Rare pairings poll!

[sophinisba]

Oh hey, I was just tagging the post for my new bingo at kink_bingo and I started to wonder if I could count it for the rare ship/rare characters Achievement. The rules say, "You define what is or is not a rare ship/rare character; this, like so much at Kink Bingo, is on the honour system."

Ahhh, I don't know! Will you help me decide? I feel pretty secure that Inara/Zoe from Firefly is a rare pairing and Annie from Treme is a rare character in fandom. If I were looking at the other squares I've filled so far I would also count Merlin/Will, Gwen/Lancelot, Freya/Merlin, and Freya/Morgana.

But what about Gwen/Morgana? It used to be a relatively popular pairing but it's never really been big compared to Arthur/Merlin, and there isn't much at all being written these days. Then there is Gus and Shawn, who are the main characters on Psych but don't actually get written about that much. And I just don't know much about Avatar fandom. Also, do you think the medium should matter? The Audiofic archive has one Azula/Ty Lee podfic and five Gus Shawn ones (two of them by me, all of them shorter than the one I posted yesterday). Gwen/Morgana poetry is certainly rare, but then any fannish poetry is rare, so, I don't know!

So here is a poll! Who doesn't like filling out a poll? Please be honest and don't vote yes just because you think it's what I want to hear! I am already getting a bunch of Achievements on this bingo so I will not be sad if I don't have this one as well.

Poll #7561 Rare pairings

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 23

View Respondents

Should I count Gus/Shawn as a rare ship?

View Answers

Yes
6 (33.3%)

No
3 (16.7%)

I don''t know
9 (50.0%)

Azula/Ty Lee?

View Answers

Yes
4 (22.2%)

No
1 (5.6%)

I don't know
13 (72.2%)

Gwen/Morgana?

View Answers

Yes
10 (43.5%)

No
9 (39.1%)

I don't know
4 (17.4%)

Ticky?

View Answers

Sophia/Vivian
15 (71.4%)

Gwaine/Merlin
7 (33.3%)

Arthur/Percival
12 (57.1%)

Arthur/Gwen
4 (19.0%)

Ticky!
12 (57.1%)

Comments

[themadlurker]

Are you going to do some Sophia/Vivian???

I think they're rare ships compared to the big ones for the fandom (well, except for Azula/Ty Lee, because I don't know that one at all), if not rarepairs as in "There is only one podfic of this." And that is probably the spirit of the challenge more than being as obscure as possible or something.

[sophinisba]

I'm pretty sure I'll be podficcing isstillabear's Vivian/All the Ladies pornlet and I could talk to srin about doing her Sophia/Vivian, though I don't think they'll count for any of my bingo squares. :)

At this point I find Gwen/Morgana is pretty much my default pairing when I'm looking to fill a square, so it is not really in the challenge spirit of stretching my boundaries, but it is pretty well in the challenge spirit of things that could use more representation in fandom.

[meri]

I'd say that Arthur/Gwen & Gwaine/Merlin count as borderline in the fandom. They could count as a rare pair especially if you're not doing fic. They are, IMHO, the most currently popular rare pairs.

Don't forget poly ships (if that's your cuppa), even Arthur and Merlin paired with anyone else is a rare thing in the fandom.

[sophinisba]

Poly ships are definitely good to keep in mind! It's probably more likely that I'd write or podfic Arthur/Gwen/Merlin or OT4 than Gwaine/Merlin, though there have been some fun Gwaine/Merlin fics at the Pornathon. Arthur/Gwen is one of those pairings where it almost feels insulting to refer to it as a rarepair. On the other hand, if you're looking at podfic that's definitely what it is. It's also one of those ones where if you go searching for it you'll get back a lot of results, but a lot of them will be a background pairing in a fic that's really focused on Arthur/Merlin.

[meri]

Arthur/Gwen is one of those pairings where it almost feels insulting to refer to it as a rarepair

IKR? But in terms of fannish output, again especially not fic, it's not that high up there. Thanks to you I think there's more podfic for Gwen/Morgana then Arthur/Gwen. Seriously, thank you. Makes me want to podfic Arthur/Gwen actually. Will have to get on that.

[sophinisba]

Yeah, I think I'm the only person to have made a podfic with Arthur/Gwen or Gwen/Lancelot as the main pairing, and the majority of the Gwen/Morgana podfics out there are mine. I almost feel bad about it sometimes, wishing there were more of a variety of voices reading about Gwen. Someone else did do a lovely podfic of an Arthur/Gwen/Merlin story by such_heights. Would love to hear some from you!

[fitz_y]

i may have a very wide interpretation of rare pairings, but basically in terms of merlin, i take anything except a/merlin and merlin/gwaine and arthur/gwen as a rare pairing. and i cite this as evidence. see arthur/merlin = take up the whole graph. everything else=rare. and arthur/gwen = not rare because it's canon. this cool little graph was done before gwaine appeared, so it's really just my gut telling me he's not a rare pairing. but the more i think about it, the more i think you could say merlin/gwaine is a rare pairing, too. yes, it is.

[sophinisba]

You know, I was actually in the fanlore chat with other people editing when someone (I'm thinking frogspace?) pulled those numbers from the kink meme delicious and made the graph. The rest of us were marveling so much, ahh! I love pie charts the best. It would probably not be that hard to make a new one from the current Delicious listing but eh I don't know how.

While I was making this post I was looking at my notes from the pornathon, and of the 335 fics I've read so far about five of them have been Gwen/Morgana. So i think, yeah, that's pretty rare, even if it is a fairly common thing to show up on my Dreamwidth reading list. :) But I will wait until tomorrow and see what the poll says okay. That definitely seems to be the closest race of the three.

[sophinisba]

PS if you look at the newsletter Delicious though, there's a much larger proportion of Arthur/Gwen fanworks there than at the kink meme, which as always been very slash-heavy, or at the pthon.

[fitz_y]

good point. and hehe, pie charts are the best.

[eruthros]

Ha, I always have such trouble with figuring this out! There's a reason we left it up to individual players :) But I feel like Azula/Ty Lee is a not-common pairing (there's a bunch of it, but that's just because the fandom's so huge).

And Gus/Shawn is confusing for me, too - everywhere I encounter Psych fandom the main pairing is Gus/Shawn, but it's pretty clear to me that there's a huge Shawn/Lassiter fandom off somewhere else. But it's hard to guess at how much discrepancy there is when I'm only in a little corner of the fandom!

[sophinisba]

Yeah, Psych makes me think of Leverage, where my f-list mostly fangirls "the kids", if they write anything it tends to be Parker/Hardison or Eliot/Parker/Hardison, and a few of my friends are also really fond of Sophie, but if you go out and look at the numbers in the broader fandom there's more Eliot/Nate than anything else. (It's different in that when I watch the show I do totally see the slash potential for Shawn/Lassiter, whereas Nate, just, no.)

Now when I got your comment last night I was going to say that I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what's happening in mainstream Merlin fandom these days, but then the two people below you mentioned that Arthur/Gwen is the second most popular pairing, far more common than Gwen/Morgana or Gwaine/Merlin. And that is also really far from my experience, but if you look at the newsletter it's true.

Anyway, I'm thinking I'm going to claim this achievement!

[slightlytookish]

I definitely consider Gwaine/Merlin a rarepair. It's not like there are tons of fanworks being posted every day (or every week, or every month!). The only pairing that can consistently boast of having new things to look forward to every day is Arthur/Merlin with Arthur/Gwen an increasingly closer second. Maybe Gwaine/Merlin is third but it's still nothing like the other two.

[sophinisba]

I've been reading a lot more Gwaine/Merlin in the past six weeks than I ever had before because there's been a lot of it at summerpornathon. It's also the second most popular pairing at the AO3. Looking at the newsletter Delicious I see you're right that there's far more Arthur/Gwen than other non-M/A pairings, but it's just not something I see very much of.

[slightlytookish]

I haven't been following the pornathon at all. It's so overwhelming and I don't like not knowing what the pairings are before I start reading. I just hope more people will repost later so I can read all the Gwaine/Merlin fics people keep mentioning, because there haven't been many posted to the newsletter lately (and the newsletter is my main source of finding new things to read, and why it seems to me that A/G is second in popularity).

Maybe something always seems like a rarepair when all you want to do is read it and you can't find any new fics??

[sophinisba]

Maybe something always seems like a rarepair when all you want to do is read it and you can't find any new fics??

Heh, I'm sure that's a factor. The Pornathon really is overwhelming and the setup is pretty confusing, even if you're participating and getting it all explained to you. Most people aren't reposting theirs and in some cases aren't de-anoning. It's all pretty haphazard in the results posts, and as excited as I was initially about the idea of podficcing pornathon stuff for kink-bingo it's been frustrating because some of the ones I want to use the author hasn't stepped forward, or they have and I've asked them for permission but they haven't answered, or they've given permission but asked me to wait for them to repost, and haven't reposted. Eh. Sorry, for the entitled podficcer tangent there.

I've been determined to read everything or as much of it as I can, so for me it's been good to have the pairings and themes mixed up, but I do wish there'd be an old-fashioned reveal and masterlist later. I mean I get that for some folks part of the appeal is that they can stay anon if they want (like at the kink meme) but I do like lists.

I hope you get to see more of the Gwaine/Merlin at some point. I will say, if your concern about the pornathon is not wanting to read Arthur/Gwen, I've only seen two of those and one Arthur/Gwen/Merlin out of about 350 fics that I've read. If you like a lot of Arthur/Merlin with a healthy amount of Gwaine/Merlin, Merlin/Uther, Arthur/Gwaine, and Arthur/Gwaine/Merlin and occasionally some other pairing, it's a pretty comfortable wall of porn.

[srin]

In Merlin fandom, I think basically anything other than Arthur/Merlin could reasonably be considered a rare-pair, but I can't bring myself to call Arthur/Gwen a rare-pair because it's the primary ship that the canon itself pushes. Canon doesn't automatically equal popular, I'd certainly still consider stuff like Merlin/Freya and Gaius/Alice to be rare-pairs, but I think Arthur/Gwen is probably the ship with the second-biggest representation in fanworks after Arthur/Merlin, so between that and the canon, I don't think it counts any more. (It certainly did before series 2 aired, of course.)

Gwen/Morgana is major as far as femslash goes, but femslash itself is such a small corner of the fandom that I can't see any femslash pairing not being a rarepair. (Well, unless it's gender-swapped Arthur/Merlin.)

I feel like Merlin fandom kind of has two levels of rare-pair. There's Arthur/Merlin and Arthur/Gwen as the big ones, then stuff like Merlin/Gwaine, Arthur/Percival, Merlin/Morgana, Arthur/Morgana, Gwen/Morgana, Morgana/Morgause, which have solid followings even if they're not that well-represented overall, and then there's the really obscure stuff like Gwen/Merlin, Uther/Gaius, and pretty much any pairing involving a one-off character - the ones that don't have their own communities or more than a handful of fics focussed on them together.

[sally_maria]

I think it really does depend on your definition of rare-pair - I certainly wouldn't consider Gwen/Morgana to be rare.

I agree with srin that there are more levels than just Merlin/Arthur and maybe Arthur/Gwen and then all the others. I suppose I'm thinking more along the lines that a rare pair is one which most fans would consider to be unusual/unexpected - and G/M (either G/M) definitely doesn't qualify under those rules, IMO. A rare-pair would be Sophia/Vivian or Leon/Lancelot, something like that.

[sophinisba]

Yeah, I went ahead and claimed the achievement yesterday morning (when the poll was tilting more decisively toward yes on the Gwen/Morgana poll) but I can definitely see both sides of it, or I wouldn't have made this post. I agree with you that Gwen/Morgana isn't the same kind of rare or unexpected pairing as Sophia/Vivian (or Freya/Sophia, which I have written!). Lots of people list it as one of their favorite ships, there's plenty of inspiration for it in canon, and it used to get written fairly often. On the other hand, it's less than 3% of the last 1000 Merlin fics posted at the AO3, for example, and less than 2% of what I've read at this year's Pornathon. So, yeah, I'd feel better about claiming it if it were called "less represented characters/pairings", but no harm done.