Dear Toast, I was reading something someone told me the other day. And he said said that non-canon ships tend to have more fics and material in their fandoms than the canon pairings. Would you say that there is any truth to this? For an example, I consider that in the Daredevil Netflix fandom, I feel there’s about twice as many fics of Kastle (Karen/Frank), a non-canon and unlikely-to-become-canon pairing, as there are fics about Matt/Karen and Matt/Elektra (canon pairings) combined.
Sorry to answer so belatedly! I suspect this is often the case, in part because there’s so much more left for fans to imagine and invent for non-canon ships. (Not that they can’t write fix-its when a ship is canon, but I believe that’s rarer.) However, I have no numbers to back this up, because I analyze tags, and most people don’t tag whether the ship in their story is canonical.
Edit: for your specific example, there are 1161 Frank/Karen works (904 of those in Daredevil– others in a related Marvel fandom), vs. 361 Matt/Karen works (353 in Daredevil) and 262 Matt/Elektra works (240 in Daredevil). So the difference is even bigger than you thought there!
I was thinking about this the other day actually, and while this is by no means a perfect measurement, I used @centrumluminaAo3 stats to look at
canon vs non-canon
in the top 20 M/M, F/M, and F/F ships.
(Obvious
disclaimer
that having more data would yield better
analysis and that Ao3 isn’t the be all and end all of fandom, it’s just
one of the many platforms people use to engage with fandom.)
M/M – 18 non-canon, 2 canon
F/M
– 3 non-canon, 17 canon
F/F
– 9 non-canon, 11 canon
I think there are a lot of reasons some canon/non-canon ships might be more popular than others in a fandom, including what
Toast
mentioned above. In general I get the impression that M/M ships don’t swear by canon as much, and that likely comes down to having being built on a foundation of older slash fandom from the 70s/80s/90s that didn’t have much canon rep going for it in mainstream media.
F/M
ships on the other hand have tons of
rep in mainstream media! So it makes sense that canon ships would rise in popularity there as fans are likely already invested in a couple they’re being presented.
F/F ships have a bit of both
approaches – while being smaller than slash fandom, femslash fandom of the 80s/90s didn’t swear by canon either
and made do with reading between the lines for subtext. However as more F/F couples are introduced in
mainstream media
those tend to be the ships people are most
invested
in and thus more fanworks!
tldr: slash never cared about canon, het has always had an abundance of canon, femslash never cared about canon but likes all these new canon ships it’s getting.
Ooh, awesome! Thanks! 😀
Another great point came in from @coaldustcanary – the canon to non-canon ratio is probably very different on FFN, where het fic is predominant.
Molly's Monsters 