#f/f ships

[manic-pixie-dick-girl]

You know how much it sucks that sapphics are so under-represented in fiction and fanfiction right? Like how it's so much harder for stories about sapphics to get published, how f/f ships on ao3, even the big ones, are like a quarter of the size of m/m ships. How we in our little sapphic fiction and fandom community on tumblr are like waaaaay smaller than our heterosexual and mlm counterparts? Because that really sucks!

So please don't then turn around and do the same thing to transfem sapphics inside our community. There's like, without exaggeration, maybe 20 published books about sapphic romances featuring a trans fem protagonist or love interest. It's not hard to get published, it's damn near impossible. There's barely any fanfic about us like there are just over a million f/f fics on ao3 and 9,000 of them are tagged as having a trans female character. Transfem sapphics basically don't exist in sapphic fiction. It really sucks.

I'll never forget searching through the "trans rights readathon" tag a few months ago excited to find more trans sapphic books. Only to find every reading list was between 95% and 100% by and about transmasculine people. Transmascs are great! Transmascs certainly need more representation too! But it kinda fucking stings to feel so excluded. Transfems need like 10x the amount of fiction written by and/or about us put out in the world just to get to the amount of "needs more rep" transmascs are at.

This all speaks to a broader undercurrent of transmisogyny in queer communities but we won't go into that, because you the person reading this are definitely an ally for trans fems and want sapphic spaces to truly welcome us. Otherwise a post from me wouldn't have reached your dash!

So what can you do? Write about us. Please. We basically can't get published, and nobody reads our shit on ao3. The next thing you write, put a sapphic trans woman in it. Or if you want EXTRA BONUS POINTS put a nonbinary transfem sapphic in there. Obviously I'd want it to be a protagonist or love interest but honestly even a prominent side character would make me very happy.

It's okay if you make mistakes! As long as you honest to god try. If you have questions you can ask transfem friends, mutuals, even just put em on tumblr. I would much much much rather see ten cis and transmasc sapphics attempt to write about trans women and get some things wrong, than see zero even try.

Good luck!

[emeoonbird]

novo ano, novos temas pro femslash february !! pra quem não sabe, esse é um evento onde você produz algum tipo de arte com ships sáficos (wlw, yuri ou f/f) com os temas sugeridos durante o mês inteiro !! é aceito fic, fanart, aqueles videozinhos de ship, gifsets, colagem de imagens/moodboards; basicamente qualquer tipo de produção artística que mova o fandom wlw <3 se tiver interesse, aqui estão...

meus temas de femslash february 2024:

1) “Isto me lembra de você.” • A cuida de um ferimento de B

2) categoria!au (tipo atla!au, mlb!au, ninjago!au, pmmm!au e afins) • “Eu estou contigo!”

3) hanahaki!au (pode ser criativo com essa trope !!) • seres sobrenaturais (vampiros, fantasmas, demônios, múmias, bruxas ou apenas monstros não -humanos)

4) omegaverse • “Estarei esperando por você.”

5) primeira vez • troca (de papéis no canon, de personalidade, de corpo, de escola, de lado numa batalha e etc)

6) deficiência (pode ser tanto levada como a palavra natural ou fazer personagens que tenham deficiências !!) • viagem no tempo (loop temporal conta !)

7) A surta porque B se feriu no meio da batalha • navios (pirata!au, marinha!au, viagem num navio, uma cena de pescaria e etc)

8) fantasia!au • “Por você, isso vale a pena.”

9) mundo apocalíptico (ataque zumbi, seres não conhecidos destruindo a terra, virose que está matando a população e etc) • a mimir (A observa B dormindo, ou ambas dormindo juntas e etc)

10) “Se eu tiver que lutar com Deuses para te ter, eu irei.” • Memórias

11) dificuldade de comunicação (falam linguas diferentes, uma muda ou uma surda tentando conversar com um falante/ouvinte, seres de espécies diferentes com linguagem não aproximadas e etc) • Casamento

12) Inimigas para amantes • A se sente segura com B

13) toques físicos (mãos dadas, abraços, aperto no ombro, cafuné no cabelo, beijo — sfw ou nsfw) • características animais (híbridos, pode se transformar em um animal e etc)

14) dia livre !

15) tatuagem • “Você é a única pessoa que eu poderia pedir ajuda.”

16) relacionamento a distância • máfia!au (italiana, japonesa, *brasileira*.... tanto faz)

17) reencarne suas lésbicas (oposto de 'enterre seus gays' trope) • fazer a maquiagem/cabelo da outra

18) “Você quer que eu pare?” • namoro falso

19) domesticidade • amor proibido

20) found family • ternos

21) asas (pode ser metafórico ou não !) • “Só tem a gente aqui.”

22) intenso contato visual • usar sobrenome/codenome em público vs usar o nome/apelido no privado

23) 'proctetive character' (si, a tag do ao3) • “Eu não vou te deixar morrer hoje!”

24) viajar na estrada • B é guarda-costas de A

25) luto • “Eu poderia te devorar agorinha!”

26) isekai • eu, você e ela/policasal

27) agentes secretas!au (fbi, csa, kgb, espiãs, charlie's angels/as panteras e etc) • “Eu morreria por você.”/“Eu mataria por você.”

28) mitologia/folclore!au • desentendimentos

29) colegas de quarto • “Por que você me ama?”

caso tenha curiosidade, aqui está a lista com os temas do ano anterior !! sinta-se livre pra usar qualquer um dos temas da minha lista <3 só peço para que, caso o faça, me avise para eu divulgar a sua arte também !! eu continuarei postando as minhas fics na coleção do ao3. se for fazer fic e também quiser participar, poderá colocá-la ali — mas não é obrigatório !!

que 2024 traga mais ships sáficos pra gente <3

[becuzmdsaidineededpersonality]

[kimiko24]

Me when I see a picture of ✨The Character™✨:

[nathaniacolver]

arcane ships be like

i love a show that teaches equality (😭😭😭)

[kakusboyfriend]

Robot characters who are given names like SL-308-62 but instead of their human friend going Well let's call you Sally for short, they instead ask the other if they Like their current name.

"Do you like your serial number?" they ask. "Yes, quite. It reminds me of who I am" the robot replies. "I have heard others like me go by different names after some time, and maybe one day I'll choose one for myself, too. But right now that is my full name, yes" they continue.

Because it's not your decision to make whether or not the robot will receive a new name. It should be theirs only. What's the difference? One is more complex and the other is simplified. They were both given by strangers instead of themselves.

"62 will do," they conclude. "It's my model number - there will be no other 62 after me."

[lovipop]

What selfshipping is like

[iyamifucker]

“I can fix him” I couldn’t fix him and I don’t want to. I think he grew prone to biting and scratching in order to get by in a harsh world, and to me his resilience is part of what makes him so beautifully himself. I could be kind to him, though. I could show him gentleness. I could, slowly but surely, in the same way one earns the trust of a skittish stray cat, convince him that my touch will never come accompanied by pain. That, around me, he can allow himself to be soft. To relax. I could be the one he associates with warmth and safety, the one he longs to be held by after a hard day. I could be his home.

[bitty-bytes]

"Your boyfriend is evil!" "Your boyfriend is cruel and horrifying!" Well, he's a joy to me. Maybe it's a you problem.

[starryy-ships]

i miss him (fictional character)

[neon-junkie]

what do you mean hes fictional. i need him

[deathdetermineslife]

"I don't want ppl to think I'm cringe—" NO. you go draw yourself smooching that fictional character RIGHT NOW. they LOVE YOU. be FREE. you have an entire community of ppl who support you, now shoo, go write that drabble!

[selfshipping-haven]

that's the mood for tonight amirite fellas

[cacodaemonia]

Just to give folks visuals to support what you said about the overwhelming majority of fandoms being very small, I wanted to link to one of @toastystats's great fandom statistics posts: The Sizes of Fandoms on AO3.

It's also on AO3:

Toast has also put together tons of stats relating to femslash here.

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/746553097204203521/the-fandom-hates-women-response-to-lack-of-ff

The "fandom hates women" part of it comes from the fact that fandom as an entity just doesn't watch the kind of media that draws femslash, even if it ticks all of the boxes of things those very same people say they like. There are so many times I've watched a show that I've seen mega-popular Tumblr posts wishing existed, and then the fandom is so, so small comparatively and often in general. There have been superheroes, vampire/supernatural shows, fantasy shows, movies, books, the list goes on, that feel like they were generated out of Tumblr's desires for ideal fandom media, and everyone knows they're never going to attract anywhere near the same attention for fandom and fanworks because the common denominator just tends to be that if there isn't a full ensemble of attractive men to ship either with each other or with the women, fandom's not interested.

So it's not about prioritizing women in that sense, it's about people witnessing hypocrisy over and over again the second a show doesn't have a mostly-male ensemble. The people who are in these fandoms are frustrated that good faith attempts to get people interested are met with every excuse in the book that all eventually boils down to "I don't like watching stuff with women in it as much as I like watching stuff with men in it." And if that's how people feel about it... sometimes the conclusions are going to turn into the more uncharitable take of "fandom hates women."

--

Maybe, but whenever I see a "fandom hates women" reblog of my stuff, one or two reblogs further down the chain I get an overt TERF. I just had to go block several people today, in fact.

The first person to reblog with a comment like that is usually subtle, but their friends and friends of friends are not. The rhetoric that very quickly starts is the fandom equivalent of that "All the butches are becoming trans men! We're losing lesbians!" stuff.

Here's the thing: I've been in ten billion fandoms that were so awesome and fit fandom's supposed tastes to a T and yet no amount of promoting them could get anyone to try the canon. This goes for canons that are all men or all white men or all majority ethnicity men or whatever else.

The default state of media is to not engender a big fic fandom.

I agree that the rare outliers mostly follow certain patterns, but we extrapolate too far when we say that a lack of those patterns is why a fandom is small.

A fandom is small because that's the near-universal default.

--

Yes, a small slice of fandom consists of guilt-ridden queer fujoshi who say they want more f/f but don't make much of a move to make that happen. I tend to run into that a lot because of my own tastes and having friends who share those tastes.

Far more of fandom is people talking generally about how representation matters without saying they would personally join these fandoms if they existed.

Neither group is large enough to be the real reason some woman-heavy canon fails to take off to HP levels.

The real reason is not hypocrisy but the fact that most things don't take off like that. Most things without massive, massive audiences especially don't take off like that. And the very few things that do are flukes and don't actually predict that another similar thing will take off in the future.

--

Go to AO3's tag search. Search for all canonical fandom tags. Sort by uses and descending order.

Right now, I get 64,390 tags.

The first page, 50 tags, goes from HP with 497,845 works to the Thor movies with 59,266 works. By page 6, we're below 10 thousand works.

By the end of page 10, we're down to Labyrinth with 3,906.

Somewhere in the top 500 AO3 fandom tags (many of which are just franchise metatags for each other), we go all the way from megafandoms to medium size and down to relatively modest ones.

That's not a lot of room for a big f/f-heavy fandom given the trends in mainstream media and that mainstream media is where most really big fandoms come from.

--

I also notice that you're conflating a lack of desire to watch something that's primarily about women with a lack of desire to watch something that includes women.

There are tons of fans who want something more like The Mummy with a leading man and leading woman they love.

Granted, that's not me and that's not a lot of my fujoshi/slasher audience, but it's extraordinarily common. I know plenty of people who don't like canons that are only dudes, but since they also don't like canons that are only ladies and they don't ship f/f, this gets spun into "fandom hates women".

--

Let me be clear:

Conflating "lesbians" and "women" is a radfem position.

[blueroseevergreen]

Me functioning by pretending I’m married to a fictional character.

[donahdevotees]

she's a fictional character to YOU. I know her personally