#(real question that i will tackle!! next time on cleb looks too long at ao3 numbers!!)

[byooregard]

The Not-Really-Official Mighty Nein Ao3 Ship Stonks

[image id: a graph showing the popularity of various critical role campaign two ships on ao3 over the course of campaign 2 /end id]

Anyways! I decided to go through all the fics written in the Critical Role tag from the start of Campaign 2 to the end, and see how the general shipping landscape has changed throughout the campaign!

I gathered together the most popular (to my knowledge) cr2 ships on Ao3 and looked at the numbers month by month (I wish I could have done it weekly, but that would have been simply too much) to put together a spreadsheet and a bunch of graphs!

I’ll include a link to my whole google sheet on this in a reblog, because the last time I did something similar for Vox Machina, tumblr ate it and I got like 7 notes for all my hard work.

More graphs (I made individual ones for each pairing for readability) and a bit of me talking about the stuff I found out under the cut

[Image id: a similar graph to the one above, but where the top one shows fic numbers by month, this graph shows cumulative numbers /end id]

Here’s a cumulative graph of the same thing as the one on the top of this post. It’s easier to read than the first one, but it doesn’t show how different ships gained and lost popularity over time nearly as well.

Onto the Ships! (Pardon the obvious extent to which I’ve been paying more attention to some ships than others and the gaps in info that come from such. This is just a project I did for fun, so my data analysis skills are far from perfect. However, if you know more than me and would like to provide insight, please do!)

[image id: a bar graph of how many Beau/Yasha fics have been posted to Ao3, month by month from January 2018 to June 2021 /end id]

Beauyasha  is currently the ship with the most fics in the Critical Role Ao3 tag (let’s go lesbians!!), with 1849 total fics, as of yesterday, July 15th, 2021. This seems to come from having a steady fic production over all of the campaign rather than being particularly popular right at this moment.

The most noticeable things here are how the fic count climbs slowly until after July 2018, when it drops off. I suspect this is because at that point in the campaign, Yasha had been gone for a bit and was gonna be gone for a while, so people lost interest in the ship. The second big jump is in May 2021, which is when Beauyasha week is hosted. Beauyasha week has been going on since 2020, if i remember correctly, but it didn’t cause enough of a jump in fic making to be noticeable back in 2019. You can also see how fics generally rose in numbers after hiatus and towards the end of the campaign as Beau and Yasha were looking more and more like they were gonna become canon/endgame (and eventually did).

[image id: a bar graph similar to the one above, this one cataloguing the number of Fjord/Caduceus fics over Campaign 2 /end id]

This ship is definitely the least popular one I’ve got here, and looking back I could have gone without including it, but I did all this data collection, so, oh well.

Notable points on here: Cad appears in July 2018, in episode 28, there are a few Fjord/Caduceus fics. I assume this is because of fandom doing as fandom does and shipping new characters with other characters as soon as they appear. Nothing much interesting happens till June-December 2019, which iirc is when most of the Angel of Irons arc and Fjord’s leaving Uk’otoa + joining the Wildmother arc is. The highest numbers are in April 2020, when Fjorclay week was held, and things drop off almost entirely soon after Cad is confirmed to be aroace in ep 114, in late November 2020.

[image id: another bar graph, similar to the bar graphs above, this one showcasing Ao3 numbers for Essek/Caleb]

This is the most fun one to me, partly because I’m incredibly biased, and partly because you can really see a lot of plot points in the show in the fic numbers here. If you look at the top graph with all the ships together, you can see that Shadowgast was the most popular ship by the end of the campaign in terms of people creating content for it currently, despite still being under Beauyasha and Widomauk in total numbers. (This makes sense, as both others have almost a 60 episode head-start.) (It’s probably still the most popular now, but i didn’t collect anything for July.)

There’s nothing from when Essek appears in episode 57 in early April. There’s a relatively big spike in fics from April to May, when Caleb rolls a 12 on persuasion and Essek teaches him some spells, despite the low roll. Stuff is relatively steady till a big uptick in fics in March 2020 (Episode 97 aired right at the end of February). The next big spike is in April, which is when Essek joined the Mighty Nein in Aeor, and after that in May, when Shadowgast Week was held. (Like Beauyasha, Shadowgast week has been going since 2020, but there wasn’t a noticeable enough spike in fics in 2020 to point out.)

[image id: another bar graph, similar to the bar graphs above, this one showcasing Ao3 numbers for Fjord/Caleb]

This is the point at which my bias shows (again, technically); I don’t really follow any people who were big Widofjord shippers while I knew them, so I have a harder time pointing out interesting things here. This ship has remained pretty consistent throughout the whole run of the Mighty Nein, being a bit more popular at the beginning (from what Liam said in the campaign wrap-up, I guess people were picking up on vibes pretty well.)

The biggest noticeable upticks are in February 2018, when I can’t remember anything interesting happening, though I will admit that I watched early Campaign 2 very long ago, and I don’t tend to notice things being romantic unless they’re directly pointed out. The next big spike in fics is in December 2018, when Fjord and Caleb make the blood pact at Divers Grave. The month with the most fics written is June 2019, when Widofjord week was held. I’m unsure if the week happened again, as there doesn’t seem to be much going on until July 2020. I’m unsure if this is because something happened in July or if it was just the campaign starting up again after hiatus.

[image id: another bar graph, similar to the bar graphs above, this one showcasing Ao3 numbers for Fjord/Jester]

Fjorester!! Out of the three ‘endgame’ ships of Campaign 2, this one is the lowest for total fics on Ao3. In terms of growing popularity, it’s not nearly at the levels of Beauyasha or Shadowgast, but it’s still a good deal higher than any others.

The ship goes pretty steady through most of the campaign, with a bit of a drop after December 2018, which I imagine is because of Jester dropping her initial flirting with Fjord. It ticks up a lot after the hiatus, when Fjorester looks like it’s heading for canon status, and goes up a lot when Fjord and Jester kiss in Episode 118 in December. The last point at which there are a lot of fics is June 2021, which is when Fjorester week is held. (Fjorester week has been going since 2019, but the first one was in late March through early April, and there seems to be none that I can find in 2020)

[image id: another bar graph, similar to the bar graphs above, this one showcasing Ao3 numbers for Beau/Jester]

Beaujester! I can’t think of a lot of interesting things to say about this ship outside of the graph.... It was pretty popular around the middle of the campaign, dropping off till the end when it doesn’t become canon.

Moments here: the highest point is in July 2019, when Beau wears one of Jester’s dresses. If I remember correctly, there were also a few things leading up to that point which could be read as pretty romantic (though Beaujester was definetly a ship in my general circle so I’m somewhat biased on that). In November 2019, fic output jumps up again, as this is when Beau tells Nott about her crush on Jester, in episode 84. Beaujester week is also held in November. There’s a bit of decline before July and August 2020, which I imagine brings numbers up again half because of how Travelercon centered around Jester and also half because the campaign started again after hiatus. Numbers drop off after that as it looks a lot more like Beauyasha and Fjorester are going to become canon over Beaujester.

[image id: another bar graph, similar to the bar graphs above, this one showcasing Ao3 numbers for Caleb/Jester]

Note again that I don’t know anyone who ships Widojest, so I don’t see a lot of it on my dash, ergo I don’t know a lot about it. But! It’s the highest non-canon ship on ao3 under Widomauk, with 1108 fics (as of yesterday), which is quite a lot.

The first notable spike is around December 2018. I can’t seem to pinpoint a moment that caused this? When I asked people on Discord, they thought it was perhaps because Jester sorta dropped her crush on Fjord around then. It makes sense that people might take that as an opportunity to turn to other pairings. The two biggest spikes in this graph are in July 2019, and July 2020, which, as you’ve probably guessed, is when Widojest week is held. Other than that, numbers have been pretty consistent throughout the campaign.

[image id: another bar graph, similar to the bar graphs above, this one showcasing Ao3 numbers for Caleb/Molly]

And here we are at the end of our ship graphs! Widomauk is still the 2nd most popular CR ship on Ao3, with 1725 fics (as of yesterday), and it actually held the top spot for quite a while, despite Molly having been dead for most of that time.

The fics go up in numbers pretty fast from February 2018 (which is when Molly kisses Caleb’s forehead in the gnoll mines in episode 7). They get really high around July 2018, when Molly dies, but go down a bit after that. I’d assume this is most likely because people figured out that Molly probably wasn’t coming back, and the big uptick in fics was half people dealing with Molly’s death and half people writing rez ritual fics and the like, though that’s just speculation. Fics go up in June 2019 because of Widomauk week (I couldn’t find any evidence to Widomauk week happening more than once). There’s an uptick in December 2020, which is around the time that the Tomb Takers start traveling with the Mighty Nein for a bit.

Now for some other things:

[id: 5 sets of photos of the drop-down ‘relationships’ list you can find when filtering a tag in Ao3. They’re labeled ‘top relationships, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and all time,’. Each shows a slightly different assortment and order of Critical Role pairings, romantic and platonic. /end id]

(Sorry about how tumblr absolutely butchers my image quality by the way, you’ll be able to see all these way better in the sheet I’ll link in the reblog.)

Anyways, here’s the top relationships in the CR tag on Ao3 for each year of Campaign 2′s run. Note that these take into account only things written in that year, not things written up till and through that year. It’s pretty cool to look and see how different things have become popular through the years, and I think this best illustrates how what ao3 currently shows as the most popular relationships isn’t a reflection of the current most popular pairings.

Anyways, that’s all I have to say in this tumblr post! As I said, I’m gonna link the google sheet I have all of this on in a reblog, which includes:

the actual numbers in spreadsheet form

all the graphs pictured here, but in readable definition, and actually working (hover over lines to highlight them, and click on points to see the actual numbers)

and a few more notes on when all the important shippy moments happened throughout the campaign next to the numbers

So, at the risk of sounding like I’m telling you to go over to watch the show on Twitch for a live community moderated chat, if you’re interested, you should probably look at my spreadsheet because I spent so long working on it, please!

Also if you like this please talk to me about it! Again, I spent a ridiculous amount of time working on it and I will likely do something like this again whether or not people like it (but if people give me validation I’ll do it.... more? faster? something like that.)