Femslash week in review: 2020-01-21 - 2020-01-27

High-level stats for week of 2020-01-21 - 2020-01-27

• Total works categorized F/F on AO3: 4423 (+129 from last week)


• Works I classified F/F: 2527 (+22 from last week) (1158 new, 1369 continued)


• 0.83% of all 303263 AO3 works I've classified F/F were updated this week

A few callouts this week:

• Boku no Hero Academia fell off the top 20 suddenly, and I got curious why. I'm not familiar with the fandom, and my dataset doesn't make this as easy as I'd like, but: the number of works fell somewhat between last week and this week, but what's really getting in the way here is the "canon male character" discount rate I apply. Backing up a little bit: the purpose of this ranking system, as far as I'm concerned, is to identify the most ensemble-femslash-y fandoms, as in, those where you'll find the most different works with the most different ships containing canonical fictional female and gender-minority characters. If a fandom on AO3 contains a lot of works with the "F/F" tag which don't actually contain an F/F ship, not only do I not count those works towards the fandom's total, but I actually penalize the fandom for them, because if you're an unfamiliar reader spelunking in the archive and what you're looking for is femslash, you're going to hit a lot of works that aren't what you're looking for. It looks like Boku no Hero Academia, specifically, has a lot of genderswap (F/F tagged works containing canonically male characters); this week, there were more F/F-tagged works with only male ships (88) than there were F/F-tagged works which actually contained a female ship (72). Typically it's a little better than that: in 2019, somewhere between 47%-63% of F/F-tagged works each week contained a ship with canonical F/F characters. But those aren't high numbers in any event, even if they're not usually low enough to knock the fandom out of the top 20. If anyone reading this is familiar with the fandom, does that analysis make sense?
  

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