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Demographic data was collected at the beginning of the survey. The purpose of this data is to understand where participants are distributed along lines of age, race, and other social factors. This first section details the responses of all 988 participants.
Age
Participants ranged from 18 to 58 years old with an average age of just over 27. Seventy-five percent of participants are younger than 35. This data is consistent with Rouse and Stanfill’s survey (2023) on fans who participate in fanfiction. Though the populations surveyed are not the exact same, there is overlap in the distribution methods and participants’ use of AO3.
Age plays a role in generational exposure to certain understandings of sexuality and the terms used to describe it. Younger participants would have been even younger when asexuality began its rounds on the internet. However, older participants could have been in their 30s while discovering these terms. Being in different life stages and perhaps finally putting a name to their sexuality is important to the fics they’ve written because, as will be discussed, it changes their perspectives, and the issues participants encounter in their lives (Harrington & Bielby, 2017).
Though age is important, it’s also necessary to consider other lengths of time such as time spent in online communities and time spent writing aro/ace fanfic. These were often revealed by participants in their responses. For example, an 18-year-old and a 40 year old could have been writing aro/ace fanfic for the same amount of time despite being in fandom for different lengths of time.
Additionally, the age of participants can be influenced by digital literacy rather than an assumption that older people do not write aro/ace fanfic. Where online activity is more pervasive for young people, they are more likely to have seen the survey distributed on social media.
Location
Nearly 75% of participants were from the United States (n=736).The UK is next with 41 followed by Canada (n=22), Germany (n=21), Australia (n=10), and France (n=7) with 96 participants choosing not to specify their location. Other countries represented include the following with 4 or less participants:
| Argentina Austria Belgium Brazil Chile Croatia Denmark | Egypt Finland Hungary Indonesia Israel Italy Latvia | Malaysia Mexico Netherlands New Zealand Norway Phillippines Poland | Romania Russia Spain Sweden Switzerland Thailand |
The overrepresentation of English-speaking and European countries is similar to Rouse and Stanfill’s findings and is undoubtedly influenced by the survey being in English and AO3 currently only offering an English interface (2023).
Race
White people account for 72% of participants followed by multiracial/ethnic people (10%) and Asian or Asian American people (8%). These groups account for 90% of participants. Of the participants that are multiracial/ethnic, 41.1% selected that they are partly White, 20.6% are partly Latino/a/x, and 15.3% are partly Asian or Asian American.
These results are largely consistent with data gathered in the 2020 Ace Community Survey with 13,902 participants (Herman et. al, 2022) and 2020 Aro Census with 9,758 participants (Aro Census Team 2020, 2021). Also, these results are consistent with Rouse and Stanfill’s findings (2023). The whiteness of both aro/ace spaces (Brown, 2022; Hawkins Owen, 2014) and fandom (Pande, 2016; 2018) have been studied. However, it is important to note that what is presented in research is not entirely representative of the actual communities being studied; access to technology or even aversions to becoming research subjects are both at play, especially for vulnerable populations.
Gender
Cisgender women account for 38.9% of participants. Interestingly, nonbinary people—those that chose the nonbinary option and others that wrote in agender, bigender, genderfluid/flux/queer, etc.—account for 46.2% of participants. Rouse and Stanfill (2023) found that only 22.03% of their participants identified as agender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary. This more than double figure of nonbinary-spectrum aro/ace fanfic writers is significant because the 2020 Ace Community Survey (Hermann et al., 2022) notes that 42.2% of ace people are nonbinary while only 1% of the general population and 11% of the queer community are likely to be so (p. 19). The 2020 Aro Census also indicated 33.87% of participants identify as nonbinary, however participants were allowed to select more than one option to represent their gender and the overall percentage of participants identifying under the nonbinary umbrella could be higher (Aro Census Team 2020, 2021, pp. 15-16).
Additionally, non-representative research on asexuality reports that around 33% of asexual people identify outside the gender binary (MacNeela & Murphy, 2011). The comorbidity of gender nonconformity and asexuality (along with aromanticism) exists in their divergence from the heterosexual norm and instability in traditional gender roles (p. 800). Where sexual and romantic attraction are nebulous subjects for aro/ace people, gender also becomes difficult to experience in a normative, binary way.
Romantic and Sexual Attraction
Nearly 81% of participants identified as somewhere on the asexual spectrum, 52.8% on the aromantic spectrum, and 45.5% on both the aromantic and asexual spectrums. Within these spectrums, many simply identified as aromantic and/or asexual. There was an option to select further labels such as demisexual and sex-repulsed with the ability to write in other labels. One common write-in was quoiromantic in which one finds difficulty in understanding romantic attraction. A few participants did not use the Split Attraction Model to describe themselves, however this data is not statistically significant. Additionally, due to researcher error, accurate data on participants’ comfort levels with sex and romance was not obtained.
This data reveals that nearly 90% of aro/ace fanfiction writers are themselves aro/ace. In comparison, Rouse and Stanfill (2023) found that 18.93% of their respondents identified as asexual and 13.86% as aromantic. Though their research did not focus specifically on fanfic writers, the difference in our findings suggests at least some credence to a notion that aro/ace people are drawn toward writing aro/ace fanfic more so than allo people. However, more attention should be paid to fic length and amount of fics written in order to draw the conclusion that aro/ace people prefer writing aro/ace fanfic over fanfic with allo characters.
Aro/ace fanfic writers are largely similar to the larger fanfic and aro/ace communities. The most salient differences are in relation to gender and sexuality. Participants are more likely to identify under the nonbinary umbrella than the larger fanfic community. Additionally, aro/ace people dominate as writers of aro/ace fic where they only account for one-fifth of the larger fanfic community. The next section explores how these demographic factors and other social conditions influence perceptions of aromanticism and asexuality that have impacted participants.
Aromanticism & Asexuality in Fanfiction Writing 