#dont tempt me to make a graph bc i will waste my time going through shit to actually get the number's

[hordeofcorvids]

I haven't been actively tracking it. But I enjoy reading chronologically through ship tags (for which my friends call me a psychopath but i digress) and I've been going through Kirk/Spock lately and I have some interesting findings. Some are like in relation to tos vs. Aos though so this is a slight highjacking of the post for my own benefit

In general Kirk is definitely more often on the bottom but the amount of bottom Spock is much higher than most fandoms would have for their established top, at least the ones I've read fanfiction for. I'd say it's about 60/40 maybe slightly more Kirk than that. A lot of newer fics are tagged #can be read as aos or tos but are actually very obviously aos characterization so that can conflate bottom Spock in tos like around 5% I'd say

Kirk also rarely complies with modern bottom stereotypes. His character might not always be exactly canon but they don't tend to butcher him to comply with his relative position.

Switching is casually mentioned in fics fairly often but not always tagged if it doesn't happen in fic. Which is also kinda rare for fandom there's not usually a lot of verse characters

Quite often Spock's only a top due to pon far. Whether they would continue that dynamic outside that time isn't always clear which muddies the water as well. Tos Spock does tend to be more aggressive during pon far too so the treatment of bottom/top isn't quite the same as most fandoms. It's not usual to find clear headed bottom, overwhelmed/almost helpless top in fic so like even with their sexual positions I don't know that it was the height that was the factor I really think it's pon far that determined their most common positions.

But that brings us to aos observations which isn't relevant to the post but I gotta talk about it.

Aos Spock is way more often portrayed as the bottom. Like significantly more. Probably due to Kirk's aos personality I'm guessing???

Really interesting to compare as modern fandom shipping standards are applied and Spock tends to be cast as the shy bottom which is a... choice for his character.

A lot of fans who were fans early on in the movies existence also had no idea pon far was a thing but once the newer fans found out about it they tended to go a more submissive route with it.

I haven't gotten to a year where omegaverse is widespread in fandom yet so I have no idea how that might affect how the fandom treats the characters but from what I've heard some fans say it seems its popularity lead a number of people to treat pon far like a omega heat cycle. Which honestly in my opinion they're only vaguely similar in concept and not actually that alike when you actually dig into them. so it's going to be interesting to read newer fics and see how that effects newer tos fic too.

I appreciate that, as far as I can tell, K/S fic doesn't seem to have a fanon consensus on top vs bottom. Almost like--stay with me--those are preferences and not personality traits