Main blog/askbox: @destinationtoast Fandom stats on AO3: bit.ly/toastystats-ao3 Code on on Github: github.com/fandomstats/toastystats FAQ: Yes, you can reuse any of my data or my code, and you can cite any of my posts. :) Blog icon by Foxestacado.
I’m not sure whether you know the answer to this, or whether or not there’s a way to find out, but I’d like to ask:
In all of AO3’s history, how many instances has there been in which a fandom with over 100 or over 1000 fics has had a platonic relationship be the most written one, appearing at the top of the dropdown list?
Because I can only think of one (2 if you count both book and movie): Project Hail Mary.
And I’d really like to know whether there’s any others.
This isn't necessarily an exhaustive list (especially if the same pairing appears in multiple fandom tags, which many of these do), but I used my AO3 Ship Stats data to try to find a few of the largest fandoms where the largest relationship tag is a platonic one:
Batman - All Media Types - 194,603 works - top relationship Dick Grayson & Jason Todd
Minecraft (Video Game) - 115,828 works - top relationship Wilbur Soot & Technoblade & TommyInnit & Phil Watson | Philza
Dream SMP - 93,420 works - top relationship Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types - 39,556 works - top relationship Donatello & Leonardo & Michelangelo & Raphael (TMNT)
Danny Phantom - 28,996 works - top relationship Danny Fenton & Tucker Foley & Sam Manson
The Last of Us (Video Games) - 14,208 works - top relationship Ellie & Joel (The Last of Us)
White Collar (TV 2009) - 13,819 works - top relationship Peter Burke & Neal Caffrey
Star Wars: The Bad Batch (Cartoon) - 13,537 works - top relationship CT-9901 | Hunter & Omega (Star Wars: The Bad Batch)
The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton - 10,432 works - top relationship Darrel "Darry" Curtis Jr. & Ponyboy Curtis & Sodapop Curtis
Linked Universe - jojo56830 (Webcomic) - 10,327 works - top relationship Four & Hyrule & Legend & Sky & Time & Twilight & Warriors & Wild & Wind (Linked Universe)
Nice! I found a couple others by looking through the fandoms that showed up in my Gen analysis from 2024, and I added those to the above set and visualized them -- along with PHM! (There are almost certainly some other fandoms missing that are bigger than Project Hail Mary is but are under 10K works, though.)
I've tagged the relationship as the top-line item, with the fandoms right below -- so you'll see Peter Parker & Tony Stark twice, for both the Spider-Man and Iron Man fandoms (I thought it was interesting to compare the size of the ship in each fandom) and similar for the two PHM fandoms. I also split the number of works into those that have the Gen category and those that do not; I figured that the platonic ship might be a background ship in the ones that aren't tagged Gen:
If we look at this graph (and the underlying data), the main ship from Project Hail Mary looks relatively tiny -- which makes sense, given that that fandom is new and the others have all had much longer to grow! But what's particularly interesting is what happens when we look at the same ships as percentages of their fandoms:
I've once again sorted the data by the number of works that are Gen and therefore likely to actually be platonic. (I also showed how much of the rest of the fanworks in the fandom are tagged Gen outside of the biggest relationship.) In this view, PHM leads the pack -- both book and movie! It'll be really interesting to see if anything changes as the fandom grows.
Side note: I also noticed when looking at some past data that Gravity Falls has sometimes had Ford Pines & Stan Pines ship heading its list, but currently Bill Cipher/Dipper Pines is juuuust ahead of that one.
There's so much here I'm excited about, including what's coming in the pipeline already:
We’re kicking things off today with Lin’s magnum opus on The Pitt’s fandom and the ways the show encourages a robust fic culture. In the pipeline, we have writing on conlang enthusiasts, Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy, a Kenyan perspective on reading fic in English, religiously observant fans, the ethics of Harry Potter fandom, and much more.
These topics make me salivate. (And they're taking pitches for other fandom perspectives, too!!)
This is awesome, and I really hope it can be sustainable. I encourage folks who like reading good journalism about fandom to subscribe (they have a free tier! and also give discounts for people who need help affording the paid tier! and all the articles have audio versions if you prefer to listen! I love everything about how thoughtfully this is being offered. <3 )
A few months ago, I went to find some Beyond Evil fics on AO3 and was surprised to see that there were almost 1,000 of them. Then I thought, how many Korean dramas have 100 or more fics on AO3? I checked, and here are the results.
환혼 | Alchemy of Souls (TV) (208)
지금 우리 학교는 | All of Us Are Dead (TV) (560)
괴물 | Beyond Evil (TV) (987)
꽃보다 남자 | Boys Over Flowers (Korea TV) (160)
컬러 러쉬 | Color Rush (TV) (114)
사랑의 불시착 | Crash Landing on You (TV) (344)
악마판사 | The Devil Judge (TV) (965)
낭만닥터 김사부 | Dr. Romantic (TV) (126)
이상한 변호사 우영우 | Extraordinary Attorney Woo (TV) (378)
The anonymised data from the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 has now been published!
This dataset is available for academic, research, or other non-commercial purposes! If you are a fandom researcher, an aspiring fandom researcher, or just have an idea for a project, you can make use of this dataset, provided you abide by the terms laid out.
If you make any interesting discoveries with this data, we hope you will share them (with attribution to the dataset)! The linked AO3 page can be given as a citation.
All of the non-anonymised data from the survey was deleted by 31 January 2026, as per the information provided with the survey. The data provided has been anonymised to the best of my abilities, and there is a full document explaining how the data was processed.
Thanks for everyone who followed this project over the last few years!
people trying to insist a fandom is tiny when it /only/ has a few thousand works on ao3 meanwhile my current fandom is a sixteen book series and has several hundred fewer works than goncharov, a movie that, and i cannot stress this enough, doesn’t even exist
#measuring the size of fandoms based on their goncharov index#this has been a useless text post you may now resume your normal programming#rote has a goncharov index of 0.63#for perspective ofmd has an index of 26.5#spn’s is 360.8#the cosmere is 2.26 for a fantasy book comparison#i am very normal
We’re celebrating love on Tumblr this week! Join us for daily list drops of Tumblr’s Top 100 Ships in the run-up to the full list reveal on Friday. Here are your top 81 – 100 ships of the last year:
81. Odypen
Odysseus & Penelope, EPIC: The Musical
82. Mizisua
Mizi & Sua, Alien Stage
83. Sterek
Stiles Stilinski & Derek Hale, Teen Wolf
84. Shadowvanilla
Pure Vanilla & Shadow Milk, the Cookie Run franchise
85. Moshang
Mobei-Jun & Shang Qinghua, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System
86. Spideypool
Spider-Man & Deadpool, the Marvel universe
87. Davekat 0
Dave Strider & Karkat Vantas, Homestuck
88. Heavymedic
Heavy Weapons Guy & Medic, Team Fortress 2
89. Lumax
Lucas Sinclair & Max Mayfield, Stranger Things
90. Sonamy
Sonic the Hedgehog & Amy Rose, Sonic the Hedgehog
91. Rookanis
Rook & Lucanis Dellamorte, Dragon Age: The Veilguard
92. Zoeystery
Zoey & Mystery, KPop Demon Hunters
93. Poolverine -90
Wade Wilson & Logan Howlett, the Marvel universe
94. Everlark -12
Katniss Everdeen & Peeta Mellark, The Hunger Games
95. Clois
Clark Kent & Lois Lane, Superman
96. Johnlock
John Watson & Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock
97. Agathario -21
Agatha Harkness & Rio Vidal, the Marvel universe
98. Stolitz -64
Stolas & Blitzo, Helluva Boss
99. Devil's Minion
Armand & Daniel Molloy, Interview with the Vampire
100. Skystar
Skyfire & Starscream, Transformers
The number in italics indicates how many spots a ship moved up or down from 2024. Bolded ships weren’t on the list last year. Art credits under the cut!
So many new or newly returned entries on this one! Join the conversation with #ships week 2026, keep an eye out for a fan art edit, and check back tomorrow for the top 61 – 80 ships.
Inspired by various posts showcasing people's stats, I wanted to get a base average for user stats. If you wish to contribute, please fill in the following form!
This form intends to gather data in order to establish the baseline of what are the overall stats for the average AO3 writer. If you wish to
The data obtained will be fully anonymous and only used as a part of a whole dataset. If you know someone who would be interested in filling it in, feel free to share it around! Thank you <3
I think the people who see and choose to participate in this survey are likely to skew towards having higher stats. (I'm guessing people with a bunch of stories on AO3 and higher author stats are more likely to be highly engaged with fandom on other platforms like Tumblr, and therefore more likely to find the survey. They may also be more eager to participate in such a survey.) So I hope the average of the responses is not taken to be an accurate representation of the overall average for AO3. But I'm interested to see what comes of this, especially given that it'll be part of a larger data set! 👀📊
AO3 will be down for about 15 hours starting at 08:00 UTC on January 21 (what time is that for me?) while we make some improvements to searching bookmarks and series, including:
adding the ability to search, filter, and sort bookmarks by word count
making sure bookmark search results are correct when you use tags containing letters and numbers
preventing series blurbs from listing tags that were only used on draft works
preventing series blurbs from listing tags used on restricted works for guests
updating series bookmark search so it only searches the tags on works you can access
After seeing centreoflight's yearly ship analysis, I decided to look into the stats within just the Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamic tag. I also compiled a list of which characters were most often tagged as an alpha or omega respectively.
I made an ao3 post describing the data and how I got it here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/77338341/chapters/202480491
Hello! I am writing an academic paper on why AO3 specifically is so popular among queer people, and I need some stats to back up that it, in fact, is. I’ve found some pie charts on google images confirming that the most popular pairing type on AO3 is M/M whereas on Wattpad and ffnet it’s mostly F/M, but the issue is that they don’t cite their sources, and I need reliable sources. Do you know how and where I can find reliable information on AO3 stats?
Hey! Cool topic. :) It's worth reading up on the history of AO3 and why/how it was founded, if you haven't already -- that has certainly had an influence on what you're writing about.
As for numbers, here's my data from 2019 about shipping on those three platforms. (I didn't cite sources because it was original research, but I explained how I came up with the data.)
You can also easily get updated numbers on AO3 yourself by visiting the Works page for each of the relationship category tags (see links below). But as described above, it's much harder to get these numbers for the other platforms. Current AO3 numbers:
M/M - 7.9M works (6.8M public works)
F/M - 4.0M works (3.5M public works)
Gen - 3.0M works (2.6M public works)
F/F - 1.6M works (1.4M public works)
Multi - 0.87M works (0.76M public works)
Other - 0.67M works (0.59M public works)
You can also have a look at my other Fandom platform comparisons and my other Shipping stats (they're time-ordered, so go to the end for the most recent ones).
A claim I often see sensible people make is that AO3 is not representative of fandom as a whole. And I agree with this! I think that fandom encompasses a lot of different groups and AO3 is merely one segment of a much broader spectrum of fannish activity. Lots of fandom activity doesn't revolve around fanfiction at all, and even in the segments of fandom where it does, not all fanfiction is on AO3. People like to generalize about fandom based on AO3, partly because it's what they are personally most familiar with, and partly because AO3 makes it very easy to see stats, while other sites often obscure that information or don't make it available at all. If you see a claim that "fandom always prefers M/M ships" for instance, that's a claim based on someone looking at AO3 and no further, and it's therefore an inaccurate (or at the very least, unproven) claim.
So, I have no desire to push back against the notion that AO3 isn't representative of all of fandom. I think that it's correct! But it often goes hand-in-hand with another claim that I do want to question. That is the claim that not only is AO3 not representative of fandom more broadly, but that it is in fact the smallest of the 'big 3' fanfic sites (the other two being fanfiction.net and wattpad).
This used to be true! But I don't think it's true anymore. I think in terms of number of posted works, it probably falls in between the two, and in terms of traffic, it's probably the biggest.
Now, I will say up front that I have absolutely no way to determine how many of wattpad's works are fanfiction. I have no REAL way to determine how many works there are on wattpad at all, because they don't make this information available anywhere that I can find. Googling for 'how many stories are there on wattpad' gets claims of 665 million works. It might be true, I have no way to prove or disprove it. It sounds like a lot to me, but who knows. (For instance, it actually says '665 million uploads' but how many of those are later deleted?) But even if that number is accurate for the site, a lot of what is on wattpad is original fiction. So trying to guess how much of that alleged total is fanfic is pretty impossible. If someone has an idea, feel free to try it and see how that goes, and let me know!
But fanfiction.net, while it doesn't make it easy to get overall numbers for the entire site, does at least provide numbers for works per category, like this:
These numbers are, to be clear, inaccurate. If you click through to the fandom, you will see a much lower number - sometimes as low as half the displayed number on the category page. For instance, if you open the Supernatural page, there are 96.2K stories listed, not 127K. You might say, ah, but Nary, fanfic.net also includes crossovers separately from the other fics in a fandom, and maybe those totals include the crossovers! They might, but the numbers still don't add up even when crossovers are included (I spot checked this across several fandoms to be sure). I can only assume that the 127K number is something like 'all Supernatural works ever posted, including ones that later got deleted'. It certainly doesn't represent the current actual total of works available in that fandom.
So to get somewhat more accurate numbers, you have to look at each fandom's individual page. Today (November 16, 2025) I did this for the top 100 fandoms in each category (Anime/Manga, Books, Cartoons, Comics, Games, Misc, Movies, Plays, TV) with the following exceptions: in Comics, Plays, and Misc there weren't 100 fandoms to go through, or before I got to 100 I was down into very small numbers of works, like double digits. In those cases, I stopped before reaching 100 fandoms because I didn't feel like counting up a lot of fandoms with ~50 works. In TV, conversely, there was a longer tail of fandoms with ~2000 or so works, so I kept going up to 150 fandoms to capture most of those.
I added up the totals for each set of top fandoms, and then the totals across the board. I got 5,553,596 works.
This is certainly leaving out a lot of works - a ton of fandoms that have triple digit or lower counts of works wouldn't have been counted by this method. I'm not claiming this is the accurate total of works on ff.net - just that this method covers the big fandoms there.
AO3, as of today (November 16, 2025), has 16,260,000 works. I do believe this is a relatively accurate number reflecting works currently actually available on the site (obviously it's rounded but other than that).
I think there's no way that fanfiction.net has 10 million more works that I didn't count using my quick and dirty method. I think that sometime in the last several years, AO3 passed it in terms of number of works on the site. Again, I can't compare it to wattpad, but that would put AO3 at least in the middle of the three sites, not at the bottom.
And then there's traffic, which is another measure of what people can mean when they talk about 'how big' a site is. And here, I think it can be shown that AO3 is far in the lead of the other two. This data was taken from similarweb, a service that compares website traffic (and other things, but traffic is what I'm interested in here).
This is a comparison with what similarweb thinks are the websites most like AO3 - it correctly figures it's closest to fanfiction.net and wattpad.com (and tvtropes which is interesting, if not really relevant here). The traffic to each site over the last 3 months (August 2025-October 2025) shows AO3 with over 2x the traffic of wattpad, and 7x the traffic of fanfiction.net.
Wattpad still has more unique visitors, according to the further breakdown of info similarweb provides on engagement.
AO3 has nearly double Wattpad's page views, however, and nearly 10x as many page views as fanfiction.net.
I don't know how really useful this is, but I wanted to share it so that people who like to think about fandom stats can take it under consideration (or tell me I'm wrong if they see a mistake I made!) and so that more generally, we can consider reframing our view of AO3's relative size and popularity compared to other big fanfic sites, so (especially those of us who have been around AO3 for a comparatively long time) aren't still operating under our impressions of what things were like 5-10 years ago.
Hope you enjoyed, let me know if this is helpful at all, or if you can think of things I overlooked!
Thanks, both of you, for these really interesting numbers! <3
@naryrising I concur about Fanfiction.net vs. AO3. There's a Fanfiction.net search hack that I think (but have not verified) probably returns most of the results on the site. Using this hack, I'm currently getting nearly 8.2M results for Fanfiction.net, which is just over half the size of AO3. It could also be an overestimate; I don't know whether some deleted works are still being counted in that total. But between this and the numbers you gave above by surveying the biggest fandoms, I would agree that it seems quite likely that AO3 is bigger than fanfiction.net.
And according to a search I just did on their site, Wattpad.com has a total of 704 Fanfiction stories:
😂😂😂🤦🤦🤦 Wattpad's native search is worse than useless!
I tried to estimate the size of Wattpad, FFN, and AO3 back in 2018 based on sampling a bunch fanworks and extrapolating. A few highlights:
The numbers Wattpad gives publicly about number of uploads are almost certainly number of chapters, not number of stories (and chapters on that platform tend to be quite short and numerous).
In Nov 2018, I estimated that Wattpad might have around 8M fanfics and seeemed to be growing fast. I thought at that time it was probably bigger than and growing faster than both other sites. (It also had a bigger spam problem, though.) I had to do a lot of guessing, so my confidence was relatively low.
In Nov 2018, I estimated 7.7M for Fanfiction.net -- which would mean it hasn't grown much since then; that's consistent with the trends at the time that showed it slowing down a lot.
Based on the sizes and growth trends I saw then, I would not be at all surprised if Wattpad (still) has more fanfic than AO3. But I also don't think the number of stories is anywhere close to those huge numbers of uploads that they've officially given. But also, their search basically doesn't work at all, so there's a lot of guesswork.
Re traffic, I do wonder whether SEO tools more substantially underestimate Wattpad traffic than AO3 traffic because Wattpad has an app. (I assume a lot of AO3 visitors also go directly to AO3 rather than clicking through from search results, but if you're in an app there's not even a chance that you'll accidentally search for "wattpad" rather than going to the site directly.) But even if Wattpad traffic is probably more underestimated, AO3 gets 3.3B pageviews/month of actual traffic, which is enormous!
So I think your overall point stands. regardless of the size of Wattpad: AO3 is hardly the scrappy underdog among the biggest fanfic sites, these days! :)
I also really appreciated your thoughtful intro about all the people saying that AO3 is not representative of all of fandom, as someone who makes such statements. :) I started making caveats about my own analyses when AO3 was much tinier, when it was obvious that it was a tiny subset of fannish activity. I still think it's probably true that there's a huge amount of variation between fannish activity the various platforms (both for the reasons you mentioned, and based on my own experience -- I haven't done any big comparisons since 2019, but I always saw large differences when I compared platforms). There's also a huge amount of variation in fannish experiences between different fandoms and sometimes between different ships. It's worth remembering that when doing any analysis, and being very cautious about overgeneralizing. But it's also worth noting when drawing data from AO3 that AO3 does capture a very large amount of fanfic-related fandom attention these days, and we shouldn't dismiss it as just a weird outlier!
Anyway, thanks for the data dive & thoughtful writeup!
I suppose there are probably worse things for me to have accidentally texted someone who is not in fandom...? 🤦🤦🤦😂😂😂
Also shameful because I don't actually have enough data yet to really say anything yet about the rise of boypussy on ao3... this was just an early cheeky comment on my part. 😂😂 I don't even get yet how the tag tends to be used... e.g., is boypussy usually an unexplained phenomenon? (how often does it appear in stories that are neither explicitly trans nor explicitly cisswap nor omegaverse? only a minority use omegaverse tags, so it's not all because of that) how often does the owner of a boypussy also have boobs? a cock?
(I do have some early stats I could share about pregnancy rates, though... boypussies seem to be extremely fertile!)
Feel free to share anecdata about boypussy in the notes if you have more experience with such fanworks. Or to text those observations to a random friend who has done nothing to warrant such behavior.
I've been relatively rarely on Tumblr for a few months, because real life has been all-consuming and full of changes lately. I have a lot of cool questions piled up in my askbox, and I've been extra flaky about reading & responding to others' posts.
If I haven't responded to you, please don't take it personally! I may yet get to it in the future. And gentle pings/follow up asks/posts you think I should see/etc are always welcome.
In the context of this survey and its results, I will be using the word "Batcest" to mean any pairing between two or more members of the "Batfamily", as defined using the following characters: Bruce Wayne, Barbara Gordon, Dick Grayson, Cassandra Cain, Jason Todd, Stephanie Brown, Tim Drake, Duke Thomas, Damian Wayne, and Alfred Pennyworth.
I included only the characters I regularly see in conversation about incest with at least one other character listed. This survey is largely about how different pairings are perceived in fandom, and how whether or not someone ships a certain pairing affects their likelihood to view it as incest. I am not, nor should you be, treating it as an objective determination as to whether or not "Batcest" is actually incest.
With 422 participants and 45 pairings combinations, I could just throw the raw data table at you and call it a day, but that's a lot of information all at once, so here's how this post is structured.
In the first part of this post, I will be covering the responses to the main section of the survey ("Is It Incest?" and "Do You Ship It?") in both a brief overview and a full break down by character.
After that, I will go over the responses to the optional section of the survey. Most of this part is a pretty straightforward, but I did have some fun with comparing the results from different demographics of participants.
At the end, I have included the link to a document containing all of the answers to the final question, the free response. I have also pulled several individual answers to that question to highlight throughout this post; one will be added at the end of each section. Let's start off with what is, undoubtedly, my favourite:
"Dick/Donna is more incestuous than any batcest ship, including the blood related ones"
Is It Incest?
I'm sure no one is shocked at the news of Bruce/Damian taking the number one spot for most incestuous Batcest pairing at a strong 99.29%. The next highest pairing is Bruce/Jason, with a consensus from 75.11% of participants for being incest.
Only 26.67% of Batcest pairings were voted as incest by 50% of participants or more, half of which are Batman/Robin pairings. The only pairing in the top five not between a Batman and Robin duo is Bruce/Cass.
I think even if they call each other “brothers”, none of them have any idea what a real family is like. In the real world, your adopted sibling/child is obviously your “real” sibling or child. But the “family” dynamics in Batman are so genuinely troubling that any potential “incest” is honestly the least of their worries…
It Isn't Incest!
Unsurprisingly, the bottom half of these numbers are dominated by Barbara Gordon, Stephanie Brown, and Duke Thomas. In particular, none of Steph's pairings made it above 10% of votes for being incest, while the only one of Barbara's pairings to make it above 3% was Barbara/Cass. It's only fitting, then, that the pairing with the lowest incest rating across the board was one of Barbara Gordon's: Barbara/Duke, with a stunning 0.95% of the votes for it being incest.
Congratulations to Barbara Gordon/Duke Thomas for being the least problematic Batcest ship!
They top the list of the 35.56% of pairings that received less than a 10% incest rating.
Someone told me out loud once that shipping Dick and Babs was incest and that was so ridiculous I went from anti-batcest to pro-batcest. Y'all have fun with whatever ships you want, I believe in you
It Is Incest & I Ship It!
Dick/Tim may not have been voted the most incestuous Batcest pairing, but the consensus from the shippers seems to be in. They take first place for the most voted pairing under the "Incest (I ship it)" option by a pretty clear margin, with 27.01% of participants selecting that answer. That means 42.86% of participants who view Dick/Tim as incest also ship them, and 62.64% of participants who ship them also view them as incest.
24.45% of pairings received more than 10% of votes for the "Incest (I ship it)" option.
I think it all really depends on the era and author and is super up to interpretation. I think a lot of people would consider Jason & Bruce to be family, but Jason essentially disowns Bruce in UTH, so are they no longer related? Or DamiTim & JayTim, I wouldn't consider them brothers in post-crisis, but could definitely see that argument for modern day. Or like, JayTim especially, Jason explicitly mocks the idea of them being brothers in RHatO, but Tim says Jason is the closest thing he's had to a brother in TT2011. Oh and CassDuke! I personally feel their B&tO2019 interactions suggest a more sibling-like relationship for them, but since they don't really show up together outside of that we don't really get to see the full depth of their relationship. Basically I am saying it is all vibes and not easy to define, much like family IRL lol. And also that if I took this survey again right now my answers would probably be different. Also despite not really liking my ships to be incestuous DickTim is my fav… I don't want to talk about it… Their love transcends my shipping preferences….
Batcest Breakdown!
Here's the point where I start throwing numbers at you and trust you to parse it yourself, okay? We're going rapid-fire down the list of Batfamily members. This is all the data from the first section of the survey, organised for your viewing pleasure.
Bruce Wayne
Most Incestuous: Bruce/Damian (99.29%)
Least Incestuous: Bruce/Barbara (2.60%)
Most Shipped: Bruce/Dick (47.63%)
Least Shipped: Bruce/Barbara (9.71%)
Most Shipped as Incest: Bruce/Jason (22.27%)
Most Shipped as Not Incest: Bruce/Dick (27.96%)
Barbara Gordon
Most Incestuous: Barbara/Cass (18.72%)
Least Incestuous: Barbara/Duke (0.95%)
Most Shipped: Barbara/Dick (52.13%)
Least Shipped: Barbara/Alfred (1.42%)
Most Shipped as Incest: Barbara/Cass (8.29%)
Most Shipped as Not Incest: Barbara/Dick (51.18%)
Dick Grayson
Most Incestuous: Dick/Damian (70.38%)
Least Incestuous: Barbara/Dick (2.37%)
Most Shipped: Barbara/Dick (52.13%)
Least Shipped: Dick/Alfred (5.45%)
Most Shipped as Incest: Dick/Tim (27.01%)
Most Shipped as Not Incest: Barbara/Dick (51.18%)
Cassandra Cain
Most Incestuous: Bruce/Cass (66.12%)
Least Incestuous: Cass/Steph (4.50%)
Most Shipped: Cass/Steph (71.57%)
Least Shipped: Cass/Alfred (1.66%)
Most Shipped as Incest: Cass/Tim (12.09%)
Most Shipped as Not Incest: Cass/Steph (68.25%)
Jason Todd
Most Incestuous: Bruce/Jason (75.11%)
Least Incestuous: Barbara/Jason (2.84%)
Most Shipped: Jason/Tim (56.03%)
Least Shipped: Jason/Alfred (3.79%)
Most Shipped as Incest: Dick/Jason (22.99%)
Most Shipped as Not Incest: Jason/Tim (39.34%)
Stephanie Brown
Most Incestuous: Bruce/Steph (8.06%)
Least Incestuous: Barbara/Steph (1.90%)
Most Shipped: Cass/Steph (71.57%)
Least Shipped: Steph/Alfred (1.90%)
Most Shipped as Incest: Cass/Steph (3.32%)
Most Shipped as Not Incest: Cass/Steph (68.25%)
Tim Drake
Most Incestuous: Dick/Tim (63.03%)
Least Incestuous: Barbara/Tim (2.13%)
Most Shipped: Jason/Tim (56.03%)
Least Shipped: Tim/Alfred (5.22%)
Most Shipped as Incest: Dick/Tim (27.01%)
Most Shipped as Not Incest: Steph/Tim (46.68%)
Duke Thomas
Most Incestuous: Bruce/Duke (29.15%)
Least Incestuous: Barbara/Duke (0.95%)
Most Shipped: Tim/Duke (14.14%)
Least Shipped: Duke/Alfred (1.42%)
Most Shipped as Incest: Tim/Duke (3.71%)
Most Shipped as Not Incest: Tim/Duke (10.43%)
Damian Wayne
Most Incestuous: Bruce/Damian (99.29%)
Least Incestuous: Barbara/Damian (2.14%)
Most Shipped: Tim/Damian (28.44%)
Least Shipped: Damian/Alfred (2.61%)
Most Shipped as Incest: Dick/Damian (16.11%)
Most Shipped as Not Incest: Tim/Damian (14.22%)
Alfred Pennyworth
Most Incestuous: Bruce/Alfred (52.37%)
Least Incestuous: Barbara/Alfred (1.90%)
Most Shipped: Bruce/Alfred (11.13%)
Least Shipped: Duke/Alfred (1.42%)
Most Shipped as Incest: Bruce/Alfred (5.92%)
Most Shipped as Not Incest: Bruce/Alfred (5.21%)
And that closes out all I have for the main part of the survey. Now, we venture into the scary world of nuance.
Interpersonal relationships for incestual Batcest ships should involve consistent character work, and not just a singular panel in which a familial title is used. The use of familial titles automatically implying incestual vibes removes either 1, bad writing or 2, the nuance for family dynamics and language that isn't 100% USAmerican nuclear family-centric. A "Batcest" ship being full incestual should require a consistently written familial relationship that develops overtime. While adopted siblings are "real" siblings in any context, the Batfamily is not representative of what a typical adopted family looks like, and often adoption or legal guardianship was not to foster relationships, but rather to solve current plot issues. For example, while Jason and Tim may be technically, adopted siblings, there has been no shown history of them fostering brotherly love for each other in the way that Dick and Tim did- even prior to Tim's adoption. "Adoption" is not a bludgen that can be used to make a ship incestual in a world where the only real thing these characters have in common is beating the same criminals up regularly. (and in the case of those with genuine familial relationships they are not real so shipping them reflects nothing on real-life adopted siblings.)
What Is Batcest?
For the question of how each of you determines whether or not a ship is Batcest, you were provided with two default options and an option to submit your own criteria.
According to the 65.94% of participants who took mercy on me and chose one of the two clearly defined and easily understandable options, "Batcest" is:
"Any ship between two members of the Batfamily": 22.63%
"Any ship that I personally consider incest": 43.31%
Over in nuance land, 9.49% of participants selected the "Other" option without submitting their own answer. 24.57% of the total participants in this survey, however, provided their own response. Here's a few that best showcase the kinds of responses submitted:
"ngl this wording confuses me a little like yes batfam ships can be called batcest but i dont think the cest suffix makes it bad its just like selfcest…"
"I dont consider ships with Steph, Babs or Duke to be Batcest because they feel seperate from the "Batfam" conceptually"
"Any ship between two that are legally or biologically family"
"Depending on actual interactions in canon comics. there has to be a deep bond that is familial."
"I don't think any of them (except Damian + Bruce) are incest, but rather some of them are incestuous. BruCass is something I see as already mildly incestuous in the comics, though not incest. Everyones relationships are ridiculously complicated, and it also depends on the timeline of their relationship. Bruce x Tim early on wouldn't be incestuous because they've yet to see each other as family, but they do grow to have that relationship eventually, in which case it would be incestuous."
"Both based on either legal relationship or individual personal repationship vibes. My stabdards areretty arbitrary. I can also have paralell different interpretation of the same relationship for fun."
"if theyre related?????"
"It depends on the specific relationships between characters. Age gaps, who raised whom, and being raised together all factor into the decision. Being blood-related like Dami and Bruce also plays a factor. Bruce didn't raise Steph or Babs, so it's not incest. Dick viewing Bruce as a father is a new development in comics and media. Not incest."
"BruDami is the only ship that is incest, but I guess I would consider another ship incest if I were to consume or create fanworks for it in a way that played up familial dynamics (homemade incest for kinky shipping purposes, I suppose?), but to me something isn't incest unless it's incest."
"If the characters on a one to one connection have been shown in canon material to reliably view one another as a specific family member (even if adoptive)."
Perhaps I should have put the next question before this one? In my opinion, an extremely significant portion of the answers this question received are from people who seem to view the term "Batcest" as synonymous with "incest"—and as such, would fall under the "Batcest is any ship that I personally consider incest" category—but I didn't want to arbitrate people's responses if they didn't choose that option themself.
batcest is a term i use for sake of clarity, so there are ships i consider incestuous (e.g. cass/babs) that technically don't fall under the net i cast when i say batcest. that's why i define it through legal relation, even though that's dead last in importance, out of the aspects i considered when sorting ships into the incest/not incest categories. average anti-batcest person considers damijay and brutim batcest, but does not think dickbabs or stephcass is.
whether a batcest ship is incest heavily depends on continuity to me, so for the sake of this form I voted based on my impression of current mainline comics. (e.g. I put jaytim as incest, but in post-crisis it is not. stephcass would be incest in wfa i guess, but it clearly isn't in mainline comics.) other ships are even more muddled. whether dickjay is incest depends on how we're interpretating their relationship during jason's robin era, since people range from 'barely knew each other/dick hated jason' to 'they were brothers and hung out all the time and went train surfing and on ski trips and so on'. dickjay fics where dick's a talon or whatever and the two of them haven't met obviously aren't incest.
i do not ship batcest ships, mostly because the pseudo-incestuous nature of it is a squick. however, in my experience, i find their dynamics extremely bland when that pseudo-incestuous element is not present. the entire batfamily is full of extremely complex people with equally complicated interpersonal relationships, and ignoring their close familial bonds in favor of something strictly romantic/platonic turns them into paper cutouts. batcest ships are far, far more interesting if they have both a familial and romantic/sexual relationship at the same time. unfortunately that also grosses me out.
(i suspect having the familial relationship in the past could be interesting as well, but i stopped seeking out batcest fanwork a long time ago, so i don't know how that looks in practice.)
What Is Incest?
Okay, now, we're getting dicey. Maybe Batcest is incest, but what qualifiers are people even using to determine what is and isn't incest?
This one was a multiple choice question, so why did so many participants use the "Other" option to inform me that they believe it's some combination of the four instead of just selecting all applicable options? The world may never know. I do respect the eleven separate people who used this option to submit the word "vibes", though.
Thank you for including the "transitive relation" category, because filling this out made me realize that's my line. You gave a good example of it too, since I don't think of JayCass as incest even though I don't ship it. One important but of nuance for that question is that I (and I imagine many others) only consider comics they like when thinking about relationships. So even though Jason and Tim have called each other brothers in New52! canon, I don't count them as having interpersonal relationship because I didn't like reading those comics
Incest Please!
Between all the incest or not incest, and shipping or not shipping, and debates over what is or isn't Batcest, there is still, as always, another shade of nuance. For those who do ship Batcest, there's also a question of whether or not they prefer their pairings to have both a familial and romantic/sexual relationship.
At the same time: 34.95%
In the past: 6.18%
Never: 13.71%
No preference: 34.14%
… 11.02% of participants chose to write in their own response instead. Sigh. Let's go see those now.
"I prefer it to be addressed where it's present and the resolution of any conflict it causes to be used to add depth and enjoyable character interaction tangles. I do prefer it to be something they move away from as they realise their feelings are not as familial as they thought/have developed unexpectedly/were never familial in the first place."
"It really depends, for example I'm interested in Bruce & Cass as a platonic relationship with incestuous undertones that toys the line of a romantic/sexual relationship without ever being explicitly romantic/sexual. With DickTim I can enjoy all 3. CassTim I don't want any familial relationship between them. JayTim (though I don't particularly care for it) I also don't want to see in an incestuous relationship. Steph and Barbara I don't view as having any familial relationships except for a sisterly/brotherly (though I wouldn't call them siblings) bond with Damian (Steph), and a somewhat motherly/sisterly but not really bond with Cass (Babs)."
"my shipping preferences change based on my mood for what I'd like to read. Sometimes I prefer the Batcest to have only romatic and/or sexual relationships, sometimes I prefer the Batcest to have both familial and romantic and sexual relationships because the familial relationship adds a certain level of spicy angst and je ne sais quoi to the pairing"
"sometimes the "some people would consider this incest" is a fun thing to play with, sometimes it isn't. I don't love when the familial ties are completely erased in an attempt to claim it's incest free, because it changes the vibes."
"either, the familial connection can add to the dynamic but it's not necessary to the ship"
"Depends on the ship tbh… I just don't like it when things are forced to be familial when they're not in canon but I do like the incest flavor lol"
"depends on the fic, a story that's going to delve into resolving feelings of discomfort over legal relations or a past sense of siblinghood vs a smut fantasy fic that's going to play into the incest kink vs a fic that just has two hot people mentored by the same people e.g. stephcass all offer different things"
"I can like both. But even when the relationship is non-familial I like that the weirdness of the connection or outside perception is acknowledged. I think it's interesting."
"Depends what I'm in the mood for. It can be interesting to explore the intersection of societal expectation for people adopted by the same man versus their own feelings."
"i am mainly always a brudick girlie and i prefer for their bond to be so ephemeral and impossible to describe that it neither counts as fully familial or fully romantic/sexual <3 that said i really do not like when people really lean into the "incesty" elements of it all, yknow? i just want them to have a bond unnknowable to any other human being"
Alright, reasonable use of the nuance section. You may all proceed to the next stage of the test.
I like incest in shipping and I feel like it elevates many ships, but not all Batcest is incest and some of the pairings are less interesting to me if they are treated as incest.
Favourite Batcest Ship
While you were asked whether or not you ship each pairing in the first section of the form, all of us have our favourites. 78.44% of participants submitted one or more favourite Batcest pairing, while 65.64% submitted one or more least favourite Batcest pairing.
"Batkid" is an umbrella term I am using for any answer in which the participant responded with the following: "Batkid", "Robin", "Batgirl", "[the/his] kid(s)", or other variations thereof where it was clear the participant was using personal criteria to include multiple but not all of the other characters listed.
Submissions with only one pairing listed for their favourite or least favourite Batcest ship are indicated by the darker bar on the graph.
Favourite Batcest Ship
Those submissions with only one pairing listed are also the criteria by which I am ranking Jason/Tim above Bruce/Dick for the number one favourite pairing, despite both pairings tying in the number of total submissions at 89. Jason/Tim received 62 sole submissions, while Bruce/Dick received 55.
It is notable to me that these are write-in responses. I didn't provide a list of ships through a drop down menu but, rather, allowed people to type whatever they wanted into the box.
brudick is real, canonical, and will outlive us all
It's a Match!
For the question of your favourite Batcest pairing, 77.04% of participants who answered submitted only one, but 22.96% listed two or more, so which pairings were submitted together most frequently?
A match made in heaven: Bruce Wayne/Dick Grayson & Dick Grayson/Tim Drake!
They were submitted together 19 times. That's an incredible 25% of the total submissions with more than one pairing listed for their favourite Batcest ship. No other matched pairings come close to touching that number.
i don't actually ship any batcest but if i did i would ship dicktim
Which Batfamily?
There's still the lingering issue of which iteration of these characters you're talking about. Of course, there are numerous depictions of the Batfamily, but they can be defined under several broad categories. So, what was the primary engagement with Batfamily content among participants?
Comics: 82.58%
WFA: 25.54%
Films: 35.32%
TV Shows: 39.38%
Video Games: 23.15%
Fanon: 58.47%
Another multiple choice, another casualty. Not even the emphasis on primary could salvage these results.
I've been in this fandom for almost fifteen years and almost no one thought of these ships (besides BruDami) as incest back in the day. BruDick is an important part of queer history dating back almost as long as these two characters have existed. The modern concept of the "Batfam" was built by people who shipped these characters in all sorts of configurations. The moral panic over "batcest" is 90% recycled homophobia being parroted by people who don't know their history.
Canon VS Fanon
Now, why did I save the media engagement section for the end? Well, I have taken the time to isolate certain demographics to see if and how it influenced the way participants responded. With a clear split between those who said that their primary engagement with the Batfamily was through Fanon versus those who did not, here are some of the most interesting differences between those two groups.
Participants who selected Fanon as their primary engagement with Batfamily content (regardless of whether or which other options were also selected) are:
12.57% more likely to view Bruce/Dick as incest
10.78% more likely to view Bruce/Steph as incest
17.32% more likely to view Bruce/Duke as incest
27.01% more likely to view Dick/Jason as incest
18.21% more likely to view Cass/Jason as incest
16.46% more likely to view Jason/Damian as incest
11.56% more likely to view Tim/Duke as incest
16.07% less likely to view Barbara/Cass as incest
18.65% more likely to ship Dick/Jason
17.55% more likely to ship Jason/Tim
10.82% less likely to ship Bruce/Dick
14.06% less likely to ship Bruce/Cass
12.05% less likely to ship Barbara/Tim
15.02% less likely to ship Cass/Tim
29.62% more likely to engage with WFA as their primary Batfamily content
I also have a fun breakdown of the submissions for people's favourite and least favourite Batcest ships between these two groups! This was, by far, the most drastic difference between those who do and do not primarily engage with Fanon Batfamily content.
Pairings coloured green have moved up in comparison to the overall ranking, while those coloured red have moved down.
If there are any other pairings not listed here that you are curious about in the Fanon VS Canon section, feel free to send me an ask and I can pull the specifics for you.
Although I largely consider them all to be part of a family, I really resent the concept of Batfamily when it is equated to a rigid structure & defined roles. Comic books being the source of these characters allows for so many possible, valid iterations of their dynamics. That ofc makes me a bit inconsistent with what I see as incest between them, but I'd rather leave space to explore different themes (identity, repetion, exploitation, etc) and implications (of like, Dick being adopted as an adult, him almost adopting Damian himself, Tim coming to Batman instead of being 'rescued' like Dick or Jason, Steph being the one robin that doesn't somewhat resemble Bruce as child, Babs being coupled with so many of them, me in particular choosing to see Cass as more connected to Batman than Bruce, whatever else). This serves more for subtextual analysis or headcanons and fanfiction tho, I'm not too invested in shipping in canon. [EDITING CUZ I WAS JUST NOW ON TUMBLR AND SAW SOMEONE NOT INTO DC COMICS REFER TO IT AS "schrödinger's incest" AND "batman and his gaggle of orphans". RELEVANT.]
That's a Wrap!
By far, the most frequent question I've received about this survey—in my messages, asks, and even (ironically) the nuance section of the survey itself—is why I didn't include a nuance option to the question of whether or not a pairing is incest. The short answer is that I wanted numbers, not nuance.
The long answer is this: The nuance to me was a given. Even within the realm of comic-only fans, there is a vast range of interpretation to these characters and their relationships with one another. I already expected everyone to be voting based on their own different levels and kinds of engagement with the Batfamily. Adding the option for people to avoid giving a clear answer would have only produced largely ambiguous—and, therefore, largely useless—results.
It also encouraged people to actually explain their thought process in the section specifically reserved for nuance; 46.21% of participants answered the additional nuance question.
With that being said, I have promised several friends that I would provide all of the answers to the final question on the survey, and so I shall.
Batcest: Is There Nuance?
Yes, that document really is 11.8k words. Have fun!
This survey has been reopened and will remain that way should anyone be interested in submitting their own response in the future.
Take the survey!
If you look at a relationship between a father and son and your first thought is "but what if they fucked?" you're just freaky fredric wertham.
inspired by this post, I made a graph about how many fics on Ao3 have Postal Service song names in their titles:
Method info/additional details below the cut
Data notes:
The counts are the number of fics on Ao3 that contain the song name somewhere in the title (i.e., the full fic title could include other words in addition to the song name), as of 9/8/2025. I used the Ao3 “Any field” search with the modifier “title:” added, since the “title” field search didn't seem to support exact phrase filtering, for some reason. The counts don't include restricted fics
To be clear, I'm not claiming the counts equal the number of fics named after the songs (especially for the songs with shorter, more generic names) :)
Notably, there’s at least 1 fic on Ao3 with an exact title match for every single song on Give Up except for “Clark Gable”, although there is a single fic that mentions Clark Gable in its title
Also, here's the graph again but sorted by album order, because why not:
I’m currently conducting a survey about what audiences think about certain production techniques. The survey is open to anyone who watches TV, and especially if you have watched Our Flag Means Death or The Mandalorian. I would love to hear from you!
Please take this online survey, which will take approximately 15-20 minutes:
Online surveys is a powerful, easy to use tool for creating online surveys. Run by Jisc, online surveys is used by over 300 different organi
Please share with anyone who might be interested.
Thanks in advance.
Tagging people interested in fan studies, fan data and tv - please consider reblogging
