Work Text:
ladyglyselia asked:
Have you ever done an analysis of which fandoms are most dominated by a single ship?
I hadn’t done so before. I just took a quick pass at doing so, but only among the biggest fandoms on AO3 as of Jan 2024 (ones with over 10K public works at that time). I sorted them by the size of their biggest ship relative to the size of the fandom. This gives us a bunch of very big fandoms with a high % of works tagged with a particular ship:
A few notes:
- This is based on January 2024 data. Some things may have changed!
- Not all these works are necessarily about these ships. Especially in the cases where the ships are canon, they may often be tagged as background ships.
- There are undoubtedly many smaller AO3 fandoms that have higher percentages devoted to the top ship.
- I removed some highly overlapping fandoms (e.g., Good Omens book fandom).
- This is AO3 data only, and (as always!) AO3 does not represent fandom overall. In particular, ship popularity tends to vary A LOT by archive/platform. See some past cross-platform shipping comparisons from 2019 (comparing het vs. slash vs. gen on Wattpad/FFN/AO3), and 2014 (comparing popular ships from HP, SPN, and Sherlock on AO3/FFN). One highlight:
