Some popularity comparison of ships between pixiv and AO3 (only mha ships)
I am preparing a full post on MHA ships and their positions among other popular anime ships, but for now I wanted to look at which ships are popular in Japan or the English fandoms.
I used here fanworks created as a measure of popularity, and used AO3 for English fandoms (fanfics only) and pixiv for Japanese fandoms. Pixiv is the main fanworks platform in Japan and it has both fanarts and fanfics.
I used the ships Japanese names and for MM ships I summed bottom/top + top/bottom, on pixiv.
First of all let's look at just AO3. Nothing surprising here. Of course I did not add ALL ships, but just the top ones, and then the main FF and FM ones:
As you can see, the numbers are simply the amount of fanfics on AO3. We have Bakudeku first, with 37k fics, following we have Kiribaku in second place and Tododeku in third place.
When we look at pixiv, instead:
We can see that some positions change. Bakudeku is still first, with a very similar number of works, but now Tododeku is second and the jump between first and second place is so much bigger. And we have Todobaku third, with Kiribaku losing two positions. Todomomo here is the most popular FM ship instead of Izuocha.
Now, sorry for the confused graph, but this is the sum of pixiv and ao3 works. Pixiv in orange and ao3 in blue. You can see here that I ordered them in order of "Total popularity":
So, for example, Bakudeku here is first with almost double the amount of works of second place. Bakudeku has an almost equal orange and blue bar, showing that it is equally popular in Japan and English fandom.
In second place with have Tododeku, but you can see that the blue bar is slightly bigger, because it is slightly more popular on AO3. Etc. etc.
I also can show this data with this graph and I will go ship by ship to explain it. The order here is not total popularity, but pixiv popularity, given that the Japanese fandom is the main target for MHA.
Keep in mind that the blue bar and the blue number is AO3, and the orange bar and black number is pixiv.
Bakudeku has very very similar number of works, with 37k on AO3 and 38k on pixiv, so it is equally popular.
Tododeku follows with slightly more works on AO3 than pixiv, but as you can see the two bars are pretty close.
Todobaku has also a very small difference (only about 3000 works of difference) with 13k on pixiv and 10k on AO3, so being slightly more popular on pixiv.
Kiribaku is instead the biggest difference we see. It has almost 30k works on AO3, and only 10k works on pixiv, which is 1/3, showing that while it is one of the most popular ships in English fandom, its popularity is not as big in Japan.
Erasermic also has a very big difference, where the AO3 numbers are four times bigger than the pixiv ones.
SeroKami was surprisingly popular in Japan, with 3626 works on pixiv, a bit less than double the works on AO3, where it was not very popular.
Todomomo is the most popular FM ship on pixiv, and it is slightly more popular on AO3 but not of a lot.
Izuocha instead is two times more popular in English fandoms than Japanese fandoms, with 8k works on AO3, and only 3k on pixiv.
Following, we have Kamijirou that has very similar numbers between AO3 and pixiv.
Kacchako is also instead more popular on AO3, so it is double in English fandoms than Japanese ones.
Surprisingly, TodoIida is a relatively big ship on pixiv with 1816 works, but not a lot of works on AO3.
Miritama has instead double the works on AO3, showing that it is much more popular in English fandoms than Japanese.
Another big difference instead is Dabihawks…. woth 10k works on AO3, being it one of the most popular ships, and only 600 works on pixiv, showing that it is 16 times more popular in English speaking fandoms than Japan.
Kirimina is another ship that is much more popular in the West, even if with small numbers, with AO3 fics being 8 times more than pixiv.
Momojirou has a similar treatment, and it is 20 times more popular in English fandoms.
Togachako instead is only 10 times more popular on AO3 than pixiv.
Tsuchako is barely there on pixiv, and it was 33 times more popular on AO3, with 3k fics.
Shinkami is also a non ship on pixiv, and it was really hard to find the ship name. Hopefully I got it right with 相上+上相. As you can see it is one of the most popular ships on AO3, but only has 26 works on pixiv.
Another way to look at this is looking at the differences.
AO3 numbers/Pixiv numbers
The result is basically "How much bigger is the English fandom compared to the Japanese one?"
For example, if a ship has 1000 works on AO3, and 100 on pixiv, we can do: 1000/100 and we have 10. It means that the fandom is 10 times bigger on Ao3, which is like saying that the fandom is 10 times smaller on pixiv.
For the graph I took out Shinkami because... it was 330 times bigger on Ao3 so the number was too high.
As you can see, Tsuchako is first, with 33. It means that the English fandom is 33 bigger than the Japanese one. It is first place in "the biggest difference between pixiv and Ao3".
In second place with have Momojirou, than Dabihawks. These seems to be ships that are mainly popular in English speaking fandoms, but not on pixiv.
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