1) I guess this is where jump for joy came from.

2) I've been running into an odd problem with my bedside digital alarm clock. I'm not sure how long the time has been off because the only time I tend to look at it is when I'm about to go to bed, during the night and when I get up. It's not easily read at other time of days due to placement and glare.

I can't imagine my not having noticed this for a long time, but I have now reset the clock 3 times because it's off, often by an hour. I did it again this morning and by noon it was 7 minutes off again.

To my surprise this is not an uncommon problem (though I have older digital clocks that are still working fine) and apparently has to do with voltage and an internal crystal oscillator. The clock didn't cost enough to make it worthwhile trying to fix it, but from what I read the more concerning issue is electrical current in the apartment. Anyone ever have this happen?

3) Melannen recently posted about seeing an uptick in genfic via AO3. There are some signs that there might indeed be some growth, but it is difficult to tell because of the randomness in how people tag at the site. And especially since you can category tag by ticky (so something could be labeled both M/M and Gen) the first obstacle to wrestle with is how people define gen.

Definitions and Consistency

I suspect people will give varying definitions of what gen is, but the most commonly agreed to is defining gen as what it is not, and that is shipfic. So a work that is tagged with both a ship genre and gen seems to be contradictory. It might be a story that is very canon-like in most ways with the exception of a non-canon ship, or that ship might even be a background one but the author tagged the story with both to be on the safe side.

What's more, there has been a perpetual lack of understanding of how the / and & tags are to be used at the site, which means many people using friendship relationship tags are actually writing some kind of romantic shipfic. And that's not even getting into the quandaries that pre-slash type stories toss into the mix.

So all that is about how people label content. But regardless of how something is tagged, there is also the question of what gets presented in a story. (Presumably the gen vs ship definition is less fuzzy when it comes to fanart or vids). It may also vary in terms of how it gets defined within a particular fandom. Character studies, for example, are very often tagged gen because there is no ship focus. (I would even argue they make up the majority of what constitutes accurately tagged gen at AO3). And there are also "slice of life" type stories or even full blown canon rewrites and other canon style stories which fall into a gen category. But the focus of those stories might really straddle a line.

For example in a fandom with a juggernaut ship, most all of the stories in it might involve that pairing, whether or not the characters are romantically involved. So the friendship stories could be fairly called gen stories. However, aside from all the pre-ship type storylines, the preoccupation with that relationship within that story to the exclusion of virtually any other focus in the story -- particularly in terms of storylines or engagement among other characters who are not a member of that pairing -- make that less of a gen story to me.

It might be difficult to tease that apart when the canon itself is fairly obsessive about that relationship, or else it does very little to characterize or give screen time to secondary characters. But let's say the canon contains four main characters who interact a lot on screen, and have various different types of relationships among one another. Yet the fanfic spends 90% of its time with only two characters in whatever kind of plot, even when the other characters are present in it. To me that may technically be a gen story but its focus is very shippy in nature.

Everything Old is New Again

I can't help thinking about how often censorship, even self-censorship, may skew a story. I'm sure that in the early days of fanzines there were quite a lot of stories which should have been explicitly romantic or even sexual stories but weren't for cultural reasons. But given the "purity culture" clashes we're having now, it would not surprise me if the bad old days are back in terms of people being anxious about what will be considered acceptable in stories.

I'd be curious to know, for example, if even within shipfic we're seeing more "fade to black" stories with no discussion of sex. But that would be difficult to determine since one person's explicit is not another's and we come back to the problem of individual tagging choices and how widely mislabeled works might be.

(I wonder, for example, if anyone has ever reported something to AO3 as being mislabeled because it promised NC-17 but didn't deliver, vs something being labeled PG-13 and being too explicit?)

As melannen points out, it may also simply be that the heavily ship focused strands of fandom -- out of which the AO3 was created -- merely reflected a greater preoccupation with it than could be found in other online spaces. Again, given the issue of censorship and site purges, it's difficult to say how true that is. But FFN and Wattpad have certainly had a substantial amount of shipfic and their collective content outstrips anything AO3 hosts, even now as it approaches 14 million works. Plus everything from early to later fandom-specific archives had a lot of shipfic compared to gen content as well, so I'm not convinced that gen has always been the majority or even equal in amount to shipfic.

The numbers of even fanfic in general aren't something I think can ever be proven, given the diversity of online spaces and different fandom traditions. However I think it would be much easier to prove the case that historically (and presently) there is more het fic than slash being shared across a wide number of fandom spaces, and AO3 is an exception in that respect. I realize that the annual Tumblr reports on popular fandom pairings throw up a lot of slash pairings as well, but I think the Tumblr pipeline to AO3 is fairly well known, so these groups overlap. But the rise in popularity of "reader insert" fiction (which has become so prevalent that we now even havecommercial works focused on it) is yet another strand of it in practice and easier to document.

Unique Cultural Times

I am willing to agree that we are in a transitional cultural state across the globe right now. And there is data being gathered which has people saying they feel more isolated, and that they are increasingly disconnected from families and may have moved away from places where early networks were developed over the past decade. There is also data revealing that people list fewer close friends than ever and that use of social media may negatively affect friendship building behavior.

But as to the types of friendships people hunger for, I'm not sure that these are any less in people's reach than before. I think that in a more face to face networked world, people had more chance encounters to develop such ties but they simultaneously had fewer alternatives. There has also been research showing that people are dating less despite an enormous number of apps and tools for finding dates.

Instead, I suspect that the poor results from using these services has made many people more likely to give up on dating, or even romantic relationships as a whole (men and sexual minorities are the most likely to find dating apps a positive experience). Plus, the fact that women are more able to live and work alone and have many choices in how to do so at present, means they are more likely to stay single. Data also reflects that as women's economic conditions go up in a country, the birth rate declines, and there have been a number of movements in different countries where women, men, or both, are deciding to stay permanently single, or at least not marrying or having families.

So I think the issue of alternatives is the key factor here. When you have fewer choices, you make do with what you have. When you are exposed to how many choices are possible – at least for other people, if not yourself – then you are increasingly dissatisfied with what is available to you. And I suspect that the number of distractions and substitutions for close connections that are out there, as well as people's increased expectations for what they want, contribute to these feelings of isolation, which are likely no worse than they have been historically. (The exception may be for the elderly, who are more likely than ever to be living alone and to feel socially isolated). Yet what the data shows is that people are having fewer friendships AND fewer relationships, so I'm not sure that there's a reason fanworks would be responding to a greater desire for one more than the other.

I am also not convinced that more friendship fics are being explored in different fandoms because societies have become more accepting of different types of relationships –- not just queer ones, but also different expressions of het ones. And as a result canon is giving more people what they want but giving viewers less of the intense, bonded friendships that readers crave. This is something it would be really tough to dredge up any data for.

But I would counter that the sort of popular tropes we see across fandoms do not reflect that. Rather, they continue to largely be focused on romantic storylines. I mean some could be used as "found family" tropes, particularly those which rely on place settings rather than story scenarios. In example, the Coffee Shop AU could easily skew to a group forming rather than just "meet cute" scenarios, whereas the "Just One Bed" or "Fake Dating" can't really be applied to non-romantic stories in a way that doesn't change the type of stories they are. Certainly the sale of commercial shipfic is booming, and many of those readers are also fanfic readers.

One thing that would be interesting to look at is crossovers and fusions. The reason I suggest it, is that these are story types which could easily adapt to gen stories and could easily exclude ship ones. In fact, my memory of the ones I've seen very often have been more gen focused, although in many cases they include a canon pairing as the ones being crossed over. And in this we circle back to the beginning as to what qualifies as gen. If the point of the story is not to explore the relationship then surely many crossovers qualify as gen, even if you have two couples as the main characters.

On the other hand, why wouldn't we see more crossovers with secondary characters or those not in a relationship? Is it just the ubiquity of lead characters being paired off? Are these characters people's favorites because they are a couple, so they appear even in non-shippy stories?

Plus of course, we do see a lot of crossovers written explicitly to create a romantic relationship. In fact this is sometimes so as to provide more pairing options than the original canon provides. And even though fusions could be written without relationships, very often the original canon relationship is explored in a new way in the fusion setting.

One thing I do believe may be having an effect is a greater awareness of Ace and Aro fans, as well as there being more canon non-binary characters so that there are more options than the traditional types of ships and storytelling on display. Fans do tend to write what is popular and the more of it appears, the more likely it will grow.

I think that if one sampled works over a week's time in a dozen fandoms, there might be some reflection of this. But I suspect it is still too small a category of storytelling for it to explain a growth in gen stories overall.

It's the Age Gap

I would be very interested to see data in terms of visitor demographics at AO3. There isn't any, certainly not gathered by the site, and any surveys I've seen are very limited and self-selected to be drawing conclusions from. But if I were to speculate, I suspect we'd be seeing a dip in the data.

There is no question that just about every survey of fans has shown a high number around the 20 year age mark with a steady decline in higher age categories. I'm pretty sure AO3 would show the same. However it would not surprise me if there is a much higher 13-20 group of users than there was at the time AO3 launched, and a slight increase at the 50 year mark.

I think that the LJ environment, and the fanzine and listserv one before it, were unusual in having a higher proportion of adults to young teens in it. Fandom has always been driven largely by the young, often the very young. It doesn't surprise me, for example, that one of the youngest overall fandoms, Harry Potter, continues to have a high level of activity all these years later, despite all its controversies.

A lot of the very young are not using AO3, they're using sites like Wattpad and other apps to develop and share their content. However that doesn't mean that the ones who do use AO3 are not influenced by mores and discussion in other spaces. And just as sexual activity has been increasingly delayed in the U.S. population (along with a dip in teen pregnancies), such a trend could have an effect on the kind of writing going on. What's more the delayed adulthood of many teens (who in previous generations were definitely seen as adults by the time they were college age) could be playing into the way they want to see the many young protagonists in canons being portrayed.

As someone in melannen's post pointed out, there may be a growth in parental substitute stories happening – for example, the sole non-romantic relationship to end up among the top written pairings in 2022 was Tony Stark & Peter Parker. However this could just as easily be generated by people who are parents writing the stories from the other side of the pairing. I've always wondered if baby and kid fic tends to be written by people wanting to have babies or wanting to write something from their own experience. What I wonder though, is why we don't see more sibling stories because, statistically, we have many more only children now than we did 30 years ago.

At the same time I think there could be many post-50 readers who are ready for other kinds of stories – either because they've been reading ship centric content for decades and they could use the variety, or else because they just have a declining interest in romantic or sexual content. Someone in their mid-30s when AO3 was launched is now reaching that age bracket and someone in their mid 20s when FFN began are also hitting that milestone.

It's the Archive Effect

Lastly, there's the suggestion that as a one-stop shop, AO3 has offered people who would like to write gen more access to readers for it. Certainly it became much easier for authors to use it for a variety of fandoms or pairings without having to belong to multiple communities or use a variety of websites. It makes logical sense that they could also cater to gen readers who would have a much easier time locating the specific type of stories they wanted.

If so though, I question why it didn't happen sooner. After all, AO3 started picking up speed about 10 years ago as a place people started thinking of as a first place to post, rather than as an additional place to post. If a big gen audience was just waiting for an easy way to find stories, you'd have thought that they'd be among the biggest early users of the site and thus gen stories would get the most feedback and recs.

And if gen stories are growing a lot now, you'd think you'd see those stats appearing in different ways. It may be happening in certain fandoms. But if I think of the SPN fandom, it hasn't. It was one of the early big fandoms on the site, and it had already been going strong for 4 years before AO3 went to open beta. There was also a larger quantity of gen stories in it than in many fandoms found on LJ. because it was an alternative to a central incestuous ship. Ten years later though, it was the main ship that changed but not the quantity of gen.

Gen works are, as of this writing, at 50,896. M/M stories are at 158,366 (of which Castiel/Dean are 106,442). F/M are at 43,305. It is this last number which I find most significant, because the number of het stories in SPN was always very small, due in part to its rare and transitory nature in canon, as well as the opposition of many fans in seeing the characters paired with women. And while it is still comparatively small (27% the size of slash stories), it's not vastly smaller than the number of gen works (32%).

In fact I would say there are more het works in SPN than in some fandoms with important canonical het pairings which, again, reflects a desire for more ship fic even in a canon that works against it. I did a quick comparison with Merlin, for example, in which het had just 23% of the slash stories and Gen had roughly 12%. I used this canon on purpose because it too has a juggernaut non-canon ship and I happen to be subscribed to the canon feed so I see what gets posted every day. My perception that there continue to be very few gen stories appears supported by the numbers.

I did a search of Gen works in the fandom 10 years ago and came up with 1,053. In the past year it was 1,814. This is a significant increase. But if we look at Gen works 5 years ago, the number is 679. So this points out two things, the first of which is that there is no steady increase in such works. The second is that the number of works being contributed to AO3 overall is increasing year over year, and has done so the most rapidly in the last 3 years. So we would also have to compare a category of works against all works on a year by year basis. An increase in gen fics may be true in numerical terms rather than in percentage terms.

Obviously this is just one fandom and results are likely to be wildly different from one fandom to the next on a year by year basis. But what it does make one question is that if there is a change in gen writing due to generational or societal reasons, wouldn't we be seeing a more steady change and not a wildly changing number?

So What's the Answer?

The quick version is, I don't think we can ever really know. I think all the suggested ideas might well be contributing in some way to an increase in gen.

But overall what they tell us about are the other potential changes that may be happening -- in transformative fandom specifically -- at a particular time. All these suggested factors tell us something about demographics, about attitudes, about levels of fanwork production, and even changing use on a particular platform in the last five years.