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TOASTYSTATS: WHICH FANDOMS HAVE THE MOST POLYAMORY FIC?
I was talking to a friend a while back about how there’s not a lot of fanfic involving polyamory in the Sherlock fandom (or hasn’t been, pre-S3; we’ll see if that changes). My friend observed that there’s far more poly fic in the Avengers fandom. I immediately wondered whether that’s because the Sherlock fandom has been so focused on a single pairing (Sherlock/John), whereas there are a lot more popular ships in the Avengers fandom. This analysis stems from that conversation.
TL;DR: Summary.
- The amount of polyamory fic on AO3 is not correlated with how much a single pairing dominates a fandom. E.g., how much of the Sherlock fandom is devoted to Sherlock/John is not noticeably related to how much poly fic there is (or, it may be related in that particular fandom – but not across all fandoms).
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The amount of poly fic is
weaklycorrelated with the amount of rivalry between the top two overlapping ships. E.g., how popular Clint/Coulson is vs. Clint/Natasha is in the Avengers fandom isweaklyrelated to how much poly fic there is. (see notes on strength of correlation below) - Poly fic is slightly more plotty/less porny than related tags. Threesome, Foursome, Orgy, and Gangbang are increasingly less plotty and more porny.
Click Read More for graphs, methodology, and any corrections/updates!
Selecting fandoms.
For this analysis, I looked at the most common fandoms on AO3 overall and also the top 10 fandoms in the ‘Polyamory’, 'Threesome’, and 'Foursome’ tags.
Prevalence of 'Polyamory’ tag.
Here are the fandoms I looked at (these are my abbrevations – not the full AO3 tags), ordered by prevalence of usage of the 'Polyamory’ tag. Because the percentage of poly fic is so low, the numbers in parentheses indicate how many fanworks out of 1000 are tagged 'Polyamory’ within each fandom.
- My Chemical Romance (13.18 'Polyamory’ fanworks per 1000 on AO3)
- One Direction (10.97)
- Avengers (9.09)
- CW RPF (8.32)
- LOTR (7.78)
- Merlin (6.95)
- Teen Wolf (6.13)
- Les Mis (5.81)
- Star Trek (5.66)
- Hetalia (5.30)
- Homestuck (5.23)
- Glee (5.16)
- XMFC (4.95)
- The Hobbit (4.90)
- due South (4.85)
- Torchwood (4.32)
- Supernatural (3.77)
- Harry Potter (3.45)
- Stargate Atlantis (3.25)
- Buffy (3.13)
- Doctor Who (2.92)
- Sherlock (2.73)
- Hawaii Five-0 (2.49)
- Smallville (0.79)
- The Sentinel (0.42)
Hypothesis 1: Polyamory is a function of how much a single pairing dominates a fandom.
This is basically my first idea – if the Sherlock fandom is dominated by Sherlock/John, then it will naturally have a lot less poly fic than a fandom with 2+ popular pairings.
To test this idea, I compared the percentage of fics in each fandom that were tagged with the top ship in each fandom with the percent tagged 'Polyamory’. There was basically no relationship at least within this set of fandoms on AO3.
If there were a relationship between these variables, we should see some kind of (noisy) line or curve here, but it’s pretty much just chaos. (R = -0.12, which is weak to the point of pretty much non-existent.) Each of the blue dots below represents one of the fandoms above:
I also looked at how much the top relationship dominated the second most popular relationship (statistically, not in terms of BDSM :) ). That is, I compared the ratio of fic devoted to the top pairing to fic devoted to the second pairing. There wasn’t a substantive correlation with amount of poly fic there, either (R = -0.19).
At this point, it occurred to me that maybe lots of fandoms have multiple popular pairings that don’t overlap, so there’s not a lot of incentive/opportunity for poly fic. This lead to Hypothesis 2.
Hypothesis 2: Polyamory is a function of there being 2+ popular overlapping ships.
In other words, if there are two very popular ships involving a single character (e.g., Clint/Coulson and Clint/Natasha), then there should be more polyamory.
To test this idea, I looked through the top 10 ships in each fandom for the top two that had a character in common. Then I looked at the ratio of the number of fanworks for each of these. In the Star Trek fandom, where there are two nearly equally popular pairings on AO3 (Kirk/Spock and Kirk/McCoy), this number is approximately 1:1. In a fandom like XMFC, which is dominated by one pairing that doesn’t overlap much with others, this number is approximately 24:1 – Erik/Charles is 24 times more popular than Erik/Mystique. In the Sentinel fandom, this ratio is a whopping 296:1.
It seems I’m more on the right track with this line of thinking – there is a weak correlation between this ratio and the amount of poly fic. The correlation is slightly stronger if you look at the dominance of ship X/Y over Y/Z on a logarithmic scale:
This is still not a strong relationship (R = -0.44), as you can see from the fact that this still doesn’t really look much like a line. (Edit: Actually, I’m not sure if I should call this relationship weak or not. In some cases, this R value would be considered a pretty substantial indicator of a relationship between the variables. See further discussion.)
I also looked at this relationship just for the top two overlapping pairings that had the same genders involved (e.g., both overlapping ships were M/M, or both were F/M – there were no fandoms with two popular overlapping F/F ships). That was a somewhat weaker relationship (R = -0.37).
What does all this mean? Well, it mostly means that other factors and quirks of individual fandoms are also important in determining how much poly fic gets written in each fandom – as we’d expect. But the amount of overlap between popular ships is a predictor as well.
'Polyamory’ tag vs. related tags.
Of course, a lot of this has to do with how people tag their fanworks; in some fandoms, it may be more common to tag the same dynamic 'Threesome’ vs. 'Polyamory’. I couldn’t completely explore this quantitatively, but I did look at how some popular tags involving 3+ parties differed in their usage across AO3.
I compared the tags 'Polyamory’, 'Threesome’, 'Foursome’, 'Orgy’, and 'Gangbang’. For each of these tags, I looked at number of works, ratings, and popular co-occurring tags.
Amount of fanworks:
- Threesome - 11951
- Polyamory - 4907
- Foursome - 1043
- Gangbang - 535
- Orgy - 438
Hypothesis 3: 'Polyamory’ is less porny than related tags.
All of these tags have 'Explicit’ as a top rating. But 'Polyamory’ has 'Teen and up audiences’ as the second most popular tag, whereas the others all have 'Mature’ as the next most popular.
Polyamory is unique in having 'Established Relationship’ and 'Fluff’ in the top 10 tags. It also does not contain ’Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot’ in the top 10, as all the other tags do.
I looked at the prevalence of two slightly more plotty tags ('Angst’ and 'Fluff’) and two more porny tags ('BDSM’ and 'Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot’) for each of the Poly-related tags:
From this, it appears that the porn-plot continuum goes from plottiest to porniest approximately as follows: Polyamory-Threesome-Foursome-Orgy-Gangbang. (The order of the last two is especially debatable.) Oh, and 'Gangbang’ has way more BDSM than the others.
Request for input!
Do you have any other hypotheses about what affects the amount of poly fic in a fandom? Or have you seen interesting trends in 3+ character ships in your own fandom? Let me know!
Also, if you have any questions, find this confusing, or want to see more of my data, let me know that, too. :)