just wanna be a good passenger

I see Steve as someone who is stubborn; prone to jealousy; not at all prone to ruminating. He's not really someone who feels responsible for the emotional states of the people around him. He doesn't get stuck in his head, and he's not really a big-picture guy. He lives in his body. He has a lot of (sometimes misplaced) confidence in his own ability to improvise and react, but his instincts are pretty good, so it usually (USUALLY) works out.

The way I write him, the worst part of Steve is his tendency to avoid challenging his own assumptions. He finds it very uncomfortable, and that's because of the best part of him: when the chips are down, when he does finally get to that point, he'll do the right thing even if it means upending his life. If he doesn't see or acknowledge it, he doesn't have to do that—but once he does, he won't turn away. He'll adapt. Ultimately, he is intensely values-driven.

My take on Eddie is that he's equally values-driven and adaptable. Like Steve, he's highly reactive and prone to acting on instinct in the moment…but crucially, he doesn't THINK he is. He's incredibly tuned-in to the emotional states of those around him in a way that Steve absolutely is not, but he mistakenly believes that this gives him mastery over his own emotion-driven impulses.

4.1 Vagina dialogues

I couldn’t help but notice when I was running the co-tagged searches for Top/Bottom that…not to put too fine a point on it, but apparently vaginas come up a lot more frequently than I'd expected.

Anyway, of course I had to run a search for the “Vaginal Sex” tag and filter it by sIX and V.C., because I wanted to check the stats on correlative co-tagging. Keep in mind that this tag includes but is not limited to transmasc characterizations, cisswaps/genderbends/Rule63, magical vagina acquisition, omegaverse, etc. 

Fig. 4.11 - Distribution of vS%Ship, vS%sIX, and vS%V.C (with a minimum V.C of 30)

Two very obvious observations, here: 

So that’s a big hell yes on positive correlation between vS and Sexual Inexperience. Please note that the scale of 4.11b and 4.11c is literally five times that of 4.11a. 

Jayvik and SoapGhost are definitely disproportionately vS-tagging regardless of filter, by a lot. Jayvik in particular is WILDLY out of sync with standard rates of vS-tagging.

4.11c is especially interesting. I’ve been pretty focused on the Eddie of it all in the Steddie evaluation, because he’s the one with the sky-high V-tag rate, but…apparently fics tagged Virgin Steve Harrington are unusually prone to being vS-tagged as well. This is particularly notable because Steddie’s overall vS-tag rate is on the high side of normal in the other two evaluations (2.17%Ship and 14.35%sIX); above Q3, but not enough to be considered an outlier.

Here’s the stat workup:

Tab. 4.12 - Stats for vS%Ship, vS%sIX, and the filtered (n30) and unfiltered (n0) vS%V.C

The vS%V.C Q3 doesn’t shift around too much, but the SD gets much bigger in the unfiltered version—which does somewhat validate my filtering approach of only evaluating ships with at least 30 V-tags total (V.C1+V.C2-V^2). 

I did actually skim through the vS Steddie fics to go a bit deeper, and for the vS-V.C1 set, 24 are omegaverse (with O!Steve) and 3 are trans!Steve. And of the vS-V.C2 set, there are 13 O!Steve fics—compared to 6 O!Eddie fics. I knew O!Steve was a fairly popular concept, but I don’t think I realized that it went this far! 

Originally, I ended this section here, with a sentence about how it could be an interesting future inquiry but I wasn’t going to actually look into it right now. 

Well…I am a dirty liar, apparently, and my self control is mostly hypothetical, because I collected ten new data columns and opened up a new stats calculation sheet to generate some fresh charts. 

After spending so much time on switches, I decided not to investigate betas; I suspect there’ll be a bit of tag confusion (e.g. around beta readers) and the numbers will be extremely small. If I do a separate omegaverse study—something I’ve genuinely been contemplating!—I’ll pull that info then. 

It very quickly became clear that Steddie is quite unusual in how many fics are tagged with “Virgin [character]” and either “Alpha [character]” or “Omega [character]” (VAO for short, like VTB in the top-bottom analysis). Even without accounting for co-tagging—e.g. one fic tagged “Omega Steve Harrington” + “Alpha Eddie Munson” + “Virgin Steve Harrington” would be +2 to VAO—there are only 10 ships with at least 30 VAO. 

Here are their numbers:

Fig. 4.13 - Raw counts for AO and VAO-tagged fics

Fig. 4.14 - Percentage breakdown of AO and VAO-tagged fics

Note that I’m not looking at the frequency of VAO tagging in general, so each segment is character-specific. In other words, I’m not checking the frequency of e.g. “Omega Steve Harrington” + “Virgin Eddie Munson” because I just didn’t think that would be useful or interesting.

A sample size of 10 is simply not enough to make any sweeping statements, but I think Fig. 4.14 strongly suggests that there’s a positive correlation between O-tagging and V-tagging. Steddie is unusual in that there’s quite a lot of Alpha-Virgin!Eddie—significantly more than any other character, no matter how we measure. 

Also, Johnlock’s AO.C is shockingly evenly distributed, damn. Given virtually every other stat I’ve taken for that ship, I was not expecting that.

And here are the omegaverse (oV) distributions, evaluating the “Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics” tag:

Fig. 4.15 - Scatterplot distributions of oV%Ship, oV%sIX, and VAO%oV

Tab. 4.16 - Stats for oV%Ship, oV%sIX, and VAO%oV

It’s important to note here that “Alpha [character]” and “Omega [character]” tags usually refer to omegaverse…but not always. See also Teen Wolf, which I should perhaps remove from consideration, but which didn’t even have enough VAO to make the n30 cut so it probably doesn’t matter. 

Fun fact: I was somewhat disengaged from fandom around the time that omegaverse started taking off. I’d watched a few seasons of Teen Wolf and was broadly aware of its contemporaneous rising fandom juggernaut status, so naturally I assumed it was the source, because…y’know…werewolves.

Imagine the emotional rug-pull moment when, years later, I realized it originated in SPN RPF—SPN! Which had perhaps two or three werewolves in fifteen seasons! Utterly bewildering. 

Anyway, it’s pretty clear that the oV rate in sIX is much higher than the general oV rate, and Steddie’s got a dramatically high VAO rate despite its average oV rate. There are plenty of other oV questions I’m potentially interested in pursuing, but I think this is about all I wanted to check within the context of virginity. 

4.2 Not suitable for all audiences

To absolutely no one’s surprise: most fics dealing with sexual inexperience are rated Explicit! 

Fig. 4.21 - Ratings distribution of sIX and LV filters

It’s sort of interesting that there’s a small contingent of ships with lower ratings overall, but by and large, no surprises.

I haven’t included the exact labels for M and nR (Not Rated) because it looked super messy on the chart, and anyway they’re not super important in the evaluation of whether it’s likely to be porn. In my experience, Mature can mean pretty much anything.

This did, however, inspire me to dig into Virginity Kink a bit more. It took me a little while just to figure out what questions I wanted to ask, especially because it is not a common tag overall; only 8 ships have at least 30 VK-tagged fics. 

I took a couple sets of measurements and filtered them by said fics:

Fig. 4.22 - Raw counts of VK-FT and VK-V.C

Fig. 4.22a illustrates how many fics are co-tagged “Virginity Kink” and “First Time” (stacked with the total number of VK fics for context), and Fig. 4.22b illustrates the VK co-tagging with character V-tags. Together, they give a very rough approximation of how much of the VK tag is nondiegetic kink, more or less; I skimmed through several of these ships’ VK tags, and there does seem to be a fair bit of Doing Kink in the fics not FT-tagged. It's more mixed with the FT and V.C-tagged fics, which sometimes appear to be just "this fic has both virginity and sex in it" or "A thinks it's hot that B is a virgin." It's a spectrum!

That then led me to the question: how kinky is Steddie overall, in comparison to its peers? Is its high VK rate just a reflection of a tendency towards kink-tagging?

Short answer: nope!

Fig. 4.23 - Scatterplot of K%Ship and VK%K

Tab. 4.24 - Stats for K%Ship, VK%K, VK%Ship, and FT%VK—note that this is from the unfiltered (M/M) data, which means that you shouldn’t take the FT%VK too seriously because it’s mostly not a population with robust sample sizes

I ran a wildcard search of *Kink for each ship, and it turns out that Steddie is flirting with that upper outlier boundary of K-tagging; in fact, it’s the second-highest kink-tagged ship, after SoapGhost. (I am now SO curious about that fandom culture.) However, even scaled for K-tags, Steddie still has an unusually high rate of VK tags! It’s squarely in outlier territory for VK%K.

4.3 Unvirgining

The “[Character] Is Not A Virgin” (nV) tag ended up being a much less popular canonical than I’d expected! I’d been vaguely aware of it from my Marvel/MCU days, so I thought it might be a fun counterweight to explore…but it turns out that Steve Rogers is single-handedly responsible for almost 3/4 of all nV tags in popular M/M ships, and I need to recalibrate my expectations about how often tags declare non-virginity.

Fig. 4.31 - Pie chart of nV distribution 

Note that due to AO3 tagging/search weirdness, the URLs in the spreadsheet return much higher numbers—but if you actually look at the fics, they also include quite a lot of “[Character] Is A Virgin” tags, which is the opposite of what I’m actually looking for! I ended up just skimming each results page to vet the final sum, so these numbers should actually be a bit more content-accurate than the rest of the sheet. 

This was not difficult, because of the extremely low number of non-Steve-Rogers results.

Tab. 4.32 - Sorted list of nV-tagged characters with n>0

It’s also worth noting that the total number of “Steve Rogers is Not a Virgin” tags (668) outpaces the number of “Virgin Steve Rogers” tags (436). Love that for him.

4.4 Backdoor exploits

The “Anal Virgin [Character]” tag is not that common overall, except with a few select characters including our very own Steve Harrington:

Fig. 4.41 - Pie chart of aV distribution

In this particular chart, I tried to set all the SPN slices in blue, 9-1-1 in red(dish), RPF in purple, and Steve in yellow; everyone else gets a shade of green.

Tab. 4.42 - Sorted list of aV-tagged characters with n>0

4.5 Asian evaluation

If you’ve looked at the plaintext data link, you may have noticed that there’s an “Asian” column. I kept noticing that there was a bit of a pattern in the outliers—at first I tried filtering for RPF, but it was really consistently only the Kpop ships that would have a disparity. Plus, I noticed the anime ships and Genshin Impact coming up again and again as well. 

I’m not sure whether this has to do with fandom demographics, source material, or something else entirely, but I sorted Asian fandoms (Kpop + anime + MXTX + Genshin Impact + Persona 5) (that last one was kind of a freebie, it doesn’t play like the rest) and found that there was indeed a disconnect on several points!

In this filter, n=30, so I actually feel okay about the robustness of the sample size. 

Tab. 4.51 - Stats resulting from Asian and Non-Asian filters applied to sIX%ship, vS%Ship, LV%Ship, VK%Ship, Vmax%Ship, Vmin%Ship, TB%Ship, and S.C%Ship

Fig. 4.52 - Candlestick chart of Q1-Q3 and outlier boundaries—not including TB%Ship because it’s at a very different scale to the rest and would have stretched the chart out too much

Clearly, Asian fandoms do seem to have markedly higher tagging rates across sIX, vS, and LV as well as T/B/S. With VK and V.C, however, there’s not much of a disconnect overall. The distribution is practically binomial—there appears to be very little overlap, with Q3 of the non-Asian fandoms hovering pretty close to Q1 of the Asian fandoms in a lot of cases. 

I’m moderately familiar with MXTX and have lightly dabbled in various anime and Kpop fandoms, but I genuinely do not have any hypotheses here. It’s just interesting to note! 

Incidentally, this also makes Steddie’s switch rate an outlier for non-Asian fandoms. As you can see in Table 4.51b, the S.C%Ship outlier boundary is 0.65%; Steddie has a S.C% of 0.92% for Steve and 1.06% for Eddie, which is not enough to be an outlier by Asian standards, but puts them both in the top 4 characters for S-tags in non-Asian fandoms. (The other two are SoapGhost.)

4.6 tl;dr

Look, quant research cannot ever tell us why something is the way it is, and it would be irresponsible to speculate, given all the weaknesses named in the intro and throughout.

However, all things considered, I'm comfortable saying that my gut feeling that Steddie is a bit unusual about virginity-related tagging compared to peer fandoms has largely been validated. It's not unique, but it IS unusual (particularly compared to other fandoms that I have personally experienced—maybe if I'd ever gotten into SoapGhost or Jayvik I wouldn't have thought twice about it).

Key Findings Regarding Steddie and Virginity:

Tab. 4.61 - Quantitative summary of findings; the bolded bottom rows are the ones to pay attention to, the rest is just context

Part 1:

Steddie's “Sexual Inexperience” meta-tag occurs at an unusually high rate, which may be due to the “Virgin Eddie Munson” tag

Steddie uses the “Virginity Kink” tag MUCH more than almost any other ship

Part 2:

Eddie Munson gets V-tagged more than any other character, while Steve Harrington is solidly middle-of-the-pack for “Virgin [character]” tags

The discrepancy between “Virgin Steve Harrington” and “Virgin Eddie Munson” outstrips every other ship except Johnlock (BBC Sherlock), due to the extremely low rate of the “Virgin John Watson” tag

Part 3: 

Although Eddie is more commonly tagged as a top than as a bottom, he’s more commonly tagged as a virgin bottom than as a virgin top

Steve is more often tagged as a bottom in any case, but he experiences a similar virginity-based shift and is virtually never tagged as a virgin top

This is normal for characters in popular M/M ships on AO3, which typically see a bottomwards shift of about 14-28 percentage points

Part 4 (this part!):

Virgin!Steve gets co-tagged with “Vaginal Sex” much more frequently than anyone except Virgin!Viktor (League of Legends); while the search itself doesn’t specify that it’s Steve who has a vagina, I did actually check, and in this case it uniformly is

Within Alpha/Omega-tagged fics, Steddie has a VERY unusually high rate of V-tagging—more than any other popular M/M ship on AO3

Although the filtered sample size is too low (n=10) to pull proper stats for VAO distribution, it does seem like there’s a lot of Alpha!Virgin!Eddie fics compared to pretty much any other ship

Steddie is unusually likely to use kink-related tags—and within those tags, it’s unusually likely to tag for “Virginity Kink”

Steve Harrington is one of the very few characters who gets tagged as an Anal Virgin more than once, though he's small fry compared to the Winchesters

Other incidental things I’ve learned about popular M/M ships on AO3:

SoapGhost is also really up there in most of the virginity-related stats

Within a ship, there’s a pretty wide range of how often characters are tagged as tops or bottoms; it’s definitely not the case that fandoms assign characters one durable role, with a small handful of exceptions (mostly Hollanov/Heated Rivalry)

Steve Rogers’ virginity is more contested than basically any other character’s

Asian fandoms have distinctly different tagging patterns from non-Asian fandoms

Possible qualitative research/discussion questions that I absolutely will not be following up on:

Do fans who are more inclined to have an interest in focusing on virginity disproportionately participate in certain ship fandoms e.g. Steddie? In other words, are the same fans reading/writing about virginity across multiple fandoms, or is it a ship/character-specific interest?

Is there a greater or lesser tendency for those newer to fandom to be interested in virginity? Is there any correlation with age and/or the fan’s own degree of sexual experience?

Are there other types of media (tropes, genres, etc.) that fans who enjoy a focus on virginity also tend to partake in? Or conversely, are there tropes/genres/etc that they tend to like less?

What associated elements tend to show up in texts that focus on virginity? Are there particular narrative beats that tend to recur, or certain characterizations/fanons?

And just because it bears repeating: there's absolutely nothing wrong with reading/writing any of this. None of this is in any way a moral or ethical judgment about readers, writers, and/or fics.

I am a big proponent of idfic/DD:DNE/darkfic/etc—as someone who grew up in a heavily censored media environment and later studied functions of deviance, I literally and unironically consider it a tremendous social good.

I also find it sociologically fascinating as a reflection of hegemonic social mores; the extremely low barrier to publishing fic makes it a very raw and unfiltered body of work that reflects and iterates on broader social/sexual narratives with varying degrees of self-awareness. It’s just fun to think about stuff sometimes, especially when this much data is readily available! Delicious, delicious data.

3.1 Matched sets

Before we get into the conceptually thornier bits, let’s talk about where these numbers are coming from.

I had initially wondered if it would be possible to just…assume that for the most part, fics would be tagged in pairs of T.C1/B.C2 and vice versa. I knew there’d be a little bit of switch-tagging and under-tagging, but I thought it might be minor enough that it wouldn’t make a big difference.

Fig. 3.11 - Works tagged “Top [Character 1]”/”Bottom [Character 2]” and vice versa

As you can see, my initial hypothesis was incorrect! If they were perfectly or near-perfectly matched, the above charts would have a clean line right down the middle, which is very obviously not the case. It's close—most of these are very near 50/50—but not close enough to make any assumptions, especially for Larry (1D), Spirk (Trek), and J2 (SPN RPF).

It turns out that quite a lot of fics just tag one and not the other, e.g.:

Fig. 3.12a - One of the shorter tag lists I found in the “Top Castiel (Supernatural)” search

Fig. 3.12b - “Bottom Castiel (Supernatural)” example—my Mandarin Chinese is not great, but I believe those tags are basically “Bisexual Castiel” and “Mundane AU”

And it also turns out that when I dug into the Larry (1D) tag to explore that 3,625-work discrepancy, tag sets like this were being returned:

Fig. 3.12c - “Bottom Louis Tomlinson” example

Note that this was in the “Bottom Louis Tomlinson” EXCLUDING “Top Harry Styles” search within the ship tag, which means “Top Harry” isn’t necessarily getting synned correctly, and that might account for a fair chunk of the discrepancy.

In fact, it turns out that characters consistently get B-tagged slightly more often than they get T-tagged.

Fig. 3.13 - Scatterplot of character T-tags against their corresponding ship partner (cC)’s B-tags; yes, I evaluated each character individually

If it were a perfect 1:1 ratio, that R-squared would be that red line there. It’s close! And it's got a whopping 94.1% R-squared, which means there is an INCREDIBLY consistent predictive relationship! But it’s not close enough for my satisfaction, especially with those pesky outliers. 

The question then became: what’s the best proxy for the info I actually want to measure? 

At this point, I think it’s reasonable to add T.C1 and B.C2, then subtract T1-B2 (and then the inverse) to get the final T1B2 and B1T2 numbers. No, they’re not exact, but it’s about as close as I think I can get at this scale. 

Also, again, please don’t come for me about my incredibly ad-hoc approach to naming conventions. I know they’re confusing, but there are just so, so many calculations and I kept discovering new things I wanted to investigate on the fly.

Fig. 3.14a - The derived T1B2 against individual measurements

Fig. 3.14b - The derived B1T2 against individual measurements

So with those numbers, we get this general T-tag/B-tag distribution:

Fig. 3.15 - Relative frequency of Top/Bottom, with Tmax indicated

I want to walk through how I got these figures, because it’s a little bit involved. Also, others may disagree with the decisions I’ve made and that’s valid! I very strongly believe that you should never quote or rely on statistics if you don’t understand and agree with how they were calculated. All statistics are products of personal decisions about how to collapse reality into numbers!

Tab. 3.16 - Sample Top/Bottom evaluation

Let’s take a look at Steddie as an example. Here I have the ship as well as individual characters listed, and you’ll see why in just a moment.

The numbers in Columns D through I are hard-coded—or rather, pulled directly from a pivot table filtering the main sheet for M/M ships.

Col. D: All works tagged “Top Steve Harrington”

Col. E: All works tagged “Bottom Steve Harrington”

Col. F: All works tagged “Top Eddie Munson”

Col. G: All works tagged “Bottom Eddie Munson”

Col. H: All works tagged both “Top Steve Harrington” and “Bottom Eddie Munson”

Col. I: All works tagged both “Bottom Steve Harrington” and “Top Eddie Munson”

Col. K = Col. D + Col. G - Col. H. This basically gives me the list of everything that has Top!Steve and/or Bottom!Eddie tags. (Yes, I could have done an OR search, but I pulled the Top/Bottom tags first before realizing that they didn’t quite line up—see Fig. 3.11—and it was the same amount of work to just pull the combo tag anyway.) 

Col. L is the reverse (Bottom!Steve and/or Top!Eddie), and Col. M just adds Col. K and Col. L. 

I then divided Col. K by Col. M (so, T1B2%TB) and Col L by Col. M. So for Steddie, the numbers were 33.1% Top!Steve/Bottom!Eddie, and 66.9% Bottom!Steve/Top!Eddie.

From there, it was pretty straightforward to just mark which character had the larger number and generate individual character labels with ships attached—the “with ships attached” bit is quite important, because there are a number of characters who appear in multiple ships e.g. Steve Rogers and Jungkook! I forgot to do that the first time I ran an individual character evaluation, and it was absolute chaos. 

3.2 Back to virginity

Now that we have some actual numbers to work with, let’s take a look at how this maps onto V-tagging!

I did a similar analysis but basically added “Virgin [Character]” to every query, and checked for V^2-tagging. And here are the results! Or at least—here are the results in the ships which have at least 30 V-tags in T1B2+B1T2 combined, because otherwise the chart would have been absolutely unreadable. That still leaves 42 ships, which is a reasonably healthy sample size.

Fig. 3.21 - Raw counts for VTB-tagged fics

I’ve kept them as raw counts in this first set, because some of these quantities are very small and I think the raw counts give a better overall sense of the dynamics here. (Frankly, I probably should have taken the time to clean the lower-quantity stats, but I DID NOT so I cannot vouch for the accuracy of any non-canonical tags.)

You can probably sort of already tell just by looking at this: within popular M/M ships, bottoms are generally more likely to be V-tagged than tops. Here are the same numbers as percentages:

Fig. 3.22 - Percentage breakdown for VTB-tagged fics

(There are no V-tagged T1B2 fics in Hollanov whatsoever!)

And here is the Fig. 3.22 data in sorted scatterplot form to illustrate the overall distribution:

Fig. 3.23 - Scatterplots for VTB percentage breakdowns in T1B2

Fig. 3.24 - Scatterplots for VTB percentage breakdowns in B1T2

(Side note: I do not love how the default scatterplot color system includes some incredibly light pastels super early in the sequence; I think it gives an incorrect visual impression. Nonetheless, I am not about to go through and change them all by hand. I suppose you can think of it as, like…with this particular number of datapoints, the top of the super-light pastels more or less marks Q3, sort of?)

Here’s a set of histograms sorting the individual characters in the n30 filter. This one isn’t the most visually intuitive; basically, I combined 3.23a and 3.24c to get the T-tag rates, and then I combined 3.23c and 3.24a to get the B-tag rates. They represent how often individual characters are VT-tagged versus VB-tagged.

Fig. 3.25 - Histograms for VT.C and VB.C distribution; x-axis is percentage of VTB and y-axis is raw count of ships

For an extra-clear comparison—and also to demonstrate that the filtered sample is in fact representative—below is a chart showing the distribution differences, using the filtered (n30) and unfiltered (n0) stats for T1B2 and B1T2.

Fig. 3.26 - Q1-Q3 and outliers in candlestick format; the solid blocks represent the IQR and the lines represent +/-1.5SD

And here are the stats per character (not ship):

Tab. 3.27 - Unfiltered (n0) and filtered (n30) stats for VT, VB, and V^2 character tagging 

And of course, it’s always worth zooming in to the Steddie case study.

Fig. 3.28 - Pie chart breakdown of TB-tagged and VTB-tagged Steddie, plus VTB-tagged Eddie

What these charts tell us is that when Eddie is V-tagged and also TB-tagged, he’s tagged as a bottom about 1.7x as often as he’s tagged as a top—almost the inverse of how he’s tagged in the ship as a whole. For Steve, the difference is even more extreme.

That’s pretty standard for M/M ships overall. Eddie is VT-tagged on the slightly high side, but it works out to roughly the 88th percentile for the n30 filter; he doesn’t even clear Q3. 

Steve, on the other hand, is VB-tagged at an unusually low rate: at 19.5%, he squeaks in under the (n30) lower outlier bound of 21.0%. 

Again, I do not think that this is a direct reflection of canon! Derek Hale (Teen Wolf) has a VB% of 51.8% and he ALSO had a plot-relevant canonical sexual history (and I think also at least one fade-to-black sex scene within the series timeline? I don’t remember tbqh). 

So…what’s going on there? I have no answers, just more questions!

It’s also just worth noting as a matter of thoroughness that Steddie is an outlier for VTB%Ship and V%TB evaluations. However, that’s pretty much to be expected from the Virgin!Eddie tagging rate overall; if anything, the V-tag discrepancy is a bit less extreme within the TB filter, perhaps due to the prominence of Top!Eddie.

Tab. 3.29 - Stats and Steddie data for VTB%Ship, V%TB, TB%Ship, and V.C%Ship plus T.C%TB, V-T.C%VTB, and the difference between the two i.e. Tdelta

ETA: I've tacked on the T% info to this chart, because I wanted to reference the Tdelta info in the next part. Unfortunately, my numbering system did not account for more than 9 charts per section—I really should've gone with 3.2.9, 3.2.10, etc. but hindsight etc etc.

The three stat columns on the right-hand side are specific to the filter of individual characters with VTB of at least 30. That filter gave me a sample size of 58 which I think is fairly robust!

As you can see, Eddie is on the high side of normal for all three columns, and Steve is on the low side for two columns but high-normal for the third. In other words, Eddie is T-tagged slightly more than average whether he's V-tagged or not, and Steve is low; Steve is less frequently VT-tagged than most characters, compared to how often he's VB-tagged, but the percentage shift between T-tags and VT-tags is well within normal parameters for both characters.

3.3 Switching it up

Obviously, there is more to life than topping and bottoming; I would even venture a very unscientific and unsubstantiated guess that the majority of real-life queers switch at least a little. 

In fanfiction, however, the numbers are much lower—and much more difficult to gather, because there are basically three active tags that I was able to identify, all of which denote switching in some way:

Top/Bottom Versatile | Switch [Character]

Top/Bottom Versatile [Character]

Switch [Character]

The way I resolved it was…let’s say inelegant. I ended up just pulling each tag as well as each tag combo and treated them like overlapping populations.

Fig. 3.31 - This might be an unnecessary illustration. I mean, you get it, right? I just add S0+S1+S2, subtract S0S1+S0S2+S1S2, then add S0S1S2 back in. 

Take a look at this completely ridiculous sample of ships:

Tab. 3.32 - S0/S1/S2 numbers for each character in Sterek, Johnlock, and Wangxian

There is no consistency whatsoever as to what gets synned! So that’s why I ended up with a whopping FOURTEEN columns per ship.

You may be asking: why didn't I just use the OR search operator? There are a few reasons, all of which are equally true, and some of which are more embarrassing than others:

I didn't actually think of that until I was mostly done anyway

I wasn't immediately able to write a formula for a URL that would return a consistent, clean result

I was a bit curious about relative tag usage—I mean, that chart up there is weird! I don’t know what to do with it but it’s weird! And maybe at some point I will figure out a better question to ask, so if I do, I’ll want the fine-grained data. 

Fig. 3.33 - Top, Bottom, and Switch percentages-per-ship for each character

It does seem like characters are S-tagged about 10% as often as they are TB-tagged in general, with a top outlier boundary of 1.19%. This is also the inquiry that led me to create the “Asian” filter on the raw data—take a look at those top listed fandoms in 3.34c! Out of the top 25, the only three characters that are not Kpop, Genshin, anime, or MXTX are Soap (CoD), Ghost (CoD), and Eddie Munson. 

I’ll talk about that a little bit more in Part 4, but spoilers: the upper outlier boundary for S-tags in Asian fandoms is roughly 2x the upper outlier boundary for S-tags in non-Asian fandoms.

Look, I’m aware that in order to be exhaustively thorough, I should probably take the V-tag numbers for each individual S-tag. This is about where my curiosity well runs dry, I’m afraid! 

The problem is that if the V%S rate is even remotely similar to the V%TB rate, we’re talking about a scant handful of fics in the largest evaluations—”Switch Jeon Jungkook” in Vkook (BTS RPF) returns 710 fics, which is a couple hundred more than the next-highest raw count (“Switch Jeon Jungkook” in Jikook at 513), but Jungkook is only VS-tagged 7 times in total and V is only VS-tagged 3 times in that same ship. These are not numbers I feel comfortable comparing! 

So, much like fandom as a whole, we are going to completely overlook switches in this analysis. But at least I spent several hours of my one mortal life checking my assumptions.

3.4 tl;dr

When Eddie gets tagged as either a top or a bottom, he’s usually a top—66.9% of the time, in fact. However, when he’s also tagged as a virgin, the ratios flip: when he’s tagged as either a top or a bottom and also a virgin, he’s tagged as a bottom about 63.3% of the time.

This is very standard for popular M/M ships on AO3. Steddie is not an outlier in this regard: in general, characters are significantly more likely to be tagged as Virgin Bottoms than Virgin Tops. 

I’m actually not going to do any analysis here because I think the extremely obvious conclusion is that we tend to associate one particular sexual role with virginity, and, well, you can fill in the blanks yourself!

2.1 Min-maxing

Kylux’s addition to the outlier roster means that for the three highest Vmax characters, their corresponding Vmins range from extremely high (Hux, 0.55%) to average-ish (Steve, 0.23%) to extremely low (Watson, 0.03%). No idea what that’s about, but it does suggest that it’s not just an inter-ship variation in V-tagging practices. In other words, it’s not just that certain fandoms are more likely to V-tag characters overall. If that were the case, we’d see moderately-to-severely elevated Vmins for all the top Vmaxes. 

Instead, we get this:

Fig. 2.11 - Gap between Vmin and Vmax for each ship

Fig. 2.12 - Measurement of each ship's Vtag gap

In Fig. 2.12, we can see that most Vmaxes are less than 0.35% or so, and nearly all of them are below 0.65%. Steddie and Johnlock, on the other hand, truly are unusual! 

I ran the (linear regression) R-squared for Vmin and Vmax (along with a bunch of other variables just for fun), and the Vmin R-squared for the V.Cdelta is ~4.5% while the Vmax R-squared is ~83.7%. In other words, if you have the Vmin number, you can only predict the V.Cdelta with 4.5% accuracy i.e. absolute garbage odds. You would probably do better throwing a dart at the wall blindfolded. 

With the Vmax, however, you can predict the V.Cdelta with 83.7% accuracy! Or in OTHER other words, the Vmax accounts for about 83.7% of the variation in V.Cdelta. 

What that all means is that the Vmin truly does not matter. In fact, the Vmin-Vmax R-squared is only about 34.6%—there’s a weak relationship, certainly, but it’s nowhere near predictive.

All of this does beg the question: can we even assume a linear relationship here?

Fig. 2.13 - Scatterplot of Vmin%Ship vs Vmax%Ship (the axis labels are flipped, sorry! I didn’t catch that until I’d already deleted the charts, but it doesn’t change the actual relationship)

Aside from the three outliers floating at the top there, it actually looks somewhat consistent to me. It does not fit very closely to a single clean line, but it does seem to be operating in a vaguely linear fashion. 

On the other hand, this obviously looks like a much more direct correlative relationship:

Fig. 2.14 - Scatterplot of V.Cdelta vs Vmax%Ship (again…the axis labels…soz…IT DOESN’T MATTER THOUGH, WE ARE NOT COMPARING AXES)

And I’m including this just for fun, because we already know it’s garbage! Just unutterably nonsensical trash with no discernable pattern.

Fig. 2.15 - Scatterplot of V.Cdelta vs Vmin%Ship (okay this one's axes are actually correctly labeled despite being the least important of the three)

To sum up, what we can conclude from this section is that generally speaking, the more one character is V-tagged in his* ship tag, the less likely his partner is to be V-tagged. 

*Remember, these findings are specific to M/M ships! They definitely do not apply to any other categories, and based on the relatively few data points I’ve gathered for F/M, I suspect that that one in particular may be significantly different.

2.2 Oops all virgins

It’s time to circle back to the V^2 evaluation! The question here is: how frequent is virgin-on-virgin action?

Fig. 2.21 - Scatterplots of V^2%Ship and V^2%V.C?

The left-hand chart describes how frequently characters are V^2-tagged within the overall ship tag, while the right-hand chart describes how frequently characters are V^2-tagged relative to the pool of ships in which any character is V-tagged. In other words, the right-hand chart represents how often a ship will V-tag both characters rather than just one.

Tab. 2.22 - Stats for V^2%Ship and V^2%V.C?

When we look at the actual stats workup, it becomes even more obvious how extreme the outliers are. Using the Q3+1.5SD guideline, we get upper bounds of 0.065% for V^2%Ship and 13.62% for V^2%V.C?. 

That means that Kylux and Aziraphale/Crowley are more than twice the upper bound for V^2%Ship! Aziraphale/Crowley is almost as extreme on the V^2%V.C? evaluation, but the rest of the distribution looks a bit more normal. Kylux, on the other hand, has the highest overall incidence within the ship tag, but sits at a very sedate 9.32% for V^2%V.C?. 

With all that said, it’s important to note that these are mostly pretty small numbers when we get right down to it.

Fig. 2.23 - Actual V-tag counts

2.3 Exchange the experience

I spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out if “Sexually Inexperienced [Character]” and “Sexually Experienced [Character]” could be used as proxies—the main challenge was that some characters are tagged “Experienced [Character]” and some are tagged “Sexually Experienced [Character]” (and the same for Inexperience) and there doesn’t seem to be any consistency or synning. 

For example, “Experienced Crowley (Good Omens)” has 148 works, none of which include the one singular work tagged “Sexually Experienced Crowley (Good Omens)”...and over in Wolfstar, “Experienced Remus Lupin” has 4 works, which ARE included in the 12 “Sexually Experienced Remus Lupin” search! 

So obviously I ended up pulling six data points per character, including the tag combo to clean duplicates, only to discover that they’re much more weakly correlated with V-tagging than I’d expected. (I did also try exponential and logarithmic regression, which were even worse fits.)

Fig. 2.31 - R-squared against each character’s V-tag, showing a ~25-35% correlation at best

In fact, for the most part, XIX tagging habits seemed to be more dependent on ship than anything else.

Tab. 2.32 - Heatmap of X.C%Ship and IX.C%Ship

As you can see from the heatmap, numbers are generally pretty low with a few exceptions that mostly stretch evenly across all four In/Experience columns.

I originally had a few paragraphs here discussing the outliers/hotspots, but…most of these numbers are single-digit. When I stepped back to review my tentative conclusions, I realized I was deriving them from, like, ten fics for one character and two fics for another. The n is just not big enough for me to feel comfortable saying anything except “a few ship fandoms tend to use XIX tags more than others, but mostly they're not very popular tags.” 

2.4 tl;dr

The big takeaway here is that clearly, most ships only have a scant handful of fics in which both characters are V-tagged, with a few big exceptions. The vast majority of fics that V-tag characters only tag one.

I’m sure everyone can come up with some hypotheses as to why that is, but this feels like a pretty good place to call this section before it gets too speculative—we’ve got another chunky one ahead!

1.1 Why are the column titles different?

Originally, I was using Min% and Max% to indicate a general range based on four tags. This was…not great. I mean, it wasn’t horrible as an off-the-cuff method, but it’s simply not that functional on a bigger scale. When I’m looking at the relative incidence of tags within the population of “fics involving virginity,” I need one actual number to evaluate against, not a range! 

I found a solution when I discovered that the “#Sexual Inexperience” (sIX) tag functions as a meta-tag including a bunch of virginity-related tags. Although it’s slightly broader than I really wanted, I decided it was good enough for my purposes. As you can see from the numbers, it’s pretty close to the high end of the original range, so I feel pretty confident that it’s a decent proxy for the population of fics I’m looking at. For example, the raw Steddie Min-Max was 539-927 and the sIX is 878.

The rest of the columns represent exactly the same thing as their predecessors, but I’ve shifted the labeling system a bit because I’m evaluating SO many more things, and I'm evaluating them against a wider variety of datasets. You’ll notice that they now have the format [tag]%[source]—that’s because I’ve also evaluated e.g. the relative popularity of the AU tag within each ship as a whole versus within sIX, as shown in Table 0.1. Therefore, I needed an at-a-glance way to distinguish AU%Ship and AU%sIX. 

Again, check the plaintext data spreadsheet linked at the top of this thread for a full rundown of acronyms and shorthand used. Not all of it makes sense because I basically made everything up on the fly! But it’s perfectly clear to me when I look at it, so…at my core, I’m someone who goes “my desk isn’t messy, I know exactly where everything is! I have a SYSTEM” while everyone else just slowly backs away from the chaos. 

1.2 Why are the numbers different?

In my opinion, the main factor is probably just that the dataset is so much bigger. n=23 is not really all that statistically significant—the rule of thumb I was taught was that n=30 is the minimum to be considered robust. It was always going to be a bit off, but I’m actually somewhat cheered to see that it’s not THAT much off. 

The LV stats are a little bit higher and the VK stats are significantly higher, which means that the original conclusion (setting 0.85% as the outlier boundary for LV, and 0.05% as the outlier boundary for VK) should really be revised upwards. The individual character numbers are a tiny bit lower but really quite similar—I originally gave 0.45% as the outlier boundary for #Virgin [A/B], now revised as V.C%Ship (i.e. the chance of any given character being tagged “Virgin [character name]”).

The VK stats are probably the only ones worth really talking about, because the revised VK limit is more than twice the old one!

At this point, I have to be so real with you and admit that I don’t remember why I set the old one so low. I mean, the outlier-cleaned stats give 0.03% for the Q3 and 0.02% for the SD, but why on earth would I cut so close to the bone when I could see that there were edge cases? 

Admittedly, my knowledge of the canonically kinky Wangxian may have biased me a bit towards assuming it was an outlier for canon-related reasons. I’m not as familiar with Wincest, but I may also have made some assumptions there based on my general awareness of SPN fandom. Mea culpa!

But if we take a look at the ships in order of fic count, we can kind of see that the top section does skew a bit lower than the rest; yeah, we’ve got some mid-range counts for LWJ/WWX and Dean/Sam, plus the obvious outlier of Steddie, but everything else hovers around the 0.05% line or less. Given a bigger dataset, though, it’s a little easier to see that LWJ/WWX and Dean/Sam—though still somewhat high—are not all that unusual.

Fig. 1.21 - VK%Ship in order of fic count; ships not previously evaluated are in green

(Yes, that’s correct; the four ships with zero VK tags whatsoever are Erik/Charles [Xmen], Blaine/Kurt [Glee], Rodney/John [SGA], and Gabriel/Sam [SPN]! Some very different canons with almost nothing in common that I can see.)

Although it is ultimately my fault for inexplicably setting the limit so low, I’m also inclined to call this a partial casualty of the small sample size. If I’d extended to a proper n=30, I would have included enough VK >0.1% to correct my assessment of where to draw the outlier line. 

1.3 A digression on the appropriateness of the previous numbers

Beyond the VK, I actually realized that I got the rest of the numbers using Q3+SD, not Q3+1.5SD, and I do not remember why I went with that equation! In a statistically normal (i.e. symmetrical bell-shaped) distribution, that only hits the 97.7th percentile. And yeah, it’s pretty fair to say that being in the top 2.3% is “unusual,” but…I think we can do better than that, especially because this is not a perfectly normal distribution. 

Fig 1.31 - sIX%Ship histogram

The standard deviation for the evaluation in the above figure is 0.57%, and the quartiles are 0.52%, 0.85%, and 1.24%. See the issue? With a right-hand tail like that, Q3+SD is only 1.81%, which means my previous approach would mark five ships (out of 74, i.e. 6.8%) as “unusual.” And, okay, that’s not a statistical term, that’s a term for my gut feeling of “oh weird?” but I’d like to cut it off a little further along the tail. 

So, taking Q3+1.5SD, we get 2.095% as the cutoff, which means…four ships are marked as unusual (5.4%). It’s not a huge difference, but that still feels a lot better to me, and it also sits right in a relatively big gap in the data. Take a look at these distributions:

Fig 1.32 - Scatterplots for sIX%Ship, LV%Ship, and VK%Ship

Tab. 1.33 - Q3+SD and Q3+1.5SD for the three evaluations

Q3+1.5SD cuts things off at the biggest gap between data points for all three, which feels very right to me! There may or may not be some mathematical reason that this works, but whatever the reason, I’m much happier with the Q3+1.5SD equation. 

1.4 tl;dr

Here’s the previous statement:

It is unusual for more than ~0.85% of fics to be tagged "#Loss of Virginity" or ~0.05% of fics to be tagged "#Virginity Kink."It is also unusual for more than ~0.45% of fics featuring any particular character to be tagged with "#Virgin [character]," regardless of what ship they're written in.

And here’s a revised version, with some of the wording tweaked to be clearer:

Within a popular M/M ship tag, it is unusual for more than ~1.2% of fics* to be tagged "#Loss of Virginity" or ~0.14% to be tagged "#Virginity Kink." It is also unusual for more than ~0.6% of fics to be tagged with "#Virgin [character]" for any particular character. In general, it’s unusual for a popular M/M ship to have more than ~2.1% of its fics tagged with something that gets classified as “#Sexual Inexperience.” 

Part 0: Very Important Preamble

A lot of people have responded to the preliminary study by going straight to a discussion of canon, often presuming that this is a reflection of "canonical virginity" in some way.

There are three points I'd like to make in response to that:

First, just to be super extremely clear in case anyone missed the above-the-cut bullet points, virginity is a social construct. Understanding that is table stakes, here—it’s simply not something that’s worth the time to explain or defend. 

Of course transitioning from a virginal to non-virginal state, however you choose to define those things, can be a meaningful experience; so can literally anything else in your life. I think it's worth interrogating why virginity gets treated in such a distinct way, and I am personally always fascinated by sexuality studies, so here we are.

At this point, I am also obliged to acknowledge the looming shadow of purity culture! I don't really feel like going into it because it's a long and depressing road, but that's the inescapable subtext of a lot of this discussion: the cultural idea that sex should only take place within the context of a committed, loving, monogamous relationship and preferably legal matrimony. (And of course the sometimes-explicit implication that sex outside of that framework is bad, wrong, dirty, lesser, "not real," etc.)

Second, I've written before about the specific cultural context informing how I interpret Eddie Munson's sexual history.

I still stand by pretty much everything I said. (Though, looking back at my hedging, I’m so hecking glad that my follower count’s fallen off a bit in recent years and I feel much less under a spotlight; I really could never be an influencer.) In short, while it's certainly plausible to write him as sexually inexperienced, it's definitely not the only plausible option by a long shot. Also, it's honestly kind of weird how some of the subtext seems to be that only cool and popular teens have sex, a thing which has never been true even once throughout history!

Third, I'm not convinced that canon has anything to do with it at all.

For a very closely related instance, take Steve Harrington, who had a plot-relevant on-screen sex scene. I don't think anyone's seriously arguing that Steve would canonically consider himself a virgin. Nonetheless, the "#Virgin Steve Harrington" tag is used within the Steddie ship slightly more than average for any given character (0.23%, when the average is 0.19% and the IQR is 0.05-0.27%).

To take another comparative case study from a similarly-sized fandom, look at Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester: both characters are presented as fairly sexually experienced in canon, but they have one of the more extreme discrepancies in how frequently each character is V-tagged, with Dean clocking in at 18 and Sam at 86.

As a sidebar: I did check the numbers on fics tagged "Alternate Universe" both in the ship tag as a whole and in the "Sexual Inexperience" (sIX for short) meta-tag within the ship tag. As you can see below, numbers are roughly 10% higher across the board in sIX. Not particularly surprising; if anything, I'd half-expected an even bigger gap. (But of course, not all AU fics are AU-tagged, and this doesn't necessarily include e.g. pre-canon or canon-divergent fics.)

Tab. 0.01 - Rates of fics tagged “Alternate Universe”

I was initially hoping to code characters with whether or not they had canonical sexual experience, but I think there are too many canons I'm unfamiliar with to make that call. I do not think there is a character sexual experience wiki/catalogue/resource anywhere, but by all means, please tell me if there is!

So…what makes Eddie special? Why is the fandom at large so interested in Eddie's virginity?

That's not something I can answer with quantitative research, but I wanted to know if the assumptions underlying that question were even valid. In other words, is this a recurring pattern in popular M/M ships on AO3? Are there particular metrics on which Steddie stands out, compared to the broader population? 

And that IS something I can answer through quant, yay!

0.1 How I got these numbers

I have done my level best to grab comprehensive data from every ship tag with at least 15,000 works on AO3, based partly on the 2024 toastystats report and also on just poking around. 

Previously, I had 19 M/M ships in the evaluation, which included Sasuke/Naruto just for kicks, even though it wasn’t technically in the top 25 of the 2024 report. When I ran the numbers, I did find that a few ships had leaped up the rankings—though of course the 2024 report did not include archive-locked fics, which may account for some of the shuffling. 

Two particular notes:

Buddie and Byler have rocketed up the rankings, especially Byler. Maybe some of that is archive-locking, but tbh I…feel very justified in my overall impression that ST5 was great for their fandom. Ship canonicity is overrated! 

Hollanov clocked in as the 25th biggest ship overall and 22nd biggest M/M ship, with about 36.5k fics at the cutoff point! It's been growing VERY quickly and at time of writing, that number is already outdated by over a thousand. Good for them! I am not in that fandom myself, but I am toasting them from the balcony. That does, however, mean that you’ll probably want to re-sample the stats if you want to look at Hollanov specifically; I didn’t, because I had too many charts I’d need to re-generate.

Fig. 0.11 - Ranking changes of top 39 ships by fic count; ships not previously evaluated are in green

I may have missed a few ships that ought to have been included, because I started going through each fandom with 15k+ fics to check for ships that met the criteria, and then I was like...actually it's probably fine if a handful slip through the cracks, I think I've got enough data for a bird's-eye view. Happy to add stuff if people do happen to know of any other candidates, though!

I also fixed the timing issue, because this was WAY more data than I could possibly pull in an hour like I did last time. The cutoff was June 8, because that's the day before I threw my hands up and went FINE, I GUESS I HAVE TO TRY TO BE CONSISTENT ABOUT THIS. Yes, that does also mean I've been noodling at this for a little over two weeks so far. Some people knit; I poke at spreadsheets.

This left me with 89 total ships, 74 of which were M/M. I gathered data for all of them, then decided to filter for M/M, because the norms and gendered cultural narratives are slightly different for F/M, F/F, and M/R (Male/Reader)—I didn't have enough non-M/M data points to make a concrete statement about overall patterns, but there does appear to be a consistent disconnect.

(No, I still don't know what's going on with Reylo.)

0.2 Critical weaknesses

⚠️ The data is imperfect.

I got most of these numbers by writing a simple Google Sheets formula to generate the URLs I wanted, then opening each generated URL in my browser and typing in each number by hand. Not the most elegant solution, but it more or less worked without me having to brush up on my rudimentary coding skills—and as a bonus, I kept all the links so anyone can double-check my work. (There were a few links I had to correct ad hoc, and I think I replaced all the URLs but I won’t swear to it.)

Please note that sometimes authors will add/remove tags, post-date works, delete works, etc. Also, I think that if a work gets updated with a new chapter after the cutoff date, it’s no longer included in the search? All numbers were correct at the time I pulled them, which was some time between 9 June 2026 and now, but I've already seen a few shift around—particularly the fast-growing, extremely active Hollanov ship.

I did make a good-faith effort to do spot checks, but without the capacity or will to go through every single fic for context, I have not corrected for e.g. background ship-tagging, mistagging, AO3 quirks, etc. There is also always the chance that I entered the data incorrectly!

The key takeaway here is that this study is about broad tagging patterns. The sample size is big enough that a lot of the individual weirdnesses should get smoothed over when viewed in aggregate; plenty of authors choose not to tag exhaustively (a choice I personally support and am here for) so I'm making the assumption that it all more or less comes out in the wash. I'm going to talk about some specific percentages here, because I don't want to compound estimation errors more than I have to, but just mentally append "-ish" to all numbers.

⚠️ The more fine-grained slices may be less accurate.

The following M/M ships have n<50 fics in the "Sexual Inexperience" tag:

Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard (All for the Game, n=20)

Nico di Angelo/Will Solace (PJO, n=27)

Rodney McKay/John Sheppard (SGA, n=28)

Alex Claremont-Diaz/Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor (RWRB, n=37)

Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1, n=49)

Those aren't absurdly tiny numbers, but it's worth keeping in mind that the sample size is a bit small for those ships, which means a single fic added/deleted could have an outsized impact on any stats that rely on the sIX filter for these ships.

(I admit I was a little surprised about McShep—I was sort of in SGA fandom back in the day, and while I wouldn’t say I thought of sexual inexperience as a common theme, I didn’t expect the numbers to be THIS low.)

⚠️ This data reflects tags—not content.

Just like virginity, tagging is incredibly subjective, and different fandoms will have different norms around what and how much they tag.

It's therefore really, REALLY important to note that these numbers do not reflect e.g. how many fics involve Virginity Kink (especially when that tag does not specify whether or not the kink aspect is diegetic). Yes, Steddie has the most individual instances of that tag of any ship studied (and the second-highest rate of that tag—howdy, CoD fandom! what's going on with you, I wonder?) but all that means is that...Steddie has the most individual instances of that tag of any ship studied.

⚠️ Kylo Ben is a data coding nightmare.

I really have no idea how AO3 handles Kylo Ren | Ben Solo. Sometimes it seems like the tags are collapsed under the "Kylo Ren | Ben Solo" handle and sometimes they aren't! I've done my best by searching for "Kylo Ren" + "Ben Solo" and subtracting co-tags whenever I notice weirdness, but...yeah, I don't know. I'm sure I've missed some. Triple-check specific numbers on any Kylo Ben ship, is all I'm saying.

There may be other nomenclature gaffes; not everything is synned to a canonical name, e.g. James "Bucky" Barnes vs Bucky Barnes. I've caught what I can, but if you notice any meaningful discrepancies, please feel free to let me know.

(I don't intend to "fix" individual fic content issues e.g. background tagging, because I don't have a consistent way to do that and the important thing here is comparing overall frequencies between ships, but tweaking search parameters to a nonstandard tag on the ship level is within scope!)

Henderson had always been the touchy-feely type, yammering on about emotional intelligence or whatever, so Steve had figured he’d probably want to fill in some of the blanks. It wasn’t like Steve had really known Eddie at all. Not for real, or not enough to count. Henderson had practically worshipped the guy, though, which meant there had to have been some memories bursting to get out. Stories about how he was with his friends, with people he liked, not jocks he teased and yapped at with that kooky energy that made people feel like they were going insane. Steve would’ve listened. He wouldn’t have minded.

But Henderson was being a fucking asshole for no reason, all touchy about the stupidest shit, and flat-out refusing to talk about Eddie or Eddie’s death or how they couldn’t have done anything, really, they couldn’t even have dragged his body back with them, so there wasn’t any point feeling like shit about that. At least Steve had Robin around to be even more of a disaster, and she might actually get a happy ending out of this whole clusterfuck. Vickie Dunne was there and the boyfriend was out of the picture, so: green light, full speed ahead, no problemo. Robin just needed to nut up and make a move before Vickie slipped through her fingers, like he kept telling her.

Robin had taken to threatening him with bodily harm if he made any more incredibly supportive comments, so he had some time on his hands. Some of the co-ed interns were pretty cute, but he just didn’t feel up to flirting much. They were pretty buttoned-up and boring-looking, probably not even down for a good time. It wasn’t a crime if he didn’t want to waste his energy on someone who seemed a little too clean-cut to handle him. There wasn’t any reason to give Robin an excuse to start a new You Suck board, either.

He figured he’d just work a little, save up, then…who knew? At first he’d thought he could get a place of his own in Hawkins, but it actually hadn’t sucked to get out of town for a while. He hadn’t been hating it. So maybe after their contract was up, he’d set out on the road and find somewhere else to settle down and have a family, the way he’d always wanted. It could still happen. He was barely old enough to drink, for god’s sake, it could all still happen.

It just didn’t feel that way, sometimes.

Steve tried not to let stuff like that get in his head too much, especially when he was working late at night and Robin wasn’t around. He always ended up spending hours just staring out of the curving glass panels into the creepy fucking ocean full of weird fish and weirder sea bugs.

Eddie probably would’ve liked it, if he’d been around. Not like Steve had any idea what the guy liked in a specific kind of way, but—they’d shared a school for four years, anyway. If Henderson was such a genius, you’d think he’d remember that Steve had known Eddie way longer, if you counted high school. Sure, they hadn’t known each other, but the point was that Henderson was an asshole and not as smart as he thought he was.

Whatever Eddie would’ve liked or not liked, Steve had to kill the time somehow, so he ended up just staring out at nothing most of the time. That’s how he started noticing that the reflections weren’t where they were supposed to be. Robin kept saying the windows were just like that, but they weren’t.

The way the caf was built was kind of artsier than the rest of the station, he guessed; maybe the eggheads wouldn’t ever emerge from their clipboards unless there was something pretty to look at. There were more windows there than anywhere else, practically slicing the cafeteria dome down the middle: half of the caf was normal metal walls, and the other half, where most of the tables and stuff for the scientists were, was made up of thick metal ribs joined with curving glass. The glass wasn’t all one big piece between the ribs, but Steve never could figure out what kind of pattern the huge panels were supposed to make. Maybe they’d just thrown some stuff together and figured that whatever fit, fit.

They’d tried to put in giant bamboo trees at one point, but it’d all died. Each plant had probably cost more than Steve and Robin’s contracts put together. You’d think the geniuses running the station could figure out how to keep a stupid expensive plant alive, but what did Steve know? He was just a hired grunt.

Anyway, they’d ended up moving some giant kelp around outside the windows so people could have something to look at that probably wouldn’t die. It wasn’t like they covered the whole area, just a little stand off to the side, right about where the massive glass panels ended and the metal walls began. A lot of tiny fish lived in the kelp, but they were pretty boring and Steve usually couldn’t really see them from the counter. Sometimes bigger stuff would come through and that was pretty cool, but normally Steve wouldn’t even bother trying to get a closer look.

Method/Approach

While logged in to my AO3 account (thus with visibility on archive-locked fics), I went through the AO3 ship tags for the most popular ships of 2024, the most recent overview available from @toastystats. Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson didn't make the cut at 23.3k in 2024, but note that that number does not include archive-locked fics.

Within each ship tag, I filtered for (individually):

#Loss of Virginity

#Virginity Kink

#Virgin [character A]

#Virgin [character B]

I did not have a hard cut-off for posting time, but I did grab everything within the span of about an hour.

I decided not to pull rating data (e.g. what percentage of fics in the fandom are labeled Explicit), because I think stories featuring virginity could hypothetically be in just about anything. If I ever do decide to do a follow-up, that's something I'd probably look at, though. Who knows, maybe there'll be some interesting correlations.

I also looked at the stats for "Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto" because Naruto made the biggest fandoms list and I was curious, having sort of nominally been on the fringes of that fandom in the mid-2000s; it's got 21.5k fics so I think it's a pretty reasonably-sized inclusion.

Something I did not expect to discover was the fact that "#Virgin Rey (Star Wars)" kept popping up as one of the top suggested tags whenever I typed in a "#Virgin [character]" tag, so I dipped a cautious toe into the heretofore-unknown-to-me world of Reylo. How could I not, with bait like that?

(Steve Rogers' virginity or lack thereof also seems to be of paramount interest to the good people of AO3...)

Reylo-specific Weirdness

I'm not really sure my approach was sufficient, because I discovered that "Kylo Ren/Rey" (16,748 fics) and "Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren" (31,759 fics) are listed as two separate ships. I did a quick search for any AO3 news items explaining why they're separate and didn't see anything; if anyone knows what's up with that, please let me know! I'm not saying it's wrong, I just have no idea what's going on or if it is indeed appropriate for purposes of this study to treat them as separate.

The numbers I got for those ships are also slightly off, because I decided to sum "#Virgin Kylo Ren" and "#Virgin Ben Solo" to get the "#Virgin [character]" figure, even though I could already see a ton of fics tagged with both on the first page of results. I suspect the raw sums ended up being off by about 100-200, since the lower number in both cases was ~300.

(In both ship tags, "#Virgin Rey" was still the higher of the two sums, so it didn't end up mattering at all in terms of getting a percentage range.)

Key Methodological Weaknesses

⚠️ Obviously, these tags are not comprehensive.

I poked around a bit to see if I could find any other commonly used tags; I considered including "#Sexual Inexperience" and "#First Times" as well, but felt that those were too imprecise and included a lot of e.g. first times between those particular characters. Ultimately, I decided that what I was actually interested in was references to "virginity" as a specific socially constructed concept in and of itself.

⚠️ I did not clean the datasets.

For example, these numbers include fics in which the tags refer to a different ship than the one I filtered by, such as multi-fandom anthologies and works in which the filtered-by ship is a background pairing.

I'm gonna be honest: proper cleaning sounded like a lot of work and I didn't want to do it.

⚠️ I did not account for multi-tagging.

I'm absolutely certain that many if not most of these have more than one tag applied, e.g. "#Loss of Virginity" and "#Virgin [character A]" on the same fic. Therefore, the total number of unique fics is definitely less than the sum of the tags. Which is fine, because I'm interested in looking at tag frequency, but it is a limitation that should be top-of-mind when looking at this data.

Findings

These are raw counts, which means that they're not scaled to the overall fandom sizes as indicated by the grey "Fic total" columns (scaled to right-side Y-axis, not shown).

Given all the listed methodological weaknesses, I want to emphasize yet again that this is an extremely sloppy study with a lot of holes in it, and no firm conclusions should be drawn from it. I know some of the numbers aren't really visible here and honestly I think that's appropriate, because they should be taken as relative indicators/estimates rather than precise measurements. (Actual numbers at end of post.)

Nonetheless, I found these results pretty interesting in terms of overall trends! For my purposes, getting a general range was sufficiently accurate, even if I had a hell of a time figuring out how best to visualize it within Google Sheets.

Here's a chart showing approximately how many times those four tags show up in fics for each ship, described as a minimum percentage (the highest number of any individual tag) and a maximum percentage (the sum of all four numbers). The actual number of unique fics that use at least one of those tags is definitely somewhere between the two, and probably much closer to the minimum than the maximum.

INCREDIBLE. Reylo fics tend to use at least one of those tags at a rate roughly 3-5x any other ship. I have no idea what's going on in there and I'm a little bit afraid to ask. (No, that's a lie, I am so anthropologically interested, please tell me if you know anything!!)

The other major outlier is the Miraculous Ladybug ship, Adrien Agreste/Marinette Dupain-Cheng; I know literally nothing about that fandom/canon and have no idea what's going on there either, but there are only 65 fics tagged "#Loss of Virginity" + one tagged "#Virginity Kink" (which is a multifandom anthology, so I strongly suspect it shouldn't count, but I didn't want to be inconsistent about my hands-off approach to data-cleaning) + one tagged "#virgin marinette."

So with those three (counting the two Reylo as separate) removed to make the chart a bit more legible, I got this:

Second figure included because it's closer to what I actually wanted the data visualization itself to look like but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to add the actual numbers, blech. GIVE ME BOTH.

By this point, you may have noticed that I wrote out some names in full and some in shorthand. This is purely based on my own personal convenience, because it's not like I'm going to forget what LWJ/WWX stands for, but if I shorten the BNHA characters' names I will simply never remember them again. I did, however, write out the character names instead of the ship names e.g. Johnlock because that helps me remember at a glance which one was Character A and which one was Character B.

Main Observations:

Hermione/Draco and Steve/Eddie have a VERY similar spread of around 1.4%–2.4/2.8%.

Jungkook/V (BTS RPF) also overlaps a bit, though with a lower maximum; this may be due to e.g. a fandom tendency not to use multiple of the listed tags in the same fic, though this is just an example hypothesis and further investigation is required to draw any particular conclusions.

Sherlock/John is the only other one with a min% of >1%, though Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku (BNHA) and Harry/Louis (1D RPF) come fairly close with a ~1.3% max% for both.

I also noted some interesting patterns around tag frequency/distribution when I was pulling data:

I went with a percentage format for these data markers, but please note yet again that these are not percentages of unique fics! These percentages represent tags used, and the ratio of tag:fic is definitely not 1:1.

Main Observations:

"#Loss of Virginity" tends to be the most or second-most commonly used tag, with "#Virgin [character A/B]" also frequently used.

"#Virginity Kink" is not that commonly used overall, which I find pretty interesting in and of itself! It shows up pretty heavily in LWJ/WWX, which makes sense because they are canonically kinky (I don't remember whether the incense-burners featured virginity kink specifically? but it's definitely not too big a stretch), Dean/Sam (SPN), and of course Steve/Eddie, which has the highest actual number of tag usages (87 compared to the next-highest at 57).

Some fandoms have a pretty even split of which character gets the "#Virgin [character]" tag, and others don't.

On that last point, I wanted to take a closer look at which ships had strong discrepancies and which had a more 50/50 split.

The formula I used was basically in the format of (MAX(A1:B1)-MIN(A1:B1))/SUM(A1:B1)—in other words, the closer the number is to zero, the closer the "#Virgin [character A]" to "#Virgin [character B]" ratio is to 1:1.

I wasn't expecting these results! I'd initially thought that it might make sense that some ships include characters who have unambiguously canonically had sex, so the bulk of canon-verse fics would thus reflect a certain weighting.

However, as the second (sorted) graph shows, below the top two, the curve is pretty smooth! I don't really know what that implies except that my hypothesis was definitely wrong. There does seem to be a more jagged step-down from 0.53 to 0.41, but I'm not convinced the R-squared is out of bounds, especially when n=23.

(I've included the Reylo numbers, but here is a gentle reminder that they should definitely be higher due to fandom-specific tagging practices that I don't know enough about to resolve appropriately. The maximum end of that range would be about 0.3-0.35, for the record.)

(Lack of) Conclusion

⚠️ It would be intellectually irresponsible to come to any overarching conclusions based on this data. (This is mostly a reminder to myself!)

What I can reasonably say is this: the data does in fact seem to support the idea that Steddie fics on AO3 may have more of a tendency to use virginity-related tags than other popular ships do, particularly the "#Virginity Kink" tag.

I am not even going to try to speculate on whatever's going on in the Hermione/Draco situation, but it's utterly fascinating to me that that's the main highwater comp, especially since the overall numbers are relatively similar but the internal tag distribution looks pretty different.

And finally, because I do know it's a pain to try and read the actual numbers on the graphs, here's a cleaner table:

It had all worked out in the end, more or less. And Dustin was a man of science, but he’d also been a fucking child, so at some level, the garbage lesson his child-brain had taken was that it would always work out, more or less, if he could just be brave enough and smart enough to follow the facts. People, grown-ups, didn’t want to see things that were right in front of their nose, and all he had to do was ignore the stupid grown-ups telling him to ignore what he could plainly see. It was like magic, like a cheat code, if you just had the nerve to question what you were told.

He was never going to be that naïve again. He was probably less of a child than anyone on this stupid fucking station, because his boss Dr. Dey sure as hell hadn’t ever watched the light go out of his friend’s eyes, hadn’t ever had to stand up covered in blood and walk away from the thing, the inanimate object, that used to—that Eddie was—

Eddie had been—

Anyway, Eddie was gone, and Dustin was left with stupid Steve Harrington following him under the water even though Dustin had told him not to. It’s not like Steve was trying to make nice with Dustin or anything; he was being a pretty shitty friend in general, actually, and he’d always talked shit about Eddie anyway, so Dustin had no idea why Steve was following him around like a dog. Maybe Steve just didn’t have anything better to do.

Maybe Steve thought that he could just take Eddie’s place in Dustin’s life. If he did, he was doing a fucking awful job. There was only one Eddie Munson, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do to fix the gap he’d left in the world.

When the acceptance letter came in, Dustin had really seriously thought about not accepting the internship. He’d applied months and months ago, before everything. Before Eddie—or, no, Eddie had been there to say huh, sounds pretty cool, so that was during Eddie. Mid-Eddie. The Eddie chapter of Dustin’s life, which he’d thought would be so much longer than it ended up being.

Anyway his mom had tried talking to him again about seeing a, a fucking grief counselor of all things, like that would bring Eddie back, so he’d booked a flight and moved under the sea where nobody would try to talk to him about Eddie or about his fucking feelings anymore. All anyone on the station cared about was science, which was how things should be, always. Science was straightforward.

Living in the station turned out to be a lot easier than living at home. Hawkins was full of unexpected booby traps, treasure chests that turned out to be mimics, like when he’d walked into the library to pick up his weekly stack of holds, and realized that one of the books was something Eddie’d recommended specially. Eddie had said, “Henderson, this is gonna blow your mind, trust me.” The cover had not one but two dragons, which was objectively awesome, and he couldn’t look directly at it.

He’d had to turn around and leave. His feet had made the decision before his brain could kick in. The librarian had shouted after him, but he’d left his library card and the books right there on the counter and he hadn’t been back. He couldn’t ever go back there again.

He’d brought one normal-sized backpack to the station, bought new, with nothing lurking in the seams to remind him of anything. It had been working out okay, but Steve was the fly in his goddamn ointment. He’s sure he’d have been having a great time, or at least a productive time, if Steve fucking Harrington hadn’t decided to tag along.

It was sort of funny, but not in the ha-ha kind of way, that Dustin could remember with agonizingly shameful clarity how he used to be the one tagging along after Steve. Maybe Steve could only ever really be friends with kids, because that was just how far his brain had developed. Dustin was just gritting his teeth and counting down to the inevitable future moment he snapped and told Steve exactly what was running through his head whenever they bumped into each other: I’ve outgrown you. I grew up, and you didn’t.

Steve had been seventeen when they met. Dustin’s age, now. He doubted they’d have been friends at all, if they’d been born in the same year. The Henderson-Harrington Theory of Relativity: two people moving at different speeds, happening to sync up at one improbable moment, but never again.

Dustin Henderson, seventeen years old, knew you had to grab things while they were there, because even if everyone was trying their best and nobody wanted to leave, people left anyway, and then you were somehow way more alone than you were before they showed up in the first place. Even if sometimes they were still hanging around, sniping at you and being a pain in the ass.

Science would stay, though. Science had his back. Dr. Dey liked him because he worked late and didn’t fuck around like some of the other interns, so he’d already received some pretty strong hints that there’d be a place waiting for him at Dr. Dey’s lab in Oxford, and that was his future taken care of. Dustin would get a couple degrees, make some modest discoveries, get published in some journals, and live the rest of his life, a life that would never have Eddie in it again.

Steve Harrington was the most grounded person she knew, which was why she wanted him with her. Not the only reason, obviously, but there was some part of her that was convinced that as long as Steve was nearby, she’d always be able to see land. There’d always been something very earthbound about Steve, when Robin was prone to floating away. He tethered her.

It’s funny how gravity works underwater, though. Things sink, up to a point, but the water is reluctant to let them settle, and tugs them sideways and around and even back up again. Not like air, which mostly leaves things be. It might wick away the corners and smooth over sharp edges over time, but it doesn’t seize the great bulk of whales just the same as the plastic-bag insubstantiality of jellyfish to hurl about. It’s funny, because water on land is always only ever running downwards. It’s how you find the lowest point of something: pour a little bit of water on it, and it will relentlessly seek depth. Water knows where it belongs.

In their little soap bubble—the vast, sprawling shielded research station clamped tight onto a rock shelf at the boundary of the twilight, with reinforced glass as thick as her arm—gravity worked pretty much like it did on land. Robin had thought at first that it would be basically exactly the same. Recycled air, sure, but all the basic things were there. She’d thought she could close her eyes and feel the same as she did on the surface.

It was different right away. She would know the difference with her eyes closed and her nose pinched and earplugs stuffed in her ears. It felt so wholly and immediately obvious to her that the station with its gravity was alien to its surroundings; that they had carved out a fragile world, an inverted tide pool.

Steve was never bothered by that kind of thing, which is why his insistence on the creepiness of the cafeteria at nighttime was so nonsensical. It was nice to be able to remind him of that, loudly and repeatedly.

She couldn’t really be blamed, she decided afterwards, for making fun of him the first time he said he’d seen something weird and creepy outside the glass.

“Yeah, dingus. Weird and creepy is kind of the default around here. That’s what all those super-fancy monitors and cameras and stuff are for, remember?”

“Jesus christ, Robin, I mean like—creepy, creepy. Not normal-creepy.”

She’d leaned forward to ruffle his hair before he slapped her hands away, and cooed: “Aw, did Stevie see a big scary fishie and get spooked?”

“It wasn’t…” He’d scowled, trailing off, and left it at that.

There was no such thing as an empty ocean. Fish were almost always around, though usually they were sweeps of tiny silver-blue-black things shimmering iridescently in the reddish light of the station exterior. Sometimes, Robin could see squid, jellies, even dolphins and sharks. At the very least, she knew there were tiny translucent zooplankton living their tiny translucent lives in every drop of water.

The mammals were the easiest to read: sometimes they’d nose around curiously, and Robin felt a fierce kinship with their quizzical expressions, warmblood muscles tugging their faces into familiar shapes. What are you doing here? their almost-human eyes seemed to say. This isn’t a place that creatures like us can stay for long.

Like the whales and dolphins and seals, the humans surfaced every so often. The contracts called it shore leave, but really it was to stop them going funny in the head. Robin and Steve were in total agreement that one weekend every two months wasn’t actually enough to keep the funnies at bay, and if anyone needed proof, they just had to look at the official regulations: nobody was allowed to skip more than one shore leave in a row, which meant there’ve been people who tried to spend more than four months below the surface.

You had to be at least a little bit not-normal to begin with, to sign up for something like this. But after everything had gone down the way it had, Dustin Henderson had gotten it into his head that grief was best processed hundreds of fathoms away from fresh air and unfiltered sunlight, and Steve had had the bone-headed idea to follow him down. To keep an eye out, Steve had said, though it seemed like every time he and Dustin crossed paths on the station, one or both of them ended up yelling and upset. Nowadays they mostly steered clear of each other.