I decided to look at ship stats all the works on AO3 for MDZS, however all the data listed here comes from the fandom tag “魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù”
Below is the most popular (romantic) ship tags as well as the most popular (romantic) ships by rating
First, I looked at the top 10 ships over all which left me with this little nifty table
And then I started to wonder whether this order changes for different ratings so I sorted through each rating to find the top 10 ships from each rating (not including any platonic relationships) and got the following results:
(Not in the data on this chart because I didn’t realize until much later in the process, but for explicit fics, Jiang Yanli/Jin Zixuan has the same number of fics as Song Lan/Xiao Xingchen/Xue Yang)
But all of this was just a bunch of numbers and it takes a lot of time looking them to really form any sort of correlation or see any general trends so I decided to make a chart instead (a bar graph to be specific) and I ended up with:
And I decided that having Wangxian there makes it hard to determine any other data and we all know that it is the most popular ship by far so I can just take it out, fill in the rest of the data for each ship (even if they were not in the top 10 for every rating), and see what remains which is
And it seems that once you get past Wangxian and Xicheng, the rest of ships switch with popularity depending on the rating (though Xiyao also rates really high with every rating as well).
I don’t really know what they implication of this is, but I can say I was a little surprised by how big of a gap there was between Wangxian and everyone else.
