#category: f/m

[lockwood-fic-recs]

my heart's on fire & the flame grows higher

by menina123 on ao3

Rating: T | Category: F/M | Relationship: Lockwood/Lucy

“Yes, I suppose it is just the two of us,” Lockwood said. “We can’t reschedule on this late notice. Everyone else will just miss out on the fun then, won’t they, Luce?”

“Yep.” Lucy’s mood instantly brightened at the idea of an adventure with Lockwood, and she smiled at him.

After the rest of Lockwood & Co. backs out at the last minute, Lucy and Lockwood escape to a cottage in the countryside for a celebratory Christmas weekend on their own. Christmas activities ensue (and yes, there's obviously only one bed).

#rating: t #category: f/m #fic rec #ship: locklyle #character: anthony lockwood #character: lucy carlyle #canonverse #canon divergent #book spoilers: major #book spoilers: teg #book spoilers: tcs #misc: one bed wednesday #misc: christmas #lockwood-fic-recs #lockwood & co #lockwood and co #lockwood and co fanfiction #status: completed #length: oneshot #author: menina123

[destinationtoast]

Toastystats: F/F, F/M, & M/M on AO3

Chapter 3: Ratings & Smut

New chapter up! One of the main things I've found is that if we look at how likely each relationship category is to be explicit, F/F < F/M < M/M:

And (as @flourish put it on @fansplaining episode Femstats February) it's not just that F/F is less likely to be tagged Explicit -- it's more likely to be tagged General Audiences (the Teen and Mature and Not Rated ratings are similarly likely in all the categories).

(This isn't mainly due to word count differences, btw -- it turns out that this "explicitness gap" exists for fanworks of every length I investigated! See the chapter for more graphs/discussion.)

One thing I wondered about was how much of this was due to the source material -- e.g., I know there are some canon F/F cartoon pairings, and what if it turned out that a lot of people liked to write F/F cartoon fic that is rated GA? To try to factor out that kind of source material bias, I decided to also look at ratings for Original Work posted to AO3:

Whoa! It turns out a WAY HIGHER percentage of Original Work is explicit than for fanworks, in all categories. Interestingly, F/M and M/M are equally likely to be explicit when you look at Original Work. But F/F is still less likely to be have the Explicit tag than the others. I'd love to hear thoughts/theories about this!

I also looked at reader feedback. When we look at the fanworks with the most kudos, we get a different ratings breakdown again:

Amongs the most popular works, F/F is once again less likely to be tagged Explicit than F/M and M/M -- but it's more likely to be adult (Explicit + Mature). And now F/M is most likely to be tagged General Audiences.

Also interesting: Explicit works get more kudos on average than the other ratings, regardless of whether the fanworks are F/F, F/M, or M/M. (See graphs and further discussion in the chapter.)

Read more on AO3 for more analyses of what people write and how readers respond -- including a look at the most common sex acts and kinks that get tagged. (Also see the chapter for corrections, clarifications, methods, and deeper discussions.)

#femslash #f/f & f/m & m/m #fandom stats #ao3 #ratings #relationship categories #toastystats #op #50 #100

[altschmerzes]

i log onto ao3, i see something marked as gen fic and tagged exclusively with Character/Character tags and has “#Romance” in the additional tags section and in the description is like “some established relationship fluff!”

i look directly into the camera and sigh so hard i simply disintegrate into dust

#gav gab #WHACKING SHIP FIC IN THE GEN CATEGORY WITH A BROOM #GET THAT OUTTA HERE!!! GO AWAY!!!!!!! #this one was so direct too lmao it wasn’t even your usual like #‘well they’re GONNA end up together but nobody’s making out yet tee hee’ bullshit lmao #it was straight up just tagged romance #lmfao. gang it’s hard out here. #‘but people don’t know what that means!!’ it’s in a list of things you pick the other options for which #are things like ‘m/f’ and ‘m/m’ and ‘f/f’ #and you have to mark a rating for the fic separately #and the faq is right there if you’re confused #come on now.

[strongermonster]

my household got one of the randomly assigned transportation surveys and this is a minor thing to be :) about but with all The Other Shit going on in the world, it's nice to see the ontario government not only keeping this up, but having really good phrasing :')

#it's so so so minor but feels Good to see #MTO said ''ok trans rights'' #jj stuff #i remember the first times i saw something other than m/f/don't want to say #or when they added the ability to have your sex changed on ID #you can change it to X for free with literally no hoops to jump through #just show up and ask for it and it's done #i'm still so nervous of putting anything in the 'other' category unless it's explicitly a queer-run/related survey #bc i'm worried they'll have some kinda internal ''ok they picked a weird one throw out the results'' #like that time ubisoft cancelled a survey if you put woman #or how my work engagement surveys secretly throw out yours if you answer too negatively #or that time bungie sent me a d2 related email and when i put female/higher education i got sent to the #''ok thank's the quiz is done now'' after TWO QUESTIONS

[femslashspuffy]

Pov you open up the shipwars tumblr poll of some new gay ship vs someone else:

Normal ship, long runner, for fun fans: haha yeah we're so much better I love this ship this ship is so good this ship for the win yeah kill them guys this ship SWEEP

New gay ship everyone thinks is so enlightened fans: I can't believe people aren't voting for stock ship don't they know they literally kissed on screen. Sorry your ship didn't kiss but this was just introduced and the actors have the bare minimum of chemistry. Also it's so mean for you guys to make fun of our ship like you're all being homophobic right now* I can't believe you all hate gay people.

*both ships are gay

#rehks rants #is this too mean? #bubbline #haha I finally figured out how to spell it #destiel #discourse #ship war #guys it was supposed to be fun we were having fun #and they have the GALL to be all offended when they went up against bubbline as if they weren't saying bad things about destiel #just last week #'oh but Crowley and Aziraphale aren't men' yeah maybe so but the fandom sits on the m/m category #SORRY that people (me) wanted to give a chance to an f/f ship #or didn't you hear we JUST reached a million fics total with that tag #anyways I should probably go back and black out their names but I won't

[excelsiorfics]

promises

Date: Jan 7, 2024 Author: madadlorian Rating: Teen Word Count/Status: 4,352, complete Dynamic: Miguel O'Hara/Xina Kwan Characters: Miguel O'Hara, Xina Kwan Tags: Xina Knows, Pregnancy Scare, Stuck In Past AU, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort

Summary:

She was late.

The last time this had happened was because of the culmination of a month of work on a multi-dimensional interface for Lyla’s new system. But this time… there wasn’t anything to cause her this much stress. Sure, she was trapped in the past with Miguel. But that wouldn’t warrant a three week late period.

And then she remembered what had happened a few weeks ago, when she had finally agreed to move in with him.

#rating: teen #uni: 2099 #team: spider-man 2099 #char: miguel o'hara #char: xina kwan #dyn: miguel o'hara/xina kwan #tag: pregnancy scare #tag: fluff #tag: hurt/comfort #tag: xina knows #length: 1k to 5k #status: complete #category: one-shot #rel: m/f

[alaynestone]

hi. is character x oc the same thing as character x reader and bad? some talk about it interchangeably but then others don't and was curious your opinion on it give your post

the thing you need to understand about reader insert is that it really wasn't a thing before the last 5 years or so. the closest thing we had to that was the original (usually female) character, the infamous mary sue.

i think coming up with an original character is definitely more creative. for starters, it requires some characterization even if the characterization is usually that of a generic young adult heroine designed to be relatable to the reader. it certainly beats y/n in terms of effort, and it's not surprising that canon character/original female character never had the numbers on ao3 that character/reader does. the content of those fics was never as simple as "tommy shelby compliments your outfit and you blush". they took more time to write and at least were more complex than your average reader imagine. i'm not a fan but i definitely respect them more.

#tommy shout out to lisa who i know suffers going into the tags #i think it should just stay a wattpad thing. you wouldn't put a random headcanon text post about your ship on ao3 either #i wish it was its own category if we absolutely have to endure it #like you have gen m/f m/m etc and then you have readerinsert #so you can check that box to exclude from the search and have it catch everything

[crunchyharold]

i posted a fanfic. it’s sadie/vito. i know. i know. but i did it for the funnies. please read it to make the past few hours worth it.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/43246965

#selecting the F/M category was so weird #i mean everything about this was weird but doing that was weird too #total drama #td #td sadie #td vito #ur welcome /j #mine #total drama island #tdi #tdroti #YOU ARENT ESACPIGN THSI

[emeraldcreeper]

The way books are marketed now gives me fucking hives like it’s cool that you can find a romantic comedy where there’s fake dating (which is less fun when it’s characters I have to learn to care about it seems or I read a Bad One) but like I get so frustrated when all I read on a review is “this sapphic romance with xyz and trope trope trope is soooo spicy!” Just say it’s a romantic comedy with sex scenes, half the time they’re bad and awkward I just want lesbian porn that’s done well! And ain’t spiiicy scenes like cool I’d love to see good ones that aren’t written in to be there to say it’s spicy gimmie good porn in the romance novel make me love the characters instead of going oh they tick 3/5 diversity boxes that’s… so cool.

#I also forgot that sapphic ≠ lesbian so I accidentally read an awful m/f romance that was so British i dnf’ed it #I just want good romance novels and I feel like I’ve read them all now #and I hate ya I wanna see 40 year old women FUCK #I like new adult it’s fun ya is fine I’m just aged out of it most of the way so I just sorta go awwww babies! #instead of oh yes my age group #I just trawled a fucking book blog for sapphic books and got angry #when it’s tagged like fanfic I don’t know who the characters are #fics are tagged like that cause you care about the characters already #you don’t have to SAY it’s rivals to lovers say it’s a steamy romance between rivals who discover their relationship is a bit more than that #is it booktok books yeah but I can’t fucking find lesbians making out anywhere goddamn else #I think I’m gonna reduce myself to going back on goddamn goodreads #plus lgbt is in one category and I like m/m romance just fine but I’d like separate categories #so I don’t squint and ask myself if that’s a woman or not #I finished a very good series and I’m mad I can’t find more like it that’s my issue

[bmpmp3]

i consider myself a bit of a connoisseur of besties-turned-lovers stories but one thing that has always bothered me a little is when the besties actually become lovers and then the relationship loses all bestie-itude LIKE correct me if im wrong but i feel like these things aren’t usually mutually exclusive... i see it more often with m/f besties but i see it with same gender, etc besties on occasion too and like. YES its realistic that friendships change their dynamics over time (even without turning into lovers) but i always see this thing where these two besties get together and then are immediately like “but i CANT dick around with my bestie anymore because theyre also my significant other” you could if you werent a coward. can’t u dick around with ur bestie romantically. can’t you dick around with ur partner bestie-ly. what am i not getting here

#and i mean maybe its because i do enjoy a m/f relationship often in a very bisexual and mildly genderly sort of way #that this character relationship development style is so like. alien and bizarre to me. what am i not understanding #had pacific rim on the mind and i was thinking about some m/f besties i like. mako and whats his nuts #(sorry i really like his character but i havent seen that movie in like 7 years orz) #i really adore their relationship as besties and also i do like the fun little flirty scenes they had a couple times in the movie too #thats a m/f bestie couple i quite like in like a romantic and platonic way folded over itself. if that makes sense #i think its very sweet and awesome. mako deserves a handsome bestie to flirt with. as a treat #thank god they never removed any bestieness from their relationship. even in the goofy flirty scenes they had they were still bestieing #thank u mr del toro #wait sorry now im thinking about mixed gender besties. i love mulder and scully of course we all do #and in the three seasons ive seen ive come to the conclusion i like them in the sense that like #theyre platonic theyre romantic theyre both theyre neither theyre something else entirely #but most importantly. theyre scully and mulder LOL #its a category in and of itself. a very interesting form of besties #oh and recently ive been rewatching elementary since i never saw the past the first season #that one as of the season ive seen i adore fully and completely platonically. oh these guys are very platonic besties #only sherlock story on earth where sherlock and watson are purely platonic LOL #god their relationship is great. oh speaking of platonic im still like fascinated with that one webcome i never finished. villainess no more #i think thats what it was called. someday i'll finish it. its fun and the romance is sweet but i still like. #kinda liked their relationship more when they were just besties at first sight. marriage of convenience turned platonic besties #probably not intentional from the author. sorry. im a sucker for romance so thats kinda new for me too #theres so many variety of bestie. so many layers. its a rich artform: the bestie

[hirokiyuu]

idk if id argue nem is Canonically a Lesbian but i do think writing her that way is really fun wwwww

#even in a colony where dating nayone is ok its like. still hard to figure out whats a crush and whats not #and i think her feelings for vace being rooted in trauma is just. interesting and fun LOL #idk exocolonist does gender+sexuality in fun ways and i vibe #tbh ive been thinking while writing teenexo fic abt how like. m/m f/f m/f are kidn of like..... reductive categories #its hard to tag some of my sol stuff sometimes bc theyre on like 3d gender chess levels u kno #agender sol using he/him out of laziness dating dys. its not m/m but tagging it as a catchall 'other' also feels kind of weird i wont lie #genderfluid lesbian sol dating nem i dont want to tag as f/f but also what else am i gonna tag it #i dont want ppl thinking its m/f bc its not. even when its Boy Day its not quite f/f u kno #IDK ITS JUST INTERESTING anwyays play teenexo. join me in thinking #teenexo stuff #makes this non rebloggable and adds the Im Cis! disclaimer wwww #these are just my personal thoughts but u kno. u kno.

[lockwood-fic-recs]

can't leave the night

by synestheticwanderings on ao3

Rating: T | Category: F/M | Relationship: Lockwood/Lucy

Quietly, he got out of bed, taking a glance at the clock on his bedside. It was 4am. This was becoming a habit, since Lucy came home, checking to make sure she was still there, still alive, still breathing. Checking to make sure she really had come home, that the one good thing that came out of that iron circle hadn’t been a dream.

(Lockwood has been sneaking up to the attic after the events of The Creeping Shadow to make sure Lucy’s really home safe at Portland Row. One night, he’s finally caught.)

#rating: t #category: f/m #ship: locklyle #warnings: none #book spoilers: major #book spoilers: tcs #length: multichap #status: completed #fic rec #part of a series #character: anthony lockwood #character: lucy carlyle #misc: sharing a bed #misc: nightmares #misc: fluff and angst #canonverse #pov: lucy carlyle #lockwood-fic-recs #lockwood & co #lockwood and co #lockwood and co fanfiction #author: synestheticwanderings

[destinationtoast]

Toastystats: F/F, F/M, and M/M on AO3

I'm starting to post my deep dive stats that started out as me looking into "F/F vs. M/M on AO3" -- it has turned out to be really useful and interesting to include F/M in most of these analyses (I'd like to also look more at other categories eventually; see further discussion about nonbinary characters). Here are some of the topics I'll be covering: Length, Ratings & Smut, Dark content, Tags & tropes, Growth rate, and Case studies of parallel-ish ships of different genders.

You can read the intro & fanwork length chapter now, and more will be posted soon! You can also listen to me discuss a bunch of the data on the latest @fansplaining episode, Femstats February.

Below are some excerpts of the fanwork length chapter -- but please click through to AO3 for elaboration/clarification/corrections, as well as for descriptions of the images.

---

(Terminology: "F/F-focused" means I filtered out every other relationship category else except "Gen," so as to remove ambiguity, and similar for F/M- and M/M-focused.)

A few observations:

These breakdowns are a lot more similar than I’d expected. There are differences, but they’re not overwhelming. It’s not like F/F is mostly just drabbles.

F/F does have the highest proportion of short fic, followed by F/M, and then M/M...

But the long fic end of the scale isn’t what I expected at all! M/M is the least likely to have works over 50K words (this graph doesn't actually show the decimal points due to lack of space, but M/M only has 2.0% of its works above 50K words, while F/F has 2.4% over 50K). And F/M is the most likely to have [works over 50K words]!

....Next, I wanted to look at reader response to long fic.... First, let's look at the word count breakdown for the works with the most kudos...:

We can see that, probably unsurprisingly, many of the works that receive the most kudos are long -- but I was surprised how strong that bias is. Nearly half of these popular works in the F/F and F/M categories are over 50K+ words (I -- or someone else -- should follow up by further subdividing the "over 50K" category, but I haven't done so yet; for now I only used the same word count buckets that I used previously.). Surprising to me is that M/M has a lot more shorter works that get a lot of kudos; only around 1/3 of the M/M works with the most kudos have over 50K words. I'd be curious to hear any theories about why this is.

....Okay, so lots of popular fic is long -- not too surprising. But now let's flip things around. instead of looking at how long popular fic is, let's look at how much reader feedback long fic gets, and see if any category clearly gets the most or least feedback.

For this, I took a very specific slide of [long fic]: works 100K words to 101K words long. I did that because I wanted to compare long fic of the same length across the different categories. But these specific numbers are therefore not accurate for most definitions of "long fic," and should not be taken too seriously -- hence the asterisks on the following slides (Edit to clarify: I did also look at a couple other long slices to check that these general patterns seem to hold... but I haven't confirmed it for all long fic). I did this just to try to get a rough sense of the ranking or the categories. Let's take a look:

Wow! I was surprised to see that F/F averages the most kudos! And that F/M gets the least of all these types of feedback by quite a lot!

Is this because readers don't seek out F/M as much as the other works? Or is it because F/M readers don't tend to leave as much feedback after they read something? To answer this, we need to look at the number of hits (views) that each category gets:

Fascinating! F/F long fic gets the largest number of hits on average. (Maybe this is because F/F works are the rarest, so more people seeking out long F/F fic view each fanwork, on average, as compared to the other categories?) And we can see that F/M long fic gets the fewest hits per fanwork. (Again, maybe this is because there are a lot of long F/M fics out there, so there's less scarcity, and fewer people view each one?)

Okay, so to follow up on the question of whether F/M readers are less likely to leave feedback after viewing a work -- we can compare rates of feedback. For each work I calculated kudos/hits (I actually looked at kudos per 1000 hits to make the numbers easier to think about), and then I took the median of all those numbers to find average feedback rate. I did the same for comments and bookmarks:

The main takeaway here is that the reader feedback rates are remarkably similar. (Again, this is based on one narrow slice of long fic, so I wouldn't take the small differences here seriously.) More people view F/F long fic on average, and fewer people view F/M long fic -- but the rate at which they leave feedback appears to be roughly the same across all categories.

---

Read more on AO3 (including analyses of drabbles and one shots)

#fandom stats #toastystats #ao3 #relationship categories #f/f & f/m & m/m #though my original tag was #f/f vs. m/m #when this was an earlier wip #word count #op #long post #50 #100

[cosmosrival]

outgrew my otome game phase when i invented altie to be honest. like she popped into my mind and i knew otome game mcs would never be her. when they'll make an otome with a playable mc thats like makima then i will go back in there

#obm isnt an otome btw its a dating sim aka other category #if i have to enjoy m/f romance the roles have to be 100% switched #assertive woman timid man and everything inbetween #basically lesbian yaoi

[waitingforminjae]

#f: vincenzo #f: bulgasal #p: lee joon #m: 2pm #the category is actors who went on set and had the time of their LIFE in their fucked up dramatic villain role

[excelsiorfics]

Coffee Disrupted

Date: Oct 31, 2022 Author: Sand3 Rating: General Word Count/Status: 1,579, complete Dynamic: Akihiro/Aurora, Jean-Paul Beaubier/Kyle Jinadu, Jean-Paul Beaubier & Aurora Characters: Jean-Paul Beaubier, Aurora, Akihiro, Kyle Jinadu, Rachel Summers Tags: Krakoa Era, Anxiety, DID, Telepathy

Summary: An anxiety lingering in the back of Jean-Paul's mind is put to rest for a moment, and then he feels antagonized a moment later.

Series: Part 9 of Le Rayon Vert

#rating: general #uni: 616 #team: alpha flight #char: jean-paul beaubier #char: rachel summers #char: akihiro #char: jeanne-marie beaubier #char: kyle jinadu #dyn: akihiro/jeanne-marie beaubier #dyn: jean-paul beaubier/kyle jinadu #tag: krakoa era #tag: anxiety #tag: DID #tag: telepathy #length: 1k to 5k #status: complete #category: one-shot #rel: m/f