#aarrow

The main result table · Ship list

CW: This discussion contains mentions of three ships which some people might not be comfortable with (sibling incest and adult/teen relationships). Only their shipnames are mentioned - the nature of these relationships is not discussed in any way.

Before I begin, I would like to address an issue I’ve noticed - I have not been consistent with ship names! You’ll see Jamaya in one chart and Janaya in another, Aruthari in one, Arunari in another. The decision to change Kadia to Kaudia has been recent (due to Kaudia being the ship name actually used by the shippers).

To prevent any major confusion, I updated the ship list to include alternative spellings of shipnames. If you’d like me to include an alternative ship name, please let me know! ^u^

Terminology:

Total Ships refer to the ships people voted for when asked to choose all the ships they ship (click here for the list). I will also use T to refer to these ships.

Favorite Ships refer to the ships people voted for when asked to choose only one ship which they consider their favorite. I will also use F to refer to these ships.

I will use the word rank to refer to the position a ship takes in terms of number of votes (rank #1 is the one with the most votes, while rank #14 is the one with the least votes for Favorite Ships. For Total Ships it’s rank #40).

As in previous discussions, I will refer to Rayllum, Janaya and Ruthari as the Trio.

Favorite Ships vs Total Ships

The first thing I would like to discuss is how favorite ships differ from total ships in terms of popularity. Cross-referencing both can allow us to understand which ships are actively shipped by people and which are just liked “in the background”.

If you read my discussion on total ships, you probably remember that I pointed out the flaw in the first question of the poll (i.e. “What ships do you ship?” is too vague a question). Hopefully comparing the two categories will counter some of that vagueness.

To compare both lists, removed any ships that don’t appear on the Total Ship list and the ones that were not chosen as a favorite ship by anyone. Here’s the list of ships that were removed from this comparison.

One problem, though - there is no way to directly compare the results, since Total Ships have 40 ranks and Favorite Ships have 14.

Trying out different methods

Take the top 10 Favorite ships as an example:

From the table it is clear that Rayllum, Janaya and Ruthari retained the same positions in terms of popularity. Viravos appears to have jumped higher - from #8 to #4. In fact, the only ship in the top 10 that dropped in rank is Corpeli - from #6 to #9. But it’s not a dramatic drop, right?

Aaaaaand this is where it gets problematic. #6 out of 40 is a much higher position than #9 out of 14. The best way to think about is to find the most obvious points of correspondence:

F1 corresponds to T1

F7 corresponds to T20

F14 corresponds to T40

Here, F refers to the rank in Favorite Ships and T - in Total Ships.

Now things become a bit more clear. T6 is closer to the first category and F9 - to the middle. So if I were to simplify the comparison, I’d say

the Trio remain at the beginning of the list;

Viravos, Gremaya and Corpeli jumped from the beginning to the middle;

Virrow, Sorgren and Raydia remain in the middle;

Sordia jumps from the end to the middle.

This method is even more evident at the end of the list:

These are the last nine ships on the list. At first, the green ones seem like a vast improvement in position and the salmon one - a slight worsening. But if we apply our new categories:

F1 - T1 [beginning]

F7 - T20 [middle]

F14 - T40 [end]

we see that:

Aarrow, Aaruthari, Claravos, Clyx, Grenavos and Rugren remained at the end;

Ezris, Grazi and Kasren fell from the middle to the end;

Sabos had the most dramatic fall - from the beginning to the end!

But then this method is still too broad. Aarrow and Aaruthari both get into the same group - “remain at the end”, even though Aarrow was closer to the middle of the list than Aaruthari. I figured these three categories could be broken down even further:

I divided 40 by 14 and got 2.857, which I rounded up to 3. Hence, three T ranks for 1 F rank. This is obviously not the only way you can arrange this table, as you could alternatively “lock” the first place (1 - 1) and do the others in triplets ( 2 - 2, 3, 4; 3 - 5, 6, 7; etc), which shifts the values quite a bit.

But let’s use this one for now.

I rewrote the Total Ship ranks so that they match the Favorite Ship ones according to the table (e.g. if a ship is ranked #10 in Total Ships, the corresponding rank is going to be #4):

This comparison is very intuitive and more accurate than the three simple categories I used before. We can compare the results for the last 9 ships again:

OLD: Aarrow, Aaruthari, Claravos, Clyx, Grenavos and Rugren remained at the end; NEW: Aarrow and Grenavos fell by three positions, Claravos - by two, Aaruthari, Clyx and Rugren - by one. (We can immediately see that Aarrow and Grenavos were the most popular of this group);

OLD: Ezris, Grazi and Kasren fell from the middle to the end; NEW: Ezris and Grazi fell from #10 to #14, while Kasren fell from #8 to #14 (Kasren clearly suffered a bigger fall);

OLD: Sabos had the most dramatic fall - from the beginning to the end! NEW: Sabos fell from #3 to #14 (I don’t know if this makes the fall feel more dramatic or not).

This method is still not very accurate:

it conflates several different positions into one (Viravos and Gremaya are now both #3, whereas originally they were ranked #8 and #9 respectively);

there are at least two ways to group the ranks into triplets, neither of which is particularly accurate and both yield significantly different results.

Notice how with this method most ships seem to have fallen in rank, some remained and only one rose! Also, even though Janaya and Ruthari did not change position, this method makes it seem like they fell in rank.

I don’t exactly know why that is, but it’s probably due to the fact that the “value” of a rank feels different depending on the total number of participants. Think of it like this - it sucks to be the third our of three, but it sucks a bit less if it’s out of 40, doesn’t it?

In the next part, I will discuss the method I decided to use in the end.

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About the event · Round 1B · List of participating ships

I am happy to announce the results for the first part of round 1! I want to thank all the participants (84 people!). Hope you guys had fun c: Feedback is appreciated <3

Results as pie charts

(gives % + total votes)

Updated Tournament Table

All of the winning ships automatically move to Round 2. In the table above, you can see whom they’ll be facing. Round 2AB is scheduled for June 15 (if all goes well) and 2CD - for June 22.

Results as pictures under cut:

Part 1 · Part 3 · Part 4 Results

Ship list in case you don’t know some of the ships

Some terminology:

I will refer to Viren, Soren and Claudia as Mage Family or magefam.

Non-canon ships between 11 and 90 shippers

I chose this number arbitrarily.

Here, the ships in light blue are where characters know each other/have interacted.

The ship in dark blue - where they don’t know each other or have not interacted.

Normally, I don’t discriminate ships by such criteria, because there’s a lot more to a ship than on-screen interaction. Fans are capable of creating wonderful stories with characters who had never met each other in the show, fleshing out their personalities beautifully. Sure, some ships are based on the characters’ looks, but my theory is that personalities have a bigger influence.

Often, when I start shipping someone, it's not a deliberate choice. There’s hardly any “okay, now I’m gonna ship The Big Sword Guy and Sunforge Dagger Guy” moment. When it comes to ships where characters don’t have a lot of (or any) on-screen interaction, their personalities play an important role. If I like some characters, I start putting them into my own stories more. Sometimes, they interact with other characters and as the story progresses, so do relationships between certain characters who wouldn’t necessarily have a relationship in canon.

Usually, such ships are called “crack ships” and are not very popular. But then there’s Soryx.

I have to say, I did not expect Soryx. In fact, I would never have even thought of shipping them together. Then I saw how popular it was (5 people chose it as their favorite ship, which is not bad for a “crack ship”!) I started to think about it more. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense! Their personalities really do go well together!

It’s incredible - Soryx is almost as popular as Virrow, and, given the 3.7% margin of error, either of them could be more popular than the other, given a bigger sample (my sample was only 701 people).

Speaking of Virrow, I was really surprised it wasn’t as popular as Viravos (Virrow - 12.55% vs Viravos - 28.39%), because when browsing for posts on tumblr and twitter, there always seemed to be an equal amount of content for both. Then again, I never took into account the age of those posts - perhaps Virrow has lost some of the fans it had in S1 after Aaravos’ introduction in S2.

Dominating characters

Can you look at the graph above and tell me what’s in common between all the ships colored in orange?

You guessed it! They all involve a member of the Mage Family (Viren, Soren, or Claudia). The possible reasons:

Viren, Soren and Claudia are well fleshed out and complex characters;

they interact with many different characters;

if a person likes one member of magefam, they often like them all;

Soren is especially versatile because of his age - he’s young enough to be shipped with teens and he’s also an adult;

of all the teenage characters Soren and Claudia have the most screen time after Rayla and Callum. Viren has the most screen time from all adult characters.

We haven’t even covered the more rare ships, which also include plenty of magefam.

User added ships

No user-added ships have made it into the top 11, and only three made it into top 30. Are they less popular? Liked less? I don’t think so. As I mentioned in part 1 - the reason for that is the fact that they weren’t on the list.

Consider Aarrow for a bit. As much as I like this ship, I don’t actively ship it and the only reason it made it onto my list was because I came across this post. I thought it was a cool idea for a ship and I wanted to see who else shipped it. And here we are - 11 people. 1 person even chose it as their favorite ship!

Another interesting example is Opiren. I hadn’t found anyone shipping them on tumblr, but I lowkey ship them myself, so I decided to add them. My boyfriend came up with the ship name and there we go - 19 people! No one chose it as their favorite ship, though.

Now compare it with, say, Grazi. It got an almost the same number of votes, but it wasn’t on the list, which means that only the users who care enough about it to include it manually voted for it. One person chose it as their favorite ship as well. If I had included it myself, I’m sure it would’ve got as many ships as Sabos or Swordjanne simply by being there.

Why didn’t I, then? Because it hadn’t occurred to me and I tried to limit my list to ships I could find content of on tumblr (I hadn’t thought of checking ao3 at the time).

Ezranya and Ezris are an interesting case, because quite a few people added “when they’re older” as a sort of justification, even though I feel like it’s ok to ship them as kids Shipping does not need to be sexual. You can have platonic or romantic kids ships (kids have crushes!) or just very strong friendships bonds. I don’t know if the latter counts as shipping in the eyes of most fans, but I just want Ezranya and Ezris shippers to feel happy and supported <3