On AO3, of the 4079 Fallout: New Vegas works today, 264 are Boone/Female Courier. That's the most popular relationship. (And my current OTP.) Boone/Male Courier is the 6th most popular and combined it'd be 359 Boone/Courier works, which would leave the 2nd place of Arcade/Male Courier firmly in the dust at 250 works.
359/4079 is 8.8%, well below the suggested rareness metric in![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisaintbc's Rarepair Hell Weekend post of less than 1/3 of the fandom's total content. However, I know from sad experience most of the Boone/Courier fics are actually just the first chapter of a novelisation where the Courier is only talking to Mitchell about the whole shot in the head thing and hasn't even met Boone yet.
If we count completed works only, there are 2987 total, and the new top pairing is Arcade/Male Courier with 181. But with 164 Boone/Female Courier (2nd place) and 68 Boone/Male Courier (7th) it would still be the top with 232 total. 232/2987 is 7.8%, which is less, as I expected, but still not a lot less.
Just from my impressions as a reader and general fan, I would say the big pairings are Boone/Courier, Arcade/Male Courier, Joshua/Female Courier, Benny/Female Courier and Vulpes/Female Courier. Apparently Veronica/Female Courier is also reasonably popular on AO3, which I wouldn't have expected at all - same with Arcade/Boone. Those always felt like rarepairs to me. Conversely, I'm surprised Ulysses/Female Courier isn't in the top 10. Veronica/Christine is more popular than that, and just outside that cutoff. That's one pretty much everyone ships, but not many write! Or few tag it at least, if maybe it's a common background feature.
I wonder if it's just because it's a video game fandom with a customisable character. Because we're not shy about OCs and all the new shipping dynamics they can provide, and because there isn't as much interaction between NPCs (when they're even on screen at all!) as there is between film/telly/book characters, we are inventing more than we're actually responding to. So the most popular ship might not end up being very popular at all.
Fallout 4 has romance in the game and its top 10 relationships all involve the player character, most of them with a character the game lets you romance (but also Nick and Maxson). There's a lot more works on AO3 (11009) and similar discrepancy between the most and least popular in the top 10, Hancock/Female Sole Survivor with 1100 and Piper/Female Sole Survivor with 429 (compared to Boone/Female Courier 265 and Benny/Courier 80)
Hancock/Female Sole Survivor has 10% of the fandom's works on AO3, which is more than any FNV ship, but the 2nd most popular is Danse/Female Sole Survivor which has 812 works, 7.4%, and is comparable. Add 230 Hancock/Male Sole Survivor for 1330 Hancock/Sole Survivor works and a whopping 12.1% of the fandom which... is still not very many! 331 Danse/Male Sole Survivor works makes 1143 total, which is 10.4%.
Fallout 3 like FNV doesn't have romance, but it has two clear favourites in Butch and Charon, who take up the first 6 entries in the top 10 by being shipped with female, unspecified and male Lone Wanderers. There are 2163 works total and 286 and 285 respectively of Butch/Female Lone Wanderer and Charon/Female Lone Wanderer, which is 13.2% each. Including /Male Lone Wanderers but ignoring the unspecified, that's 371 Charon/Lone Wanderer and 361 Butch/Lone Wanderer works which makes them the closest thing Fallout has to juggernaut ships with 17.1% and 16.7% each! But, we'd have to add them together to get something with more than 1/3 of the works in a fandom, and it would literally be right on the cusp.
Unlike in FNV with its Courier/Boone & Courier/Arcade preference alongside its Arcade/Boone preference, Butch/Charon isn't a thing. Actually there's only one fic with anything close, which is a Butch/Male Lone Wanderer/Charon fic! Hancock/Danse is reasonably popular though, though it has nothing like the popularity of the two shipped with the Sole Survivor.
(I'm realising I need to ask the tag wranglers about the Lone Wanderer, Courier and Sole Survivor tags. I never checked those before, but I managed to get Natalia Dubrovhsky > Female Vault Dweller > Vault Dweller set up which I'm still inordinately pleased about considering I still haven't finished the Natalia/Ian fic I was writing then which made me look it up. I'm sure I heard somewhere that they plan to not even make new sex-specific player character tags, which I'm actually really against, but in any case the umbrella tag should work like one. Chosen One seems to work okay, too!)
Fallout 1 & 2 are hardly worth doing the sums for. Fallout 2 has 129 works on AO3. Its ships? Well, in the top 10, the first is 12 Female Chosen One&Lenny fics all written by the same person. Discounting friendships isn't enough. They're mostly ships from other games! The ones that aren't are 6 Female Chosen One/Lenny fics all written by the & person too, and good for her, but this is about as solidly rarepair territory as you can get, when you're the only one writing! Otherwise we have 5 Female Chosen One/Joanne Lynette fics, 4 of which are again written by the champion of FO2 shipfic on AO3, and 4 Chosen One/Miria fics, 2 of which are written by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
owlaholic68 who really deserves a shoutout at this point, one by ME!!!!! but one by an entirely separate person.
And Fallout 2 has loads of characters, including 2 you can marry (Miria or her brother Davin) in what I think is the first potentially same-sex marriage in a game? But nobody is making things about these ships, or maybe just not adding them to AO3.
Fallout 1 has 88 works. We have other Fallout game relationships in the top 10 again, but our number one ship is Female Vault Dweller/Pat (which is funny really because 1. this comes from the Fallout 2 intro and 2. it's immediately shit upon by the Fallout 2 intro which retroactively insists the Vault Dweller was male. It's like a Fallout 2 thing we ship because of and in spite of Fallout 2!) There are 10, 8 by one person and 2 by others (my Natalia Dubrovhsky/Pat fic isn't counted...) Next, 8 Killian/Male Vault Dweller fics all by one person. And the only other Fallout 1 ship on the top 10 is Katja/Vault Dweller with 5 fics, 2 by one person.
So, I don't think there's any metric at all that could identify Fallout rarepairs. We can't even say less than 10 fics or something because some people have been so productive with their one person ship. Same with fanart - for example, there's one really great Natalia/Ian fanartist (![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
partialvolume / refinedstorage) and like, nobody else. Part of this will be age - FO1 turns 25 this year and FO2 is only a year younger, and FO3 and FNV both came out after AO3, but only FNV came out after it went into open beta, and the site was still in its very early days then. But, you would imagine that it's all recent enough that people would have been importing old works, so who knows?
I guess with small fandoms like these, that are still very definitely fandoms with active fans making fanworks (as opposed to like, the book you wanted fanfic of and literally nobody has ever written any) it's difficult to draw lines, but I think it's also how OC-centric everything is making everything more diverse. It makes it harder to find what you're looking for, but maybe more interesting in general because you're encouraged to browse by character or even fandom more often, and you find new ships (this is how I got into Arcade/Vulpes...). It also encourages people to make their own fanworks because of necessity, but I wonder if that's swings and roundabouts, and as many people aren't happy about shipping into the void. Which makes me think that maybe yeah, it's all rarepairs! With all the pros and cons that they have.
Nevertheless, I would feel ridiculous calling Boone/Courier a rarepair. I have a tumblr devoted to it (and Boone in general) and there's loads of fanart for me to feature, a fair amount of discussions that I don't start, and plenty of fic on AO3 - again, it's literally the most popular FNV ship on AO3. But I'm still over the fucking moon when I meet another Boone/Courier shipper - or even if I find their abandoned blog, their 5 year unfinished fic.
I have some super rare Fallout rarepairs, mostly FNV. 2/3 of the FNV ones would get brand new AO3 tags when I publish HTTWSB if I weren't planning to upload the whole thing as one fic (after this discussion) and probably just tag it as Boone/Courier, Arcade&Courier, Arcade&Boone, Arcade/Manny, Veronica/Christine. Which is painful to me because everyone there but Boone literally gets shipped with at least one more person within the story (technically so does Boone...), but what can you do?
359/4079 is 8.8%, well below the suggested rareness metric in
thisaintbc's Rarepair Hell Weekend post of less than 1/3 of the fandom's total content. However, I know from sad experience most of the Boone/Courier fics are actually just the first chapter of a novelisation where the Courier is only talking to Mitchell about the whole shot in the head thing and hasn't even met Boone yet.If we count completed works only, there are 2987 total, and the new top pairing is Arcade/Male Courier with 181. But with 164 Boone/Female Courier (2nd place) and 68 Boone/Male Courier (7th) it would still be the top with 232 total. 232/2987 is 7.8%, which is less, as I expected, but still not a lot less.
Just from my impressions as a reader and general fan, I would say the big pairings are Boone/Courier, Arcade/Male Courier, Joshua/Female Courier, Benny/Female Courier and Vulpes/Female Courier. Apparently Veronica/Female Courier is also reasonably popular on AO3, which I wouldn't have expected at all - same with Arcade/Boone. Those always felt like rarepairs to me. Conversely, I'm surprised Ulysses/Female Courier isn't in the top 10. Veronica/Christine is more popular than that, and just outside that cutoff. That's one pretty much everyone ships, but not many write! Or few tag it at least, if maybe it's a common background feature.
I wonder if it's just because it's a video game fandom with a customisable character. Because we're not shy about OCs and all the new shipping dynamics they can provide, and because there isn't as much interaction between NPCs (when they're even on screen at all!) as there is between film/telly/book characters, we are inventing more than we're actually responding to. So the most popular ship might not end up being very popular at all.
Fallout 4 has romance in the game and its top 10 relationships all involve the player character, most of them with a character the game lets you romance (but also Nick and Maxson). There's a lot more works on AO3 (11009) and similar discrepancy between the most and least popular in the top 10, Hancock/Female Sole Survivor with 1100 and Piper/Female Sole Survivor with 429 (compared to Boone/Female Courier 265 and Benny/Courier 80)
Hancock/Female Sole Survivor has 10% of the fandom's works on AO3, which is more than any FNV ship, but the 2nd most popular is Danse/Female Sole Survivor which has 812 works, 7.4%, and is comparable. Add 230 Hancock/Male Sole Survivor for 1330 Hancock/Sole Survivor works and a whopping 12.1% of the fandom which... is still not very many! 331 Danse/Male Sole Survivor works makes 1143 total, which is 10.4%.
Fallout 3 like FNV doesn't have romance, but it has two clear favourites in Butch and Charon, who take up the first 6 entries in the top 10 by being shipped with female, unspecified and male Lone Wanderers. There are 2163 works total and 286 and 285 respectively of Butch/Female Lone Wanderer and Charon/Female Lone Wanderer, which is 13.2% each. Including /Male Lone Wanderers but ignoring the unspecified, that's 371 Charon/Lone Wanderer and 361 Butch/Lone Wanderer works which makes them the closest thing Fallout has to juggernaut ships with 17.1% and 16.7% each! But, we'd have to add them together to get something with more than 1/3 of the works in a fandom, and it would literally be right on the cusp.
Unlike in FNV with its Courier/Boone & Courier/Arcade preference alongside its Arcade/Boone preference, Butch/Charon isn't a thing. Actually there's only one fic with anything close, which is a Butch/Male Lone Wanderer/Charon fic! Hancock/Danse is reasonably popular though, though it has nothing like the popularity of the two shipped with the Sole Survivor.
(I'm realising I need to ask the tag wranglers about the Lone Wanderer, Courier and Sole Survivor tags. I never checked those before, but I managed to get Natalia Dubrovhsky > Female Vault Dweller > Vault Dweller set up which I'm still inordinately pleased about considering I still haven't finished the Natalia/Ian fic I was writing then which made me look it up. I'm sure I heard somewhere that they plan to not even make new sex-specific player character tags, which I'm actually really against, but in any case the umbrella tag should work like one. Chosen One seems to work okay, too!)
Fallout 1 & 2 are hardly worth doing the sums for. Fallout 2 has 129 works on AO3. Its ships? Well, in the top 10, the first is 12 Female Chosen One&Lenny fics all written by the same person. Discounting friendships isn't enough. They're mostly ships from other games! The ones that aren't are 6 Female Chosen One/Lenny fics all written by the & person too, and good for her, but this is about as solidly rarepair territory as you can get, when you're the only one writing! Otherwise we have 5 Female Chosen One/Joanne Lynette fics, 4 of which are again written by the champion of FO2 shipfic on AO3, and 4 Chosen One/Miria fics, 2 of which are written by
And Fallout 2 has loads of characters, including 2 you can marry (Miria or her brother Davin) in what I think is the first potentially same-sex marriage in a game? But nobody is making things about these ships, or maybe just not adding them to AO3.
Fallout 1 has 88 works. We have other Fallout game relationships in the top 10 again, but our number one ship is Female Vault Dweller/Pat (which is funny really because 1. this comes from the Fallout 2 intro and 2. it's immediately shit upon by the Fallout 2 intro which retroactively insists the Vault Dweller was male. It's like a Fallout 2 thing we ship because of and in spite of Fallout 2!) There are 10, 8 by one person and 2 by others (my Natalia Dubrovhsky/Pat fic isn't counted...) Next, 8 Killian/Male Vault Dweller fics all by one person. And the only other Fallout 1 ship on the top 10 is Katja/Vault Dweller with 5 fics, 2 by one person.
So, I don't think there's any metric at all that could identify Fallout rarepairs. We can't even say less than 10 fics or something because some people have been so productive with their one person ship. Same with fanart - for example, there's one really great Natalia/Ian fanartist (
I guess with small fandoms like these, that are still very definitely fandoms with active fans making fanworks (as opposed to like, the book you wanted fanfic of and literally nobody has ever written any) it's difficult to draw lines, but I think it's also how OC-centric everything is making everything more diverse. It makes it harder to find what you're looking for, but maybe more interesting in general because you're encouraged to browse by character or even fandom more often, and you find new ships (this is how I got into Arcade/Vulpes...). It also encourages people to make their own fanworks because of necessity, but I wonder if that's swings and roundabouts, and as many people aren't happy about shipping into the void. Which makes me think that maybe yeah, it's all rarepairs! With all the pros and cons that they have.
Nevertheless, I would feel ridiculous calling Boone/Courier a rarepair. I have a tumblr devoted to it (and Boone in general) and there's loads of fanart for me to feature, a fair amount of discussions that I don't start, and plenty of fic on AO3 - again, it's literally the most popular FNV ship on AO3. But I'm still over the fucking moon when I meet another Boone/Courier shipper - or even if I find their abandoned blog, their 5 year unfinished fic.
I have some super rare Fallout rarepairs, mostly FNV. 2/3 of the FNV ones would get brand new AO3 tags when I publish HTTWSB if I weren't planning to upload the whole thing as one fic (after this discussion) and probably just tag it as Boone/Courier, Arcade&Courier, Arcade&Boone, Arcade/Manny, Veronica/Christine. Which is painful to me because everyone there but Boone literally gets shipped with at least one more person within the story (technically so does Boone...), but what can you do?
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Date: Sunday, 26 June 2022 16:41 (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, 26 June 2022 17:10 (UTC)