#ffxiv rare pair

[toomanywols]

WoLship Playlist: Oboro/L’yara 2/20

Talk - Hozier

“I won’t deny I’ve got in my mind now, all the things I would do...”

[shroudkeeper]

𝒇𝒓𝒂𝒚 𝒙 𝒌𝒊𝒌𝒚𝒐

rare pair week contribution

[weatheredfailnot]

Rarepair ( 2 / ? ) - Ortefauchel, his unnamed wife with no canon design, and Handeloup

[sjmillerart]

don’t stray from your path

[crystalcaravan1]

It was rarepair week on Twitter recently so I'm just gonnaaaaaa

[thevikingwoman]

saw some post earlier this month with 'finish your wip february' and I thought Nope, I'm not going to pick up old wips, I got A Plan for a bunch of Meryta stories I want to write and I'm not going to get through all of the wips for her anyway

and today I was commuting and randomly thought about the unfinished solavellan infidelity fic I was writing for a kinkybingo in 2021 and you know what

there's a few more days in february, I can do this right?

[ladyramora]

Rare pair hell is either making your own food, hoping someone else has the same brainwyrms, or paying somebody else to make you food.

[eemamminy-art]

I totally forgot about the scene where Lyse is exhausted after spending the whole day helping the Mol kids with their daily tasks and Cirina is sitting with the wol while cooking; Smiling at Lyse, she says softly: "She needed the rest. To come so far and carry so much..."

🥺🥺🥺

[rainofaugustsith]

Keep Us Warm (1454 words) by RainofAugust Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Final Fantasy XIV Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Lucia goe Junius/Warrior of Light Characters: Lucia goe Junius, Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV) Additional Tags: Women in Love, Hurt/Comfort, Sapphic, Endwalker Spoilers, Final Fantasy XIV Spoilers, InMyLeyLines's XIV Rarepair Week 2023 (Final Fantasy XIV) Summary: When it is all in ashes for Lucia, Rigel is still there to keep her warm. Rarepair week 2023. Endwalker spoilers for level 83

[anneapocalypse]

The Sapphire Weapon solo duty is currently kicking my ass so instead let's talk about how warmly Cid and Gaius look at each other in the scene prior. Cid buddy, I think you should let your ex go and get you a man who will treat you right, instead of one who drinks everything in the minibar and stiffs you with the hotel bill.

[bi-disastersoup]

"C'mon, relax a little! You're off-duty, aren'tcha? My father always says it's not good to work too hard. Gotta take proper breaks and all!"

[toomanywols]

WoLship Playlist: Oboro/L’yara 1/20

A Little More - Alessia Cara

“Am I crazy for wanting a little bit more? A little more, a little more of you”

[arighmaa-dataq]

So crack shop thought for the night.

Zenos and Haurchefant battling it out and banter that slowly goes into flirting and finally making out and going to town.

Rivals with benefits.

[weatheredfailnot]

Rarepair ( 1 / ? ) - Tentoawa, Loazenikwe, and Firmalbert

[rainofaugustsith]

Love this commission of my quiet but strong Rigel enjoying Pride with Lucia!

@rainofaugustsith’s Warrior, Rigel, and Lucia goe Junius showing their pride

💖🧡🤍💜

insta | twitter | kofi | commission info  

[alicesadventuresinffxiv]

What are the most popular F/F Final Fantasy XIV ships?

(*on AO3, as of October 13, 2024)

I like writing femslash, so while I was doing the FFxivWrite challenge, I had the thought: wouldn’t it be fun to try writing each of the top 10 most popular FFXIV F/F ships? 

I figured it would be a good way for me to learn to write characters I wasn’t used to, plus hopefully it would mean some of the well-liked but rarely-written pairings would get more fic for them!

But then I ran head-first into the question: what are those F/F ships? I hit some interesting challenges attempting to figure that out, so here’s a post about how I reached my answer!

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First things first: I’m using AO3 stats for this analysis, entirely because AO3 has the most robust searching and filtering tools. Trying to wrangle this kind of analysis on tumblr or twitter would be a nightmare, as much as I’d love to know the answer on those sites!

Second, let’s quickly double check my assumption that F/F ships are indeed rarepairs in this fandom.

Yep, if you’re at all familiar with @centrumlumina's work on AO3 stats (which this analysis is somewhat inspired by ^^;), this is exactly in line with general fandom trends! For reasons that I understand intellectually but not in my heart, F/F fics tend to hover at around 6% of AO3 output overall.

Interestingly, this small slice of femslash makes FFXIV more similar to large, broad fandoms like the MCU or MHA (pictured above), and less similar to other online multiplayer videogame fandoms (pictured below). You might think that given its friendly reputation, FFXIV would attract more women and/or LGBTQ+ players and therefore have a higher proportion of femslash. But nope!

(Admittedly, pitting FFXIV against the fandom that contains Arcane feels a little unfair... :P)

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So alright, with that out of the way, let’s start by doing the obvious thing. Hey AO3, what are the top 10 relationship tags when searching FFXIV on the F/F category?

[Note: Since the Warrior of Light is typically written as the author’s original character - especially in cases with multiple WoLs - I am combining the WoL/WoL and WoL/OC tags together.]

If you’ve been in FFXIV spaces for a while, you probably already guessed the #1 result! But as someone relatively new to the fandom, I was actually quite surprised. None of my previous fandoms had nearly this much focus on original characters!

Indeed, WoL/NPC ships and OC/ OC ships absolutely dwarf the numbers for any NPC/NPC ships, with the exception of the three largest M/M pairings (Aymeric/Estinien, Emet-Selch/Hythlodaeus, and Thancred/Urianger). Also, given that not everyone tags their OCs using either of the WoL or OC tags (ack! please use tags, your works get lost otherwise!)… you can always expect results for OCs to be an undercount. Woah!

Anyway, since WoL ships are so huge, I decided it made the most sense to give them their own list:

Another thing that surprised me is that male characters in FFXIV are so many times more popular than female characters that genderbent M/M pairings will show up in these F/F lists.

And… I wasn’t quite sure how to count those ships in my tallies.

On the one hand, genderbending (not to mention trans headcanoning-ing!) characters is a fun and often subversive way to approach popular ships. More power to everyone doing it!

On the other hand, part of the underlying motivation for my own writing goal was that I wanted to write pairings that fandom somewhat overlooks. 

As such, I went with a compromise: I’m including pairings with canonically male characters in my graphs (those are the pink bars), but I kept the lists going until I reached 10 pairings involving characters who are portrayed as women in the source material.

(There were no nonbinary FFXIV characters which placed on any of my lists, sadly. Apologies to Feo Ul, who is still the loveliest of branches in my heart.)

Other than that caveat, the results here aren’t too far off from my own guesses. Anecdotally, I’d seen that a lot of WoLs are self-inserts for their players, so it makes sense that typical WoL ships are with NPCs that are generally considered to be attractive by the fanbase. Correspondingly, the Reader/Character fics that are somewhat common in other fandoms don’t even rank on these lists, which might suggest WoL/NPC ships are largely fulfilling that niche.

(Something something, FFXIV is a dating sim with combat, in this essay I will…. :P)

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Anyway, WoL ships are nice, but what I actually wanted to write were NPC/NPC ships. So let’s add a bunch more excludes to the filtering… and…

Hm. That's interesting. There's a bunch of F/F ships that I know I’ve seen fic and art for that are missing from this list!

Out of curiosity, I did a few searches specifically on these missing pairings, in case they were so rarely tagged as purely F/F (or so commonly shipped alongside a WoL ship) that trying to find them via excludes didn’t work. These were:

Alisaie/Tesleen (20 total, 13 tagged F/F)

Krile/Tataru (14 total, 7 tagged F/F)

Ysayle/Heustienne (5 total, 5 tagged F/F)

Wuk Lamat/Sphene (4 total, 4 tagged as F/F)

[Note: The first number is what I used during the writing challenge last month… which is how I ended up putting Krile/Tataru over Lucia/Hilda. Oops! But the second number is more in line with the rest of the analysis here, so I will use that going forward.]

Seems my expectations were flat-out incorrect! Of these four, only Alisaie/Tesleen makes the top ten. Meanwhile Wuk Lamat/Sphene is a pairing consisting of very new characters... so perhaps it will grow over time!

Right then, let's add Alisaie/Tesleen in, and while we're at it, let's run direct searches on all the potential candidates rather than using excludes to ensure no fics are getting needlessly thrown out.

With those adjustments in place... I reached my final top ten!

Not bad! Predictably, pairings that get more focus in canon (Gaia/Ryne and Sadu/Cirina) tend to place high, as do pairings involving Y’shtola (since she’s a very popular character overall). 

As a Lyse-enjoyer, I found Lyse getting 3/10 spots on the list to be pretty funny, as was the heavy presence of Stormblood characters! Apparently I’m not the only one who thought StB was a good expansion for lesbians. :D

There are also a few pairings here that I hadn’t ever considered before doing this analysis. But hey, that was the point of making the list! And trying to figure out the dynamics for pairings I didn’t usually ship did indeed turn out to be a fun writing exercise last month.

So what do you all think, tumblr? Did the results surprise you like they did me? Or did I overlook a pairing that really deserved to be included?

In any case, I hope you enjoyed reading this analysis!