The Top Archive of Our Own Ships Say a Lot About Fandom

“What’s fandom into these days?” is a hard question to answer, because fandom is not a monolith and fandoms lurk in all sorts of different places. One good indicator is statistics, such as the Tumblr Year in Review, but that’s just one data set. Another we can look at is the top ships on the popular fanfic site, Archive of Our Own. Ao3 user Centeroftheselights has for years crunched ships stats on AO3 and the latest “What fanfic was the world writing in 2020? (AO3 Year In Review)” tells us a lot about what’s popular in the fic world, what’s changed from years past, and where fandom has some serious work to do in terms of inclusivity.

Centeroftheselights lists the top 100 ships (romantic and platonic) based on new fics added to AO3 in the year 2020. She also breaks down the genders of the participants and their race. The results show that fandom in 2020 was still into stuff that was overwhelmingly male and queer (no surprise there), but the race of characters being shipped is not as white as it has been too often in the past, thanks to the massive popularity of Asian dramas and K-Pop ships.

The list isn’t the ships with the most fic on AO3 overall, which tells a different, longer story, but rather the number of new works reflecting what people were most excited about this year. So, let’s look at the ships first. Here are the top 10 ships in terms of new fic added to the site in 2020.

1. Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng, The Untamed
2. Aziraphale/Crowley, Good Omens
3. Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier, The Witcher
4.  Rey/Ben Solo Kylo Ren, Star Wars
5. Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Harry Potter
6. Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku, My Hero Academia
7. Bakugou Katsuki/Kirishima Eijirou, My Hero Academia
8. Castiel/Dean Winchester,  Supernatural
9. Platonic Peter Parker & Tony Stark,  MCU
10. Jeon Jungkook/Kim Taehyung  from the K-Pop band BTS

The immediately apparent thing here is the popularity of Asian media, which is a pattern that continues beyond the top ten. Live-action Chinese dramas like The Untamed, K-Pop groups, and Anime shows and films are all huge players in the AO3 fic world this year. These also provide an interesting contrast to Tumblr’s top ships. While My Hero Academia was in the Tumblr top 100 many times, it didn’t crack the top 10 there. And the primary ship from The Untamed, “Wangxian,” for Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian, is at #13 on Tumblr’s top 2020 ships while it’s #1 in new fics on AO3 (caveat: this Tumblr ranking may be due to multiple tags, alternate character names, and multiple properties leading to the stats being a bit scattered; many fans use the tags “MDZS” and Mo Dao Zu Shi for the Xianxia novel by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, upon which The Untamed is based. The Untamed is also tagged as “CQL,” for the Chinese title of the live-action show. There are also several other adaptations of the work, including animated and audio dramas).

Many of the usual ship suspects from years past are also here, from Reylo and Ineffable Husbands to Drarry and Destiel. Destiel is, as far as I can tell from the stats, the biggest ship on AO3 overall, with over 90,000 fics total. The next closest in sheer total number were Sterek and Johnlock, both of which were much further down in the 2020 numbers, as 29 and 53 respectively. I guess going canon does have its perks.

But of course, there’s a rub here. This list is incredibly male-dominated. In some cases where there are canon female love interests, like in Harry Potter or The Witcher, they’re nowhere near as popular as M/M ships from the property. Yennefer of Vengerberg’s relationship with Geralt of Rivia doesn’t crack the top 10. The entire list is mostly M/M-focused. While this isn’t surprising fandom-wise, it’s frustrating to see the relative lack of femslash in 2020.

There are only three (THREE!!!) F/F ships on this top 100 list and only one is live-action (SuperCorp). And yes, fans ignored the actual lesbian interracial relationship on Supergirl again. That’s depressing, and the stats are even worse when it comes to intersectionality. When we talked about Tumblr ships, we noted that very few of them included women and none of them included women of color. And that racial and gender disparity is even more pronounced on AO3.  Here’s Centeroftheselights breaking all of this down:

Of the 200 names on the list, 22 belong to women and 2 to characters of indeterminate gender, down from 23 and 3 in the last comparable list. There are 16 Characters of Colour from Western media and 88 from Asian media, as well as 7 characters of ambiguous race. In total, 54 of the pairings are from Western media, putting the rate of POC representation for Western media fandom at 14.8%, up from 12.9% on the main 2020

So, yes, the stats are increasing, but … 16 characters of color from Western media? Just 16? And almost all of them are from animated television shows such as Avatar, She-Ra, Voltron, Miraculous Ladybug, and The Owl House. There is one Black man on this list, Finn from Star Wars. There are no Black women. None of the canon F/F ships from Tumblr’s top 100 made a dent here, and even on Tumblr, no BIPOC women in live-action showed up. Trans and gender-nonconforming characters are still lacking in media representation, and while fandom often explores gender within its fics and meta, canonically trans characters are absent from the top 100. This is all worrying.

Fandom can be a wonderful place to explore and be creative, and as fans, we are practically programmed to fall for shows like Good Omens and The Untamed (both of which have M/M relationship in canon) and ships like Destiel where half of the fun and exquisite agony of shipping is extrapolating from the thing that’s not quite there enough onscreen. It’s canon but needs more, a sentiment we find echoed across many properties that do provide some kind of queer representation. This can also be true of an M/F ship like Reylo, because what we get onscreen is just a hint of what fans want to see and find in fic. So often fic and fanworks are created to show the kind of deep, complex connections we don’t get to see from media. There’s nothing wrong with the ships we choose to ship and the amazing outpouring of creative energy worldwide to support them.

But fandom’s tendency to only see or prioritize these stories when they focus on men or white characters in western media is indicative of a larger problem, not just in fandom, but with our society and culture. Fandom, for all its talk of inclusivity, is still a place where women, BIPOC people, and non-cis people can feel erased and ignored. Even in a progressive space like fandom, we frequently elevate white, male, cis narratives. This can be indicative of systemic racism and ingrained sexism and we need to do more active work to dismantle it. We also need to keep pushing for far better representation onscreen, in books, and in video games so that fans don’t need to do all the heavy lifting of creating the narratives we want.

For so long, fandom, in all its queer glory, saw itself as inherently progressive and transgressive because it queered the narrative of very straight popular culture, and that’s still true to a point. But pop culture now has changed and become far more inclusive and queer than it was even 10 years ago, and fandom has not caught up. The erasure and ignoring of women and BIPOC people in Western media is a serious issue that fandom must reckon with if it really wants to be a space for everyone.

(image: Netflix)

Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!

—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—