Femslash week in review: 2019-05-07 - 2019-05-13

High-level stats for week of 2019-05-07 - 2019-05-13

• Total works categorized F/F on AO3: 3860 (-151 from last week)


• Works I classified F/F: 2358 (-108 from last week) (1035 new, 1323 continued)


• 0.91% of all 259146 AO3 works I've classified F/F were updated this week

A few callouts this week:

• I was curious why Game of Thrones isn't in the top 20 this week (it was at 14 last week), so I looked into the details. GoT's "unweighted" rating this week would have been 18.10, but it has a very high discount rate. According to my engine, 46% of GoT works tagged F/F this week did not actually contain a ship between two canonical female characters. Specifically, of 61 works tagged GoT F/F, I rejected 25 as having only ships with at least one male character, and 3 as having no two-canonical-character ships. The latter are all reader-fic, which makes sense. I spot-checked a handful of works from the former set, and they all look correct as well: they're works with a million ships, but every explicitly tagged ship contains at least one male character. (Worth noting: it's totally valid for a fic author to tag a work F/F if it contains an M/F/F ship, but I won't count that unless the author calls out the F/F pairing as its own ship tag.) I dig into numbers like this because I often find a bug when I do (for instance, if I'd misclassified Margaery Tyrell as a male character, that would throw everything off), but in this case, there is no bug: if you browse GoT F/F-tagged works looking for ships containing multiple canonical female characters, you are going to have a slightly disappointing time, so GoT has to have a much bigger week than the 97%-reliable Life Is Strange would, in order to chart in the same place.
  
• I don't know that any of my loyal readers are actually in any way looking for MCU recs, but, post-Endgame, I have an eye open for Nat-centric stuff, and I liked this Maria/Natasha fic and this silly Wanda/Natasha team-centric fic.
  

( Full top-20 table and description of methodology after the jump )