How does the Sherlock fandom vary across platforms? A study in shipping.
Partly as a follow-up to my post about slash in the Sherlock fandom, I decided to try to compare the amount of shipping (and, in particular, Johnlock shipping) on Archive Of Our Own, Fanfiction.net, and on Tumblr.
Methodology
In order to compare, I looked at the first 100 stories in the Sherlock (TV) category in the fanfiction archives, and the first 100 posts in the #sherlock tag on Tumblr. I discarded all posts that weren’t actually relevant to Sherlock or weren’t unique (this was only relevant for Tumblr). Then I tallied the primary ship for each item. (This is a different comparison from my last AO3 analysis, wherein if a story contained Johnlock and Mystrade, it got counted in both categories; here, I only counted the primary ship in each case.) In most cases, the primary ship was clear; in one case of a John/Sherlock/Lestrade fic, I counted it as “other”.
Note: This method of sampling is strongly biased toward whatever happens to be trendy at this moment, as all the items I sampled were posted on June 19, 2013. Results should not be generalized from too strongly, but should give a rough idea of differences between the platforms.
Conclusions
The AO3 Sherlock fandom is heavily biased toward slash, and toward Johnlock in particular. Most of the “other” pairs were other slash pairings. (Mystrade showed up slightly more than Sherlolly, but I didn’t note it as a separate category, because it was often a secondary pairing in a Johnlock-focused story.)
The FFN Sherlock fandom has a lot more Sherlolly and a lot more Sherlock/Original Female Character than the other platforms. There is also more Gen fic here than any other category. However, out of all the ships, Johnlock still predominates by a ratio of 3:1 over the next most popular ship — and there is more Johnlock than all other ships combined.
The Tumblr tag is mostly just about the show Sherlock without focusing on ships,and a bunch of the fanart, gifs, and roleplays are non-shippy as well. However, where shipping occurs, Johnlock again swamps all other ships.
I feel most dissatisfied with the Tumblr analysis (it feels the least useful/revealing), and would like to think about how to better sample & analyze fandom on this platform. If you have ideas, drop me a line.
[the rest of the AO3 analysis series]
Wow, this looks brilliant. Great work! Really looking forward to reading your other analyses.
• Presumably the balance of FFN content is more gen./less ‘shippy’ because of FFN’s clampdown on explicit content and the ensuing exodus of writers to AO3?
• ‘Mystrade showed up slightly more than Sherlolly, but I didn’t note it as a separate category, because it was often a secondary pairing in a Johnlock-focused story’. This secondary-ness causes many Mystrade fans deep pain, so I’m sure they’d appreciate a method that acknowledges Mystrade as a distinct category. I’m very curious indeed to know what proportion of your ‘other’ ships percentage is actually Mystrade. (Also see my next point re. tags.)
• On Tumblr (where tags are not wrangled), your method needs to allow for the fullest possible range of variant tags: #sherlock BBC (etc) as well as #sherlock, and the various – debated – tags for some of the rarer ships such as Molstrade/Mollstrade. Moreover, a Tumblr analysis limited to #sherlock posts will not yield the full picture because quite a lot of Tumblr Sherlock posts primarily use ship and/or character tags, without the addition of the (virtually redundant) #sherlock.
• The volume of Sherlock fan output is so huge (AO3 currently lists 32,686 ‘Sherlock TV’ fanworks) that your (sensible/understandable) methodology of sampling the ‘first 100’ stories per archive and ‘first 100’ Tumblr posts clearly can’t generate a statistically representative result. I personally would supplement this method with the use of AO3’s ‘sort and filter’ function to get the full tag-based stats for each ship (and equivalent searches on FFN).
• In this prolific fandom, a sample of 100 fics or posts will represent only a tiny period – days, not months – in the full timeframe of Sherlock fanworks since July 2010. (12 new fanworks classified as ‘Sherlock TV’ were posted on AO3 today, 22 June, alone.) For a fuller picture (which might also give insights into temporal shifts in trends as the fandom has grown), you could try capturing equivalent samples from earlier moments in the Sherlock fandom timeline.
(BTW, I’m deeply envious of those last two issues: I’m studying a ‘rare’ fandom that only has around 100 fics in total!)
