Tumblr Fandometrics

In November 2020, deep into the first year of the pandemic, two subjects took the internet by storm: the impending results of the presidential election, and Destiel finally becoming canon in the worst, most non-committal way possible. While the former marked the beginning of a new historic era for the United States, the latter closed a 15-year chapter of the cult classic show Supernatural, which follows brothers Sam and Dean as they hunt monsters and demons across the country. Dean’s relationship with the angel Castiel (yeah, there are angels in this too. ‘God’ in this show is a guy named Chuck) has been dissected a million times over by fans, academics, and even the cast themselves. The show experienced something of a cultural revolution and a subsequent increase in ratings when fans (a lot of whom were queer and female) took interest in the Dean/Castiel (shortened to ‘Destiel’) relationship and built an explosive fandom out of it, one that has been going strong for over a decade. Then, in the penultimate episode of the final season, after years of winking at the audience with meta references to the fan-favorite ship, the show confirmed Castiel's feelings for Dean....right before Castiel sacrifices himself for Dean and Dean dies of a mortal wound. Ouch. (spoilers)

Fandometrics and Fan Culture

Shipping – the desire to see two characters or people be romantically involved (however you define romance) – has gone a long way since the early days of underground Kirk/Spock zines. Fantasizing about two fictional straight men kissing is no longer taboo – not on sites like Tumblr, at least. Since 2013, Tumblr has aggregated a weekly and annual list of the most popular ships (among other categories, including movies, TV shows, and anime & manga) using a system known as Fandometrics, which looks at the number of posts, searches, reblogs, and likes associated with the relevant tag. I scraped each Year in Review post for the Top 20 ships, manually coded three data points for each ship (the genre, RPS status, and canon status), and charted the ranking history of the most popular ship each year.

Analysis: The data was taken from Tumblr's Fandometrics blog and analyzed using pandas.

Across 10 years of data, 8 of the #1 ships were between male characters (denoted as M/M, colloquially known as slash) who are not in an established relationship with each other. These are known as non-canon ships – canon being the source material itself – meaning that fans propelled them into popularity out of sheer will and hours upon hours of analyzing the subtext embedded in each interaction. Destiel proved to have the most longevity by hitting #1 twice in the span of 7 years while never leaving the Top 20, while Klance (Keith and Lance from the show Voltron: Legendary Defender) saw back-to-back summits after the show debuted in 2016. Reylo (Rey and Kylo Ren from the Star Wars trilogy), the only ship to have come out of a movie franchise rather than a show, remained relevant throughout the trilogy's lifespan between 2015-2019. It is the only ship between a male and female character on this chart (denoted as F/M, colloquially known as het). Clexa (Clarke and Lexa from the show The 100), on the other hand, enjoyed a short lived stint at the top as the only ship between female characters (denoted as F/F, colloquially known as femslash), and fell off after a controversial third season that ignited an online movement bringing awareness to the Bury Your Gays trope. Personally, as someone who ran a Clexa Tumblr blog back in 2015-2016, I stopped watching after Season 3, too.

If you’re a little confused by these terms, don’t worry: here’s a handy glossary of common fandom terms compiled by Vox.

Still, the question remains: Why are people so obsessed with shipping two male characters who are often 1) straight and 2) have probably never indicated an ounce of romantic interest in each other? How did Byler (Will and Mike from the show Stranger Things) disrupt a pattern of multi-year appearances and put Stranger Things on the Fandometrics spotlight for the first time? Why do femslash (F/F) ships tend to be overshadowed by their slash counterparts? Does any of this even make sense to anyone who’s not chronically on Tumblr all the time?

Probably not, but a powerful fandom is what keeps something culturally relevant years after it’s bit the dust, and shipping gives fans a medium to reinterpret the characters in a shared fashion and build off each other to create layers and layers of nuanced perspectives that evolve past the creators’ original intentions. Shipping doesn’t exist in a vacuum, after all; fans often extrapolate tropes and techniques from older fandoms to produce an unending corpus of fanworks (such as fanfiction or fanart) that seep into other fandoms via fans with overlapping interests, creating a network of shared beliefs and practices in fandoms separated by oceans and decades. You’ve probably never heard of The Sentinel, a crime drama with a fantasy angle that aired in the late 90s, but it spawned a popular trope known as the Sentinel & Guide AU that newer fandoms have continued to use and develop in their fanfictions. Or take the Buffy Fiction Archive, a specialized archive for Buffy the Vampire Slayer-related fanfiction created in 2002 that predates the popular modern fic archive, Archive of Our Own (AO3).

All of this is to say that this shipping business finally starts to make sense when you account for the sheer history behind this practice. Back when shows had (and still have!) a tendency to feature a handful of underdeveloped female characters clearly positioned as love interests for the male lead, the emotional crux of the story often lied between the male characters who revolved around each other without the subconscious expectation of a romance and thus had room for the homoerotic subtext that deepened their dynamic, allowing fans to latch on to a relationship far more compelling than that of pre-determined heterosexual love interests. Simply put, a ship like Destiel makes you work for it instead of spoonfeeding you scenes of Dean smirking at a woman as she trades banter with him. It’s the same for femslash ships, though evidently smaller in scale due to the constraints of having a limited number of shows led by well-developed female characters. Buffy Summers, the titular character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has always been famously shipped with Angel and infamously shipped with Spike, but it’s Faith who I and many others really ship her with, thanks to the Season 3 arc that featured their tenuous but hopeful friendship as the Chosen Two spiraling into a murderous rivalry that was, at the heart of it, caused by their tragic inability to get through to each other despite being damned to the same fate.

Shipping, in some ways, can feel like an engaging back-and-forth between the audience and the creators, who adapt character arcs and plotlines in response to fan reaction. Castiel, for example, was catapulted from a one-off character to a fan favorite over time thanks to the intense support of Destiel shippers. But enthusiasm doesn't always translate positively in real life, and shipping has had harmful spillover effects on the real people associated with these fictional characters. Kit Connor, who played Nick in the Netflix romcom series Heartstopper, has spoken about how the show’s fans pressured him into coming out in response to his portrayal of a bisexual character. And it doesn’t stop with the fictional stuff.

Have you ever had a boy band phase?

Further analysis shows that boy bands – first One Direction, then BTS – tend to be subjected to RPS (Real Person Slash) shipping the most out of categories like musicians, celebrities, actors, and YouTubers. Here, Tumblr’s fan metrics seem to accurately reflect the cultural handover between the two bands: One Direction took the world by storm when they emerged from The X Factor in 2010, but their hiatus in 2016 left a vacuum that was waiting to be filled by a similar set of young, good-looking pop juggernauts. BTS forged their early years in the social media space, much like One Direction did, and quickly gained mainstream popularity after releasing “Blood Sweat & Tears" in 2016 and “DNA" in 2017, which they performed at the AMAs for their American TV debut. Members of both groups have been shipped in all possible permutations and written about thousands of times; as of last year, AO3 logged 37,318 works tagged Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson and 32,629 works tagged Jeon Jungkook/Kim Taehyung | V, placing them 8th and 9th respectively on the all-time chart.

While the general zeal toward TV shows and movies tends to be cyclical as attention waxes and wanes between installments or seasons, fan activity – or more precisely, scrutiny – in RPS fandoms can be overwhelmingly persistent, as celebrities cannot withdraw from existence as easily as TV characters on the off-season. Both Styles and Tomlinson have expressed discomfort over being shipped together as Stylinson, a sentiment shared by Lauren Jauregui, one half of the Camren ship with Fifth Harmony teammate Camila Cabello, who has since spoken about how the fan theories damaged her friendship with Cabello and made her feel predatory as a queer woman. RPS shipping is polarizing, contentious, and often reduced to a spectrum with purists on one end and tinhatters on the other, but the lines are especially blurry in K-pop, where companies deliberately push their idols into performing fanservice and skinship to draw in fans. This strategy capitalizes on the fans’ sexualized gay fantasies and simultaneously neuters the idols to assure fans that someone like Jungkook can’t possibly be in a real, secret relationship, because he is in fact obsessed with V, his boyfriend, and You, his girlfriend/other boyfriend/partner/one true fan.