Numlock Sunday: Florina Sutanto on our obsession with fanfiction

Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to the talented Florina Sutanto, who worked on “Who Gets Shipped, And Why?” for The Pudding. Here's what I wrote about it:

Fanfiction is a massive creative output of the internet, with millions of fics published by fans about the characters of massive entertainment properties, niche communities and even real people. One interesting trend over the past several years has been shifts in non-canon (as in, the characters are not in a relationship within the official story fiction) and canon relationships covered by the fanfic on AO3. While non-canon ships typically outnumber canon ships 2 to 1, from 2013 to 2023 that gap has shrunk considerably, decreasing from a 50-point difference to closer to a 30-point difference. One interesting element? In 2024, the slash ships (male-male romances) that make up 78 percent of the content on AO3 are canon just 14 percent of the time and semi-canon just …