#I used to get concerned about Izzy ships being in the upper tiers of popularity

[chocolatepot]

A while back, when there was concurrent ship discourse on Twitter and Tumblr, I started looking at the AO3 statistics for OFMD to get a sense of what the actual proportions are of different ships. The basic stats are pretty clear from the sorting sidebar:

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet (12321)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Israel Hands (2269)

Black Pete/Lucius Spriggs (1561)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet/Israel Hands (1411)

Oluwande Boodhari/Jim Jimenez (1394)

Stede Bonnet/Israel Hands (976)

Israel Hands/Lucius Spriggs (839)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach & Israel Hands (677)

Israel Hands/"Calico" Jack Rackham (474)

Minor or Background Relationships (283) (label not appearing in pie chart)

However! There's a significant amount of overlap with some of these. Pete/Lucius and Jim/Olu are common side ships to Ed/Stede, for instance - 327 fics are tagged with only Ed/Stede and Pete/Lucius (23% of the Pete/Lucius tag), 195 fics are tagged with only Ed/Stede and Olu/Jim (14% of the Olu/Jim tag), and 749 fics are tagged with Ed/Stede, Pete/Lucius, and Olu/Jim (48% of the Pete/Lucius tag and 54% of the Olu/Jim tag).

It's also common for fics with Ed/Stede/Izzy to tag one or more of the two-person ships that make up the triad - 378 (27% of the Steddyhands total) include all four ships, and each of the side ships have 600-700 fics that overlap with Steddyhands in some way. As best as I can tell from careful inclusions and exclusions in the filters, there are 11,106 fics that are just Ed/Stede and not the other three, 1,113 that are just Ed/Izzy, 456 that are just Ed/Stede/Izzy, and 248 that are just Stede/Izzy.

So then I went in and tried to find the data for fics with each of the ships as the only pairing out of the group (italics indicate that the label wouldn't generate because the slice was so small, but this is the order they appear in in the chart):

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet (9294)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Israel Hands (898)

Black Pete/Lucius Spriggs (214)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet/Israel Hands (426)

Oluwande Boodhari/Jim Jimenez (320)

Stede Bonnet/Israel Hands (236)

Israel Hands/Lucius Spriggs (411)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach & Israel Hands (160)

Israel Hands/"Calico" Jack Rackham (279)

Minor or Background Relationships (31)

This isn't perfect - there's no way to filter main vs. background ships, so there's no way for me to differentiate between an Ed/Stede fic with Lucius/Pete and Olu/Jim tagged for background mentions and an Olu/Jim fic with Lucius Pete and Ed/Stede tagged for background mentions; there are also even smaller ships that come into play once I cropped out the heavy hitters. However, I think this data gives a clearer picture of authorial priorities on AO3.