High-level stats for week of 2025-04-22 - 2025-04-28

• Total works categorized F/F on AO3: 9673 (-628 from last week)


• Works I classified F/F: 5451 (-374 from last week) (2361 new, 3090 continued)


• 0.62% of all 880609 AO3 works I've classified F/F were updated this week

A few callouts this week:

• I still find it a little surprising that Wheel of Time has never been on the chart before, but it's doing well now, reaching a new best-ever rank of 13 in its second chart-week.
  
• She-Ra returns after a week away, and Alien Stage returns after a month away. They replace Murder Drones and The 100.
  
• Addams Family celebrates 130 consecutive weeks on the chart, and Project SEKAI COLORFUL STAGE! hits a tidy 150 consecutive weeks.
  
• Toothpastepancake writes that the femgiftboxes gifting community is looking for fills for a few last prompts before reveals on May 15. If you have a little time to help out, check that out.
  

Most active classified fandoms:

What is all this again?

Mission statement: help out people (including myself) who read fic on AO3 and wish they were reading more femslash, but don't know what's out there. Plan: do a week-in-review post every week which contains general stats about new fic and a few recs.

I am starting with the list of all works on ao3.org which were updated within a given week, and which were categorized as F/F, but I am not reporting stats on 100% of those works --- I'm narrowing down to a subset of fandoms and works for which it's tractable for me to actually look at all the character tags, and then I'm excluding ships containing what I believe to be cis-male characters. I'll give overall stats about how many works I've reported on and how many I've excluded. If you think I'm excluding a fandom you care about, please let me know!

More info about column headers:

• Fandom (and top three ships): If multiple tags that seem to correspond to the same fandom (e.g. "The 100 (TV)" and "The 100 Series - Kass Morgan") show up in my ranking, I report the one with the best rating. There's totally a judgment call here about what things are "the same fandom" --- I'm going to err on the side of reporting more different things when I can, but I won't skip something with a lot of works which aren't otherwise accounted for. When measuring the top three F/F ships in a fandom, I count both "A/B" and "A & B" as "A,B". Ties are broken by including all of the ships, but I only include a maximum of five ships per fandom to keep the table length reasonable.


• Rating for week: This is the number of works I classified as F/F, multiplied by what I call "F/F fidelity", which is the fraction of all works tagged F/F on AO3 that I classified as containing at least one F/F ship.


• F/F/ works updated this week: includes both new and continued works.


• % of F/F works updated this week: This is the percentage of all F/F works I've ever categorized in the fandom, so a big number probably means a brand new fandom, or at least one which was unusually active this week.


• F/F:M/M ratio (all works): This ratio is taken from all works in the fandom tag, and is just a hint to readers about how F/F-dominant the fandom is. Obviously there's no reason you can't find great F/F works in a predominantly male fandom (we've all read those), but the ratio may give a hint about whether the F/F pairing is likely to be the dominant one in a work with multiple pairings. Note that the "F/F" and "M/M" numbers for this column are taken directly from AO3, not from my compiled character and ship stats. (Since I don't categorize M/M works, I couldn't do it any other way.)

Known bugs which affect the accuracy of this data:

• AO3 does not modify the "last updated" date of a work in a revealed exchange when the exchange reveals, so my database can miss exchange works entirely if they're last edited awhile before the exchange works are revealed. This probably leads to a serious undercount of works in revealed exchanges.

Share and enjoy, and let me know what I can do to make this more useful.