If your fic is 1000 words long, you can’t tag it slow burn. It’s not slow burn. That is a matchstick. And this is my personal bias here but if those motherfuckers you’re writing experience significant forward momentum in their relationship in under 5k words, then that is just a regular old burn. Slow burn should be borderline intolerable and a mistake to start reading at 2 in the morning.
If the fic doesn’t have multiple scenes where two people almost kiss but then don’t because of a contrived interruption that they are both grateful for and angry about, until the desperate reader is forced every other paragraph to mutter, “this is fucking ridiculous, this is bullshit, I’m so fucking mad, please update sooooooooooon,” then it isn’t a slow burn. It is a romance and that is a lovely thing but. Slow burns should feel like being set on fire unto your death but the tinder is people not kissing and the spark is people who don’t admit they love each other and the whole thing is. You know. Slow.
The year is 2042. Your daughter is awkwardly silent as she eats her dinner. “Something wrong sweetie?” She sighs and puts down her fork. “I was digging really deep in AO3 last night…Why didn’t you finish that coffee shop au?” It happened. Your past has come back to haunt you. Nay, it never truly left.
U CANNOT OUTRUN UR CRIME
OKAY BUT WAIT. This has happened to me. Recently. Because I am old and I have things out there from previous fandoms with previous pseuds and one day my teenager begins a rant at me about people never finishing any WIPs on the pit of voles (which he does not call the pit of voles because he has No Knowledge of such a thing but yet he still reads on which I didn’t think anyone did any longer) and he points out an example to me of something I WROTE AND LEFT WIPing for ages and he has NO IDEA #1 that his mom wrote this and #2 How much it still haunts me to this day that it will. sit. there. for. eternity. because I am too lazy to pull it down.
hear me out: a cutthroat kitchen-type contest for fanfic writers. contestants are given a different trope to write each round. sabotages include making an opponent write in first person, requiring them to write in a particular AU, making them incorporate the opening structure of my immortal. alton brown looks over your shoulder while you write the smut.
Sorry to answer so belatedly! I suspect this is often the case, in part because there’s so much more left for fans to imagine and invent for non-canon ships. (Not that they can’t write fix-its when a ship is canon, but I believe that’s rarer.) However, I have no numbers to back this up, because I analyze tags, and most people don’t tag whether the ship in their story is canonical.
Edit: for your specific example, there are 1161 Frank/Karen works (904 of those in Daredevil– others in a related Marvel fandom), vs. 361 Matt/Karen works (353 in Daredevil) and 262 Matt/Elektra works (240 in Daredevil). So the difference is even bigger than you thought there!
I was thinking about this the other day actually, and while this is by no means a perfect measurement, I used @centrumluminaAo3 stats to look at
canon vs non-canon
in the top 20 M/M, F/M, and F/F ships.
(Obvious
disclaimer
that having more data would yield better
analysis and that Ao3 isn’t the be all and end all of fandom, it’s just
one of the many platforms people use to engage with fandom.)
M/M – 18 non-canon, 2 canon
F/M
– 3 non-canon, 17 canon
F/F
– 9 non-canon, 11 canon
I think there are a lot of reasons some canon/non-canon ships might be more popular than others in a fandom, including what
Toast
mentioned above. In general I get the impression that M/M ships don’t swear by canon as much, and that likely comes down to having being built on a foundation of older slash fandom from the 70s/80s/90s that didn’t have much canon rep going for it in mainstream media.
F/M
ships on the other hand have tons of
rep in mainstream media! So it makes sense that canon ships would rise in popularity there as fans are likely already invested in a couple they’re being presented.
F/F ships have a bit of both
approaches – while being smaller than slash fandom, femslash fandom of the 80s/90s didn’t swear by canon either
and made do with reading between the lines for subtext. However as more F/F couples are introduced in
mainstream media
those tend to be the ships people are most
invested
in and thus more fanworks!
tldr: slash never cared about canon, het has always had an abundance of canon, femslash never cared about canon but likes all these new canon ships it’s getting.
Ooh, awesome! Thanks! 😀
Another great point came in from @coaldustcanary – the canon to non-canon ratio is probably very different on FFN, where het fic is predominant.
Molly's Monsters 