We get results!

[jlh]

Now that you've taken it, I'll reveal the real reason for this poll, since it comes down to one question: Do you assume that het shippers are "predictive" shippers? That was the question I was trying to answer. All the rest of the questions were really just demographics. Note that I called "stop" and worked through the numbers yesterday, when overall 240 people had answered the poll.


Part 1: Shipping.

I divided the answers into five big chunks:

1. Serious Slashers answered "exclusively" or "primarily" for m/m slash, and "rarely" or "never" for het. 5% of total.
   
2. Definite slashers answered "P" or "sometimes" for slash and "R" for het. 13%.
   
3. Leaning slashers answered "P" for slash and "S" for het. This was the biggest category, at 32%.
   
4. Neutrals answered either "P" for both het and slash, or "S" for both. 21%.
   
5. Leaning het answered "P" for het and "S" for slash. 17%
   
6. Definite het answered "P" or "S" for het and "R" for slash. 7%.
   
7. Heavily het answered "E" or "P" for het and "N" or "R" for slash. 5%.

A few notes:

• Yes, yes, LJ is more slash than het, blah blah blah. But note that at the extremes the percentages are pretty close. It's the big middle that is slightly shifted slash, and even then only slightly.
  
• However, despite the seeming rivalry, the "is x better than y", the "ew het," the "x character is not gay", most people read both. 69% of those who answered the poll used "S" or "P" to refer to both het and boyslash.
  
• I asked the femslash question in the interest of equal time and other fandoms, and I won't make too much of it given that many of you answered it based on availability rather than your actual preferences. But let's all toast thelastgoodname, who is firmly in the femlash camp, putting "rarely" for both het and boyslash, and "primarily" for femslash!
  
• So is femslash's biggest problem (other than blah blah female characters blah blah) het-types not wanting to read about same sex ships, or boyslash-types not wanting to read about girls? In the big middle, everyone is about the same but at the extremes, interestingly, there were more Serious Slashers saying "N" to girlslash than Heavily Het-types. The numbers are small, so no conclusions here, but an interesting finding.

Part B: Canon Predictions?

It should come as no surprise that het-types, particularly Heavily Het-types, are much more likely to identify as predictive shippers and to see all shipping as predictive as well. Interestingly, however, what you ship has nothing to do with thinking that het shipping is likely a predictive exercise; that 25% was spread fairly evenly across het and slash shippers. But across the board, most of you don't assume that anyone's shipping is predictive, even that's the way you yourself ship.


Part III: Discussion

Right, so I got the answer to my question. So as not to skew the results, I didn't make clear in the poll what the key question was that I was asking. This made the discussion in the comments that much more interesting!

First, everyone hates "radio" questions. Wah, I have to choose! I have to put a stake in the ground! I can't say both! How and why and where people ship is complicated and personal and could only really be answered by an essay question, but for the sake of aggregation I needed everyone to choose just one simple answer.

There was some conversation about the words I used in my five-point scale for ship interest, to which I can only say: It was a five-point scale. While I found some interesting things about shipping, it wasn't really a poll about shipping. So no worries.

On the predictive shipping questions, what was most surprising was the assumption that since the questions were binary they represented the extremes. The answer "I read/write certain ships but I don't think of them as my canon prediction" originally had a line about how the ships were "consistent with canon" but I thought that would lead to even more confusion so I took it out. That said, the opposite of "I read/write the ships that have happened or I feel will happen in canon" is not "I read/write totally OOC stories!" It isn't about not caring about canon at all; it's about being able to ship without worrying about where the canon narrative is headed. If you weren't sure how to answer, to my mind, you fell in the latter camp. The first answer was really for those folks who are fairly canon rigid, and who would never ship anything that wasn't going on in canon, or that they didn't think was where the author/writers were going to go.

However, in the follow up conversations with many of you, I came up with a four-point scale for this:

1. My ship is canon, or 'clearly' will be canon. Here I'd put James/Lily or Ron/Hermione.
   
2. My ship might be canon, might not be, but my characters have this really interesting dynamic in canon which I can make romantic or sexual. Here I'd put everything with subtext but actual interaction: Harry/Draco, Harry/Snape, Remus/Sirius, Harry/Hermione.
   
3. My characters don't really interact but their personalities are such that if they did it would be cool. Percy/Oliver or Percy/Hermione.
   
4. Let's do something OOC! This could be crack fic, it could be ignoring the characters' canon personalities altogether, plugging them into a stock narrative, whatever.

Note that even if I'd had this I wouldn't have used it in the question, because I was more interested in isolating #1 in terms of assumptions about het shippers than in making a scale of shipping. Also, as is always true in these sorts of things, there are ships that don't fit easily; Draco/Ginny comes to mind: is it 2 or 3?


Huge thanks to everyone who voted and commented. The response was amazing, from all corners of the fandom, and I think really made it a poll that somewhat reflected fandom on LJ. Thanks again!

Comments

[malachan.livejournal.com]

It's generally good market research practice to make people choose just one option, even if people don't like it. Especially if people don't like it. :D

[jlh.livejournal.com]

So. True. It's like, you know, just pick. No one will be killed based on this information. There were only two individual answers that stood out anyway.

[aome.livejournal.com]

My ship might be canon, might not be, but my characters have this really interesting dynamic in canon which I can make romantic or sexual.

My shipping habits in both my primary (one past, one present) fandoms indicate that this seems to be the biggest draw for me. Truly canon ships seem too ... uninventive ... perhaps? They're already out there, so even if I enjoy them in canon (and I often do), I'm not that interested in reading or writing too much about them. What fires me up are the characters with interesting dynamics - that potential - the "what if there was something going on in the background we don't see in canon?" thing. I've got a bit of interest in this:

My characters don't really interact but their personalities are such that if they did it would be cool

too, but it's definitely the 'canon dynamic' - but not outright canon shippiness - which seems to spark me the most.

Congrats on getting 240 responses! Wow.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

It's all about pimping out to HT and DS, man. Also, if you ever thought that people only consume LJ posts within 24 hours? So not true, even without the links.

Canon. If a ship is really well done in canon, then I'm not going to be looking for fic because canon will always be better than the fic could ever be. For ex, I don't go looking for Veronica/Logan fic, because why? But if the canon has let me down on a ship, written it badly, that sort of thing, then it usually turns me off on the fic entirely because what has usually gone wrong is the interaction of the characters, not the events of the ship. [Big exception: Pickard/Dr Crusher on ST:NG.] For ex, Gil and Sara on CSI, who are such a mess that I have to look away and for Christ's sake she could do BETTER and so could he, and I don't mean a better person, but better for THEM. Gah! Which means, yeah, I don't want canon ship fic like, ever.

It really is all about potential, as you say. The stuff we aren't seeing and will never see. The stuff that they probably won't give us but wouldn't it be really cool if they did? [Or maybe it wouldn't. Honestly I'm sort of glad that my HP ships aren't canon because JKR's romances are hella clunky.]

[thelastgoodname.livejournal.com]

I knew people who favored f/f were rare in fandom, but I didn't think we made up only 0.4% of fandom. Wow. (Sorry for throwing off your statistics.)

You results are fascinating; I'm particularly interested in the "everyone in the broad middle" conclusion.

[tamerterra.livejournal.com]

I know! ...Though it does explain why there is a grand total of 3 in my fandom...

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought about it before this poll because everyone always blames it on the lack of girls in HP canon (which isn't as true among the kids but is certainly true in the adults) but it really seems like there is a big block of people who just don't want to read about women. At. All. Not het, certainly not f/f, just no girls anywhere on my screen please. I have my own personal feelings about this, and suspicions, but that leads into dangerous places. Mostly, I wasn't all THAT surprised that extreme boyslashers were less likely to read f/f than extreme het-types.

Thanks for reading!

[jlh.livejournal.com]

You so didn't throw them off! And in the comments there were a lot of people who said if there was more f/f they'd read it, but it's a massive push-pull thing, isn't it? In a way, I was excited by the 6 or 7 people who said "primarily" and that so many people said "sometimes", especially for HP where it seems even het is swimming upstream to a certain extent. That said, yeah, you know, silent majority is reading a lot of different things, and it's the noisy extremes that get everyone grouchy.

Thanks!

Here from daily_snitch

[summerborn.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting; thanks for posting!

[mmichelle.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting the results. I found this really, really interesting.