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RELATIONSHIPS: FFNET VS AO3
I looked at popular relationships on AO3 and FFNet in three large fandoms (Harry Potter, Sherlock, and Supernatural). There are no relationship tags on FFNet, so the numbers for that platform are less certain. (Click Read More for methodology details.) A few patterns that seem to repeat across these fandoms:
- The relative popularity of ships differs (sometimes substantially) on the two platforms.
- FFNet has a much higher proportion of non-romantic fanfic than AO3.
- AO3 has more rare pair fics than FFNet.
- AO3 has a bigger focus on M/M than FFNet.
Which works are shippy?
I divided the fic into shippy and gen (non-relationship focused). On FFNet, I categorized all the works that had Romance listed as a genre as shippy and others as gen (labeled "no romance" in the graphs). On AO3, I categorized all works that did not use the "Gen" tag as shippy and others as gen.
Note that fics can be romantic even if they don't use the Romance genre or if they do use the Gen tag. Note also that this "shippy" category will capture pairings that are sexual but not romantic -- and potentially non-consensual. This is only a rough approximation of what proportion of the fanworks are relationship-focused.
How many works per ship?
On the AO3 side, it's easy to look at how many times a ship tag is used (e.g., "Sherlock Holmes/John Watson"). Because I was looking at works that were specifically romance-focused, I excluded works tagged "Gen".
On FFNet, there are no relationship tags; there is a relatively new "pairing" filter for specifying when story characters are involved, but it's not widely used on older works especially. So I tried to approximate the number of fanworks per ship by searching for stories labeled "Romance" that listed each of the two characters in the ship.
Note that this FFNet method will incorrectly classify some ships (E.g., a Sherlolly story may list Sherlock, John, and Molly as characters and be labeled "Romance" genre; this story would get classified as both a Sherlolly and a Johnlock story.) This is obviously more error-prone than the AO3 method. I've also tried other methods in the Sherlock fandom in the past (hand classifying 100 fics, searching for shipnames as well as Romance genre). None of them are perfect; this one seems to be the most stable method.
Which fandoms and ships to investigate?
I picked three of the largest fandoms on both platforms. And then I tried to pick some of the top relationships in the fandoms. This was based in part on which relationships AO3 said were most popular, but also on other relationships I'd heard were popular on FFNet. Sorry if I missed some of your favorites! I'm not active in any of these fandoms except Sherlock, so I may have made some silly errors.
Edit: I forgot to say -- I only included non-canon ships. I chose to do this because often canon ships are only mentioned in the background, and I was curious about what people were actively writing.
(Aside: I think Sam/Gabriel is called Sabriel; as a fan of the Garth Nix books, this is a source of periodic confusion and amusement for me. I used smush names rather than spelling out the pairings to save space/make for quicker reading, but I'm sorry if I made any errors.)
How many rare pairs?
I approximated the number of rare pairs by subtracting the number of works for each of the pairs I looked at from the number of shippy fics overall. Because some works get show up in multiple top relationship tags (and e.g. get counted as both Johnlock and Mystrade), that means this rare pair number is overly conservative -- there are actually more rare pairs than are shown here.
What about absolute numbers?
Here are the numbers of fanworks devoted to each ship:
You can see a correlation between the age of the fandom and the relative popularity of AO3 and FFNet. Because AO3 wasn't around yet during the HP heyday, the HP fandom is particularly dominated by FFNet; the SPN fandom has also been around long enough that it also has more FFNet works than AO3 works. Sherlock is more evenly distributed.
A few quick fandom-specific observations:
Harry Potter
Snarry is most popular on FFNet, closely followed by Draco/Hermione. On AO3, Drarry dominates. Harry Potter fandom has a wider variety of popular relationships and a larger proportion of rare pair fic than the other fandoms.
Supernatural
Destiel is the most popular ship on both platforms, but on FFNet most of the fanworks are not romance genre.
Sherlock
Johnlock, man. It's everywhere in large quantities. After that, though, Sherlolly is most popular on FFNet, while Mystrade is second on AO3.