Well, well . . . And Bioware let us choose every ME1 squadmate (including Ash) as a "favorite" for the custom MELE cover EXCEPT for Kaidan. Then, on N7 Day 2021 the game makers wished they could kill both Ash and Kaidan on Virmire.
It's a big reversal from the stats Bioware released in July. These new stats are from EA in general (not Bioware) and for the whole year.
I compiled an average for AO3 stats based on ME ship. I stratified the list for a ship from greatest to least for each variable (kudos, hits, BM, etc). I'm using median vs mean due to ease in collection and to correct for outliers. I filtered out confounding ships to better isolate the ship being studied.
Out of curiosity, since I love to read and write epics, I compared the major ships for >80,000 words. Data is less dependable since sample size is less.
Popularity Stats: The major ships, except for FShenko, consistently have the highest stats. Despite the larger sample size, Shakarian performs the same as MShenko and FShiara. The minor ships I studied were about equal. FShenko consistently had less than half the stats of the other major ships and brings up the rear, even behind the minor ships studied.
Epic-Length Stats: MShenko has nearly twice as many kudos on average as Shakarian and FShiara and three times as many as FShenko. This is likely due to the smaller number of epic-length fics available and the higher completion rate. FShiara and Shakarian are about equal. Again, FShenko takes up the tail.
Kudos/Hits Ratio: To correct for the wide range in popularity (hits), I calculated the median kudos / median hits.
With these results, it appears minor ships and FShenko fall amid the major ships. The difference in average number of kudos seems more a factor of ship popularity (hits) than a difference in reader responsiveness.
Conclusions:
Most major ships have higher stats than minor ships (unsurprisingly)
Shakarian, MShenko, and FShiara are the most popular and fall about even
FShenko is the least popular. It falls well below other major ships and is even outperformed by the minor ships I studied
Correcting for popularity (hits), the ships get about equal engagement. FShenko and the minor ships fall even with the Shakarian, MShenko, and FShiara
*** Note on ship selection: There were more m/m ships I tried to study, but after eliminating confounding ships, they had too small of a sample size (Steve Cortez/Male Shepard, James Vega/Male Shepard, Garrus Vakarian/Male Shepard). I didn't explore MShep/Female due to lack of interest, but generally, it appears to be on the low end of average kudos (20-30 range).
