![slash fiction slash fiction](http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/26500000/7x06-Slash-Fiction-supernatural-26526833-1280-720.jpg)
![slash fiction slash fiction](http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/26400000/7x06-Slash-Fiction-sam-winchester-26447958-1280-720.jpg)
![slash fiction slash fiction](http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/26500000/7x06-Slash-Fiction-supernatural-26523868-1280-720.jpg)
(If you’re confused, consider that respondents could check as many boxes as they felt represented them-i.e., both female and transgender under “gender”, both heterosexual and pansexual under “sexuality”. About 90% of survey respondents were fans of M/M, but only 30% identified as both female and heterosexual. However, centrumlumina’s results suggest that perhaps the combination of “heterosexual” and “female” ought to be questioned. The general assumption, as we know, is that the average slash fan is a heterosexual female fan. Tumblr user centrumlumina did just that with a survey of 10,005 AO3 users. To see why slash rules the internet, however, one would need to turn to the actual producers (fanfic authors and artists) who use AO3. They then went on to prove that M/M was the largest category on AO3, double the size of its closest competing category, Gen (fics which do not center around relationships). Tumblr user destinationtoast did all that and more, proving that the top ten AO3 ships were all slash and that Sherlock Holmes/John Watson far outpaced both Supernatural’s Destiel and Teen Wolf’s Sterek. Slash’s reign as king of the internet was pretty much verified after The Daily Dot challenged someone to actually count the number of fanfics for every pairing on AO3, an extremely popular fanfiction archive. (To be fair, it was a much better explanation than the first one that popped into my head, which ran something along the lines of, “Because… shh”.) Now, however, there’s some legit data on the inner workings of fandom, and it means we might do well to rethink the assumptions that lead to this explanation. It’s hard to explain this phenomenon to those outside fandom: the usual explanation runs something along the lines of, “Well, there are a lot of straight girls in fandom, and they like reading about two guys together… what?” I’ve used that explanation myself when trying to explain to my brother why, upon ascending to the internet, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy can no longer keep their hands off each other. This is commonly known as “slash” (accordingly, a relationship between two girls is “femslash”, etc). But most often, when we talk about fanfiction, we’re talking about a relationship between two guys. If it exists, there’s porn of it-no exceptions.