Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

While I was working on the 2010 chapter of Celebrating Sapphic Love in Fanfiction, I realised I could also use the vast amount of data to look at the top sapphic pairings more generally, getting the top ships from 2008 until now and eventually ending up with a fairly accurate list of the number of works for most of the sapphic pairings on AO3. 

The numbers I find could be anywhere from slightly to moderately different to the numbers in the corresponding years in Celebrating Sapphic Love since I will use the pairings found in that series but run the numbers without restricting the count by the Category F/F, which my other work does. Since I have found that tagging and categorising was often used very differently in the beginning of AO3, my F/F category work will definitely be missing works. Another thing I thought it might reveal some things about was the difference between total works for a pairing and the works categorised as F/F, and whether this tied into my Background Pairings work and findings.

My other works go into a lot more detail, but the chapters of this will be much shorter, focusing on the top ships of each year and slowly watching how our current 2023 100 list built up over the years. I was curious which top pairings in 2008 and 2009 stayed popular, and which ones vanished very quickly.

Centreoftheselights has been gathering ship stats since 2013 (femslash since 2014) and destinationtoast has also looked at femslash stats since 2014, so do check out their work as well if this topic interests you. I seem to use a fairly different approach to either of them with gathering data, so I am really interested to see how this impacts the numbers (though, of course, works have been deleted so this will change numbers). I also used centreoftheselights Top 100 list for 2023 as the comparison throughout the chapters; it will be interesting if we end up with roughly the same top 100 come 2023.

Caveats

The same caveat in my other works applies: AO3 is not all of fandom and, especially early on, many F/F writers were not on AO3. AO3 was started mostly by fans who shipped M/M pairings predominantly and I definitely remember a lot of femslash-focused individual websites around for many years before more F/F writers moved to AO3. I didn't start reading much on AO3 until around 2016, because the femslash I read was elsewhere. So, these are very much just AO3 stats.

Secondly, I got my pairings to check from all the F/F works' lists I've been gathering. It is possible, though highly unlikely, that there could be a pairing in the top x number of works which did not have many or any works tagged as F/F, but I think the lists will be by-and-large accurate, especially once we've hit 2012 onwards and the numbers begin to grow.

Due to the slightly different nature of the Closed Beta, that will be the first chapter (2008 to 13th November 2009) then 2009's remaining 2 months will get their own chapter, too. After that, it will be year-by-year. The Closed Beta does not have enough pairings with 3+ works to build a top 100. This gives me the slightly clunky "Top 31^[1] Sapphic Ships" but a Top 100 in 2009 onwards (after re-running some numbers).

2008 - 13th November 2009: The Closed Beta

Which Pairings were in 2023's Top 100?

Four pairings still remain in 2023's Top 100 F/F pairings:

Which pairings did we never (or rarely) see again?

Some pairings rise, some keep going with modest numbers, and some we rarely see again (only remembering them, perhaps when making lists like these ones!).

Within the top 32 pairings in the closed beta there's quite a big gap between the top ships' numbers today and all the others: 26 of the ships currently have 367 or fewer works, with the remaining 6 having more than 1,000 (Xena/Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess and Hermione Granger/Ginny Weasley from Harry Potter just falling short of 100 in the 2022 rankings). 15 out of the 30 on the list have 100 works or fewer in 2023 (of course, some likely have been deleted over the years).

Three pairings, however, saw more than half their current AO3 works as of 2023 posted in the closed beta:

Xena/Original Female Character (Xena: Warrior Princess) - 3 out of the total of 5 works were posted in the closed beta.

Maggie/Hopey (LOCAS: The Maggie and Hopey Stories by Jaime Hernandez) - 4 out of the 7 total works.

Melanie Bush/Charley Pollard (Doctor Who) - 5 out of the 6 total works.

And a further two saw more than a quarter posted in 2008:

Alice/Nancy (Alice Dao/Nancy De Raey - This is Wonderland) - 4 out of the 11 total works.

Teyla/Sora (Teyla Emmagan/Sora - Stargate Atlantis) - 6 out of the 23 total works.

How does it compare to Celebrating Sapphic Love's list?

In F/F categorised works, there were only 7 pairings with 5+ works. This list clearly shows a lot more when the F/F category isn't applied. The following pairings all appear on this list with 5+ works, but not the other list for the same year:

Chloe Sullivan/Lana Lang (Smallville)

Faith Lehane/Dawn Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Elizabeth Donnelly/Casey Novak (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit)

Teyla/Sora (Stargate: Atlantis)

Tara Maclay/Willow Rosenberg (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Faith Lehane/Willow Rosenberg (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Laura Roslin/Kara Thrace (Battlestar Galactica)

Teyla Emmagan/Kate Heightmeyer (Stargate: Atlantis)

Kate Heightmeyer/Elizabeth Weir (Stargate: Atlantis)

This may be the result of people not using the categorising options available, especially in the context of other tagging practices in 2008. With the number of works now, a small number of people opting not to categorise is unlikely to change the Top 100 lists very much when we're talking about 1,000+ works, but when the highest pairing on the list has less than 40, a few people makes a difference. It could also be the some pairings were more likely to be background tagged, so the works weren't categorised as F/F.