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big-trouble-in-little-eldia · 1 year

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A deep dive into AO3′s Bertolt Hoover shipping tags

I got bored and I like making lists and excel sheets, so I went ahead and mined all the data from the various Bertholdt relationships that exist on AO3. The resulting statistics and graphs are quite interesting, so I want to share them!

To start, I went to AO3′s tag search page, searched for every ship that contains Bertholdt OR Bertolt, picked the Relationship category, selected Canon and Non-Canon, and sorted by chronological ascending so that they would show up in the order in which they were created.

Then, I went ahead and collected the following data:

The canonical ship name

Characters involved

Type (romantic or platonic)

Genders involved

Number of characters in the ship

Number of fics in the tag

The order in which they were created

A link to the works and tag page

The number of G, T, M, E, and Not Rated fics

In doing so, I ignored synonym ships. Half of all of Bertholdt’s current 525 ship tags are variations on Reiner/Bertholdt. I’ve only catalogued the canon tag, or if that was missing, the most canon spelling.

Then, I went ahead and created some tables to count totals and other numbers that seemed interesting.

Important to note is that the total number of fics isn’t an accurate sum of total fics that are on the archive. For example, if a single fic is tagged with both “Armin Arlert/Bertolt Hoover” and “Armin Arlert & Bertolt Hoover”, then this fic will represent itself twice in the data. The numbers are more to be taken as relative: how many fics contain this ship tag and how does that compare to other ships?

I went with ships because these are the easiest way to ensure that the fic is at least a little bit about Bertholdt. Most fics that tag him have him in the background or he doesn’t even show up in them. When at least one relationship with him is tagged, the odds that he’s relevant in the fic increase by a lot. The number of fics that have him as a main character but that don’t tag him in any relationships is rather insignificant, so this is the best way to go through Bertholdt fics and collect some data.

You can find the full sheet here. Data was captured on the 8th of January 2023. The newest ship tag at the time was Bertolt Hoover/Onyankopon and I will likely not update these stats since it’s quite a bit of work. Unless some really bad life decisions lead me to still be in this fandom in five years and data has shifted enough to see an evolution.

Find the full sheet with data here.

Let’s go through the data!

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Number of fics

When sorted by size, these are the ships with the most fics:

Reiner Braun/Bertolt Hoover (2666)

Bertolt Hoover/Annie Leonhart (465)

Bertolt Hoover/You (310)

Reiner Braun & Bertolt Hoover (300)

Reiner Braun & Bertolt Hoover & Annie Leonhart (275)

Reiner Braun/Bertolt Hoover/Annie Leonhart (125)

Armin Arlert/Bertolt Hoover (75)

Bertolt Hoover & Annie Leonhart (63)

Bertolt Hoover/Eren Yeager (61)

Bertolt Hoover/Original Character(s) (59)

Bertolt Hoover/Jean Kirstein (58)

Marco Bott/Bertolt Hoover (55)

Bertolt Hoover & Reader (40)

Armin Arlert & Bertolt Hoover (32)

Sasha Blouse/Bertolt Hoover (30)

Reiner Braun & Pieck Finger & Marcel Galliard & Porco Galliard & Bertolt Hoover & Annie Leonhart (29)

Reiner Braun/Bertolt Hoover/Reader (25)

Mikasa Ackerman/Bertolt Hoover (23)

Porco Galliard/Bertolt Hoover (23)

Bertolt Hoover/Ymir (20)

Not unexpected that RBA ships and reader ships are at the top, considering the former has always been popular and the latter is a large trend at the moment.

I was surprised that Bertholdt/Armin is the largest rarepair considering that when I first got into this ship in September of 2020, there were about 20 fics in this tag and over half of them were either crack, didn’t contain them, or had them as background characters. It’s nice to see it boom!

Ships with Eren, Jean, and Marco are one of the first Bertholdt ship tags to be created on AO3. They used to be popular in the early days but are quieter in recent years due to a shift in character spotlight.

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Characters

Ships

The following graph shows how many Bertholdt ships each character is a part of.

Reiner, Annie, Marco, Jean, Eren, Marcel, Armin, and Reader take up the top spots for characters who appear in the most ships.

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Fics ‎

When you bring in how many fics are tagged with a ship containing each character, the view becomes quite skewed.

Because of the sheer number of Reiner/Bertholdt fics, Reiner racks in 3530 fics, representing 65,8% of all Bertholdt fics. Annie comes in second at 996 fics or 18,4% and Reader is third with 310 or 5,7% of fics.

To give a more representative overview of the other ships, Reiner, Annie, and Reader’s data were removed from this graph.

Armin (122 fics), Jean (115 fics), Marco (106), and Eren (100) are notably higher than the rest.

In the second grouped tier, we have Porco (63), OC (58), Marcel (54), Sasha (48), Pieck (41), Ymir (41), and Mikasa (27).

In the third, we have Erwin (17), Connie (14), Historia (10), Levi (7), Gabi (5), Colt (4), Hange (4), Zeke (3), The Colossal Titan (2), and Mina (2).

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Romantic vs Platonic

The table shows some interesting data. Let’s look at that as graphs.

An interesting number when it comes down to ships: 41,6% of all ships on AO3 are platonic ships (&) and 58,4% are romantic (/). However, this also shows that the number of ships can deviate wildly from the number of fics:

If you look at the bulk of fics that are associated with a romantic Bertholdt ship, suddenly that number becomes 16,7% platonic vs 83,3% romantic.

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Fic Rating

A fic can only have one rating. There are five ratings available:

G, or General Audiences, for fics that can be read by anyone

T, or Teens and Up, for fics that contain slightly more mature themes

M, or Mature, for fics that contain mature themes or mild sexual content

E, or Explicit, for fics that contain explicit sexual content, violence, or gore

Not Rated, for when the author doesn’t think the fic fits neatly within one category and they leave it open

For every ship, I went ahead and counted how many fics there are in each category. Check out the full sheet for every ship’s percentages.

First off, the number of ships that have at least one fic per rating. For example, G’s 50 means that 50 different ships have at least one fic that is rated G.

Interestingly enough, E is the most represented rating among the differing ships, followed by T, then M, G, and Not Rated. But the statistics are generally well-balanced.

Second: the number of fics that are tagged with each rating.

In terms of fic representation:

T > M > E > G > Not Rated

Note that just because a fic is rated E, that doesn’t mean that the content of that warning applies to the Bertholdt ship, for example when they’re tagged as a side ship in another character’s ship.

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Number of partners

General

Most ships (41,6%) consist of Bertholdt and one other person. 30,4% has two other people, 13,6% has three other people, 4% four, 2,4% six, and 8% can’t be counted because the character can be plural, for example Original Character(s).

Despite the decent number of 3+ partner ships, an overwhelming majority of fics is about mono ships, namely 86,7%. 9,3% is three partners, 0,9% four, 0,1% five, 0,6% six, and 2,5% can’t be counted.

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Romantic

Looking at solely romantic ships, there is a notable increase in 3 partner ships.

Percentage-wise, the number of fics for mono ships is even higher than in the global numbers. Mono ships represent 92% of all romantic Bertholdt fics. Three partner fics are 4,7%, four are 0,6%, five and six are both 0,02%, and 2,6% can’t be classified.

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Platonic

There is a notably small amount of 3+ platonic ships compared to the others.

However, the number of fics that contain a friendship between three characters is higher. Two platonic partners accounts for 60,5% of all platonic fics, three for 32%, four for 2,1%, five for 0,3%, six for 3,3%, and others for 0,4%. The uptick in six characters is probably due to the number of RBAMPP fics.

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Ship composition

Romantic

M/M, M/M/M, M/F, and M/M/F have the largest amount of ships.

There are more M/M romantic ships than there are M/F ones. Notable is how the number of M/M ‎fics is about 5x higher than the number of M/F fics. Only one M/X ship and two fics exist.

When it comes to ships with a total of three partners, a funny pattern emerges. While M/M/F only have about the third of the amount of ships that M/M/M has, it has almost 3x the amount of fics because of M/M/M. M/F/F has only one fic, which goes to his ship with Ymir and Historia.

Looking at 4+ partners, there aren’t many ships. Still, despite being represented by only two ships, M/M/M/M sticks out above the rest, which is due to RBJM being paired pretty often.

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Platonic

2M, MF, 3M, and 2MF are the largest platonic ships.

The gap between MM and MF ships is smaller for platonic ships than for romantic ones. Still, M&M dominates in terms of fics, with almost 4x the amount of fics compared to M&F.

3+ platonic partner ships show a large skew due to RBA ships as well: 278 fics are M&M&F and the next highest number is M&M&M&M&F&F, mostly inhabited by respectively RBA and RBAMPP. That’s almost 10x as many fics as the next item! Hence why it’s been removed from the graph.

Notable is that there is no RBAMPPZ relationship yet.

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I kinda of lost the plot at this point and have run out of information to showcase

If there’s anything else you’d like me to make a graph out of, I’d love to do so. I can pretty much compare every data point against every other data point.

(Go and populate the smaller ship tags!)

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