Work Text:
@vefanyar asked:
If you're still taking prompts, would you mind tackling pairing stats in the different parts of the Tolkien fandom (Silmarillion, Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit)?
Sure thing! :)
Before we hop into ships, let’s take a quick look at the way Tolkien-related tags are used on AO3:
The meta tags (the ones with All Media Types) return the most search results, because AO3 includes all the results under these umbrella tags (some users also choose to use All Media Types as a fandom tag, but most choose to use the more specific tags). Interestingly, The Hobbit movie tag is more popular than the Tolkien tag (ostensibly for the book), whereas for LOTR it’s the other way around. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the books are more popular than the movies in the LOTR fandom, though; it’s likely just that tagging conventions evolved differently in the two fandoms. The LOTR movie tag may not have existed or been popular on AO3 when most of the authors were posting their LOTR fic (and keep in mind that most LOTR fic was being written in the pre-AO3 days, so a great deal of LOTR fic never got posted here).
Taking a quick peek on FFN (which has been around much longer than AO3, and which classifies all these fandoms only under “Books”):
LOTR still reigns supreme on FFN.
Okay, so for pairings (which I’ll be looking at exclusively on AO3, since FFN doesn’t categorize that way), let’s start with The Silmarillion, because there’s only one of those:
Fascinating — I have never heard of either character in the top pairing, and have no idea of the genders or races of the characters involved! :D (I’ve read LOTR and The Hobbit — though not for ages — but not The Silmarillion.)
Moving on to LOTR, we see that tag choice makes a big difference to ranking. Here is the union of the top 10 pairings from each LOTR tag — 13 overall:
Aragorn/Boromir is most common in the Movies tag (just barely beating Frodo/Sam, which is most common in the other tags), but it ranks 8th in the Tolkien tag. Meanwhile, Erestor/Glorfindel is far more prevalent in the Tolkien tag than the Movies tag (unsurprisingly — were those characters even in the movies?). The tag you choose makes a big difference to popularity of pairings!
Moving on to The Hobbit:
Here we see less variation in rankings; the main difference is that Kili/Tauriel isn’t very common in the Tolkien tag (Tauriel being, I believe, a movie OC).