Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-4830106-20140921022402/@comment-24993958-20141111143748

AnonymousReader wrote: Are there actually any statistics about the popularity of every ship on fanfiction.net? No?...yes…sort of…it’s nothing that you can be told, it’s more like something you learn of…I mean statistics can only help you so far…it’s easier to just figure it out on your own really.

The simplest answer is that the popularity of a ship is directly proportionate to the screen time a ship has both on and off screen...usually the same ship but that’s not always the case…take our teams from RWBY for example.

Ruby and Weiss’s popularity has existed as soon as a picture of the 2 where released, even though the two did not have even 1 second of screen time together…why? Because they were the only characters shippers associated with the show at the time…and lo and behold once concepts of Blake and Yang got released the 2 instantly got shipped. Now once volume 1 rolled around Arkos got skyrocketed because of, you guessed it, the screen time the 2 characters shared…the scenes DID NOT have to be romantic, because once someone starts shipping 2 characters, EVERY SCENE they had becomes romantic in the shippers eye, hence why JaunexCardin is still a thing. Let’s call this direct shipping.

HOWEVER the popularity of a ship is not necessary dictated by its own screen time. Despite the fact that there was only a little…there wasn’t a lot…oh who am I kidding, despite the fact that there was NO BlakexYang content throughout volume 1 the ship managed to remain popular BECAUSE of the potential moments they had. It allowed fans to abuse the amount of IMPLIED time they spent together in order to let their imaginations run wild and make up all sort of scenes the 2 had off-screen, and that’s why most people threw a fit when Sun came along since it completely shattered almost all their ship related head canons. Let’s call this indirect shipping.

Finally, some ships become more popular because of another ships growth. One more thing that boosted and still boosts Bumblebee is White Rose itself because they didn’t want Yang or Blake to be left out …that and they were trying to reduce the chance of Ruby or Weiss hooking up with the other 2 which would ruin their flag ship; A similar case can be made for NoraxRen, ScarletxSage, and so on and so forth. Let’s call this consequential shipping.

You keep those 3 things in mind and you can generally figure out every popular pairing in a show since...ever really. At the very least it hasn't failed me yet.