Work Text:
SHERLOCK FANDOM AUs: TEENLOCK
The forthcoming episode of threepatchpodcast is going to discuss AUs in which the cast of Sherlock are teens, or are attending high school or university. Let’s take a look at the statistics of these AUs.
(Edit: not all teenlock is AU! But most of the analyses here address only the AU teenlock stories, which comprise 91% of the teenlock on AO3. See more definitional clarifications here.)
Sherlock compared to other fandoms
There’s a lot of teenlock fic out there! Is this AU more common in the Sherlock fandom than other fandoms? To find out, I looked at which AO3 fandoms were most often using “Alternate Universe -- Teenagers” or any of its subtags:
Wow -- at first blush, it sure looks like Sherlock dominates the field entirely when it comes to teen AUs! However, this turns out to be a case where the tag you search for makes all the difference.
If we instead look at “Alternate Universe -- High School,” for instance, we see a very different pattern:
Sherlock is no longer at the top of the charts when we look at this tag (even though it’s bigger overall than several of the other fandoms).
And for “Alternate Universe - College/University,” we see yet another fandom ordering:
The takeaway lesson here is, how much fic you find for your favorite AU depends a lot on the tags you search for, and on the tagging habits of your own particular fandom.
Popularity of teenlock over time
The most popular teen AU tags in the Sherlock fandom (“Alternate Universe - Teenagers” and “Alternate Universe - College/University,” both of which are umbrella tags for a bunch of related tags) have grown in popularity over time.
Within the Sherlock fandom, both tags have experienced some large spikes:
But the fandom itself has experienced some large spikes (e.g. following each new series, and during Holmestice). So what if we look at teenlock and unilock as a percent of the overall Sherlock fandom’s production over time?
We still see an upward trend for both these tags, with about 5% of Sherlock fanworks currently being tagged as a teen AU. But some of the specific peaks and dips change, and there’s now a more consistent upward trend.
(Note -- some of the increase is probably due to the fact that the tags are getting more popular on AO3 overall… I haven’t verified that, but in general, AO3 fanworks have been getting more tags and more specific tags as the years go by. So while it is true that proportionally more Sherlock fanworks are getting tagged as teenlock over time, it may not represent as large an increase in teen AU content.)
Teenlock shipping
The most popular Sherlock ships in the “Alternate Universe - Teenagers” tag are almost the same as the most popular ships in the fandom overall:
[Ships from top to bottom: Sherlock/John, Mycroft/Lestrade, Moran/Moriarty, Sherlock/Molly, Mary/John, Sherlock/Victor]
The big exception here is viclock (Sherlock Holmes/Victor Trevor), which is a much rarer pair in the fandom overall. Given that Victor was a university friend in ACD canon, it makes sense that he’s so popular in this genre!
If we look at which ships produce a lot of teen or college AUs relative to their size, we see viclock produces A LOT of teen AU fic:
[Ships from top to bottom: Sherlock/Victor, Mycroft/Lestrade, Sherlock/John, Moran/Moriarty, Mary/John, Sherlock/Molly]
Sherlock/Victor could be a past teenage relationship for Sherlock without requiring it to be AU. It’s therefore interesting that almost 10% of viclock is a teenlock AU fic.
Also interesting -- a Mystrade fic is more likely to be teen AU than a Johnlock fic!
Sherlock/Molly fic is less likely to be teenlock AU than a lot of the other big ships -- I wonder why? My wild speculation is that maybe that’s because it’s gained a lot of popularity more recently, and Sherlolly writers have had less time to fully explore canon possibilities and move on to AUs. Other theories welcome!
If we look at when some of these ships started to have a bunch of teenlock fic, we see that Johnlock Mormor had a teenlock surge before any of the other ships, but Mystrade has the highest percent of teen AU works currently:
And if we break it down further, month by month, we see that Mystrade (yellow line) has had two particularly big spikes in activity:
Anyone know whether there were fanwork exchanges or other events that these spikes correspond to?
Top AO3 freeform tags
Teenlock appears to be very fluffy, very angsty, and very full of first kisses (though all of those tags are also quite popular in the fandom overall):
It could be in part that teenlock writers are better at tagging, rather than teenlock works really having proportionally more fluff and angst. Then again, teens do tend to have a lot of strong emotions and first kisses. :)
Here are some rare tags that I found far more often in teenlock fic than in the fandom overall:
- John Plays Rugby (67% of the uses of this tag are teenlock fanworks)
- Alternate Universe - Ballet (37% teenlock)
- Bullying (33% teenlock)
- Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting (21% teenlock)
Fanfiction.net
Shipping varies a lot by platform (both overall and within Sherlock). Sherlolly is far more popular on FFN than AO3, for instance -- it’s more popular than Mystrade on FFN -- so I was wondering whether Sherlolly teenlock AU works are easier to find on FFN.
Unfortunately, it’s a lot harder to tell because FFN doesn’t have tags for ships or AUs. And I can’t find much teen or school AU there. A search for “teenlock” yields only 265 results (out of 53K Sherlock works), and “Sherlock school” yields 639 works. That’s just 1% of the FFN Sherlock fanworks -- a lot less than the approximately 5% of the works on AO3 that are teenlock. But like I said, I’m probably missing a bunch due to lack of tags.
Because I can find so few, we can’t really draw many conclusions from the ship breakdown:
- Johnlock + school: 126 search results
- Sherlolly + school: 21
- Mystrade + school: 21
- Mormor + school: 14
Any fans who spend a lot of time on FFN have any better search suggestions?
Final thoughts
Teenage and college age AUs are very popular in the Sherlock fandom -- and not just for our juggernaut ship. Their popularity seems to be growing over time, and for certain rare pairs, this is a particularly fertile AU to explore.
I’d love to hear any of your theories, speculations, or follow up questions about any of this data -- and be sure to check out the threepatchpodcast roundtable discussion and recs in the upcoming episode if this is a topic that excites you. :)
If you want to see these graphs bigger or look at the actual numbers, here’s the raw data (not terribly well organized; ask if you have any questions!).