I am disapprove

[farla]

Just did a quick check with what's in the meme collection by character. Removing groups (including just "The Felt" instead of counting it on the male side) and just going by individual characters:
Female characters were tagged 56 times.
Male characters were tagged 111 times.

There's 13 listed female characters, which goes down to 10 if you combine ones with different names. The character in the most stories is Rose, at 12, followed by Jade and Kanaya at 7.

There's 22 listed male characters, 20 once combined. The character in the stories is Karkat with 21, followed by Dave (14) then John (12).

Almost exactly twice as many boys than girls in every comparison.

So then I did the category as a whole. It's a bit better.

I removed Death, Hella Jeff, Imperial Drone, Nicolas Cage, Skipper Plumbthroat, and Sweet Bro from the list as not being actual Homestuck characters or, in the case of the Imperial Drone, not having a gender. So that's five male characters down by technicality. Also, Casey was counted as a female character.

There are 18 female characters, once you remove repeats and 582 total times the tags were used. Rose is most popular again at 117, followed by Jade (103) and then Terezi (67).

Male characters at 39 and there were 770 times the tags were used. (Of course I can't think of a single time I've seen a male character get bashed in a story about them.) Most popular was Dave (137), followed by John (115) and Karkat (104). I think the difference is largely that meme fic tends to have a restricted cast, while regular fanfic is more likely to reference the whole cast, at least in passing.

I'm doing a bit better myself - the cast list for my fics is 10 for both, but the total is 19 for male characters and 13 for female ones.

None of this gets into the issue of viewpoint/main character vs side character, but I expect it comes out similarly.

Comments

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

Speaking of your character tags, I just played around with them. I knew that was why you were being so cagey about your NaNo. :D

Also I really, really loved that Dave and Rose piece.

My cast list: 11 guys, 6 girls. The total of appearances is 16 for male characters and 17 for female. Which is a counterexample to your assumptions about POV and main versus side characters, because that looks pretty even, but only one out of ten stories has a male POV. For another measure, five out of ten fics pass Bechdel. Only one would pass a reverse-Bechdel test, and that for all of five sentences jumbled up with a second conversation between two female characters talking about a third female character.

[farla.livejournal.com]

...I saw that and thought oh it's fine, no one would care enough to mess with my tags. Oops?

Dave and Rose are so fun to write together! I didn't ship them but I'm sad the ectobiology thing means there's less of them with each other because shipping gets into everything. She's the only one who can get the better of him with innuendo.

Which is a counterexample to your assumptions about POV and main versus side characters, because that looks pretty even, but only one out of ten stories has a male POV.

I don't think there's a direct correlation, just that the whole category did badly by every measurement and that when I was reviewing I got the general impression of more male main characters running around, so I'm assuming.

My stuff has two passing both tests, two passing Bechdel only, three passing reverse Bechdel (one if reverse Bechdel covers talking about romance), and everything else failing both counts. Four male POV, one female POV. I have a fic on the other computer I need to retrieve that would improve my numbers and another one in my notebook that'll do the same, but still, pretty damning. (Karkat is so easy to write!)

I should probably tag everything with fail/pass male/female which will probably get people on both sides to hate me but it's better than going through and trying to count each time I want to see how things are.

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

What part of "mutual stalkerage" do you not understand?

She's the only one who can get the better of him with innuendo.

Please. Terezi. Rose and Dave are on more or less even footing, which is great, but Terezi runs circles around him. Though I shipped Rose/Dave more than I ship Terezi/Dave, probably because Rose's innuendo is more literary whereas Terezi's is baldly crude to the point of being kind of uncomfortable to read. Also I didn't stop shipping Dave/Rose because of incest; I stopped shipping it because Kanaya/Rose became an OTP from their second conversation. But yeah, there needs to be more siblingfic of them. I would do it, but I can't write Dave.

Karkat is so fun to write! I was kind of surprised looking at my tags to find that he is second only to PM in terms of how many of my stories he's in. Although part of that is also that I pale-ship him with Kanaya pretty hard.

[farla.livejournal.com]

I don't think calling Terezi's stuff innuendo covers it.Rose implies he's enjoying puppet molestation, Terezi's just flat-out hitting on him. Which opens up plot and stuff, but for banter it's not as good.