of EU books our parents had haphazardly found on a shelf for one of us.
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Latest scientific studies indicate that the share of gaming consoles owned by women (PDF, page 9) ranges from 42% to 52%. If companies take such data seriously, it seems reasonable that they would alter their artistic products for this seemingly new demographic.
This is quite consistent with them forcing the survey to be 50% female.
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I checked that PDF link and the data was 86% male which completely contradicts what you claimed.
Not sure if that was your point and you were trying to set up a contrast between "the science" and Nintendo's actual sales figures, but if so that didn't come through in the post.
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I would like to read that study in detail, but lets say a large amount of switch are purchased and played by women. Does it really make sense for game company to change strategy for the new release of fps/stategy/rpg game to appease (seemingly large) audience that just bought nintendo switch to play Animal Crossing 24/7?
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MMOs used to and still can have large female audiences. Pre-WoW days it was more common but you still see it in places that are more virtual worlds rather than focused on gear/grind/raids. Raiding especially the WoW flavor of it heavily gamified and tuned for a particular experience was a quirk of development/guild/recruiting interaction. Community content, roleplay, player housing/customization, cosmetics tend to be less of a boys club. FF14 is sometimes called an rpgmmo and seems like it has a much more balanced ratio.
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WoW specifically and post-WoW influenced MMOs I was referring to the deep lore, the legacy of steel.
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Most core WoW players (ie players who subscribe permanently rather than only for expansions, and who play many hours a week) don’t raid. Many levels alts, collect outfits/play Barbie, farm old instances for rare mounts, socialize, play minigames, do PvP or mythic dungeons, participate in the endgame single player treadmill (ie world quests or whatever they’re called now) etc etc.
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Interestingly, I feel like game studios have not been as catastrophically bad about this as hollywood. Generally the "audience shifting" controversies are pretty mild and course corrected quickly compared to Star Wars, Ghostbusters etc. It's funny because it seems like this whole thing got started with GamerGate but overall the big studios never totally lost their head, and I think nothing nearly as devastating as new Star Wars has happened to any IP. EA is the one company that I think has made the most missteps, but they were voted the worst company in the world so what do you expect.
The Last of Us 2 took a very progressive turn (including the replacement of the legacy male main character) that has arguably damaged the series irreparably.
Yes this is a more isolated example than the prevalence of the issue in film/tv.
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Developing video games is low status relative to working in Hollywood. Game dev is, on average, weighted toward hard skills where success in Hollywood is weighted toward soft social skills.
Game development on aggregate isn't any more technical than making a movie anymore IMO. We aren't in the 90's where making a game started with building an engine. The bulk of videogames released each year are indie games where the workload of programming is probably less than the art required to fill the space (which is also often just bought from the unity asset store).
If anything you are correct just because it takes literally 0 social skills to solo dev a game, while making a movie usually requires actors, whom would likely need some form of interaction to help guide them. Has there ever been a successful "solo dev" movie?
Point being that success in hollywood isn't really based on soft social skills, but movie making has a baseline requirement for social skills that game dev doesn't have. I imagine however that rubbing the right elbows will get you just as far in Rockstar Games as it would in Disney Films, provided you have a reason to be in the room in the first place.
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No, they are just boiling the frog slowly, which is the smart way to do it. All gamergate did was give them a solid enemy to point to when anyone mouths off, and as a result this has invoked the chilling effect, leaving gamers afraid of speaking out. So nobody complains much* when Viking women get as much respect as men while they conquer a Britain, or make world war 2 games starring black girls, or "play it safe" and give you a white male protagonist in a world where every other hero is a woman or minority and every other white man is at best broken, if not outright evil. Not even call of duty or halo were safe from this.
*When I say nobody complains much I mean to the same extent as when a developer fucks up the ending to a game.
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When they read such things, did they like them?
With enough pressure, you can attract audiences to lots of things that they don't like... once. Then they try them, decide they don't like them, and go away.
They liked them but didn't obsess over them, but the Tolkein legendarium became a sort of quasi sacred text for a generation of nerds and it doesn't feel like it is on that level of significance to them. The movies they're pretty obsessed with, and Harry Potter and animes I don't keep track of are pretty big with them.
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