Fictional Fans

It is true that many sources are short female characters. I think I read that on average (which means some sources are much worse) there is one significant woman to every five men of note.

I was also around for how Samantha Carter was treated- sometimes the reasonable anger towards TPTB got directed at the character or in fact Amanda Tapping, and instead of critiquing the poor writing and directing choices of Canon (I'm staring right at Stalker Peter) fandom leaned into the vexing character beats.

AO3 is a slash juggernaut; many of the older zine fandoms that were het either never made transition to the internet or are still on private archives/author websites. Remington Steele and Scarecrow & Mrs. King are two I've read in, and I've written a little of the first.

In the wake of the excellent acceptance speech of the henceforth Astounding New Writer Award, I think we should examine Why and How we've got the media and fandom landscape that we do. Some of it is works that do have women in better proportions so satisfy their audience writing fanfiction isn't the itch that say The Sentinel was during original broadcast. I've not run any statistics but my gut sense (from mailing lists) is due South fandom produced fewer procedural stories than comparable media. The niggle that sent fans to their keyboards were relationship based, whether that was slash, het, gen, or the elusive femslash.