2020 Stats

More than a year late! But 2021 stats will be tricky because I'm not sure how to categorize "In Heavier Air" (a Dragon Age: Inquisition story with an Avvar inquisitor, where the Avvar are a sort of fantasy!indigenous group), so I'm focusing on 2020 for now. 2022 is going to be even more complicated, because I'm almost done with a fic that focuses on Iron Bull, but that's also a problem for later.

So, 2020! A trashfire, obviously, but what did it look like in podfic terms for me personally? Did I actually manage to podfic more characters of color and femslash? more podfic focusing on not-cis!men?

(please ignore the line connecting the counts - I can't figure out how to get rid of it, but the data isn't in any particular order, so it's meaningless)

(also please ignore that it says "length" instead of "duration" /o\)


Well, An Eye For Quality is dragging up my overall stats, at any rate! I started recording that in 2018, but I'm only counting things in the year I posted them (unless I post as I go), so here we are! It was just under 58% of my total podfic output by duration, which is wild. Otherwise I did a lot of Guardian podfics and two Lilo & Stitch and one Lilo & Stitch & Moana podfics for the chromatic characters podfic anthology. Overall total was 15:43:26, so just shy of 16 hours. Not anywhere near my max, but not bad for the trashfire that was 2020.


Well, my 2019 stats record that I wanted my overall podfic amount (measured in duration) to be less than 50% m/m, and I did it! Overall m/m was 19% of my total, compared to 59% of my total being f/m. Femslash as a percent of dudeslash is still low, but better than last year - roughly 30%, which is my new all-time high! I keep trying to go in hard on this one and it's always hard, which is deeply frustrating, but still worth doing.

In 2019's stats post I realized that I was trying to use this stat to measure both time spent on non-m/m and on non-cis!men, which are related but different stats, so here's the graph for gender of the main character, where "main character" is mostly, but not exclusively, the pov character. It's not a perfect science, and I'm not sure everyone would agree with who I've designated as "main character" (is the main character of Kisses Don't Count, a Discworld story from the pov of a cis!woman dating a genderqueer person, "about" the former or the latter? I've lumped it into "female", but I'm still not sure)


So in 2020 I mostly made podfic about women! I haven't run the stats on previous years, but I don't think that's always been the case, so that's cool! I'm trying to increase the amount of time I spend podficcing non-cis!men, and I don't think I'll manage this much of a difference in future years, but it's something to aim for.

Which brings us to the series of stats that started it all, which I still don't think I'm doing right, but I'm trying, and I'd rather try and get it wrong than not try and never know. So: podfic produced by racial/ethnic background of the main character, where "main character" is "who I remember the story being about several months after I made it" and "racial/ethnic background" is a series of checks, first against the character's self-definition in the story, lacking that against their self-definition in canon, lacking that against their actor/voice actor's self-definition, lacking that (as in the case of, once again, Kisses Don't Last) their depiction in official art (Discworld book covers, in this case). It's messy and deeply imperfect, and is going to come back to bite me in 2021 and 2022, but it's what I've got. Also, these categories are highly awkward and imprecise, and by their nature reductive. I'm American, and trying hard, but am probably fucking up.

Here goes.



Well, this is where An Eye for Quality comes back to bite me. Since Bella (genderbent!Bilbo) isn't defined/described in the fic, and Bilbo is played by a white guy in the Hobbit movies, all 9+ hours of that go under "white"; ditto 2.5 hours of "Kisses Don't Last". I did make a lot of podfic for Guardian, which brings up my count for podfic focused on people of Asian ethnicity/background, but overall Not Great. I had managed two years running of mostly making podfic NOT focused on white people, and fucked that up in 2020. I also didn't manage a single podfic focused on a Black character, which I'm pretty ashamed with. It's too late for 2021, but will do better in 2022.


So, better on some scores, worse on others. I do think that keeping track of everything is helping me be more mindful of how I spend my time, though, which is good. This effort started because fandom can be terribly, wildly, willfully racist, and I wanted to try to be center marginalized characters in my fannish output. Several years later, it's a mixed bag, but at least I know what's in there, and can keep working on it.

2022 Snowflake Challenge: Create Your Own Challenge

This is my first post for the 2022 Snowflake Challenge - I'm planning on going back to do the others, but this month has been a fairly epic trashfire for our household - but today's challenge grabbed me and wouldn't let go, so here we are.

I challenge you to track your fannish output, and use that information to spend more of your fannish time on characters of marginalized identities.

It's not news that fandom has a racism problem, and is bad at addressing other marginalized identities as well (see Transphobia in Fandom, Ableism in Fandom., Biphobia in Fandom, Misogyny in Fandom, and others). There are a lot of challenges and fests aimed at creating fanworks for those identities (I'm mainly familiar with the podfic-specific ones, which include Awesome Ladies Podfic Anthology, Women and Genderqueers First: A Podfic Exchange/WAGFAPE, and the chromatic characters podfic anthology, but I know there are others, for all sorts of fannish activities!), but I know I, at least, tended to make stuff for those fests and then go back to creating material about white cis-men.

Once I noticed that pattern, it made me very uncomfortable, but I wasn't really sure to do with that discomfort. After all, how could I possibly quantify the time I spend watching/listening/reading media, including fannish media? It's in the background of my day, every day. I have over 300 tabs open on my phone right now, roughly  90% of them open to AO3. It's just not feasible.

But I also make podfic. And while the amount of time I spend on every podfic varies wildly (my record is re-recording a five hour podfic twice, for a total of three recordings, which comes to a total of at least 30 hours on a five hour podfic - I have to do a lot of editing passes, because I'm a messy editor who misses things), the final output can be measured in literal hours, minutes and seconds. So I started there, and in 2015 I started tracking how and where I spent my podficcing time. I've done it every year since.

In 2020 I made more than twelve hours of podfic focused on women. That same year only one-quarter of my output was about characters of color, none of which was about Black characters. That's not something I'm proud of. But now that it's something I can measure, I have something to work towards. I was better in 2021. I'm going to try to be better in 2022.

Right now I'm working with three main sets of stats: relationship category that the story focuses on (I use the AO3 categories), gender of the main character (an imperfect measure, defined as "who do I remember as the main character and how do I remember them identifying"), and racial/ethnic background of the main character (a very imperfect measure, currently defined as "who do I remember as the main character and how does the story/the canon/the actor/fandom identify them"). It's messy, and inextricably bound up with my prejudices as a White Middle-class American. I'm not tracking several things I could be,including disability, though I'll try to do that in 2022. But it's a starting point.

So if you're reading this, I challenge you to do the same: track your fannish output, in whatever way you can, knowing it will not accurately measure the time spent but that it's better than nothing (words? square inches/centimeters of art? duration of podfic? weight of wool/fabric? batches of cupcakes? number of icons?). Look at where you're spending your fannish time, and see if there's you want to consciously choose to spend your time on. Then see how you did, and do it again next year.