Cultus Dispatches: Writing Women in Fanfiction - An Analysis of the Data

If you have been writing or reading Tolkien fanfiction for any length of time, you probably remember Mary Sue. In the early-mid 2000s, she haunted the margins of our stories: the specter of a woman permitted into Tolkien's world to an extent that she changed the plot or even the characters. (Cue horror-movie scream.) Worry about Mary Sue—and whether our carefully crafted female characters were actually a Mary Sue, much like the slasher-film villain you only think is dead but is actually traipsing toward you with insidious purpose—permeated discussions of female characters and led some writers to abandon the idea of writing women at all. It just didn't seem worth it.

This month, in our Cultus Dispatches column, we begin a series on writing women in fanfiction. The first article in the series looks at data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey and what it shows us about the once fraught endeavor of adding a woman to your fanfiction.

Thankfully, the data shows, it is far less fraught today. Most fanfiction writers endeavor to add women to their stories, according to the data, and many use fanfiction as a vehicle to critique and repair Tolkien's depiction of women in the legendarium. But the fandom's historic distaste for seeing women in fanfiction lurks in the data as well.

You can read the article Writing Women in Tolkien Fanfiction: An Analysis of the Data here to learn more about what analysis of the survey data revealed. And if you create or read/view fanworks with women characters and wish to contribute to our latest Fandom Voices collection, you can contribute your memories of writing, creating, and reading about female characters here. Finally, don't forget that Cultus Dispatches is always open to contributions, so if you would like to contribute to our series about women characters in fanworks, comment here or email us and pitch your idea!

Posted on 29 October 2022 (updated 26 November 2022) by SWG Moderators