As part of the AO3 Ship Stats project, this list shows the 100 most-posted relationship tags on Archive Of Our Own in the period July 31 2021 - August 4 2022. This list was created by comparing the current number of fics with data gathered for the 2021 AO3 Ship Stats.
There are 56 M/M relationships on the list, 11 F/M, 6 F/F, 20 Gen, 1 Poly and 6 Other. (Please note that on AO3, 'Name & Name' indicates platonic or familial 'Gen' relationships, while 'Name/Name' is used for romantic and sexual pairings.)
Of the 205 names on the list, 25 are women, 1 is non-binary, and 6 are characters of ambiguous gender, up from 18 and 2 in the 2021 list. In total there are 122 white characters, 63 Asian characters, 5 Latino characters, 3 Black characters, and 1 Indigenous character, as well as 11 racially ambiguous characters and 1 character with a non-human skin tone. There are 71 total Characters of Colour, which is twenty fewer than the number listed in 2021.
This list shows the 100 relationship tags with the most total fanfics posted on Archive Of Our Own as of August 4 2022. There are 69 M/M pairings, 15 F/M, 4 F/F, 11 Gen and 1 Other. (Please note that on AO3, 'Name & Name' indicates platonic or familial 'Gen' relationships, while 'Name/Name' is used for romantic and sexual pairings.)
Of the 202 names on the list, 23 belong to women and 1 to characters of indeterminate gender, down from 25 and 3 respectively in the 2021 list. In total there are 137 white characters, 56 Asian characters and 3 Latino characters, along with 6 characters of ambiguous race. There are 59 total Characters of Colour, up 1 from 58 in 2021.
Of the 201 names on this list, there are 120 white characters, 39 Asian characters, 8 Latino characters, 6 Black characters, 4 Middle Eastern or North African characters, and 3 Indigenous characters, as well as 9 racially ambiguous characters and 16 characters with non-human skin tones. There are 56 Characters of Colour in total, up from 55 in the 2021 list.
Because of the way I produced this data, there is a small chance some F/F ships are missing, particularly those in fandoms dominated by other categories of ship. For more information, see the project FAQs. This project also includes a 2022 Top 100 and an All-Time Top 100 list.
This is an FAQ post for the AO3 Ship Stats 2022 project.
I've found a mistake!
I try my hardest to ensure the data on the chart is 100% accurate, but I'm not a perfect fact-checking machine. Please check the post in question for edits and read the rest of these FAQs, but if you can't find a correction or an explanation, please drop me a message.
What exactly is this measuring?
This measures the number of publicly-accessible works posted in Relationship tag displayed on Archive Of Our Own. The data was retrieved on August 4th 2022, and the comparison data for the This Year list was retrieved as part of last year's list.
Because of the way AO3 tags work, all sub-tags and synonymous tags are also counted automatically (i.e. fics tagged "Johnlock", "John/Sherlock" and "Sherlock Holmes/John Watson" are all combined into a single entry). The data gathering technique I use cannot access locked fics, so fandoms with a high proportion of locked fics (e.g. RPF) may have lower fic counts than expected.
What do all of the columns on the chart mean?
Rank - The ranking of this relationship out of all of the relationships on AO3, listed by number of works tagged with that relationship in the period specified (the last year or all time). 1 is the most frequently tagged relationship, 10 is the tenth most, etc.
Change - The change in rank since the last top 100 list. Positive numbers mean the relationship has moved up the list, negative mean it has moved down. N indicates that this is a new entry which was not in last year's top 100.
Relationship - The relationship tag being considered. Because AO3 has a tag hierarchy, this includes all tags which the site considers synonymous to or sub-sets of the main tag.
Fandom - The fandom most frequently tagged in association with the relationship tag.
Works/Total - The number of fanworks (typically fanfics) tagged with that relationship, as of 4th August 2022.
New Works - The number of new fanworks created in the time between 31st July 2021 and 4th August 2022, calculated as the difference between the number of pairings in this dataset and the number in the 2021 dataset.
Type - The genders of the characters/people involved in the relationship. M indicates male, F female. Other is used for relationships involving non-binary characters or characters of ambiguous gender. Gen indicates that the tag is for a platonic or familial relationship, not a romantic one (indicated on AO3 by an & symbol).
Race - The races of the characters/people involved in the relationship. In most cases, the first box indicates the first character listed and the second indicates the second character; a small number of relationship tags with more than 2 characters are included, in which case multiple characters/people of the same race may be represented by a single box.
How is race determined?
This year's stats have introduced a new system of categorising race, which gives a better breakdown between different racial groups. Race is determined first by any in-universe statement of a character's background, then by the race of an actor portraying them on-screen, then by any other cues such as the setting of the work, or "Word of God" creator statements. Characters from fantasy worlds are still considered according to real-world racial categorisations, provided that the cultures in question have a clear real-world equivalent.
If this is insufficient to categorise a character, they are typically listed as ambiguous. "Ambiguous" also includes characters whose race is explicitly intended to be ambiguous, video game characters whose race can be chosen or changed by the player, reader-insert or "You" characters, and/or characters whose race varies between adaptations of the work. Please note that real people cannot be racially ambiguous. Characters with non-human skin tones such as blue or yellow are listed separately.
Please note that ethnically Jewish characters are considered white; this is due to the limitations of race as a categorisation system and the need to limit the number of categories listed. I am also following the usual American convention of not listing white heritage in the case of characters/people who are mixed race or fall into multiple racial categories, e.g. Barack Obama would be listed simply as "Black" not as both Black and white.
As this is the first year of a new categorisation system, there may be errors than usual. Please have patience while I work to ensure my data is accurate.
What about background pairings?
Because of the way AO3′s tagging system works, there is no way to differentiate between the main pairing in a work and minor, or background, pairings. Some of the pairings on these lists may be popular primarily as a secondary pairing in works about another couple.
I have not done any research into background pairings with this data set. However, in the 2013 version of this project, I found that the background pairing effect was most common with F/M, and to a lesser extent F/F, ships.
How was this data gathered?
The raw data was collected from AO3 using a web-scraping program of my own design. All of the data collected on pairing names, fandoms and fic numbers is publicly available to any user of the site. Some processing has been done in order to remove duplicates, synonyms, non-specific/parent tags and tags involving original characters.
Data on gender and race was copied from previous lists or added by hand, and may contain errors.
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 focussed 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?, my analysis of race in the AO3 Ship Stats, and my discussion of What does a 'Person of Colour' look like in the AO3 Ship Stats?
AO3 Ship Stats 2022 - centreoftheselights - No Fandom [Archive of Our Own]
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
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