#punchbuggy

~guzusuru and punchbuggy

So, there was recently a post by Phantom Statistician analyzing the 9 most popular ships in the Worm fandom, using data from fics on AO3.

Taylor/Lisa(Smugbug) taking the top spot with a whopping 37% was no surprise to anyone, but I wasn't the only one surprised by Taylor/Sophia taking the second spot (11%).

And this kicked off a discussion in the notes about why a ship I would argue is only moderately popular would take this spot. It's still an order of magnitude less than Smugbug, but Taylor/Sophia still beat out extremely popular ships like Taylor/Amy (9%) and Taylor/Victoria (8%), as well as the popular but black sheep-y ship Amy/Victoria (9%).

And the general consensus was that Taylor/Sophia ranked unusually high because of smut. Canon's history on race isn't particularly good, and this carries through into fic, with Sophia often being written as animalistic or aggressively sexual, traits often associated with black stereotypes.

So I decided to do a run-down on just how smutty each pairing actually is, to see if this theory holds true.

Data was derived from AO3, using the individual character/character tags. Numbers came from the rating system. Anything tagged Explicit + anything in the Mature or Unrated categories that had smut/porn indicated in the tags/summary.

And the winner for smuttiest ship is... TAYLOR/EMMA?!

Data follows, ranked by highest percentage of smut:

Taylor/Emma: 50 works. 32 explicit. 32/50 = 64% smut

Amy/Victoria: 59 works. 35 explicit + 2 mature with sex. 37/59 = 63% smut

Taylor/Imp. 11 works. 6 explicit. 6/11 = 55% smut

Taylor/Madison: 29 works. 14 explicit + 1 unrated with sex. 15/29 = 52% smut

Taylor/Sophia: 70 works, 33 explicit. 33/70 = 47% smut

Taylor/Amy: 61 works, 21 explicit + 4 unrated with sex. 25/61 = 41% smut

Taylor/Victoria: 53 works. 20 explicit. 20/53 = 38% smut

Taylor/Lisa: 242 works, 69 explicit + 1 unrated with sex. 70/242 = 29% smut

Taylor/Alec: 5 works. 1 explicit. 1/5 = 20% smut

Dragon/Defiant. 53 works. 10 explicit. 10/53 = 19% smut

Taylor/Rachel: 34 works. 4 explicit. 4/34 = 12% smut

Polysiders: 41 works. 2 explicit. 2/41 = .048%. smut

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A surprising turnout here, and one that speaks to a trend in wormfic that I think carried a lot of weight - bullyshipping.

Taylor x her three bullies, Emma/Sophia/Madison, are a really popular topic for worm smut writers, and overtook all other smut ships except the infamous Amy/Victoria ship, and Taylor/Aisha, which skewed unusually high with 6/11 smut.

Taylor/Lisa, while still higher than one would expect for a ship that's half aro/ace, placed way lower at 29% smutty.

I must confess to being surprised by the low ranking on fandom darling Taylor/Rachel (12%). Y'all are really slacking on Wolfspider filth.

Polysiders, I think likely comes higher than it did in the numbers, just that most smut involving Undersiders ships as a group seem to tag individually. I didn't check, but there's likely a lot of overlapping fics under there.

So, back to the original question - is Sophia over-represented in shipping due to being stereotypically oversexualized? She doesn't seem to be, though I still think her depictions in fandom do often trend towards racist overtones. Aisha's presence in the top 3 for smuttiest ships does seem to add some weird elements to this theory as well.

Perhaps appropriately for the fandom, bullying the shit out of Taylor and shipping the two sisters are basically the most popular smut ships.