Submitted July 13, 2023

Read the project here!

Every year, Tumblr releases a round-up of the most popular fandoms on the site by category. Some of the categories, like movies and TV shows, have predictable outcomes, but I was interested in analyzing the movements of the top ships (two characters or people that fans want to see together, usually romantically) and using the data to deduce fandom trends. As someone who grew up on Tumblr, it was the perfect excuse for me to revisit old ships and contextualize how shipping, once a fringe activity in fandom, has grown to be a primary indicator of fan culture.

Data Source:

• Fanlore and Tumblr Fandometrics (2013-2022)

Tools:

• Jupyter Notebook + Pandas
• RawGraphs
• Figma + figma2html

• Destiel from Supernatural (2005-2020) consistently ranked in the Top 20 and hit #1 twice with 7 years in between
• Slash (M/M) ship accounted for more than half of the Top 20 ships collectively, followed by het (F/M) and femslash (F/F) ships
• Slash ships were overwhelmingly made up of non-canon pairings, while the opposite is true for het and femslash ships
• Most RPS (Real Person Slash) ships were of One Direction and BTS members. The cultural split between their respective eras of dominance is reflected clearly on the RPS chart.

This was a fun project! I loved the topic and was able to draw upon my own knowledge of this space to contextualize the findings. I would have liked to add some element of interactivity to the charts, like having the annotations triggered by scrolling and the different 'genres' of ships pop up at different times.