Talk:Juggernaut Ship

Is a juggernaut?

Is Spike/Buffy really a juggernaut? I was only ever on the outskirts of Buffy fandom but it always seemed like there was a lot of fic about a lot of different pairings, and I didn't think B/S even got big until S4/5. (Also I really wish I could think of some animanga examples but I've gone all blank. Does Heero/Duo count, you think? only I have no idea how big the Relena/Heero ever got, it was a whole different corner of fandom.) --MegR 10:39, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

I was going by a quote I found googling but I was never in the fandom so happy to remove it.We could do with some more het & non-Western examples! No idea about Heero/Duo though:/ --Tai 19:53, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

Re: anime & manga. I can only think of examples in small fandoms. Shinkumi makes up the bulk of Gokusen fanfic, Mireille/Kirika is the focus of most Noir fic, Hiruma/Mamori is the largest het pairing in Eyeshield 21, etc. Maybe we could add a section about small fandoms? --Anenko 20:14, 27 January 2012 (UTC) ETA: Oh! How about Yami no Matsuei? --Anenko 20:18, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

I kind of feel like you can't even have a juggernaut ship in a small fandom? It seems to me it's more like, when one pairing eclipses everything else because there's *just so much*, but when there's not much of anything, that can't happen. Maybe I'm using it wrong but I feel if there aren't people constantly whining about the ship that ate their fandom, it's not a proper juggernaut ;P. (But, I have no idea how big YnM is. Though I think I'm going to rewatch the anime over the weekend now you've put it in my head. I'm suddenly in the mood for ridiculous homoerotic melodrama.)

Heero/Duo absolutely eclipsed all other yaoi pairings in Gundam Wing by ten thousand stories to one (and I mean this pretty literally), but I have a vague impression that Heero/Relena was also very popular, which is why I didn't add it. But the yaoi and het fandoms were so separate that maybe it's worth adding anyway? MegR 23:07, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

"Juggernaut pairing" isn't part of my fannish lingo, so I really don't know. *hands* What would you call a fandom that is just one pairing? --Anenko 01:42, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

[Fandom Name]? I don't know! I actually can't think of any fandoms of which that is true. MegR 10:21, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Harry & Johnny, Kiefer/Lou. --Doro 10:27, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

The Gokusen manga/anime/jdrama fandom is almost exclusively a single het pairing. The third series of the jdrama introduces a slash pairing, but that's practically a different fandom. Moving over to Western fandoms, Big Wolf on Campus fandom is almost exclusively centered around a single slash pairing. There are definitely fandoms that revolve almost completely around a single pairing.

Changing topics a bit: would Xena/Gabrielle count as a juggernaut pairing? I don't think we have any femslash examples in the article. --Anenko 10:30, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

There was a lot of other fic as well, but like with most buddy shows, they were the main pairing. Compared to other femslash pairings I would count them as a juggernaut pairing, but I'm not familiar with the term, so I wouldn't know. --Doro 10:43, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

I'd definitely say Xena/Gabrielle counts. For het, does anyone have opinions on whether John/Aeryn would be the juggernaut pairing (or not) for Farscape fandom? --Sk 00:20, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

From my understanding of the term, I'd certainly call John/Aeryn a juggernaut pairing. --Anenko 00:59, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

I'll boldly go and add both of those. :) --Sk 01:23, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Going back to Spuffy, I don't think it was a true juggernaut pairing. As I recall, there were always several extremely popular pairings going on, even if slash fans & B/A fans got a bit huffy about Spuffy stealing their webspace. Espresso Addict 00:13, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

SPN's two ships

some anons had an opinion about the spn example. [1] would it be better to say that sam/dean was the juggernaut until destiel came along, at which point neither one qualified?--æþel (talk) 04:36, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

het ships

FFA thinks Mulder/Scully should be added to the list and that more het ships could be added in general.[2]--æþel (talk) 23:41, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

When Juggernauts change

This thought just because Sokka/Zuko was removed from the list recently, but could we instead make note of when juggernaut ships are replaced by another ship later on in the life of the fandom?

It seems like Sokka/Zuko was the juggernaut, but now Katara/Zuko is, and I think it'd be interesting to have examples of that kind of shift recorded here especially for long-lived or very large fandoms. -- Chanterelle (talk) 16:49, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

No, you've got it backwards. Zutara and Kataang have always been the big ships (and the subject of massive ship wars) with Zutara winning out. Sokka/Zuko was probably the most popular ship on tumblr in the most recent wave of fandom when there was a mild revival because ATLA was pit on netflix, but even so, it was only small, and it was still alongside a number of other big ships. It never, that I saw, achieved 'juggernaut' status, and the numbers on AO3, FFnet, and Tumblr bear that out. That said, a general section on when/how Juggernaut ships change with examples would def be interesting. There's already a few on the list, and a few ships that I considered removing because no one would consider them a juggernaut ship now but they were at one time, so... I didn't know how to handle those. A new section would help. Math-is-magic --(talk) 17:04, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks so much for the correction Math-is-magic! I've been on the outside of ATLA fandom looking in or hearing about it from others on occasion and was mistaken about why Sokka/Zuko was removed, so it's great to hear from you since you're more familiar with the fandom (and the fact that there were shipwars). Sokka/Zukko is the #2 pairing in the ATLA tag on AO3, right under Zutara, which was why I had guessed it may've been juggernaut for a while, so apologies for any upset and for making an incorrect assumption, and thank you for your insights! -- Chanterelle (talk) 23:13, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

No problem. Glad I could clear that up. (Although I'm surprised you hadn't heard about the ship wars. ATLA's ship wars were quite infamous once. It was The Thing everyone knew about the fandom, it felt like. Now I feel old. XD) Your idea about ships changing over time is a really interesting one! --Math-is-magic (talk) 01:59, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Chanterelle, we as editors can't just go around removing the pairings without any kind of explanation. At some point Sokka/Zuko were considered juggernaut because they were on the list and never before removed -- it seems. It would be good to add a small section for ships that were juggernaut, but with time they stopped being juggernaut, and maybe even try to say why, as in the case of this ship in question, which math-is-magic cites as popular solely on Tumblr, losing to Zutara and Kataang -- Ellakbhesse (talk) 18:05, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Two things:

1. Sorry, didn't know the etiquette. This hasn't been an issue on other pages I've worked on when something is so obviously mis-included. I believe I included my reasons in the edit notes, so it wasn't "without any explanation." Do people also have to justify adding ships? Seems like the should, to be fair. Anyways, I'll make sure to start a conversation for any others. There are several ships on here that I felt don't qualify that I'd like to discuss in the future. However, they were borderline and not so cut and dry, so I chose to be conservative and only removed Zukka. That was the one that I couldn't find or remember even an inkling of evidence for. I've been in this fandom since its inception, and 'mildly popular for a couple weeks on one platform of the fandom' does not a juggernaut make, and the number of creative works on the primary fandom sites support that. If it ends up having staying power or getting big in the future, it could be re-added, but for now... it is not and never had been a juggernaut, and dilutes the meaning of 'juggernaut' for the other ships listed.

2. I don't read Chanterelle's comments as saying what you said they're saying. They're just saying we should create a new section for when juggernaut ships change, which I agree with. In this case, Zukka never has been a juggernaut ship. It was improperly added, and probably never noticed. I know I hadn't noticed it until recently, and even thought it was gone when I was looking today until I looked again. --Math-is-magic (talk) 18:26, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

To clarify in this discussion, I think there are a couple ways we could track when juggernauts change over time - for instance, by creating a new section on this page to discuss "when juggernauts change" here, or by making notes next to specific examples provided in this list, and/or by talking on the relevant fandom page (since usually fandom pages in my experience have had notes about Popular Ships, and will frequently mention if there's a juggernaut pairing). I'd love to hear what other editors think.

One other emergent thing that comes to mind from this discussion so far is how the "juggernaut ship" may differ on various platforms; based on the definition on the page "so extremely popular that it dwarfs all other pairings in the amount of fanworks produced" I realized I've been thinking about a juggernaut as something that could exist either on a specific platform (ie: the juggernaut on AO3 might be different from the juggernaut on Tumblr) but that a juggernaut might be intended to be understood as "most popular pairing overall, across a fandom, regardless of platform". And then of course that a juggernaut in a 'first generation' of a fandom might change in a 'later generation' of a fandom (ie: Terminator juggernaut in the 1990s might be different from in the 2010's; I'd like to take a look at if that's the case for some of the femslash pairings included here).

I'm not sure if that last thought of mine muddies the waters for what we're talking about or helps think about what kinds of notes might be helpful on this Fanlore page or on others, but I'm interested to see if there's meta written on the subject or if other fans have talked about "what makes a juggernaut" elsewhere, and also in what other editors think about what we could capture and how! -- Chanterelle (talk) 23:13, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

I definitely do get the vibe that a LOT of the confusion on this page (see: the spuffy question above and the MCU question below) could be solved by doing what the page notes say and better clarifying what a juggernaut ship is. Based on the definition on the page, I don't think a lot of the listed examples right now count tbh? A lot of those ships are popular, but do they DWARF the other ships? Not really. I mean, ATLA is INFAMOUS for its ship wars, so even Zutara, which I didn't touch is like. More popular than other ships, but not by a ton? Hardly 'dwarfing' the others. If we take a couple new fandoms that are primarily only on AO3 as an example, using fic numbers as a rule of thumb to gauge approximate popularity...

Look at Wangxian from MDZS, which has >22k fics, to the next relationship tag which has about 4k. It has FIVE TIMES the fan content that the other ship has, and that second ship is their brothers (a 'pair the spares') type situation that is considered a 'friendly' ship with the main pairing. In fact, the next 6 ships after Wangxian all coexist with the ship. That's 22k out of 46k - HALF of all fic. Same with Catradora - Catra/Adora is 8k, Catra&Adora is 2.3k, and Bow/Glimmer is 2k. Combine the first two and you get 10k vs. 2k for the next ship, which is also a 5:1 ratio. That's 8-10K fics out of 13K fics for the series overall. More than half either way you count. Basically, being an MDZS fan, or a She-Ra fan, is practically synonymous with being Wangxian or Catradora fans, because they take up the vast bulk of the fandom. Comparatively, Zukka (5.7k fics for Zutara, 4.8K for Zukka, 3.4k for Kataang, out of ~30K total ATLA fics) or Lapidot (2.3k fics vs. 2.2 for Stevonnie, out of 20K total) from Steven Universe or Jaime/Brienne (6.3k vs 5.6 for Jonsa, out of 45k total) from ASOIF are popular, but really don't dwarf things. None of them are even a quarter of their respective fan fics.

For your question about definition, I did take it to mean (and would encourage we clarify in the direction of) a ship that dominates the fandom as a whole. Otherwise things could get way too granular. I mean, there's sites specifically dedicated to certain pairings after all. Does that make those ships juggernauts in those spaces? Plus, per my previous examples, I think any fandoms where like. One ship is slightly bigger on tumblr but another is slightly bigger on AO3, or whatever, is probably better defined as having warring ships or something, but no juggernaut ship. The exceptions would be where the shift in location correlates to a shift in the fandom over time, I think. Like the SPN example. I'm not in that fandom and I refuse to look it up, so I can't say for sure, but it seems like for a couple seasons the show fandom was dominated by 1 ship, but then a new character was introduced and became 1/2 of the new dominating ship. Thus an older site like ffnet might shows ship 1 as bigger or show them near equal, but the site where the newer fandom congregates, AO3 might not. That said, I'm prettu sure shifts in 'juggernaut ships' over time are probably not actually that common, if the bar for juggernaut ship is raised, per the previous paragraph. Maybe some, especially when there's sub-fandoms, like Dr. Who or the MCU, or when a new character is introduced in a long-running series, but for the most part... if something is big enough to be a TRUE juggernaut, not just a popular ship, that's a lot of fandom inertia to overcome. --Math-is-magic (talk) 01:48, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

This has given a lot of food for thought and I've made an effort on the page itself at capturing something in this Talk section and earlier up, which is that fans have a variety of opinions on how to define or identify a juggernaut! What's been weird is that I can't find much in the way of meta written, which I tried to look for in some of my free time over the last couple of days -- it seems like its a term that fans understand intuitively? The examples you've provided I find really interesting (and the ratios you've pointed out are wild! Having rough percentages is a really great way to illustrate the magnitude of some of these disparities in content!) and now I want to continue searching for external references if there are any to be found - has anyone done a survey around these topics? Are there meta essays or primers for people outside fandom? Is there a juggernaut for the MCU extended, and do people identify juggernauts for sub-fandoms as you've noted? How about in Star Wars fandom, and the different kinds of sub-fandoms under the biggest category? To sum up, I've done my best to add a bit to the glossary page about how "juggernaut pairing" can be a contested term, which can be tweaked or added to further, and I'll keep looking for additional sources which could help flesh out the page; in the meantime, thank you both so much for sharing your thoughts, this is really cool to think about! -- Chanterelle (talk) 21:51, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Possible addition in the slash pairing section

I have the slightest impression that after Steve/Bucky is a big ship with the arrival of the Winter Soldier series, a new pair has emerged that could soon become a juggernaut -- if not already for, considering how fandom has grown lately. Steve/Sam may in the future be there next to the Steve/Tony sequence --> Steve/Bucky and --> Bucky/Sam. For situations like this, would we continue to follow the in-line sequence or assemble a subsection on this type of pairing that breaks down and becomes another? -- Ellakbhesse (talk) 18:11, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

With the MCU being so huge and varied having one predominant ship be considered the juggernaut is difficult to judge. The MCU fandom is basically like an umbrella over top of several smaller fandoms. Also, the TV show fandoms can sometimes be very different than the films, and they don't necessarily translate from one medium to another. You will have MCU fans who never bother to watch the TV shows, some who are starting with the shows, and others who watch both. I would say that in Captain America fandom it still seems like Stucky is the predominant pairing. Sam/Bucky may be huge in TFATWS fandom, but in the greater MCU they are still considered a very small ship. -- Kingstoken (talk) 18:41, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

We should probably add Reylo?

I'm not really in the fandom for the Star Wars Sequel trilogy (just for star wars overall), and I'm not really into Reylo, so I don't want to make the unilateral decision but uh. I feel like Reylo fits the definition of "juggernaut ship" really well, plus someone was asking for more Het examples... Anyways, reylo's EVERYWHERE, invading even the older fandom spaces, and becoming so popular they basically changed the direction of the series to make it happen because some fans were so rabid about it. Using AO3 as a rule of thumb reveals it to be CRAZY popular as well. In the "Star Wars Sequel Trilogy" fandom, if you combine all the various Rey/Kylo and Rey/Ben tags, then Reylo has 43k fics out of 69k total fics in the fandom - TWO THIRDS of all fics are tagged for reylo. The next biggest ship (Huxlo) has 19.1 fics, less than half the size, and after that it's 7.7k fics for stormpilot. Reylo is basically the perfect example of a juggernaut ship from where I'm standing. --Math-is-magic (talk) 01:55, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

I agree that Reylo is a juggernaut ship, but Ao3 stats are tricky here. You can't combine tags to get the total number of Reylo fics! You have to look at the parent tag. All Reylo fics are included in the parent tag - Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren. So there are only 20780 Reylo fics in the Star Wars - All Media Types category on Ao3. (Still almost twice the number of Kylux fics) --Auntags (talk) 18:26, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

eugghh, at least this time I only accidentally reverted my own edit. Sorry for any confusion --Auntags (talk) 19:58, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Is that entirely true? because I have def tried to block the top reylo tag before and still gotten reylo tagged fics in my results. But regardless, good poitn about the parent tags thing. AO3 tagging hierarchies can be SO weird sometimes. --Math-is-magic (talk)

Well, the exclude feature only works if the fics are tagged correctly. So its always possible a few will slip through, or an author may choose not to include the pairing tag. --Auntags (talk) 21:31, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

No I mean liek I'll exclude the one tag and then still fics with the other tags show up and I have to exclude those too. Same with Harry/Voldemort(/Tom Ridle) tags, actually. But I digress. It looks like Reylo was added, which is good. My issues with AO3's occasionally weird tags (which, I get it, tag wranglers are volunteers and may not even be in the fandom) are for elsewhere. --Math-is-magic (talk) 22:00, 13 October 2021 (UTC)