[Poll] The Science of Slashiness

[thefourthvine]

Recently, cimness posted a graph of genius, comparing level of canon gay and quality of canon writing across several fandoms.

I, of course, immediately looked at it and thought: this calls for science. Because clearly what we need are definitive numbers for each of these values for many, many fandoms, so that they can be plotted on graphs. This will make me HAPPY. Possibly it will also make you happy - or perhaps you are just interested in increasing overall happiness in the universe! - in which case I direct you behind the cut.

ETA: lolitakun has provided us with some preliminary scientific results here. Go and behold!



A quick note on the selection of the fandoms: I picked ones I thought a lot of people would have opinions on. If I left something critical out, feel free to tell me in the comments.

A quick note on voting: When I say "slashy," I include femslash. Buffy/Faith, Gabrielle/Xena - these are pairings worth considering! Also, if you haven't seen an episode of the show, please don't vote on canon writing quality. (Ideally, you would have seen three! Or even more!) But if you think you can make a fair estimate of slashiness based on vids or YouTube pieces or transcripts, by all means, vote on that.

ETA: For quality, 1 = worse than anything you could find on fanfiction.net, even if you were funded by a grant solely for the purpose of finding the worst writing the world has ever known. 10 = genius unparalleled. For slashiness, 1 = straighter than a ruler. 10 = they could suck cocks or finger each other right there on the screen and it would only reduce the overall slashiness. Thanks for pointing out the ambiguity, lolaraincoat!

And now it's time for...SCIENCE.

[Poll #1352713]

Comments

[margueritem.livejournal.com]

My head exploded when I thought of DoctorWho/Torchwood : first, is it really fair to put them together since one is obviously more sexual than the other? (at the same time is slash about the sexual? one would argue no) And when talking of slash, does sexual intent count? As in, is it still slash if it's canon? *facepalm* *goes vote*

[hannahrorlove.livejournal.com]

DC Universe gets a few bumps in points for writing when I took various one-shots and specials (Superman: Peace on Earth) into account, but for the most part, the level of writing in the comics isn't as high as it could be. I blame the editors losing their grip on people like Judd Winick.

For "Jossverse," I voted for Firefly, having never seen Buffy or Angel, but having gathered enough about those from periphery observation that people seem to have read more into the text than is there. This relates to an issue I have with fandom in general, which is that emotional closeness doesn't always translate into sexual attraction.

Also, Tolkien lost several points for Tom Bombadil, something I'm glad Peter Jackson knew to forget about.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I refused to answer the writing quality question in re:DCU, on account of the fact that it ranges from -17 billion (All-Star Batman & Robin) through really pretty good (the most recent Batgirl run, YJ) to great (the occasional one-off issue: I really like the ish after Bruce Wayne: Fugitive where we see BW just going thru his daily life.)

Also, some of my answers for some shows were altered by my awareness of greater fandom - for example, SG-1 is not slashy at all to me, but obviously to some people it is.

[giandujakiss.livejournal.com]

How is Starsky & Hutch, the father of hurt/comfort, the father of gay subtext, the show starring characters referred to as "prime time french kissing homos" at the time the show aired in the 70s, not on this list??

*points at icon*

[xjestx.livejournal.com]

That list needs Man from U.N.C.L.E. - that show practically invented slash.

[miss-porcupine.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how to vote on DC -- on either question. For quality, there's just too much variation. For every Mark Waid run on JLA, there's Jon Lewis with the underground tag-team alien Amish twin wrestlers in Robin. Bill Willingham singlehandedly made Schroedinger's cat explode by being simultaneously brilliant in Fables and making a wretched hash of the DCU.

For slashiness, do I focus on the hilariously unintentional stuff from Way Back When (oh, say, Dick and Roy in the Action comics series that introduced Lian) or the intentionally slashy stuff written by gone-legit slasher Devin Grayson (the 'Transference' arc of GK) or do I acknowledge that most of the time it's played straight (pun intended, except where Piper or Rene Montoya or GLBT-Character-Du-Jour is concerned)?

eta: I only saw one episode of it, but considering that there aren't that many, I nominate Crusoe for eligibility in this matter. You know it's bad when even I see slash...

[rheanna27.livejournal.com]

I started thinking about graphs -- in Excel! Pie charts! OMG PIVOT TABLES! -- and then I got too excited and had to go and lie down for a bit. I am WHOLLY IN FAVOUR of this very scientific exercise.

[afrikate.livejournal.com]

I think your science is genius, but I need to comment at the moment because Supernatural is currently an average of 6.66 slashy, and that's got to mean something, right?

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

I'm having a hard day in the parenting mines, so please forgive me for asking such a dumb question, but 1=better writing and 10=worse writing? or is it the other way around?

[jenna-thorn.livejournal.com]

heh, i was coming to comment about how the DCU writing varies so wildly when I realized that I was following a trend, so I'll simply state here that I am tickled at how the writing quality graphs fall into (at this point in time) sort of a bell, with some variation on each, but for some of the fandoms (Xena/Hercules, I'm looking at you) no one puts the slash rating below seven.

And though I didn't think I had my own set of slash goggles, I'm boggling at some of the answers. Apparently, I'm enthusiastic.

[brownbetty]

OMG, TFV, ILU! I can only convey my love in caps and acronyms!

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I was hoping somebody with a paid account would do a poll of this! After I saw cimness's graph yesterday I had to go and make one of my own (http://melannen.katycat.net/slashgraph.png). (Mine takes in "variability" as a color variable. Because. Variability is an *important factor* slashiness! House has a constant layer of slashy; Highlander is usually only a little bit slashy, but then suddenly it will be OMG THEY'RE PRACTICALLY MAKING OUT ON SCREEN.)

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I think Dr Who and Torchwood need to be separate. You're getting a huge skew in the results because of the canonical gay romantic relationship in TW. DW isn't that slashy with or without being sexualised!

You know, maybe you couldn't write a paper about it or whatever, but I think this... Science is looking pretty reliable. Already with your pretty small sample, most of the questions seem to be showing a clear trend, with several presenting a pretty obvious bell-curve!

We HAVE to make rainbow graphs for this!

But I do think you should make an addendum with more shows. Starsky & Hutch really needs a slot! There are several older fandoms I can think of like Man from UNCLE and The Professionals which, however, might be harder to poll for due to most modern slashfen not being familiar with them.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

Both DCU and DrWho have too much canon to be other than around "5" in quality overall. But maybe you're not going for the whole run in either case?

[quillori.livejournal.com]

Oh, thanks for doing this. I'm looking forward to seeing how the votes come out.

I found the Jossverse one hard to answer: the scores for both slashiness and writing quality are pushed up by Buffy, which has canon lesbians and some very good writing, whereas I found, say, parts of Angel unwatchably bad. I gave up on answering the Dr Who/Torchwood one because averaging my scores for each gave results misleading for both.

[minotaurs.livejournal.com]

Hmm, how interesting. I'm amused that (aside from a couple of obvious exceptions like Sentinal and Smallville) most people disagree with me on the relative Slashiness:Quality ratio. I rated almost all these shows considerable higher in Slashiness than Quality, but it appears most everyone else gave above-the-midpoint scores for both.

[vsee.livejournal.com]

I love graphs, but feel baffled by the questions. Also quality=enjoyableness often get confused in people's heads, which is why I think people tend to rate writing quality high, even for shows with some pretty serious writing problems.

I also agree that Torchwood and Doctor Who are really impossible to rate together. Both the sexuality and the style of writing are markedly different.

Can't wait to see what everyone else says, though.

*rubs hands greedily and grabs a fork for the hoped for pie charts*

[ealgylden.livejournal.com]

I will never understand the general disdain for the writing on Sentinel. At worst it's mediocre, no worse than SGA or Smallville, and far less aggressively insulting than, say, the third season of SPN. But it's a truism that it's terrible, and who am I to fight a truism.

[lolitakun.livejournal.com]

I made a graph *headdesk*

[janne-d.livejournal.com]

Okay, Doctor Who/Torchwood gets a 10 for slashy for the mere fact that Captain Jack Harkness is in them and could be slashy with a tree.

But I think it is unfair to lump them together in terms of writing quality because in general Torchwood isn't as well written as Doctor Who. (It's not actually much more slashy than Doctor Who, it just has more canon gay kissage.)

I skipped the ones I've never seen/read.

[travels-in-time.livejournal.com]

"Quality of writing" combined for Doctor Who/Torchwood is Not Fair. One is SO MUCH BETTER than the other. "Slashiness" also doesn't really compare, but it's not the same level of disconnect.

[solar-cat.livejournal.com]

Yay for science!! \0/

(I'm kind of loving the ones that are "OMG!SLASHY!!" and "OMG!BAD!!" at the same time. XDDD )

[macey-muse.livejournal.com]

lol I feel I should campaign for the addition of Hikaru no Go to this poll; I'm sure at least, like, three people would vote on it. right? ^.^' (did you catch stirring_still's essay on 'coded references to same-sex attraction in Hikaru no Go (http://stirring-still.livejournal.com/4687.html)' aka Why Their Love Is Canon, No Really ~? because in hikago, it /is/)

[animeartistjo.livejournal.com]

Some of the fandoms are so large that the amount of bad and good even out: HP, SV, SGA, and Jossverse mostly.

I think HP has a lot more poor writers do to the proliferation of teens, pre-teens, people who did not pass English with a B or better who write in it. I'd say 90% of HP fic on fanfiction.net is pure and utter crap. If the people who vote only read LJ fic, then that would influence the votes, I'm sure.

[tevere.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that people are giving HP canon such a low slash factor! REMUS AND SIRIUS, PEOPLE! Werewolf = gay? (Forced to hide identity; once discovered, driven out of mainstream society.) They LIVE together for a period? They have a long and troubled history of secrets and lies and betrayal and hot exploratory adolescent sex, and then hell of a lot of sadder complicated adult sex? (Okay, perhaps those last two are my interpolation, but the very fact I CAN interpolate means there's seeds in the canon!)

Like many previous commenters, my brain went a little ka-boom on the DW/Torchwood combined question. Bizarrely, I consider DW more slashy than Torchwood. Because DW is full of potential and tasty subtext (Jack's flirting with 9 is just wonderful, and with 10 you get Jack's bitchy comments about being left behind), whereas Torchwood has made it explicit -- and to my mind, making one pairing explicit actually sort of reduces the overall slash factor for me. And, yeah, the overall quality of writing is very different between DW (I'd grade it 8-9) and Torchwood (I'd say around a 6).