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PARENTLOCK: PARENTING AND KID FIC IN THE SHERLOCK FANDOM
In preparation for the upcoming Three Patch Podcast episode on Parentlock, I decided to look at parenting fic in the Sherlock fandom from a statistical perspective.
Quick Summary
Compared to the Sherlock fandom overall, parenting fic:
- has lower ratings
- is more Johnlocky
- has more Irene/Sherlock
- is fluffier
- is more popular
- is longer
Methods
I compared the following tags on AO3:
- Sherlock (TV) tag -- 55K fics
- Parentlock tag -- 711 fics
- Sherlock + Kid Fic (omitting Kidlock and Teenlock) -- 1048 fics
The Kid Fic tag is a mix of Sherlock characters raising kids and Sherlock characters as kids, but omitting Kidlock and Teenlock removes most of the latter category.
Ratings
Parenting/kid fic has lower ratings than fandom as a whole (Blue = General; ratings increase clockwise from there):
Genres
There is way more Fluff than Angst for Parenting/kid fic, though they’re nearly equal for fandom overall:
Shipping
Both Parentlock and Kid Fic are more Johnlocky than the fandom as a whole:
I didn’t notice any other big shipping differences, except that Irene/Sherlock is more common in Parenting/kid fic (note that the top of this scale is 5%; these are much smaller numbers than the above graph):
Popularity
Parenting/kid fic is more popular than average for the fandom (comparing median number of kudos in each category):
- Sherlock: 22 kudos (median)
- Parentlock: 30 (36% more than average)
- Sherlock + Kid Fic: 33 (50% more than average)
Length
Parenting/kid fic is longer than average for the fandom:
- Sherlock: 1624 words (median)
- Parentlock: 2701 words (66% longer than average)
- Sherlock + Kid Fic: 2493 words (54% longer than average)