AO3 Ship Stats

From Fanlore
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Meta
Title: AO3 Ship Stats
Creator: centrumlumina
Date(s): 2013 - present
Medium: tumblr posts, later cross-posted to AO3
Fandom: panfandom
Topic:
External Links: Tumblr: AO3 Ship Stats Masterpost; AO3 ship stats tag
AO3: AO3 Ship Stats series
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

AO3 Ship Stats is a project by centrumlumina that tracks the amount of fanworks produced for different ships on Archive Of Our Own. It began in 2013 and runs annually.

The main bulk of the series consisted of lists of the most popular pairings on AO3. The original 2013 post consisted of 161 ships - any pairings that had more than 500 fics posted to AO3. From 2014 onwards, this became a 'Top 100' list of the hundred most popular pairings, regardless of number of fanworks. In the same year, centrumlumina began serialising an annual 'Femslash list' with the most popular femslash pairings sorted by number of fanworks (this started out as a top 50 in 2014, and subsequently became a top 100 list).

In 2016 centrumlumina also began publishing a 'Year to Year list', which showed the ships with the most works posted since the previous year's stats list was assembled (as opposed to the most works posted overall).[1]

In February 2019, centrumlumina announced that there would be no ship stats list for 2018 due to changes on the Archive which made it impossible for her to gather data in the usual way. Due to the difficulty involved with reprogramming the data-gathering program, the Ship Stats project went on hiatus,[2] however it resumed in July 2019 after new data-gathering methods were found.

About Ship Stats

What exactly is this measuring?

This measures the number of publicly-accessible works posted in Relationship tag displayed on Archive Of Our Own. [...] Because of the way AO3 tags work, all sub-tags and synonymous tags are also counted automatically. The data gathering technique I use cannot access locked fics, so fandoms with a high proportion of locked fics (e.g. RPF) may be lower than expected.

What point are you trying to make?

All of the information in the main post is intended to be factual and verifiable. However, the data is presented in order to highlight the lack of fanfiction focused on women, F/F pairings, and People of Colour. If you wish to learn more about my views on this topic, please read my essays Why M/M? and Misogyny? and my analysis of race in the AO3 Ship Stats.[3]

Categories

  • Top 100 List
  • Year-to-Year List
  • Femslash List

Ship Stats

References

  1. ^ AO3 Ship Stats 2016: THIS YEAR'S TOP 100 by centrumlumina via Tumblr. Published August 4, 2016 (Accessed July 14, 2019).
  2. ^ Hello! I was wondering if you were planning on doing the AO3 Ship Stats for 2018? :) by centrumlumina via Tumblr. Published February 22, 2019 (Accessed July 14, 2019).
  3. ^ "AO3 Ship Stats 2016: FAQ". Archived from the original on 2020-04-01.