#ill live

Have some Bark x Jewel because they’re cutesies

1. Partner/Player with 76 fics, to absolutely noboy's surprise. PMD is a fandom filled with OCs that tend to follow the hero-partner dynamic of the games, and these OCs tend to also date.

2. Grovyle/Player with 34 fics. That's right, Grovyle's most popular ship is neither Dusknoir nor Celebi but a self-insert/OC. And for those who think Duskvyle is still too popular...

3. Celebi/Grovyle with 17 fics - yes, you read that right, Celebi/Grovyle outnumbers Dusknoir/Grovyle. So much for Dusknoir/Grovyle being 'overwhelmingly popular' and 'taking away all the attention from Celebi'. (BTW, did you know Celebi/Grovyle isn't actually canon, either? Her interest in him certainly is, but at no point does Celebi confess to Grovyle, not even when they're about to be erased from existence, which you would expect to be the one time Celebi would gather her courage to confess. It's not that she confessed at some point before the story, either, since she clearly (and unconvincingly) denies having romantic feelings for Grovyle when you talk to her at Dusk Forest. On Grovyle's side, any comments he makes or feelings he shows for Celebi fit a platonic explanation easily as well as a romantic one, if not more so. Plus, Super shows Celebi still in the pining stage and Grovyle completely oblivious to her romantic feelings for him with no signs of this dynamic changing at any point. Just something to consider for the 'DuSkVyLe IsN't CaNoN' crowd.)

4. Grovyle/Dusknoir with 16 fics. Admittedly this is a narrow margin, but again, given the outcries by a vocal minority that Duskvyle is 'too popular', you'd expect the pairing to be, you know... actually popular for both characters, not third place behind Hero/Grovyle and Celebi/Grovyle (the ship the complainers typically complain is 'less' popular than Dusknoir/Grovyle).

5. Chatot/Wigglytuff with 11 fics. Here we see the impact of story relevance on pairings - when you ask about gay pairings in PMD, Duskvyle and Chatot/Wigglytuff (no, that's not canon either, but neither is any fan content that does any more or less than just copy any actual canon content) come to mind, but since Dusknoir and Grovyle are more relevant to the story, people fixate on them more often. Plus, the guild characters don't have a lot of depth in general, whereas the future and protagonist characters get SE5 and OC-fication, respectively.

6. Celebi/Grovyle/Dusknoir with 8 fics. Polyamory win or loss? Given how underutilised NPC characters are in general, I'd consider it a win!

7. No romantic relationships and Dusknoir/OC with 7 fics. This is where the filter section's list of relationships ends, so I won't be looking any further. There's not much to say here, either, except it probably says something that no romantic relationships is a tag as popular as an actual relationship tag.

Oh, and since I'm at it, some total numbers:

Fics shipping Partner: 76

This is probably because Partner isn't treated as the outright self-insert that is Player, so anyone who ships what is basically an OC with personality quirks with another character is going to use Player instead.

Fics shipping Player: 110

Self-insert. 'nough said.

Fics shipping Grovyle: 75

He's the tragically misunderstood twist hero who doesn't act very emotional and has a friend who is romantically interested in him, plus an intense relationship with his greatest foe. Not very surprising, either.

Fics shipping Celebi: 25

It's as sad as it is unsurprising - 2010s Pokémon was highly misogynistic, and as we all well know, the majority of fanfic is going to be about the characters with depth and/or interesting roles. Frankly, the fact that there is a canonically, non-OC-fied female character in this list could be considered a surprise on its own. That all her listed ships involve guys isn't surprising, though as with any ship I'd rather judge by the quality of the writing than by any inclusion/empowerment message checkboxes. A fic can have tons of female characters and still be highly misogynistic in its treatment of them; on the other hand, a fic can consist of a girl dating two guys and still be very respectful and progressive. In Celebi's case in particular, you also have to consider - again, the source material itself is misogynistic, and so anyone writing her is going to have to put in extra effort to characterise her beyond her writing, and the original writing will still be noticeable if you so much as try to stick to her canon character, which at its surface level is a mix of 'plot device' and 'brooding anti-hero's love interest' (again, I don't see those future trio ship complainers tackling the part where she was written to be a glorified side character in love with Grovyle and how any fic trying to seriously characterise her has to deal with that mess somehow - I have, however, frequently seen posts by a frequent Duskvyle & future trio poster criticising the game's treatment of Celebi).

Fics shipping Dusknoir: 31

That place 7 with the /OC ship comes in handy here, allowing Dusknoir to beat at least one of his former adversaries. I genuinely don't know where the OC fics came from, but good for whoever wrote those. This also implies that Dusknoir himself is only slightly more popular as a ship character than Celebi, and it's only because some people wrote him dating an OC. Without those fics, he'd be behind Celebi by one, just like in the list above. Again, the claims of Duskvyle or Dusknoir himself being popular are wildly exaggerated.

Fics shipping Chatot OR Wigglytuff: 11

They have it even worse than Celebi because neither of them has a strong or particularly notable relationship to Grovyle or Player.

Fics shipping No romantic relationships: 7

It says a lot about the state of shipping in the PMD fandom that this tag made it into a list about relationships at all...

Oh, and since I got curious, here's the same stats but taken from the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon tag:

1. Partner/Player with 152 fics. Again, not a surprise, it's the Conan/Kaito of PMD.

2. Celebi/Grovyle with 27 fics. Oh gee, it's you again? Seriously, you'd think if Duskvyle was so popular it'd visibly outweigh Celevyle in fanfic, but twice now it's been the opposite. (Spoiler: Dusknoir doesn't even show up here, that's how comparatively Not Popular Duskvyle is.)

3. Grovyle/Player with 22 fics. Huh, this one lost some of its popularity. Must be because we're in the general PMD tag now.

4. No romantic relationships with 21 fics. HOW??? DID A TAG ABOUT THERE BEING NO ROMANCE? MAKE IT INTO THE FILTER LIST FOR RELATIONSHIP TAGS???

5. OC female/OC male, TIED WITH OC/ OC with 19 fics. You think there's any actual non-Player non-Partner OCs in that tag? (Statistically speaking there probably is, but I'm assuming a majority is still Player/Partner.)

The only character who is properly labelled as having more than one ship is Grovyle, who gets a total of 49 fics. Less than in the Explorers tag, because, again, Duskvyle didn't even make it into the relationship tag filter list, because guess what, it's not actually popular.

...sorry. I know the odds that anyone who actually thinks this way about Dusknoir/Grovyle is going to read this are abnormally slim, but it just baffles me how these people complain about an apparent abundance of Duskvyle that I just can't find any evidence of. On tumblr, too, most of the duskvyle tag posts come from Scribz, and on the MD Reddit it barely exists at all (again, outside of reblogs of Scribz' posts, which are even rarer on Reddit - I think you can count them on one or two five-fingered hands), which just emphasises how actually rare it is. Even funnier are the people who complain about that and Celebi/Grovyle/Dusknoir because 'it's misogynistic', only to then turn around and ship Celebi/Grovyle without giving Celebi any more character than the actual game did, so they're not exactly making the misogyny situation any better. But I digress.

Obviously there's some limitations since I only looked at relationship tags that showed up in AO3's filter list for the PMD tags. Additionally, at least for the general PMD tag, there were several ambiguous OC ships 'clogging up' the space where canon-character-ships could have gone in addition to friendship tags which I didn't count since my focus here is the romantic relationships. I also didn't go through any other PMD tags since I'm most familiar with and able to provide commentary for the Explorers characters.

Adam Parrish • Will Byers