Of course you may friend me - please do! I'm happy to have you around. :-) I should warn you that I only rarely read my friendslist on DW, though; I'm still mainly on LJ.
I've been in a good number of fandoms with female leads and other strong female characters, and I would say that Carter fans are probably not the reason for the relative scarcity of slash in POI. :-) My first fandom was X-Files, and Mulder/Scully shippers were everywhere - but at the same time, there were not one, but two huge and flourishing slash fandoms alongside the MSR fans. Mostly (barring some cases with flame problems), slash and het fans seem to coexist perfectly well in fandom, and not get in each others way much or draw fans away from each other.
In fact: I just checked the AO3 and found 426 fanfics for Reese/Finch, and 13 for Carter/Reese. Even assuming that there is a disproportionally large number of slash fans on the AO3, that's still a dramatic discrepancy that I feel is a good indication that it's not the preponderance of het fans that's getting in the way of the slash fanfic.
At this point I don't have a good theory on what the reason might be. Why do some fandoms catch on in the slash world and others just... don't? General popularity of the show no doubt has a lot to do with it, and I have a suspicion the conventional attractiveness of the male characters in question does too. Plus, there's the need for a "buzz" to build up in fandom, a kind of fannish momentum which automatically attracts new fans who read and write.
So: Yay for writing, and for writing long fic in particular! I think that's basically the best thing to be done to invigorate the slash fandom. :-)
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Date: 2013-04-20 11:42 am (UTC)I've been in a good number of fandoms with female leads and other strong female characters, and I would say that Carter fans are probably not the reason for the relative scarcity of slash in POI. :-) My first fandom was X-Files, and Mulder/Scully shippers were everywhere - but at the same time, there were not one, but two huge and flourishing slash fandoms alongside the MSR fans. Mostly (barring some cases with flame problems), slash and het fans seem to coexist perfectly well in fandom, and not get in each others way much or draw fans away from each other.
In fact: I just checked the AO3 and found 426 fanfics for Reese/Finch, and 13 for Carter/Reese. Even assuming that there is a disproportionally large number of slash fans on the AO3, that's still a dramatic discrepancy that I feel is a good indication that it's not the preponderance of het fans that's getting in the way of the slash fanfic.
At this point I don't have a good theory on what the reason might be. Why do some fandoms catch on in the slash world and others just... don't? General popularity of the show no doubt has a lot to do with it, and I have a suspicion the conventional attractiveness of the male characters in question does too. Plus, there's the need for a "buzz" to build up in fandom, a kind of fannish momentum which automatically attracts new fans who read and write.
So: Yay for writing, and for writing long fic in particular! I think that's basically the best thing to be done to invigorate the slash fandom. :-)