We were inspired by a similar thing we saw for Persona 5, so we took it upon ourselves to try this. We scoured the AO3 tags for Kagerou Project ships, and ranked them based on their frequency, to create some form of popularity ranking.
Without further ado...
And though we didn't take poly relationships into account when doing the main rankings, we'd like to give a special mention to the poly Yuukei Quartet, which is one of our favorites and has a relatively sizable amount of fic!
We weren't able to add every ship to the graph, so here's a list of ships that only have one fic each:
Ayano/Haruka
Ayano/Momo
Ayano/Kido
Ayano/Seto
Shintaro/Marry
Shintaro/Hibiya
Takane/Konoha
Takane/Kido
Takane/Seto
Momo/Takane
Momo/Seto
Kido/Hibiya
Marry/Konoha
Hiyori/Konoha
We'll also add the full chart we did while trying to keep track of this, if anyone else finds that interesting:
And lastly, some more notes:
Our methodology was to simply look at the story count per tag. For the sake of this being a six hour project instead of a six day project, we didn’t investigate every story and tag combination, so numbers in that regard may be inherently inaccurate.
We did not filter out tags or ships that some may deem inappropriate, such as Hibiya/Momo or Shintaro/Momo, for the sake of avoiding bias. We also did not filter out any fics.
AO3 separates characters inconsistently, and tagging isn’t always enforced. This is particularly notable in regards to Takane, Haruka, and Konoha. Takane and Ene are treated as the same character in the tagging system, but Haruka and Konoha are not, but oftentimes Konoha is written under the Haruka tag, so Haruka’s numbers may be artificially inflated, and/or Konoha’s numbers may seem lower than they actually are.
Fanfiction tags aren’t an inherently trustworthy indication of popularity, as the lack of representation of WLW content in fic has been historically noted.
We kept the selfcest fics in because it was funny. The fact that there are two Takane x Ene fics out there is a bit wild, but to the authors who wrote them, huge respect. To the authors behind the nine Shintaro selfcest fics, you doing okay? Everything alright?
We did not look at poly relationships because that would have increased the scope of this project far too much. It’s also why we avoided any characters that weren’t part of the Dan, although it wouldn’t have had a huge effect on the final results.
We’ll inflate the Ayataka and Shintaka numbers ourselves if we have to, dammit.
Thanks for making it this far down! This was a super fun project that we did all night instead of doing anything productive haaaa
So as we all (should by now) know, about a year ago in the final novel we learnt that Kano likes Kido (in that way). Manga didn’t want to fall behind though and in the final volume we got this (that jp fandom went absolutely crazy about as you can see from RTs and likes):
It’s the character info that’s been in other manga volumes as well, but something in Kano’s description changed.
The first two sentences mean “Childhood friends with Kido and Seto.” and “His ability is deceiving.”, but there’s a third sentence that wasn’t there before:
“Kido ni omoi o yoseteita.”
“He fell in love with Kido.”
So if (for some reason) you weren’t convined before by the novel, there you have it. Explicitly stated, as straightforwardly as it could be, that Kano is in love with Kido. (Also being the long-awaited answer to Mary’s question ;) )
