A while back, I attended a Bronycon panel (Awesome job on the shipping panel if you're reading this, people who ran it!) About shipping and romance in the fandom. While watching, they made a brief note about how F/F ships were the most popular in this universe, and they offered up a variety of reasons, several examples being:

1) The large number of female characters.
2) The bland male characters.
3) The majority of the fandom being male.
4) As one of them joked: "It's pay back for all the Harry/Draco slash."

But that got me thinking, why do we write so much female/female in this fandom? Is it really for something as simple as the number of characters, or is there another, deeper reason behind it? What do female/female writers think of it, writers who have an outside perspective? Why is our fandom so focused on F/F pairings?

FYI, I'm not against this, I actually love F/F stories as a whole, Twysalis for life XD! But I am curious to know everyone's opinions on this topic, please leave your opinions below with plenty of comments! We shall strive to discover the answer, on this FIMTHEROY TOPIC!

4689926 A series this popular, and the main characters are mostly female?

Yeah, I think that would lend itself to F/F shipping stories.

Most of the time, when you watch/read a popular series, the main character(s) are often male. So, this often leads to M/F and M/M shipping, but not in the case of MLP.

4689926 I don't think there's anything else to it, honestly.

4689926
For me, I'd say it's mostly 1 and 2.

Discord is is the only vaguely interesting male character for shipping. Okay, maybe Spike.

4689926 Ship everything

4689926 Mostly because of number three. Don't forget that lesbians exist solely for straight men to gawk at.

4690064
I guess that explains why the majority of HP fanfiction is M/M then.

I kid, I kid. Your opinion is appreciated, thanks for commenting!~

I think it's a little bit of each, a combination of all those options.

I think it's 1 and 2. I mean aside from Spike and maybe Discord. All of the main characters are female. Our main interactions are them with each other. Considering how shipping goes (at least good shipping) this makes most of the best material in that area. It's just like why most series with a bunch of males tends to more M/M shipping.

The fanbase can lead to different shifts in what is popular but I do think it's overstated how many males are in the fandom. There are many girls who watch MLP and ship primarily F/F ships. In fact usually the only people who don't ship mostly F/F ships in this fandom (aside from those who don't ship) seem to try to take great leaps of logic so that every possible pairing is heterosexual. Sure there are some males here who go for the F/F because it appeals to them and that's it, but I do feel the genders of the main characters is more of a factor.

4689926
I think they pretty much nailed it, it's probably "A, B, and C are all correct".

1. We have a lot of female characters on the show, more than what is usual in just about any other medium.
2. The male characters are few, and usually either already paired with somebody or are just generally unshippable.
3. Many of our fans are straight males who get a kick out of "girl-on-girl" as a fetish.

Of course, a lot of it also has to do with paranoia towards either expanding upon male background or side character personalities, or creating new male characters, meaning that a lot of people are scared to work outside of what's been developed, and inevitably, the female characters are usually the most developed.