#this is my persuasive essay on why Mei Thursday should be more popular

[sophoscorner]

As long as I’ve been on Tumblr I have seen posts talking about how undervalued women are in fandom, and I’ve nodded along, reblogged and moved on with my life. Occasionally I’ve tried to figure out how one would solve this problem at least in their own fandom experiences, and I’ve never had an answer, but today I am here to tell you: the answer is Mei. 

I’m 100% joking, but also so serious. Mei is the most undervalued character in lmk and she deserves so much more love. She is the only girl in the main cast (I’m counting red son as a boy because that’s what he is in cannon) and she has so many cool things about her. She’s literally descended from dragons, she has a complex relationship with her parents, trouble sharing her feelings and asking for help, and she HOSTED LITERAL WORLD ENDING FLAMES, but when you look at her followers on tumblr you’d think she doesn’t do much.

(Pigsy did not make it on this graph because he doesn’t have his followers listed on his tag page)

Before I carry on with all this data analysis I want to say that I’m not shaming any specific people for not being particularly interested in Mei. The important thing when it comes to biases isn’t one specific case it’s trends, so it’s not about whether you like Mei, it's about whether you have a tendency to think guy characters are more interesting to talk about them more. 

Anyways, when you look at Ao3 tags you may think that Mei has just as many fics about her as a lot of the main cast (minus the main character and the gay monkeys of course), but when you filter for fics tagged with Mei in them you’ll find a frustrating amount that have her as a supporting character or worse mentioned that one time. The thing about tagging characters is you’re not saying the fic is about them you’re saying the fic has them as part of the plot, and so most of her popularity comes from being an amazing best friend, matchmaker and a party animal instead of any of her internal conflicts.

To find fics that were actually about Mei (to some degree) I filtered for the tags Mei-centric and Mei Needs a Hug,and the results were much different. Mei’s number of fics is around how many Tang has. She has 10 more Needs a Hug fics than him, and he has 10 more -centric fics than her. The only character she’s beating out is Pigsy whose -centric tag doesn’t even have it’s own page yet.

Probably the most popular aspect of fandom (for better or worse) is shipping, and there’s a surprising lack of shippable characters in lmk. With the brotherhood and older demons there’s some variation, but for the stoplight trio they really only have each other (at least from what I’ve seen), and when you look at the popularity (on Ao3) of the different ships the results are… decisive. The most popular ship in the trio is MK/Red Son and the runner up Mei/Red Son has only 1/5 of the fics. I personally only really like MK/Red SOn and the whole trio shipped together (poly ships aren’t as popular), but I’m still surprised that Mei/Red Son, which is the one most supported by cannon in my opinion, is so much less popular. 

Unlike the others this isn’t really me saying Mei absolutely should be shipped more, but shipping is pretty much always correlated to how popular a character is in fandom so I thought it was worth mentioning.

I don’t really know what to say at the end of this. I’m not much of a analyzer or a headcanoner. I don’t know how to delta every interesting thing I love about her. Please just take a second to appreciate Mei and all that she’s been through. Maybe partake in Mei thursday every once and awhile or just talk about her more. I don’t know, I just wanted to make a bunch of graphs about it. (Thank you @mythicalmagical-monkeyman for inspiring this <3)

Also this started as a fic rec list (that’s why Ao3 comes up so much), so if you have any Mei fics you like pls send em on over.

#I was gonna post this last Thursday but I couldn't figure out how to start it #Mei thursday #this is my persuasive essay on why Mei Thursday should be more popular #lmk #lmk mei #long xiaojiao #this was inspired by not finding a whole lot of Mei fics #also shoutout to whoever wrote and drew that samadhi fire Mei and Red Son comic on tumblr #bc that's the first thing I think of when it comes to good Mei art #can you tell spreadsheets drive me insane?