#ship statistics

I thought it might be fun to compile ship stats for The Doctor. Because of the uniqueness of The Doctor I have split them up by incarnation. Let me preface this by saying I'm taking my numbers from AO3, so this will only show those ships being the focus of fanworks in the past 20 years approximately, so it will not most likely be an actuate representation for Classic Who. For characters like The Master there may be a few different incarnations shipped with one version of The Doctor in most cases I took the overall number unless there was one version of the Master that was the clear favourite. I excluded all reader and original characters. This was for romantic ships only, there is lots of fanworks focused on the Doctor's friendships, but that wasn't what I was currently interested in. I picked the top five ships for Doctors 1-15, unless I could not find five significant ships to include. Survey was completed on July 31, 2025.

First Doctor: -First Doctor/Rose Tyler (42 fanworks) -Doctor/Master (26 fanworks) -First Doctor/Cameca (6 fanworks)

The First Doctor does not feature in a lot of romantic ships, but we do see our first appearances of Rose Tyler and The Master, they will become a recurring theme.

Second Doctor -Second Doctor/Jamie McCrimmon (704 fanworks) -Second Doctor/Rose Tyler (26 fanworks) -Second Doctor/The Master (15 fanworks) -Second Doctor/Zoe Heriot/Jamie McCrimmon (10 fanworks)

Second Doctor/Jamie is the overwhelming favourite for this version of The Doctor. Plus our first polyam ship.

Third Doctor -Third Doctor/The Master (Delgado) (279 fanworks) -Third Doctor/Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (117 fanworks) -Third Doctor/Jo Grant (52 fanworks) -Third Doctor/Rose Tyler (35 fanworks) -Third Doctor/Sarah Jane Smith (33 fanworks)

Third Doctor/The Master is the most popular, but this is not surprising considering this is the era in which The Master was introduced.

[Image ID: A graph of Codywan works on AO3. The horizontal axis shows the years from 2009 to 2023, and the vertical axis shows the total number of Codywan works from 0 to 6000. From 2009-2015, there are nearly no Codywan works. From 2015-2019, there is a slow gradual growth to about 350 works. From 2019-2023, there is a huge growth of 1000-2000 works per year ending in nearly 6000 works in 2023. /End ID]

you can see the sudden growth of codywan in 2020 in the following graph:

[Image ID: A graph of Codywan works per year. The horizontal axis shows the years from 2009 to 2023, and the vertical axis shows the number of Codywan works posted. From 2009-2015, there are nearly no Codywan works. From 2016-2019, there are about 50-100 works posted each year. From 2020-2022, each year there is an increase in Codywan works posted from 900 to 1400 to 2000. In 2023, there are a little more than 2000 works posted*. /End ID]

*the number of codywan works posted in 2023 was extrapolated from the number of works posted this year so far. at the time of this post (2023/07/31), there have been 1179 codywan works posted in 2023

it's wild to think about how just a few years ago, what is now the 7th largest star wars ship was a rarepair. now there are redditors running into it and screenshots making the rounds on twitter. so uh congratulations codywans?

[Image ID: Graph of total works on AO3 by ship. Quiobi is shown as a blue line, Obikin as red, Anidala as yellow, and Codywan as green. The horizontal axis shows the years from 1997 to 2023, and the vertical axis shows the number of total works from 0 to 9000. /End ID]

quiobi starts increasing moderately but steadily from 1999 to about 4000 works in 2023. there are under 100 anidala and obikin works dated 1999-2009, then both ships start to increase slowly, then faster from 2015-2019, and even faster from 2019-2023 (anidala faster than obikin). anidala overtakes quiobi at about 2500 works in 2019 to reach nearly 9000 in 2023. obikin overtakes quiobi at about 2750 works in 2020 to reach about 8000 in 2023. there are no codywan works until 2009, then it increases slowly from 2015-2019 and grows rapidly from 2019-2023. codywan overtakes quiobi at 3500 works in 2022 to hit nearly 6000 works in 2023

[Image ID: Graph of works posted per year by ship. Quiobi is shown as a blue line, Obikin as red, Anidala as yellow, and Codywan as green. The horizontal axis shows the years from 1997 to 2023, and the vertical axis shows the number of works posted from 0 to 2500. /End ID]

these two graphs confirm my feeling based on my experiences* in sw fandom that quiobi is an old, steadily growing ship. the phantom menace in 1999 sparked the ship, and there has been a moderate but steady 50-100 works per year since then til 2014, when it starts to grow. after 2016 and 2020, there are some moderate step-ups in the number of works posted per year (200-300 and 300-500, respectively), but not the huge spikes of the other ships

anidala and obikin share pretty similar growth patterns, with the number of works per year being pretty low until 2016, when it jumps to 500-600 (overtaking the number of quiobi works posted per year), then jumps again in 2020 to over 1000 and has been growing ever since. i already discussed codywan in my previous post, but in brief, there is a low growth from 2015-2019 of about 100 works per year, before it spikes in 2020 and catches up with the number of anidala and obikin works posted yearly

*when i got into star wars fandom, quiobi was the pt-era largest ship. i never felt that it was losing popularity, just that other ships were growing faster

[Image ID: Graph of year over year growth by ship. Quiobi is shown as a blue line, Obikin as red, Anidala as yellow, and Codywan as green. The horizontal axis shows the years from 2000 to 2023, and the vertical axis shows the percent growth from -100 to 1100. /End ID]

what's interesting here that all of the ships had spike in growth in 2016, most likely from the force awakens being released in december 2015 and sparking new interest in star wars, and 2020, possibly from folks quarantining at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and spending more time writing. season 7 of the clone wars being released in 2020 could have also been a factor. it would be interesting to see if other fandoms also had a spike in new works in 2020. anidala had a spike in 2005, when revenge of the sith was released. there are no obikin works dated 2004 on ao3, which is why there is a gap in the graph from 2004-2006 (percents don't play nicely with zeroes). not shown on this graph is the jump from 1 quiobi work dated 1998 to 104 works dated 1999, because that is a 10,000% increase that completely destroys the vertical range

notes:

largest ships were determined from the relationship tags in the "Star Wars - All Media Types" tag on ao3

works from each ship tag on ao3 were filtered by date. no other filters were used. some works may have been tagged with multiple ships (e.g., codywan and anidala) and/or with a 3-way ship (e.g., obianidala)

each year shows the number of works at the end of that year (i.e., 2022/12/31, 2021/12/31, etc)

data for works posted by year and for % growth for 2023 was extrapolated from the number of fics posted in 2023 so far. at the time of making these graphs (2023/08/01), there have been 191 quiobi, 1391 obikin, 2205 anidala, and 1179 codywan works posted in 2023

technically, the graphs show the number of works updated, not posted, as i could not find any option to filter works on ao3 by date posted

since quiobi, obikin, and anidala are all significantly older than ao3 itself, these graphs are of limited scope pre-2009. pre-2009 data is affected by which works were imported from older archives and/or backdated by their creators moving to ao3

Well first off get off the goony site and look at real time data on X, tiktok, IG and even reddit. Kataang pulls more numbers with the general public. Korrasami has dwindled due to lack of content and the fans finding new interests. Zutara only really has numbers on insta and Tiktok at the moment.

I last checked in 2015, so I thought I’d do an update. Data collected from AO3 works search using the AO3 pairing tags, while logged in. I did not include 2011 data because there were only 57 works.

I also noticed a lot of 1D fanworks from the early years have been deleted, based on the raw counts I had as of early 2015:

2011: 18.57% deleted 2012: 14.75% deleted 2013: 26.99% deleted 2014: 29.35% deleted