About ao3 femslash ship stats (2025): More likely than not
Remember than they use only the public fics, so I'll count the public ones.
CaitVi will rise to second place (Supercorp is still 1)
Yellowjackets will appear for first time and with 3 ships! (Jackieshauna, LottieNat and TaiVan)
Gelphie will appear too for first time!
Rhaenicent (prev 50) and tgck (prev 63) will rise some numbers (around late-mid 30s) -for MHA mmjr is still n°1 sapphic ship-
I'm unsure if Polytrix (1191) will make it. Last year n° 100 was with Astra/Alex 1350 (now 1375) but it's incredible popular and fresh so maybe? It tends to be count August first week so... we'll see
Oh hey, Kuzusouda is now included in the top 10 most-tagged ships for SDR2 on AO3, as long as you specifically include M/M ships!
If we exclude M/F, DR1 and V3, it rises up to #5, or #4 if we discount platonic Komahina. (Don't mind the platonic Hinanami sneaking in as well.)
Granted, these numbers are probably inflated by the sheer number of Kuzusouda ficlets and drabbles I've written over the years, but it's still pretty significant and I personally fail to be convinced that Kuzusouda is a rarepair with each passing day.
I believe that Kuzusouda is a mid-tier ship as far as popularity goes. It's not as popular as Kuzupeko or Mahiyoko (Komahina is in its own tier), but it's not quite as rare as, say, Gundam/Mikan or Peko/Sonia. It lives in the same spot as most Hajime ships, I'd say, along with other decently-popular same-gender ships such as Nanamiki and Soniaki.
I have added geographic & language data to my ship data set!
(some of the combo ones may still be recategorised but alas that's very few)
Total ships (by country, continent, language):
TLDR:
The US has too much soft power with over 50% of top AO3 ships in the last decade being from US-originated media
UK & Japan are runners up but each only make up about an 8th of the ships
"European media" is almost exclusively UK media, with only about 3 fandoms from other countries (France, Norway, Sweden) without UK/US collaboration and/or original/most popular release(s) in english, we do not have much translated non-english european media represented the way translated east asian media is
Africa and South America are straight up not represented
Other than Thailand, only east asian media is represented for Asia. India as one of the two most populous countries in the world alongside China is not represented at all
Oceania (Australia and New Zealand only) only has I believe 3 fandoms represented
Countries by ranking:
(overall, annual, and femslash:)
The overall and annual rankings improved their country distribution over the years.
Annual had the biggest influx of east asian media, aligning with the previous racial diversity findings.
Femslash is actually doing the worst on country diversity, with 3/4 consistently being made up by the US alone, which was surprising cause it was doing the best on racial diversity out of the three. (me@femslash: YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE ToT)
Overview stats by country (biggest 6 represented):
US & Japan:
UK & Canada:
China & South Korea
East asian countries feature about as many east asian characters as english speaking countries feature white ones.
The latter also do not feature much more east asian rep than other groups, meaning that the vast majority of our east asian characters in the rankings are *from* east asian media becoming more globally popular, not from more east asians being represented in other media.
Korea is doing the worst on diversity represented cause its fandoms are almost exclusively kpop RPF, hence only feature east asians (and even among them largely only the ethnically & nationality-wise korean ones, not many of the international ones), and with the exception of Red Velvet only boy bands/mlm. BTS makes up over half of its ships despite only featuring 7 individual men.
The US as the biggest category has the most racial diversity and highest percentage of interracial ships, but Japan and China have surprisingly high levels of diversity represented, despite their irl population's much lower ethnic diversity than say the US to my understanding.
In China's case this seems to largely be due to Genshin Impact making up over half of its ships and featuring many different culturally inspired worlds, leading to more diversity represented on paper, with the caveat that a lot of its non-white and non-east asian characters have been criticised for white-/light-washing/colourism.
Both Japan and China have white characters as their second biggest group, unlike english speaking media which does not mirror that ratio for east asians.
The UK and Canada are doing way worse on racial diversity than the US, despite featuring way more different fandoms than Korea. (= They don't have an excuse lmao)
As expected based on the rankings' country distributions, the US features an almost equal amount of male & female characters, due to wlw and mlm ships being nearly tied and a decent amount of straight ships being represented.
Canada has an even crazier femslash ratio with over half of its (much lower number of ships) being femslash.
Japan and the UK both feature about 1/3 female characters.
Japan is also the only asian country of the three that features any straight ships at all.
To celebrate the end of 2023, I decided to create a spreadsheet documenting the number of works that were created for...well, not every DCMK ship since I don't have time for all that, but at least a handful of them. Some of the numbers have probably changed by now, but as of 02:00 today, these were the official counts on Pixiv.
Note: the rows outlined in bold indicate repeated data.
In relationship to this post, I'm pretty sure CaitVi will be the highest a sapphic ship has been in "this year top 100" Ao3 stats but also the one with the hightest incress:
In the following list, the highest sapphic fic in the "this year's top 100" of each year
(Again, I'll only count the public fics)
2025: Caitvi, 3th with 9965 new fics.
2024: Chaggie, 19th with 4373 new fics
2023: Wencliar, 11th with 4080 new fica
2022: CaitVi, 28th with 4009 new fics
2021: Lumity, 36th with 3797 new fics
2020: Supercorp, 19th with 3614 new fics
2019: Supercorp, 24th with 5677 new fics
2018: No registered by the lists. But I looked it out the wlw ship with more fics created between 2017-08-03 and 2018-08-03 was Supercorp with 2685.
I counted and 15 mlm ship and 1 wlm have more fics than them so:
2018: Supercorp, 17th with 2685 new fics.
2017: Supercorp, 13th with 3793 new fics
2016: Clexa, 6th with 4628 new fics
During the years 2013, 2014 and 2015, there wasn’t a "this year" list, so I looked it myself.
From 08-01 of the previous year, to the 08-01 one we're talking about.
2015: Carmilla/Laura, 13th with 1914 new fics
2014: Swanqueen, 26th with 1127 new fics
2013: Swanqueen, 36th with 631 new fics
.These data (except the ones in red, belong to centreoftheselights in ao3)
I AM BACK AT IT AGAIN
This time with some time period data
And this NOTE WORTHY.
Here is how long it took each ship to get 1000 fics on AO3:
Bumbleby took about 2.5 yrs
White Rose took a little less than 3.5 yrs
Arkos took almost 4 yrs
Renora took almost 7 yrs
Fair Game reached 1000 in just 9 months
And here is the order in which they currently appear on AO3(as of two days ago):
Bumbleby has 4727
White Rose has 3509
Arkos has 1473
Fair Game has 1351
Renora has 1147
Looking to pull some more data soon and update how the new Volume has impacted creation of more RWBY fics.
