When writing fanfiction (or, for the uninformed, stories that use existing characters, universes, or real-life people from popular media), there aren’t a lot of rules. Sure, it should have some modicum of sense and follow the rules of the platform you choose to publish on. But for the most part, a lot of what’s out there are seen as just guidelines.
For example, fanfic writers should probably know the original work well enough to be able to use the characters meaningfully. Plus, getting the mechanics of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and so on is always important.
As a reader, I do prefer stories that have interesting summaries, a well-paced plot, and natural dialogue. But then again, no one is actively enforcing rules like these except, perhaps, when it comes to plagiarism among fanfic writers.
Outside of that, fans are free to do whatever they want.
They can expound on seemingly small moments in the original TV show, book, or movie and do a character study (like the split second before Neville Longbottom gets to kill a Horcrux), or they can continue where the series left off (like, how did Delphine and Cosima vaccinate all those clones?).
They can take existing characters and place them onto other universes, such as real-life high schools (think Genshin Impact characters doing a chemistry project) or even other fictional settings (like Star Wars characters in Friends’ apartments). They can reimagine the canon and explore what happens if a character had chosen a different path (like, what if Bella had chosen Jacob?).
Even among these directions, canon or not, there are plenty of ways to actually go about it: a 50,000-word multi-chapter fic versus a quick one-shot, omniscient POV versus first-person writing, heavy and angsty versus light and fluffy, traditional prose versus poetry or even group chat formats.
Indeed, the world of fanfiction is one wholly determined by the community. And a lot of what’s out there involves ships.
A Brief History and Psychology of Ships
Nope, it’s not about boats.
Short for “relationship,” shipping has been described as “the single most popular fandom activity,” where fans wish for or support a specific romantic relationship between two or more characters.
It can be used as both a noun and a verb, and has become such a big part of fanfiction that ship names (Dramione for Draco and Hermione, for example, or Drarry for Draco and Harry) have become their own genres of fic and an identifier for fans.
According to Fanlore (a wiki on the history of fandoms brought to us by the same folks who gave us the gift of Archive of Our Own), the term was first used back in 1993. It started among those who wanted The X-Files’ Fox Mulder and Dana Scully to get together. Spoiler alert: They do, but they took their sweet time to get there, which drove shippers crazy.
Ships come in all shapes and forms. They can be het (as in, heteronormative), slash (among two men), femslash (among two women), or poly (among three or more people).
They also don’t always have to make sense. For example, there’s a whole genre of fics shipping the Giant Squid of Hogwarts Lake with several of the Harry Potter characters, and people who ship SpongeBob with Squidward in a ship that’s known as SquidBob.
But according to Dr. Lynn Zubernis, a fangirl and psychologist, shipping is a psychological tool for finding out more about ourselves. Describing ships as “lovemaps,” she explains that they function as blueprints for romantic and erotic ideals.
“It’s all about identity exploration,” she tells Fandom content analyst Maggie Owens. “We’re all going around looking for depictions of our own romantic, sexual, and emotional fantasies.” For her, the act of shipping — as well as reading and writing fanfics around ships you like — is a form of self-narrative therapy.
Who you choose to ship, then, is less about the characters themselves, and more about you, the types of physical or emotional characteristics you look for in a partner, and the kind of relationship you’d like.
All this means that we can learn a lot about what a fandom is like based on what we write and, more specifically, what we ship.
Thankfully, AO3 user centreoftheselights has been gathering and publishing data on this since 2013, using the platform’s award-winning tagging system to provide a pretty cool public service.
What’s on the Menu?
In her latest report, AO3 Year In Review, centreoftheselights answers one interesting question: What kinds of fanfic was the world writing about in 2021?
The report lists 100 pairing tags with the greatest jump in total fanworks from January 2, 2021 to January 1, 2022.
A quick guide to deciphering the list below: In AO3, pairing tags that use ampersands (“name & name”) mean that the fic is about the two characters in a platonic or familial relationship. In contrast, a slash (“name/name”) indicates a romantic and sexual relationship.
The top 10 ships of 2021 are:
- Clay | Dream/GeorgeNotFound (Video blogging Real-Person Fiction)
- Wilbur Soot & Technoblade & TommyInnit & Phil Watson (Video blogging Real-Person Fiction)
- Castiel/Dean Winchester (Supernatural)
- Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn (Módào Zǔshī – Mòxiāng Tóngxiù)
- Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit (Video blogging Real-Person Fiction)
- Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku (Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia)
- Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter (Harry Potter)
- Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit (Video blogging Real-Person Fiction)
- Sirius Black/Remus Lupin (Harry Potter)
- Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
It’s worth noting several things. First, six of these are new to the top 10, including the top 3 items. All four ships involving video blogging real-person fiction jumped quite high to get there, as two of them are completely new to the list, and Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit moved up 62 spots to make it to 8th place.
Moreover, Harry Potter fanfic remains strong, as do Castiel/Dean Winchester (known as Destiel) fics. In fact, Supernatural, Harry Potter, and Good Omens shippers are some of the most prolific in general.
In the 2021 edition of centreoftheselights’s annual report on AO3 Ship Stats, which tracks all-time data, the top 10 are:
- Castiel/Dean Winchester (Supernatural)
- Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (Sherlock – TV)
- Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski (Teen Wolf)
- James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers (Captain America – Movies)
- Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter (Harry Potter)
- Steve Rogers/Tony Stark (The Avengers – Marvel Movies)
- Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
- Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson (One Direction – Band)
- Keith/Lance (Voltron: Legendary Defender)
- Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester (Supernatural)
What Do These Lists Tell Us?
Let me start with the elephant in the room: The characters on these lists are overwhelmingly white men.
The Numbers
With the exception of Lán Zhàn, Wèi Yīng, Bakugou Katsuki, and Midoriya Izuku, the rest of the 2021 list is white and male. A Latino character makes it onto the list on the 12th pairing (9-1-1’s Evan “Buck” Buckley/Eddie Diaz), and a woman appears as ½ of the 13th ranked ship (Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug).
As for the all-time list, which exclusively has slash pairings among men, only Voltron’s Keith and Lance are not white (Keith is marked as “ambiguous” and Lance is Latino). Asian characters appear on the 11th and 12th ranked pairings (BTS’s Jeon Jungkook/Kim Taehyung | V and Shadowhunters’s Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood, respectively), while Star Wars’s Rey is the first woman on the list, ranked 13th alongside Kylo Ren.
Compared to 2020’s numbers, the 2021 Top 100 list also has fewer women and characters of color. Of the 205 names included, 16 are women and seven are characters of indeterminate gender. Racially, 113 of the 205 are white, 74 are Asian, four are Latino, two are Black, and one is North African. The remaining 12 are racially ambiguous.
For those of us who like writing and reading femslash, which make up just three of 2021’s top ships and four in the all-time list, centreoftheselights has also come up with a Top 100 F/F all-time list. The top 10 ships are:
- Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supergirl – TV)
- Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Emma Swan (Once Upon a Time – TV)
- Clarke Griffin/Lexa (The 100 – TV)
- Adora/Catra (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power)
- Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer (Supergirl – TV)
- Korra/Asami Sato (Avatar: Legend of Korra)
- Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long (RWBY)
- Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught (Wynonna Earp – TV)
- Laura Hollis/Carmilla Karnstein (Carmilla – Web Series)
- Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam (Homestuck)
Out of the 202 names on the F/F list, 119 are white, 33 are Asian, 12 are Latino, eight are Black, four are Middle Eastern, and three are Indigenous. Moreover, eight of them are racially ambiguous while 19 have non-human skin tones. The combined total of 55 characters of color is a slight rise from 2020’s 52.
So, Why All the White Men?
Despite fandom being a haven for women, queer people, and people of color, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum outside of the patriarchy and white supremacy. Sure, fans have queered a historically straight and straightwashed media culture dominated by men behind the camera, but we can’t deny that the fanworks on sites like AO3 still largely ignore WLW and queer people of color.
Over her years of working on the AO3 Ship Stats project, which began in 2013, centreoftheselights herself has written about her views on fanfiction’s apparent inclusivity problem with regard to M/M fics, race, and colorism.
POC representation in AO3’s top 100 ships has been steadily increasing, which is a good thing. A closer inspection reveals that this is largely due to the rising popularity of Asian media, like Chinese dramas and donghua (The Untamed and Módào Zǔshī), anime (My Hero Academia), and K-pop groups (BTS). But this rise also hides a more subtle trend: Between 2017 and 2019, no Black characters appeared in the Top 100 list.
This is symptomatic of larger problems of Black representation in mainstream media, colorism among POC, and racial diversity more generally in film and TV, which much of fanfiction is based on. If the media we love and write about is disproportionately white, then many of the characters fanfic writers have to work with are also disproportionately white.
Of course, I have to mention that some fans have “racebent” (the opposite of whitewashed) popular media like Harry Potter in the past. However, the impact of this practice, which isn’t exactly common, isn’t tracked by lists like the AO3 Ship Stats project.
Even though POC representation in mainstream media has been improving in recent years, the shipping juggernauts of fandom will have a hard time catching up to that on the all-time list. Because of the volume of existing fanfiction, centreoftheselights explains, even if we stopped writing about white characters, a POC ship would still need at least a year to break into the top 10.
The problem of women’s representation in fanfic, too, is partly based on historically poor representation in TV, film, and games, which form much of fanfic’s source material. (It’s still pretty rare, after all, to find a show that places women front and center, while also paying attention to racial diversity.) Even though women’s representation, too, is slowly rising, the world of fanfic will also take longer to catch up.
The interesting part about the overwhelming M/M content is that creators and readers are primarily non-heterosexual women. There are a few theories about why F/F is so rare. Aside from the lack of women characters to work with, there are also the issues of comphet and internalized misogyny.
Plus, because fanfic is already overwhelmingly composed of M/M ships, that’s what most readers (who may eventually start writing) become familiar with.
What Now?
Of course, all this doesn’t mean that fanfiction is wrong and that we can’t enjoy our white M/M fics anymore. Neither does it mean that we’re all inherently racist or sexist.
What it is, however, is an invitation to think more critically about how, even among what we consider progressive spaces, and with so much freedom in fanfiction to write the stories that we want using characters we love, the same patterns of underrepresentation and erasure can still occur.
Even within a queer and women-led community, systemic racism and internalized sexism can still operate, and it’s important that we think about what is shaping our preferences and how we can do better.
It’s also a reminder that despite increasing representation and diversity in media, there’s still a long way to go towards true parity. And in celebrating women’s and POC wins in today’s narratives, we can’t take our foot off the gas.