So, the fact that f/f shipping is so much less popular than basically any other type of shipping probably isn’t coming as news to anyone, but the AO3 ship stats for 2021 just came out and I went into an autistic whirlwind plugging them into spreadsheets and making graphs, so I thought I’d share what I found.
Like I said, you all probably know that f/f shipping is way less popular than m/m and m/f shipping, but you might have assumed that it’s share of fandom is growing slowly or is at least stagnant. The fact is that it’s declining. And it has been for several years now.
Here’s what the Top 100 ships of 2016 looked like. This isn’t an overall number, it’s just fics that were posted in 2016. 62% of fics were M/M, 19% were M/F, and 7% were F/F.
Here’s the same chart for 2021. 61% were M/M, 12% were M/F, and 3% were F/F. The 2021 Top 100 list has fewer than half the number of F/F ships the 2016 list had. Although Gen is up to 22% from 5% in 2016, so I guess that’s good news if you like Gen.
The total number of fics written for the F/F ships in the year’s Top 100 in 2021 is less than it was in 2016 and 2017, and is generally on the decline. Out of M/M, M/F, and F/F, F/F is the only category that’s been trending downward, albeit slowly.
To be clear, the number of M/F ships represented in the year’s Top 100 has declined but the number of fics has not. What this means is that the M/F ships that are on the list are highly ranked.
By contrast, both the number of M/M ships and the number of M/M fics is trending upward while both the number of F/F ships and the number of F/F fics are trending downward. In 2016, M/M fics made up 75% of the Top 100 list while F/F ships made up 7%. In 2021, M/M ships made up 83% of the Top 100 while F/F ships made up 3%
So when we look at new fics coming onto the website, M/M is easily the most popular, followed this year by Gen. That’s quite the spike, and a quick look at the data tells me it’s attributable to video blogging RPF. We’ll see if that holds next year. Then is M/F, and then F/F just barely edging out Other by one pairing. Other is a catch-all category for OT3s, reader fics, and ships involving a character with a customizable gender (i.e. video game PCs).
Finally, to even things out a little bit since the Top 100 of the year list includes so many more M/M pairings than F/F pairings, let’s look at the number of fics represented by the top 50 ships in each category.
As you’d expect, both are increasing because new fics are being uploaded every day. But you can see the rate at which the number of M/M fics is increasing far exceeds the rate at which the number of F/F fics is increasing. More than 165,000 fics were written for M/M ships in the top 50 this year compared to 30,500 for F/F ships in the top 50. I didn’t include M/F fics here because a list of the top 50 M/F fics on AO3 isn’t available.
You can also see here that the number of fics written for the top 50 F/F pairings still hasn’t reached the number of fics that had been written for the top 50 M/M pairings in 2013.
Since the Top 100 of the Year lists began in 2016, a total of 15 F/F ships have been featured, peaking at 8 at once in 2017 and steadily declining to 3 by 2021. A total of 7 have broken the top 50, peaking at 4 at once in 2017. The highest ranked F/F ship on a yearly list was Clexa, which peaked at #6 in 2016, followed by SuperCorp, which peaked at #13 in 2017.
Here is a chart that I think puts into pretty sharp relief how sparse the F/F presence on the yearly list has gotten. Some of these are a real throwback to what was trendy at the time.
To date, at total of 8 F/F ships have graced AO3′s Top 100 ships of all time list, never more than 4 at once. Swan Queen was the first F/F ship to break the top 50 in 2015, peaked at #27 in 2016 and 2017, and is probably enjoying its last year in the top 50 in 2021. It is the only F/F ship to have been in the Top 100 list every year since 2013. Only 3 F/F ships have ever managed to crack the top 50, and no F/F ship has ever made it higher than #27. In 2021, Catradora became the first new F/F ship to reach the Top 100 since 2017.
The 8 F/F ships that have featured in the Top 100 are:
Quinn Fabray/Rachel Berry (Glee) - 2013
Brittany Pierce/Santana Lopez (Glee) - 2013-2015
Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam (Homestuck) - 2013-2016
Emma Swan/Regina Mills (OUAT) - 2013-2021
Laura Hollis/Carmilla Karnstein (Carmilla) - 2015-2017
Clark Griffin/Lexa (The 100) - 2016-2021
Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supergirl) - 2017-2021
Adora/Catra (SPOP) - 2021
