Work Text:
To go with the latest threepatchpodcast episode (Kinktober, featuring omegaverse roundtable discussions and fic recs) I took a look at omegaverse AU fanfic in the Sherlock fandom. (I used the "Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics" umbrella tag on AO3.)
POPULARITY COMPARED TO OTHER FANDOMS
In 2014, omegaverse has been more popular in the Sherlock fandom than most. Here’s a look at a bunch of popular fandoms in 2014 -- what percentage of each fandom’s works this year were omegaverse?
Note: This is an incomplete sample of fandoms with at least 1000 fanworks posted to AO3 in 2014. Takeaways from this graph:
Sherlock has one of the highest percentages of works tagged Alpha/Beta/Omega. SPN RPF is the originating fandom for this trope, and the popularity seems to be continuing there. And Hannibal also has a very high percentage of omegaverse. Those were the only two fandoms I was able to find with more omegaverse than Sherlock.
On AO3 overall, about 0.8% of the fanworks (fewer than 1 in 100) are omegaverse. In Sherlock, it’s 2.1%. There’s a lot of cross-fandom variance; there are some popular & active fandoms with almost no omegaverse (e.g., Once Upon A Time has produced 5563 fanworks in 2014, of which only 1 was omegaverse).
On FFNet, omegaverse does not appear to be very popular, but it’s even more strongly associated with Sherlock. There are only 314 search results for “omegaverse” on FFNet. Hetalia and Sherlock are the primary fandoms posting omegaverse fics on that platform, accounting for 108 omegaverse fics (34%) apiece.
Omegaverse is growing in popularity, as I've shown before. 50% of Sherlock omegaverse fic was written post-S3.
GENDER ROLES
A lot of A/B/O fics don’t indicate which genders the characters are in the tags, so it’s hard to be very confident about the stats in this section. But out of the ones that do, let’s look at the most common characters and how often they take each gender role:
Sherlock and John are the most frequent omegaverse characters (as in the fandom overall), and Sherlock is more often alpha, while John is more often omega.
It’s hard to see the relative proportions for some of the less frequent characters, so let’s also compare the percent of the time that each character gets each tag, and then sort by proportion of alphaness:
Moriarty is the most frequently alpha and Molly the most frequently omega, but their overall numbers of appearances are very small (so if someone writes a few more fanworks about either character, that could rapidly change). John and Molly are the only characters in this set who are written mostly as omega.
SHIPS
There are 674 Sherlock/John A/B/O fics -- that’s 75% of the A/B/O Sherlock fandom fics. Here is an (incomplete) set of other Sherlock ships, with the number of A/B/O fanworks devoted to the ship:
Mystrade is second most popular ship here, as in the AO3 fandom overall (though on FFNet, Sherlolly is second most popular ship).
In fact, the relative popularity of ships in omegaverse is similar to the overall ship popularity, with the top four ships remaining the same in both cases (see the BASC Sherlockian Fandom Stats presentation for further Sherlock fandom shipping data.)
Let’s look at how the more popular Sherlock ships have changed in popularity since S3 (blue is percentage of omegaverse fics written before S3, red is after S3):
50% of the Sherlock A/B/O fic has been written in 2014, so we can compare to that and see that A/B/O Warstan, Mystrade, Sherlolly, Sherstrade, and Johniarty fics have been growing proportionately faster than average post-S3 (the numbers are very small, though, so these percentages shouldn’t be taken as too meaningful).
RELATIONSHIP CATEGORIES
If we compare Sherlock fandom overall to Sherlock A/B/O fics, we see a strong preference for M/M in both cases, but stronger for A/B/O:
Interestingly, though, the distribution of all the tags except M/M are more evenly distributed within A/B/O. That means that within Sherlockian omegaverse fanfic, there are proportionately more uses of the F/F, Multi, and Other tags than in the Sherlock fandom overall.
POPULARITY AMONG READERS (BY KUDOS)
So only 2% of Sherlock fic is omegaverse; it's not very popular to write compared to some other AO3 tags and tropes. How popular is it to read? As one measure, let's look at the average number of kudos that the omegaverse tag receives, as compared to other tags in the Sherlock fandom:
[This data was collected in March 2014 and presented at 221B Con. ]
The median number of kudos for the Sherlock fandom overall is 22 (or was as of March. The median number of kudos for omegaverse is 8 times greater than average! (160 kudos) By comparison, the most commonly used tags (Fluff, Angst, and Alternate Universe) are much closer to the fandom average.
Caveats: This is a handpicked set of tags -- the set of common tags and any other tags that occurred to me to test that turned out to have a higher median number of kudos than the fandom overall. So lots of tags are missing.
IN CONCLUSION...
The omegaverse AU is growing in popularity in many fandoms, but Sherlock is one of the fandoms most actively developing this AU. And it's even more popular among readers than writers. While the AU is even more dominated by M/M slash and Johnlock than the fandom as a whole, it's also easier to find femslash and other rare relationship categories.
For omegaverse recs and discussion, check out the latest TPP episode!