Star Trek fic on the Archive of Our Own (AO³):
graphs showing categories [gen/het/slash/femslash/etc.], ratings, and frequencies of most popular ships by sub-fandom
(File also under: Kate is easily bored and has strange entertainments.)
A note re. accessibility: I've provided the data for each graph under it, but bar graphs and pie charts are specifically designed to make a bunch of numbers make intuitive sense, so I'm not sure whether I'm doing it right? If there's a better way to do it I would be happy to make corrections.
A few explanatory notes and disclaimers before I start with the graphs:
All fic on the AO³ must receive one (1) rating--either General Audiences/G, Teen and Up Audiences/T, Mature/M, or Explicit/E. If the author chooses not to rate, the fic is given a rating of Not Rated. Therefore, the ratings add together to make up exactly 100% of fics. All fic on the AO³ may receive categorizations (a series of tickable boxes indicating whether or not there are romantic/sexual relationships happening, and, if so, what sex(es) and/or gender(s) the people involved are), but categorizations are not required and any one fic can have more than one. Therefore, categorizations very rarely add up to exactly 100% of fics. Finally, there is as yet no way to exclude crossovers/multi-fandom works from a search, meaning that the only guarantee about these data is that they are listed under the fandom in question; they may be listed under other fandoms as well--as crossovers, recastings, etc.--and the ratings and/or categories may apply more to the non-ST fandom than to the ST fandom.
Due to database limitations, if a fandom has more than 1000 works in it, a maximum of 1000 can show up at a time. You can sort within that data set by ratings, categories, pairings, etc., as well as by date posted (most recent or oldest) and hits (most or fewest). Both the fandom as a whole ("Star Trek" with 5690 total fics at the time I collected my data) and the 2009 film (with 3836 total fics at the time I collected my data) had more than that, and therefore all data regarding them is perforce incomplete. Unless I explicitly state otherwise, all data for either of those are from the most recent 1000 fics posted.
The AO³ is not an unbiased source. The AO³ is not a random sampling. To a certain extent, the AO³ self-selects (people discover it through fandom friends, etc.). Data sets are hugely incomplete. All conclusions here are concluded about, and only about, the fandom as represented by its contributors to the AO³ itself, without venturing to make valid assumptions about fandom as a whole.
Also, I am not a mathematician. If I've done something really stupid, I apologize.
Okay.
What Is Fandom Writing?
Most of the fic--most recent, longest, and most popular--is the recent film: 611 of the most recent, 634 of the longest, and 921 of the most popular. The original series was next in all categories: 164 of the most recent, 147 of the longest, and 59 of the most popular. The fewest recent (17) and long (22) fics were Voyager, and the fewest popular fics were Enterprise (2).
Full breakdown of the most recent fics, which are primarily what I'm working with:
TOS vs. AOS
We start off more detailed analyses with a comparison of Star Trek: the Original Series and Star Trek XI, because they share characters, at least nominally.
TOS had 651 fics at the time I collected these data; figures are expressed in percentages. I haven't duplicated the fic count for AOS, because it's just the percentage without a decimal point.
(Yeah, this is not Scientific And Impartial.)
Popularity and AOS
I did a quick breakdown of categories and ratings through the recent-long-popular sorts for AOS (technically I did the same for the entire Trekverse, but I didn't bother graphing it).
(Sorry for the colors, I didn't bother changing their defaults.)
Ratings by Source
Here is a standard bar graph with the data.
Here is a stacked bar graph. The numbers are the same; the presentation is what's different. I'm giving you both for whichever is easier for you to process.
Categories by Source
Standard bar graph! Also available: a stacked bar graph (see how everything except Enterprise has more than 100% of fics, now? multicategorization!) and a scaled stacked bar graph (I got this one by adding all the fics up and then calculating the categories as percentages of the (larger, except in the case of Enterprise) total. I like this one because everything sort of lines up visually). Anyway, your data!
Here's the same collection of data, sorted by category instead of by show.
Okay. I have just given you approximately ALL OF THE THINGS, and I apologize. Now, thoughts!
The second-most common category in all but AOS (where it's literally one fic away from tying for most-common) is gen. It's...closer in some than others but uh. Anyway, for TNG and VOY, the most common is het (and it's AOS's second-most-common); for TOS, DS9, ENT, and AOS it's slash.
TNG and VOY both have a lot of femslash, as well--more than they do slash, actually, especially VOY. (I should note, even though this didn't make it to the official data, that a decent quantity of this--30-some fics--is crossovers pairing Beverly Crusher of TNG with Kathryn Janeway of VOY, so there's overlap.) DS9, especially considering that its most-common category is slash and it has the smallest percentage of het of any of the shows (also, less het than TNG and VOY have femslash), makes a respectable showing in the femslash category as well.
(This is because the women on DS9 are made of awesomeness. I mean. What.)
Anyway, moving on. ENT actually has smaller percentages of femslash and het than TOS does. TOS. The one where the women were rarely allowed to be in the same room as each other, and were usually defined as The Girl in any given situation instead of developed as individuals. This implies really bad things about ENT and female characters.
(Have I told you guys the story about how I started watching DS9 because of the last set of graphs I ran? 'cause...I did. It is a choice I have not regretted.)
The earlier three shows have more gen than the later shows--there's a really, really noticeable break between DS9 and VOY (the latter has the lowest percentage of gen total).
And here's a graph where I stacked all the percentages on top of each other to show that Star Trek fandom is writing a hell of a lot more slash than anything else.
I'm sure you're shocked.
Individual Shows & Shipping
Okay, so. Here there are pie charts of what percentage of all the fic the most common three ships are, and what percentage of their category [het or slash] the most common two ships are--I would have done all three, but in several cases the third-most-common was from a different category than the first two.
Star Trek: the Original Series
Of the 651 TOS fics, 178 were Jim Kirk/Spock (27.3%), 72 were Leonard McCoy/Spock (11.1%), and 21 were Jim Kirk/Leonard McCoy/Spock (3.2%).
Here's a version scaled to encompass only the slashfics. Kirk/Spock is 61.6% of this graph, and McCoy/Spock 24.9%. (Over in the Multi piechart, assuming one existed, the original OT3 would be taking up 77.8% of the chart.)
So, this is the fandom that quote-unquote "invented" slash (and I suspect that, again, it's at least a bit a nonrepresentative sample? I was expecting a larger chunk of the pie to be red). The main ship is nearly two-thirds of its category, and the secondary about a quarter.
Star Trek: the Next Generation
Of the 497 TNG fics, 43 were William Riker/Deanna Troi (8.7%), 42 were Beverly Crusher/Jean-Luc Picard (8.5%), and 40 were Jean-Luc Picard/Deanna Troi (8.0%). There were a couple of others that were close, too--Picard/Q was somewhere in the thirties, I think, and something else?, and then Crusher/Janeway at thirty-odd. I have the weirdest urge to pat TNG on the head and go "aw, you're adorable."
Here's the hetfic-scaled version (I realized belatedly I could have included Picard/Troi on this as well, but I had a system). Riker/Troi is 23.6% here, Crusher/Picard 23.1%, and Picard/Troi would have been 22.0%. The two main ships are each slightly less than a quarter of the pie, differ from each other--even scaled--by only half a percentage point, and it's...well, either it's the result of a very ship-neutral fandom or it's the aftermath of a massive shipwar with so much carnage people are afraid to take strong opinions.
I incline towards the former opinion.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Of the 433 DS9 fics, 162 were Julian Bashir/Elim Garak (37.4%), 16 were Julian Bashir/Miles O'Brien (3.7%), and 14 were Kira Nerys/Odo (3.2%). We very very narrowly missed, by a margin of one fic, having femslash [Dax/Kira] tie for third place, which would have delighted me on principle. Ah well.
Scaled to slash. If I weren't captioning I'd say "presented without comment" but as it is I have numbers to give. Bashir/Garak is 90% here, Bashir/O'Brien is 8.9%. (Over in het, Kira/Odo is 21.2%.)
...presented without comment. Okay, I lie, I like the sound of my own voice too much to present anything without comment.
Digression: This Is Your Fandom on OTP (Non-Trek Samples & DS9)
There's a phenomenon I call "your fandom on OTP"--where the fandom has a ship that is incredibly pervasive, to the point where it can be almost...assumed? This is not quite that.
I headed over to X-Men: First Class (which I have yet to see, but which even mainstream media reports perceived as a relationship story) and to Merlin (with which I am personally familiar) to grab some stat patterns for that [note: I have not yet seen XMFC, but everything the internet has told me about it has made me confident it will be a good example. Which, indeed, it is].
In our first sample data set, XMFC, the category for the fandom's OTP [Charles/Erik] makes up 77.4% of all fics, and the OTP itself 67.8% of all fics/87.7% of its category. In our second, Merlin, the category makes up 65.4% of all fics, and the fandom's OTP [Arthur/Merlin] 62.9% of all fics/96.2% of its category.
Let me just whip up a few graphs for you to get those data into easily-visualized form. Left to right: XMFC, Merlin, DS9.
As you can see, the first two--examples of Your Fandom On OTP--have the OTP in question making up something in the neighborhood of two-thirds of all fics, with the category [slash, in all three of these cases] going from about two-thirds to about three-quarters of all fics. When looking for fics that aren't about the OTP, your options are limited. This is not the case with DS9, where there's a lot of fic that falls into other categories (the grey area representing gen, het, femslash, etc. takes up about three-fifths of the pie).
But if you look at the second row, where the most popular pairing is represented as a percentage of its category, the graphs all look pretty much the same--more than 85% of slashfics are the most popular pairing. (Merlin is a bit of an outlier, but Merlin is...well...it is what it is. DESTINY, lack of other male leads, etc. I thought about leaving it out after I'd done the math and then I smacked myself upside the head and informed myself that there is a difference between not being a Serious Mathematician™ and deliberately adjusting data to assist a conclusion.)
The interesting thing about DS9 as compared to the two samples, and what I think accounts for the similarity between the bottom set of graphs despite the difference between the top set, is that XMFC and Merlin are both--correct me if I'm wrong re. XMFC--functionally about the relationship between the two halves of the most popular ship. DS9 is an ensemble show, and, although half of its most popular ship (Julian Bashir) was a main character--not that that guaranteed he would play a key role in every episode, because, again, ensemble--the other half (Garak) was a guest star who actually only showed up in 22% of the episodes (38 of 173).
I can feel the urge to continue this lecture rising, so I'm going to ungracefully veer to ST:Voyager before I bore you all to tears.
Star Trek: Voyager
Of the 682 VOY fics, 175 were Chakotay/Kathryn Janeway (25.7%), 62 were Tom Paris/B'Elanna Torres (9.1%), and 37 were Kathryn Janeway/Tom Paris (5.4%). (Janeway/Seven almost made it. You can imagine my surprise when it didn't.)
Scaled to het. Again, I could have included Janeway/Paris, but I spaced out. Here, Chakotay/Janeway is 47.2%, Paris/Torres is 16.7%, and Janeway/Paris would have been 10.0%.
I haven't seen Voyager yet (though the graphs seem to indicate it is strong on awesome ladies and weak on plot), but I believe the internet has informed me that Chakotay/Janeway was one of those Official Unresolved-Sexual-Tension couples which the show kept not quite putting together?
Star Trek: Enterprise
Of the 357 ENT fics, 96 were Jonathan Archer/Malcolm Reed (26.9%), 68 were Malcolm Reed/Trip Tucker (19.0%), and 27 were Malcolm Reed/Hoshi Sato (7.6%).
Scaled to slash. Archer/Reed is now 49.7%, Reed/Tucker 35.2%, and over in het Reed/Sato (Reed/Hoshi? I'm assuming it's the former because the AO³ sorts alphabetical by family name) is at 39.1%.
I really don't have anything at all useful to say about these graphs. I have no idea who these people are, what their relations to each other are, or anything else like that. I have no idea who was canonically with whom, or anything else like that. (I do conclude that Reed was either incredibly attractive or flirted with everyone, though, just because he managed to turn up in all three distinct top-three pairings. Other than that, I've got nothing.)
Star Trek (2009)
Of the most recent 1000 AOS fics, 323 were Jim Kirk/Leonard McCoy, 197 were Jim Kirk/Spock, and 70 were Spock/Nyota Uhura.
Scaled to slash, Kirk/McCoy is 49.3%, Kirk/Spock is 30.0%, and over in het Spock/Uhura is 36.2%. (What in the world are people writing for het? o_O)
Anyway, these last three scaled sets actually bear some resemblance to each other--I think it's connected to having the most popular category as a majority of the fics and very little gen, maybe? I have no idea what it means, though.
Summing Up the Shipping
Also, for some reason I made a bar graph with all the data. I'm not sure why, but since I obviously spent some time on it, here, you can have it as a summary (since I already quoted all of the numbers, I'm skipping them now).
I...am also not sure why I felt this was a brilliant idea. The pastel bars show the ship in question as a percentage of the category; the dark bars show the category and ship as a percentage of the whole. This helps us to see that TOS and DS9 are the only ones whose most popular ship comes to more than 50% of its category, that TNG and DS9 have the lowest percentages of the category for the most popular ship (not that it helped TNG's scaled pie chart get more color, or anything) and AOS has the highest, and...a few other things. I'm not sure; I think my brain ran out a while ago.
Anyway! Questions, comments, debates?
This entry is also available at Dreamwidth, where there are
comments. Comment here or there, as you wish.
(File also under: Kate is easily bored and has strange entertainments.)
A note re. accessibility: I've provided the data for each graph under it, but bar graphs and pie charts are specifically designed to make a bunch of numbers make intuitive sense, so I'm not sure whether I'm doing it right? If there's a better way to do it I would be happy to make corrections.
A few explanatory notes and disclaimers before I start with the graphs:
All fic on the AO³ must receive one (1) rating--either General Audiences/G, Teen and Up Audiences/T, Mature/M, or Explicit/E. If the author chooses not to rate, the fic is given a rating of Not Rated. Therefore, the ratings add together to make up exactly 100% of fics. All fic on the AO³ may receive categorizations (a series of tickable boxes indicating whether or not there are romantic/sexual relationships happening, and, if so, what sex(es) and/or gender(s) the people involved are), but categorizations are not required and any one fic can have more than one. Therefore, categorizations very rarely add up to exactly 100% of fics. Finally, there is as yet no way to exclude crossovers/multi-fandom works from a search, meaning that the only guarantee about these data is that they are listed under the fandom in question; they may be listed under other fandoms as well--as crossovers, recastings, etc.--and the ratings and/or categories may apply more to the non-ST fandom than to the ST fandom.
Due to database limitations, if a fandom has more than 1000 works in it, a maximum of 1000 can show up at a time. You can sort within that data set by ratings, categories, pairings, etc., as well as by date posted (most recent or oldest) and hits (most or fewest). Both the fandom as a whole ("Star Trek" with 5690 total fics at the time I collected my data) and the 2009 film (with 3836 total fics at the time I collected my data) had more than that, and therefore all data regarding them is perforce incomplete. Unless I explicitly state otherwise, all data for either of those are from the most recent 1000 fics posted.
The AO³ is not an unbiased source. The AO³ is not a random sampling. To a certain extent, the AO³ self-selects (people discover it through fandom friends, etc.). Data sets are hugely incomplete. All conclusions here are concluded about, and only about, the fandom as represented by its contributors to the AO³ itself, without venturing to make valid assumptions about fandom as a whole.
Also, I am not a mathematician. If I've done something really stupid, I apologize.
Okay.
What Is Fandom Writing?
Most of the fic--most recent, longest, and most popular--is the recent film: 611 of the most recent, 634 of the longest, and 921 of the most popular. The original series was next in all categories: 164 of the most recent, 147 of the longest, and 59 of the most popular. The fewest recent (17) and long (22) fics were Voyager, and the fewest popular fics were Enterprise (2).
Full breakdown of the most recent fics, which are primarily what I'm working with:
- TOS -- 164 [including things filed as TOS movies]
- TNG -- 070 [including things filed as TNG movies]
- DS9 -- 140
- VOY -- 017
- ENT -- 057
- AOS -- 611
- we're, what, one short? I think it was one of the novels.
TOS vs. AOS
We start off more detailed analyses with a comparison of Star Trek: the Original Series and Star Trek XI, because they share characters, at least nominally.
TOS had 651 fics at the time I collected these data; figures are expressed in percentages. I haven't duplicated the fic count for AOS, because it's just the percentage without a decimal point.
- 1.8% (12) of those were femslash, compared to 3.3% of the film's.
- 20.1% (131) of the show's fics were het, compared to 19.3% of the film's.
- 37.9% (247) of the show's fics were gen, compared to 19.2% of the film's.
- 44.3% (289) of the show's fics were slash, compared to 65.5% of the film's.
- 4.1% (27) of the show's fics were multi/poly, compared to 6.4% of the film's.
- 1.1% (7) of the show's fics were "other", compared to 3.6% of the film's.
- 41.5% (270) of the show's fics were rated General, compared to 21.2% of the film's.
- 25.3% (165) of the show's fics were rated Teen, compared to 28.9% of the film's.
- 13.5% (88) of the show's fics were rated Mature, compared to 18.6% of the film's.
- 18.1% (118) of the show's fics were rated Explicit, compared to 27.8% of the film's.
- 1.5% (10) of the show's fics were not rated, compared to 3.5% of the film's.
(Yeah, this is not Scientific And Impartial.)
Popularity and AOS
I did a quick breakdown of categories and ratings through the recent-long-popular sorts for AOS (technically I did the same for the entire Trekverse, but I didn't bother graphing it).
(Sorry for the colors, I didn't bother changing their defaults.)
- Femslash: 33 of the most recent, 24 of the longest, 10 of the most popular
- Het: 193 of the most recent, 242 of the longest, 158 of the most popular
- Gen: 192 of the most recent, 145 of the longest, 148 of the most popular
- Slash: 655 of the most recent, 678 of the longest, 705 of the most popular
- Multi: 64 of the most recent, 104 of the longest, 87 of the most popular
- Other: 36 of the most recent, 25 of the longest, 26 of the most popular
- Most recent: Jim Kirk/Leonard McCoy (323), Jim Kirk/Spock (197), Spock/Nyota Uhura (70)
- Longest: Jim Kirk/Leonard McCoy (312), Jim Kirk/Spock (267), Spock/Nyota Uhura (121)
- Most popular: Jim Kirk/Spock (435), Jim Kirk/Leonard McCoy (245), Spock/Nyota Uhura (79)
Ratings by Source
Here is a standard bar graph with the data.
Here is a stacked bar graph. The numbers are the same; the presentation is what's different. I'm giving you both for whichever is easier for you to process.
- the Original Series: 41.5% (270) rated G, 25.3% (165) rated T, 13.5% (88) rated M, 18.1% (118) rated E; 1.5% (10) not rated.
- the Next Generation: 41.9% (208) rated G, 24.3% (121) rated T, 11.5% (57) rated M, 17.5% (87) rated E; 5.0% (25) not rated.
- Deep Space Nine: 32.8% (142) rated G, 33.5% (145) rated T, 17.3% (75) rated M, 12.2% (53) rated E; 4.2% (18) not rated.
- Voyager: 28.7% (196) rated G, 29.3% (200) rated T, 14.7% (100) rated M, 23.6% (162) rated E; 5.1% (35) not rated.
- Enterprise: 31.9% (114) rated G, 36.4% (130) rated T, 12.9% (46) rated M, 17.9% (64) rated E; 0.8% (3) not rated.
- reboot/2009 film: 21.2% rated G, 28.9% rated T, 18.6% rated M, 27.8% rated E; 3.5% not rated.
Categories by Source
Standard bar graph! Also available: a stacked bar graph (see how everything except Enterprise has more than 100% of fics, now? multicategorization!) and a scaled stacked bar graph (I got this one by adding all the fics up and then calculating the categories as percentages of the (larger, except in the case of Enterprise) total. I like this one because everything sort of lines up visually). Anyway, your data!
- TOS: 1.8% (12) femslash, 20.1% (131) het, 37.9% (247) gen, 44.3% (289) slash, 4.1% (27) multi, 1.1% (7) other.
- TNG: 15.5% (77) femslash, 36.6% (182) het, 35.0% (174) gen, 13.7% (68) slash, 3.6% (18) multi, 1.8% (9) other.
- DS9: 7.6% (33) femslash, 15.2% (66) het, 33.0% (143) gen, 41.6% (180) slash, 5.3% (23) multi, 1.6% (7) other.
- VOY: 15.4% (105) femslash, 54.4% (371) het, 17.7% (121) gen, 12.3% (84) slash, 5.0% (34) multi, 1.6% (11) other.
- ENT: 0.8% (3) femslash, 19.3% (69) het, 22.7% (81) gen, 54.1% (193) slash, 1.7% (6) multi, 0.6% (2) other.
- AOS: 3.3% femslash, 19.3% het, 19.2% gen, 65.5% slash, 6.4% multi, 3.6% other.
Here's the same collection of data, sorted by category instead of by show.
Okay. I have just given you approximately ALL OF THE THINGS, and I apologize. Now, thoughts!
The second-most common category in all but AOS (where it's literally one fic away from tying for most-common) is gen. It's...closer in some than others but uh. Anyway, for TNG and VOY, the most common is het (and it's AOS's second-most-common); for TOS, DS9, ENT, and AOS it's slash.
TNG and VOY both have a lot of femslash, as well--more than they do slash, actually, especially VOY. (I should note, even though this didn't make it to the official data, that a decent quantity of this--30-some fics--is crossovers pairing Beverly Crusher of TNG with Kathryn Janeway of VOY, so there's overlap.) DS9, especially considering that its most-common category is slash and it has the smallest percentage of het of any of the shows (also, less het than TNG and VOY have femslash), makes a respectable showing in the femslash category as well.
(This is because the women on DS9 are made of awesomeness. I mean. What.)
Anyway, moving on. ENT actually has smaller percentages of femslash and het than TOS does. TOS. The one where the women were rarely allowed to be in the same room as each other, and were usually defined as The Girl in any given situation instead of developed as individuals. This implies really bad things about ENT and female characters.
(Have I told you guys the story about how I started watching DS9 because of the last set of graphs I ran? 'cause...I did. It is a choice I have not regretted.)
The earlier three shows have more gen than the later shows--there's a really, really noticeable break between DS9 and VOY (the latter has the lowest percentage of gen total).
And here's a graph where I stacked all the percentages on top of each other to show that Star Trek fandom is writing a hell of a lot more slash than anything else.
I'm sure you're shocked.
Individual Shows & Shipping
Okay, so. Here there are pie charts of what percentage of all the fic the most common three ships are, and what percentage of their category [het or slash] the most common two ships are--I would have done all three, but in several cases the third-most-common was from a different category than the first two.
Star Trek: the Original Series
Of the 651 TOS fics, 178 were Jim Kirk/Spock (27.3%), 72 were Leonard McCoy/Spock (11.1%), and 21 were Jim Kirk/Leonard McCoy/Spock (3.2%).
Here's a version scaled to encompass only the slashfics. Kirk/Spock is 61.6% of this graph, and McCoy/Spock 24.9%. (Over in the Multi piechart, assuming one existed, the original OT3 would be taking up 77.8% of the chart.)
So, this is the fandom that quote-unquote "invented" slash (and I suspect that, again, it's at least a bit a nonrepresentative sample? I was expecting a larger chunk of the pie to be red). The main ship is nearly two-thirds of its category, and the secondary about a quarter.
Star Trek: the Next Generation
Of the 497 TNG fics, 43 were William Riker/Deanna Troi (8.7%), 42 were Beverly Crusher/Jean-Luc Picard (8.5%), and 40 were Jean-Luc Picard/Deanna Troi (8.0%). There were a couple of others that were close, too--Picard/Q was somewhere in the thirties, I think, and something else?, and then Crusher/Janeway at thirty-odd. I have the weirdest urge to pat TNG on the head and go "aw, you're adorable."
Here's the hetfic-scaled version (I realized belatedly I could have included Picard/Troi on this as well, but I had a system). Riker/Troi is 23.6% here, Crusher/Picard 23.1%, and Picard/Troi would have been 22.0%. The two main ships are each slightly less than a quarter of the pie, differ from each other--even scaled--by only half a percentage point, and it's...well, either it's the result of a very ship-neutral fandom or it's the aftermath of a massive shipwar with so much carnage people are afraid to take strong opinions.
I incline towards the former opinion.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Of the 433 DS9 fics, 162 were Julian Bashir/Elim Garak (37.4%), 16 were Julian Bashir/Miles O'Brien (3.7%), and 14 were Kira Nerys/Odo (3.2%). We very very narrowly missed, by a margin of one fic, having femslash [Dax/Kira] tie for third place, which would have delighted me on principle. Ah well.
Scaled to slash. If I weren't captioning I'd say "presented without comment" but as it is I have numbers to give. Bashir/Garak is 90% here, Bashir/O'Brien is 8.9%. (Over in het, Kira/Odo is 21.2%.)
...presented without comment. Okay, I lie, I like the sound of my own voice too much to present anything without comment.
Digression: This Is Your Fandom on OTP (Non-Trek Samples & DS9)
There's a phenomenon I call "your fandom on OTP"--where the fandom has a ship that is incredibly pervasive, to the point where it can be almost...assumed? This is not quite that.
I headed over to X-Men: First Class (which I have yet to see, but which even mainstream media reports perceived as a relationship story) and to Merlin (with which I am personally familiar) to grab some stat patterns for that [note: I have not yet seen XMFC, but everything the internet has told me about it has made me confident it will be a good example. Which, indeed, it is].
In our first sample data set, XMFC, the category for the fandom's OTP [Charles/Erik] makes up 77.4% of all fics, and the OTP itself 67.8% of all fics/87.7% of its category. In our second, Merlin, the category makes up 65.4% of all fics, and the fandom's OTP [Arthur/Merlin] 62.9% of all fics/96.2% of its category.
Let me just whip up a few graphs for you to get those data into easily-visualized form. Left to right: XMFC, Merlin, DS9.
As you can see, the first two--examples of Your Fandom On OTP--have the OTP in question making up something in the neighborhood of two-thirds of all fics, with the category [slash, in all three of these cases] going from about two-thirds to about three-quarters of all fics. When looking for fics that aren't about the OTP, your options are limited. This is not the case with DS9, where there's a lot of fic that falls into other categories (the grey area representing gen, het, femslash, etc. takes up about three-fifths of the pie).
But if you look at the second row, where the most popular pairing is represented as a percentage of its category, the graphs all look pretty much the same--more than 85% of slashfics are the most popular pairing. (Merlin is a bit of an outlier, but Merlin is...well...it is what it is. DESTINY, lack of other male leads, etc. I thought about leaving it out after I'd done the math and then I smacked myself upside the head and informed myself that there is a difference between not being a Serious Mathematician™ and deliberately adjusting data to assist a conclusion.)
The interesting thing about DS9 as compared to the two samples, and what I think accounts for the similarity between the bottom set of graphs despite the difference between the top set, is that XMFC and Merlin are both--correct me if I'm wrong re. XMFC--functionally about the relationship between the two halves of the most popular ship. DS9 is an ensemble show, and, although half of its most popular ship (Julian Bashir) was a main character--not that that guaranteed he would play a key role in every episode, because, again, ensemble--the other half (Garak) was a guest star who actually only showed up in 22% of the episodes (38 of 173).
I can feel the urge to continue this lecture rising, so I'm going to ungracefully veer to ST:Voyager before I bore you all to tears.
Star Trek: Voyager
Of the 682 VOY fics, 175 were Chakotay/Kathryn Janeway (25.7%), 62 were Tom Paris/B'Elanna Torres (9.1%), and 37 were Kathryn Janeway/Tom Paris (5.4%). (Janeway/Seven almost made it. You can imagine my surprise when it didn't.)
Scaled to het. Again, I could have included Janeway/Paris, but I spaced out. Here, Chakotay/Janeway is 47.2%, Paris/Torres is 16.7%, and Janeway/Paris would have been 10.0%.
I haven't seen Voyager yet (though the graphs seem to indicate it is strong on awesome ladies and weak on plot), but I believe the internet has informed me that Chakotay/Janeway was one of those Official Unresolved-Sexual-Tension couples which the show kept not quite putting together?
Star Trek: Enterprise
Of the 357 ENT fics, 96 were Jonathan Archer/Malcolm Reed (26.9%), 68 were Malcolm Reed/Trip Tucker (19.0%), and 27 were Malcolm Reed/Hoshi Sato (7.6%).
Scaled to slash. Archer/Reed is now 49.7%, Reed/Tucker 35.2%, and over in het Reed/Sato (Reed/Hoshi? I'm assuming it's the former because the AO³ sorts alphabetical by family name) is at 39.1%.
I really don't have anything at all useful to say about these graphs. I have no idea who these people are, what their relations to each other are, or anything else like that. I have no idea who was canonically with whom, or anything else like that. (I do conclude that Reed was either incredibly attractive or flirted with everyone, though, just because he managed to turn up in all three distinct top-three pairings. Other than that, I've got nothing.)
Star Trek (2009)
Of the most recent 1000 AOS fics, 323 were Jim Kirk/Leonard McCoy, 197 were Jim Kirk/Spock, and 70 were Spock/Nyota Uhura.
Scaled to slash, Kirk/McCoy is 49.3%, Kirk/Spock is 30.0%, and over in het Spock/Uhura is 36.2%. (What in the world are people writing for het? o_O)
Anyway, these last three scaled sets actually bear some resemblance to each other--I think it's connected to having the most popular category as a majority of the fics and very little gen, maybe? I have no idea what it means, though.
Summing Up the Shipping
Also, for some reason I made a bar graph with all the data. I'm not sure why, but since I obviously spent some time on it, here, you can have it as a summary (since I already quoted all of the numbers, I'm skipping them now).
I...am also not sure why I felt this was a brilliant idea. The pastel bars show the ship in question as a percentage of the category; the dark bars show the category and ship as a percentage of the whole. This helps us to see that TOS and DS9 are the only ones whose most popular ship comes to more than 50% of its category, that TNG and DS9 have the lowest percentages of the category for the most popular ship (not that it helped TNG's scaled pie chart get more color, or anything) and AOS has the highest, and...a few other things. I'm not sure; I think my brain ran out a while ago.
Anyway! Questions, comments, debates?
This entry is also available at Dreamwidth, where there are
comments. Comment here or there, as you wish.