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Fanfiction is often praised as a space for diverse representation and engagement.1 And indeed, in shifting authority away from the producers of official culture, fanfiction attracts and makes space for diverse people while encouraging creative and critical expression.2 Fan practices can push source texts toward alternative storylines with unexpected character arcs or character “ships,” meaning pairings or relationships between characters. That does not mean, however, that fanfiction is inherently progressive; far from it. The social biases and exclusions that characterize our world and popular culture manifest in fanfiction too.
Consider, for instance, statistics on shipping in fanfiction. In 2012, fan writer centrumlumina began a macroanalytical or large-scale study of the racial politics of the most popular ships on Archive of Our Own (A03), one of the big online repositories of fanfiction. She discovered that year after year, the top most popular ships featured white characters only (centrumlumina, “AO3 Ship Stats”). Ships featuring non-white characters appear only further down the list, and tend to cluster below the top 50 out of 100 sampled. As she notes in her 2016 reflection on these annual Ship Stats, “Fandom’s Race Problem and the AO3 Ship Stats,” this pattern is problematic not merely because the top ships are glaringly white, but also because they are also dramatically more popular. Typically, a place twice as far down the list will have 1/3 fewer stories than those higher up. She reports, for instance, that in 2016, the top 10 spots on the list account for almost 30% of the fanworks listed, and the #1 pairing makes up 6% of the total. In an aggregated Top 100 across those four years (2012–2016), those two figures are even worse, at 37% for the top 10 and 8% for the #1 spot. “Fandom’s Race Problem” was met with defensive reactions by some fans invested in those top-ranked ships, but centrumlumina has continued her work. She was unable to generate Ship Stats for 2018, noting that AO3 had reconfigured its data such that her sampling methods would not work. Fortunately, she was able to resume the project for 2019, if unfortunately finding much the same pattern.3
Racism and white privilege in fandom have not been sufficiently confronted in fandom studies. In 2015...