#and i'm saying that as a rufly shipper!

[terrainofheartfelt]

funny how gg 1x13 hinges on lily choosing between two men, when what she could have chosen....was neither.

[terrainofheartfelt]

out of curiosity, what are the readership numbers like for pairings like date or jennate that aren’t fully rare pairs the way haizen is, but aren’t dair/chair/serenate-tier either? outside of dair stories, which have gotten the most hits for you in the gg fandom?

It's hard to say. I mean, I'm not the data scientist in my friend group (though we do have one!), and I can really only go from what my ao3 stats are and what I know of my own information behavior as a fic reader.

my date fic with the highest amount of hits is 1.3k hits, and that is significantly less than the fics with the highest numbers. but, those high number fics - while all centered around dair, are long, multi-chaptered stories, and the date fic mentioned is a smut oneshot.

my big jenate fic has a pretty decent hit count of 1.1k, but I also tagged dair as a background ship, because they are present in the story, so a reader, though they don't seek out jenate fic on the reg, would see it in the dair tag and maybe take a glimpse at it.

And, when looking at the ao3-generated bar graph of stats on my most recent fic, my last four completed works are all oneshots of various fic genres, but 2 are strictly dan/nate, 1 is nate/dan/blair, and 1 is dair. The three non-dair oneshot have only about one-third of the hits that the dair oneshot received.

which is just to say, there's a lot of variables to compare, and while I love love love that ao3 has a statistics page for writers, the way to get that kind of granular data just is not readily available.

maybe is just because of my little fandom ecosystem, but there are more date shippers about that are reading and writing for that pairing, so I'd say that's my second most popular main ship with I write, but to be fair I have not written much outside of that.

but this discrepancy isn't only about ship to ship comparisions. fics that aren't romantic-ship-centric get significantly less hits. my all time lowest numbers are for character study oneshots that have nothign to do with said character's romantic relationships. (like I have one about jenny and my tattoo headcanons for her, and one that is JUST about dan & milo. only dan and milo. not date and milo or dair and milo).

but that makes sense, right? the tags that I have pinned to my ao3 homepage are ships, and that is typically how I browse. because GG has a wiiiiiiiide range of ship preferences, so the main tag has got to be pandemonium (that's also why I never check the main gg tag here on tumblr. if a post is good it will make it through S's peer review process <3). So, the only way *I* know about new fics that aren't about the ship tags that I have my eye on, is if one is written and posted by one of my writer subscriptions. aka, like all my mutuals [affectionate]

and maybe another reason is that dair is a very unifying kind of ship. It's sort of the umbrella under which many GG meta opinions fall, such as: Season 6 Is Fake; Dan Humphrey Is Not Gossip Girl (unless it's funny); Chuck Bass Is Terrible, Actually; She [insert name of any woman character here] Deserved Better; End the Girlbossification of Blair Waldorf; and Rufly is Endgame -- dair kind of intersects with all of those opinions, so it's sort of a gathering point for fandom. I know it was for me, and from there I've branched out into exploring so much more about this garbage fire of a teen soap [affectionate/derogatory]. Dair is perhaps the most universal of the non-canon GG ships, so it's a common point for many people, which could explain why, as a point of intersection, it gets more vested interest from fic writers and readers. And, speaking as a writer, it's easier for me to write dair because I know people will care about it, it's hard to put in the time for something - even if you love it and the idea - if you feel like it's not going to reach anyone.

But all that said, I don't think any of these circumstances are an overall Bad Thing. I mean, of course I would hope that if someone liked my dair fanfic enough they would like to read something about another ship, or maybe something i wrote that's not "about" a ship at all, but the lovely wonderful thing about ao3 is that you can construct your searches to your own preferences, you can choose to exclude themes and ships and tags that you don't want to read about, and in a fandom like this one where there are so many strong and polarizing preferences, it is so unbelievably nice that if you choose too, you can section yourself off from what you don't want to see, and explore what you do. And I too, am extremely picky about writing quality, if I click on a fic I want it to be good and take me out of my cynical head for a minute or two, so I tend to stick to writers that I know do really great work (and if I follow you then you are one of them that's just how that works <3)

I guess if there's a moral to the story it's: if there is a dair fic writer you love, check out their full list of works and see if there's something you missed because it wasn't in that tag, and if you like it, tell them! they will love it!