With the dawn of a new year, the whole world is looking back on the trends of 2024. For any avid readers of fan fiction, that means reflecting on what fandom culture looked like throughout the year, including what kind of stories were published on popular fan fiction sites like Archive of Our Own, aka AO3.
Luckily, one user makes that easy. AO3 user centreoftheselights compiles stats on what the site looked like at the end of each year — specifically, which 100 relationships had the most works written about them, and what those relationships are like demographically. The data is more than just a New Year’s novelty: it reveals how little diversity there is in the most popular ships on AO3, sparking plenty of discourse in the process.
Of the top 100 ships on AO3 in 2024, 65 were between two men (with 9-1-1’s Buck and Eddie topping the list), 12 were non-romantic relationships, 10 were between a man and a woman, eight involved nonbinary or ambiguously gendered characters, and only five were between two women.
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Folks across the internet were quick to point out this discrepancy, wondering why sapphic fan fiction seems so rare compared to works about queer men (or even about straight couples).
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Some don’t see this underrepresentation as a real problem, arguing that fans of WLW content should simply write more of it for themselves. That line of thinking has a few issues, though: For one, it puts the onus on queer women to wholly represent themselves, potentially excluding them from the broader queer community. It also ignores the probable root of the problem: that fan fiction focused on women is less popular due to misogyny, internalized or otherwise.
Other users pointed out a different issue: that Harry Potter fan fiction remains inexplicably popular, even among apparently queer folks, despite series creator JK Rowling’s continued transphobia (including claiming that trans children don’t exist just a few days ago).
What were the five sapphic ships that made the top 100? In order of popularity, they were Charlie and Vaggie from Hazbin Hotel; Caitlyn and Vi from Arcane; Agatha and Rio from Agatha All Along; Marlene McKinnon and Dorcas Meadowes from Harry Potter (two extremely minor characters who’ve gotten much more attention in fan works than they ever did in the canon series); and Wednesday and Enid from Wednesday. None of those ships were in the top 10 overall.
The stats also reveal a major racial disparity in fan fiction. Of 200 represented characters, 86 were white, 67 were Asian, six were Latino, four were Black, two were MENA, one was Indigenous, and one was Roma, with 34 characters being racially ambiguous or having non-human races.
This discourse around representation isn’t accidental — it’s part of centreoftheselights’ intention for compiling the data. “All of the information in the main post is intended to be factual and verifiable,” she wrote in her FAQ for the statistics. “However, the data is presented in order to highlight the lack of fanfiction focussed on women, F/F pairings, and People of Colour.”
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