corny

2. Ship popularity over time

Note that: 1) 'popularity' here is a short stand-in for 'percentage of total fics in the fandom tagged with this ship,' 2) ships from L->R are in order of their total no. of fics on AO3, and 3) I only include romantic/non-platonic pairings (/ not & on AO3) for the purposes of this data.

Trip/Reed stayed a fairly consistent top ship until ~2022, with their mid-late 2010s popularity seeming in line with what I gather was a pretty high popularity on tumblr etc. at the time. The 2011 spike corresponds to 198 out of 318 fics that year having them tagged, three quarters of which were written by the same prolific author! On that note, I killed them for the second graph to give the other ships a chance to shine.

Impressive jump by Shrancher, from having 11 fics total from 2001-2015 to becoming THE most written for ship in 2022!

The decline of Archer/Reed is something I definitely did expect, due to it being the 3rd most popular ship on AO3 but having rarely seen it discussed/seen ship art for it anywhere. Still kinda crazy how it went from being such a major player in the earlier fandom, being the top ship on 3 occasions, to having only a comparative handful of fics written each year.

Trip & T’Pol continue to go strong and are comparatively more popular now than years ago!

I was expecting Hoshi/Reed to have been a popular ship a while back (due to it being the 4th top ship overall but seeing malcolm fairly commonly headcanoned as gay nowadays), so was surprised by its recent resurgence, being the 3rd top ship last year

Archer, Trip and Reed all have 4 ships in the top 10 (serving white man fandom realness).

3. Ship fic ratings (all time)

I was expecting Hayes/Reed to be the top here for hatefuck-related reasons (they scored 53.7%) so was surprised by Archer/Trip taking the top spot with a score of 58.7%! (I talk about how these percentages were calculated in section 4 :))

Trip & T’Pol have the lowest rating of 31.4% despite being the only one of these pairs to canonically have sex during the show

Reed is in 4 of the 5 ‘highest rated’ ships! People really do like putting repressed british characters in Situations

4. Fic ratings over time

Above: The average graph was produced by assigning each rating a number (3 for E, 2 for M, 1 for T and 0 for G), then multiplying this number by the number of fics with that rating and dividing by the total number of fics, excluding not rated from the fic count for this purpose. The numbers produced were scaled up to work as percentages, with 50% corresponding to a nicely evenly balanced rating distribution (e.g. 2T & 2M, or 1E, 1M, 1T & 1G). The same method was used for ship ratings in section 3!

The general rising trend of fic rating since 2017 is interesting -- I did a quick correlation test on the 2017-2025 data and found a strong correlation with an r-value of 0.84! (for those unfamiliar with stats, an r value is a measure of correlation between two variables and runs from 0 to 1, with 1 being a perfect correlation; this makes 0.84 a strong positive correlation). I'm not sure what speculative reason, if any, I’d give for the increase though.

5. Fic category composition over time

Pretty even recently, with M/M dropping to 3rd in the ranks last year for the first time

F/F economy severely impacted by dire lack of female characters

6. Misc notes from research

Archer/Hernandez is the 11th most popular ship

Shinji/Asuka had a top 10 appearance in 2023?!

Phlox didn't appear in the top 10 ships for a single year :( his top ship appears to be with Trip, with a whopping 9 works ever in that tag. Where my phlox/archer warriors at damn

The most written-for Travis ship is Travis/Reed, which was pretty popular early on

7. General caveats and reasoning

Backdating is unreliable! Lots of fics will just be uploaded as is and not backdated to when they were written.

Early years often have very few fics, leading to skewed data.

Sometimes one author gets REALLY into a ship and writes a hundred fics for them in a year, meaning number of fics can't always be equated exactly to popularity.

Approximating higher rating to more sexual content (as in sections 3-4) is just an approximation. However, whilst there definitely are E-rated fics on ao3 without any sexual content, it does hold pretty true across the site that most E/M rated ship fics are rated for their sexual content; this therefore makes it the easiest specific conclusion to draw from the ‘average fic rating’ data.

This method obviously doesn’t account for ships being background ships in different fics!

My fandom experiences are obviously not universal and mainly based off tumblr and my own internet circles, so please take it with a grain of salt when I speculate about which things I did/didn’t expect to find :)

8. Future research?!

Would be interesting to look at correlation of screen time and fic appearances for different characters. That would however be a LOT more work unless someone’s already gone through and got screen times for all the characters! Maybe lines spoken in the scripts could be easier to get data for?

I've excluded 2026 data so far for all these graphs bc we're less than 2 months into the year and I only wanted to look at a full year's worth of data!

pls enjoi meme thank you for reading this far <3