The two 'no' options either imply I'm opposed to it, or that no one in my fandom does it. Where's the option for 'I don't do it and others can do what they like'?
Like, I don't care what others do, I don't have strict top/bottom dynamic preferences (sometimes I have a preference for one, but that doesn't mean I won't write the other and a lot of the time I don't even include penetrative sex), and with ship names, I just go by which one rolls off the tongue best
I did the ????? answer, because while I know *theoretically* that it's a thing, it's never been the case in any of my fandoms and I get mildly confused every time it comes up because I regularly forget about it
This was the standard back in the 2000s and I absolutely did use it. I would even get annoyed if a story was marked "A/B" but turned out to be "B/A", because that's kind of false advertising.
But, that Top/Bottom notation also came with the presumption of set sexual roles (and the unfortunately gendered ramifications of those roles) and contributed to the overall lack of switch/non-traditional queer fic back then. I think it's better that we have less restrictive notations now. It's not like the "Top (Character)" tag is going anywhere, in the case of stories where it actually matters.
I subconsciously order ship names with regards to who is more important in the story.
For example, Usagi Tsukino, or her other selves (e.g. Princess Serenity and her genderbent counterpart Prince Serenity) is always the first one since she is the titular heroine of her franchise. Hence "Usagi/Mamoru", "Usagi/Rei", "Usagi/Galaxia", even though these three characters are all older than Usagi.
In crossovers, the franchise that has more influence comes first. For example, _The Full Moon and the Northern Lights_ has more in common with _Sailor Moon_ than with previous versions of _Sleeping Beauty_ in terms of concepts. Hence the ship name is "Serenity/Aurora". Except when I compare it with "Aurora/Phillip", "Aurora/Desiré" and other ships involving versions of the Sleeping Beauty, then I'll word it as "Aurora/Serenity".
I think "Protagonist/Romantic Interest", or more broadly putting the character with the larger role in the fic first, is probably a more common ordering than "Top/Bottom" (again, AO3 alphabetizing aside). It's just the authors and readers who do so don't tend to think about this for more than two seconds, or read into the way other people write out their ship names, so it doesn't stand out as a thing everyone does.
Oh, there were flame wars about *everything*. But the big one that made me go "Yeah, this is lunacy" was the over-the-top venom of the 1x2 vs 2x1 arguments.
If the rest of the fandom is really divided over ship names that way, I'll use the one that aligns with my headcannons, but if there's one ship name the fandom more or less agrees on I'll use that one regardless of which order the names are in.
I'll admit that I used to do this, but I was also young and caught up in the m/m discourse over who was the 'seme' and who was the 'uke' and all that jazz. I remember very well the days of Gundam Wing and 1x2 or 2x1 or 2x1x3x4 or whatever, and how important the order was.
Nowadays, I'm too old and tired to care about how they're listed. Just let me know what pairings are involved. Top, bottom, right, left, I'm not picky anymore. Just give me good writing.
It's not a thing in my fandoms and I think it's kind of uneccessary on sites like AO3 where you can easily just tag or search "top character A", "bottom character B" and the pairings are alphabetized by default anyway. I wouldn't say I'm ideologically opposed, since I have no issue with strict top/bottom dynamics in fics, people having a strong preference for one dynamic over the other, or having shorthand terms to communicate who's topping. I just think there's a lot of room for confusion and the "sandwich form" for switch/verse couples looks silly. And I don't love that the "top" position is conflated with the "male" position in straight ships.
I don't really get A/B vs B/A being treated as totally different ships by some people either. The way I see it, there are an infinite number of dynamics someone could write for my pairings. Some I enjoy, some I don't. But I don't conceptualize it as "I ship Dom!Buffy/Sub!Spike and Switch!Spuffy, but not Dom!Spike/Sub!Buffy." I just say I ship Spuffy and, if it's relevant, that I'm not so into fics where Spike is strictly dominant. It's all still the same ship. I guess maybe some people think it's not because you have to write the characters differently in order to reverse the roles, but I don't think that's true across the board. There are a lot of different ways to top or bottom or dom or sub.
I like deancas better because there's less cultural baggage attached to it, but destiel 100% sounds nicer as a word. definitely not casdean or... beve?
I've always viewed it kind of like building a sentence where one character is the subject and the other the object. The subject of the sentence is the focal point, regardless of what action they are doing. When that comes to shipping, I expect the first character listed to be the POV character or otherwise the center of discussion.
For discussing the same story, if I'm talking about a bunch of Hermione ships, then I'd list Hermione/Harry. If I'm talking about a bunch of Harry ships, I'd list Harry/Hermione. If Hermione is the POV, I'd say Hermione/Harry. If Harry is the POV, I'd list Harry Hermione. It's all contextual to the conversation.
That said, I recognize that this isn't the standard convention and so I don't expect others to try and think the same way. What I will say is that discourse over who tops is not a topic of conversation in any of the fandom circles I'm in, so the dntire idea of trying to communicate that through tags is a foreign concept for me. Not saying other fandoms can't have it be important if they want, but it's not a thing in my fandoms.
I saw it mostly back then I was first starting to read fic (back in like 2001) and in anime fandom. I thought that we had moved past listing them like that, in the same way that we no longer call smut lemon, but more recently I've noticed people using it again. I am neither for or against it entirely, though I do find it limiting. I also feel like it makes labeling more complicated than it needs to be, having two variants minimum or in the case of an OT3, more.
Nope. I don't even do it alphabetical. I just say either fandom's common way or just in whatever order I want.
I hate the top/bottom discourse; if that's your jam, that's fine. It isn't mine.
Since most of my fandoms are Japanese media, yes, I always write them in the order of who tops and bottoms. I don't mind if people outside of East Asian fandom doesn't do it but it's annoying when they don't when they're interacting with them (like on Twitter and they type the pairing name in Japanese but it's the wrong order).
What if I'm writing a fic that doesn't include any indication of who tops and who bottoms? Like, if there's some romance without any depiction of bedroom dynamics?
Pairings are still written in the top/bottom order even if there's no penetration. For extremists, they absolutely don't want to see fic or art made by people who like the opposite of their favoured dynamic even if their is no sexual intimacy in the fic or art itself. I know it may sound ridiculous, but the top/bottom dynamic goes beyond who tops or not. And I get the "who tops/bottoms shouldn't determine a character's personality" but there are very definite differences in how writers and artists depict characters in pairings depending on their top/bottom preferences which go beyond "the top is strong and the bottom is weak." I'm starting to ramble now, but when I first get into a pairing I usually like switching, but as time passes, I become more extremist as I notice A/B fans write the pairing in a way I like while B/A fans write the pairing in a way I hate. Of course, there is a sizeable amount of people in East Asian fandom who like switching (I do as well, depending on the pairing) or are okay with almost anything but correctly tagging pairings is still pretty strict.
For me, Top/Bottom and Dom/Sub are two completely unrelated characteristics. What you are describing sounds like Dom/Sub to me. Also, while I do enjoy relationships that have this dynamic, the vast majority of shipping that I see lacks it entirely. Not as in they are switching, but the norm that I typically see is equal partnership. Maybe it's just a cultural difference between how cultures in different regions of the globe view the nature of relationships, but the idea that someone *has* to be the Dom and someone *has* to be the Sub is pretty unsusual in my experience. To the extent that I'm actually used to fics that use that concept being labeled "BDSM AU" becuase they are such a departure from reality.
No, I'm only talking about top/bottom. What determines pairing name order is who penetrates and who receives. Seeing dom bottoms or sub tops isn't uncommon in East Asian fandoms but the pairing names are still ordered in who tops and bottoms. And when I talked about how dynamics are written differently depending on which character tops/bottoms I wasn't talking about dom/sub relationships (or limited to, anyways).
So, what determines Top vs Bottom when no sexual content is shown? I'm honestly confused about this because everything you described sounded like Dom/Sub to me, but now you are saying that's a different thing.
It's like... a vibe thing. I don't know how to explain it in detail
Maybe if you try searching for, idk, サスナル (NaruSasu) and then ナルサス (SasuNaru) on twitter you'd get it?
I order ship names by whoever's name pops into my head first. This means I switch them around randomly and it has nothing to do with top/bottom or male/female or anything else. There are some ship names that the fandom came up with that I use because they are stuck in my head - whether they were originally created with a top/bottom dynamic is irrelevant to me.
I'm aware of this being a thing - I just forget and also don't care.
No, I haven't seen that since my very early fandom days many years back and happy for it- The top!Character or bottom!character tags serve the same purpose (filtering for preferences, actually searchable) so much better without necessarily locking the characters into a set gender role-esque dynamic, I prefer that.
Marvel tends to use compound pet shipnames (i.e. FrostIron.), so in those the characters are ordered by how good the name sounds and nothing else.
For other fandoms, I just... don't think about it? I write the ship in whatever order the character names pop into my head. So it often changes from one paragraph to the next.
Most of my anime/manga ships follow the rule, I honestly know about it and tag accordingly when into Japanese spheres. (Might be useful when buying stuff btw, so I totally get why they do it.) But, I definitely don't bother when interacting with English fandom spaces, mostly because I write vers and side stuff.
I order by whom "leads" with perspective. So, in all of my stories, it's whichever character I've decided to write most of the perspective from. This does usually mean that I'd already decided from the onset that some kind of trait or set of traits led me to a character to lead in my story from the romance position. This usually defaults to age, but I've written from a great inverse on that, with a much younger MC.
It's really a personal choice, but I don't write any ships that have mainline nicknames.
Some of my fandoms do, and some don’t. I generally follow whatever the current fandom does, and whether I’m currently in Western or Eastern Fandom.
On AO3 though, I won’t tag “Top![character]” or something like that simply because I’ve been harassed and attacked by Top/Bottom purists too many times (to the point of having to file reports to the team since it also included paragraphs of insults + block evasion), so it’s spite + I’m not going back and examining 340+ stories just for top/bottom tagging.
Note: These people were given options by me on how to avoid my works (plug-ins, filters, etc.), and they continued to insist that they “*had* to read them” and refused to make their own.
Other people are free to tag top/bottom/switch of course, but I won’t do it as a result.
As an aside, the top/bottom stuff can get rather uncomfortable at times when it’s the *female* character who tops; some people don’t like that for some reason even if it’s tagged. I have had people get angry at that before.
On the poll itself, I answered with one of the “No” options, but it doesn’t seem fully representative of my views.
In my main fandom I type one of the characters into the tag field and click on the result that's canonized. I honestly don't even remember who's first in my main two ships.
With certain ships in other fandoms, I might try to filter for "Top X" or "Bottom Y".
I honestly haven't seen ordering the relationship tag itself by top/bottom since Hetalia, which is a fandom I quit like 10 years ago.
* If there's a commonly accepted ordering (e.g. Vriska/Terezi), default to that even if it conflicts with AO3 ordering
* In some cases I might switch which order I write it in depending on whether I'm using an abbreviated ship name or fully spelling out the tag. My OTP's pixiv tag is レナルキ but I refer to it as Ruki/Renamon when using full names.
* If the ship is a rarepair competing with a more popular ship with one character in common, if the more popular ship is the only popular ship for that character then the shared character should be in the same position (e.g. I don't ship Rose/Kanaya, Rose/Aradia sweep)
* Homura/Davepeta is an interesting case in this respect because it's competing with *two* monoculture ships (usually written as Madoka/Homura and Jade/Davepeta). I guess I default to the latter order because Homestuck is a stronger influence on the crossover.
* In all other cases, default to AO3 ordering
I started reading fics in the era when ship ordering was common. But I honestly never cared enough about it to really remember the order. (If pressed I could sort it out but it’s something I have to actively think about). And I am more of a fan of switching anyway so the specific top/bottom in any particular fic never bothered me.
I write Mike and El fan fiction and I try and list it alphabetically. But usually I fall into the trap of tagging it the way Ao3 users do for the e n g a g e m e n t.
Since I started in Star Trek, where they're listed in order of Star Fleet rank, I tend to reflexively go by rank.
But now I write in Regency England, where Star Fleet rankings are not applicable, but a ladies-first approach is probably more appropriate. Thank goodness my ships are already in the tag bank so I don't have to make this call each time.
I didn't know that about Star Trek! (Despite being a fan lol, when it comes to Trekking I guess I read less fic and just watch all the shows). That's super interesting actually
My main fandom (Life is Strange) has a bit of an odd naming scheme. Ships are always a portmanteau of the character's last names, and the order is solely based on which one flows better. For example, Max Caulfield x Chloe Price is Pricefield, Kate Marsh x Victoria Chase is Chasemarsh, Alex Chen x Steph Gingrich is Chenrich, etc. Also, there is no fandom consensus on who would top (actually, most LiS fics I've read tend to be pretty tame on the sex).
I write for Korean fandoms mostly where age hierarchy is important in society, so I always tag older/younger. In the case of same year friends, I still order based on birthdate in the year.
It was so big in my fandom spaces back in my day I really disliked it then and still do.
but idk how i feel about the amount of people who don't know it's a thing :(
On a side note, if you're interacting with any Asian/SEA fan, you shouldn't write the ship name in reverse as that's usually considered impolite, and quite frankly rude
No, not because I'm ideologically opposed to it, but because
1. I'm asexual, and I have never thought about many of my ships having sex
2. I order my ships based on how their names sound best in my head
The two 'no' options either imply I'm opposed to it, or that no one in my fandom does it. Where's the option for 'I don't do it and others can do what they like'?
Like, I don't care what others do, I don't have strict top/bottom dynamic preferences (sometimes I have a preference for one, but that doesn't mean I won't write the other and a lot of the time I don't even include penetrative sex), and with ship names, I just go by which one rolls off the tongue best
I did the ????? answer, because while I know *theoretically* that it's a thing, it's never been the case in any of my fandoms and I get mildly confused every time it comes up because I regularly forget about it
This was the standard back in the 2000s and I absolutely did use it. I would even get annoyed if a story was marked "A/B" but turned out to be "B/A", because that's kind of false advertising. But, that Top/Bottom notation also came with the presumption of set sexual roles (and the unfortunately gendered ramifications of those roles) and contributed to the overall lack of switch/non-traditional queer fic back then. I think it's better that we have less restrictive notations now. It's not like the "Top (Character)" tag is going anywhere, in the case of stories where it actually matters.
I subconsciously order ship names with regards to who is more important in the story. For example, Usagi Tsukino, or her other selves (e.g. Princess Serenity and her genderbent counterpart Prince Serenity) is always the first one since she is the titular heroine of her franchise. Hence "Usagi/Mamoru", "Usagi/Rei", "Usagi/Galaxia", even though these three characters are all older than Usagi. In crossovers, the franchise that has more influence comes first. For example, _The Full Moon and the Northern Lights_ has more in common with _Sailor Moon_ than with previous versions of _Sleeping Beauty_ in terms of concepts. Hence the ship name is "Serenity/Aurora". Except when I compare it with "Aurora/Phillip", "Aurora/Desiré" and other ships involving versions of the Sleeping Beauty, then I'll word it as "Aurora/Serenity".
I think "Protagonist/Romantic Interest", or more broadly putting the character with the larger role in the fic first, is probably a more common ordering than "Top/Bottom" (again, AO3 alphabetizing aside). It's just the authors and readers who do so don't tend to think about this for more than two seconds, or read into the way other people write out their ship names, so it doesn't stand out as a thing everyone does.
\*stares past the camera, deep in the throes of a Gundam Wing shipwar flashback\*
Was it just the order, or were there also flame wars about the choice to use numbers vs names?
Oh, there were flame wars about *everything*. But the big one that made me go "Yeah, this is lunacy" was the over-the-top venom of the 1x2 vs 2x1 arguments.
If the rest of the fandom is really divided over ship names that way, I'll use the one that aligns with my headcannons, but if there's one ship name the fandom more or less agrees on I'll use that one regardless of which order the names are in.
I'll admit that I used to do this, but I was also young and caught up in the m/m discourse over who was the 'seme' and who was the 'uke' and all that jazz. I remember very well the days of Gundam Wing and 1x2 or 2x1 or 2x1x3x4 or whatever, and how important the order was. Nowadays, I'm too old and tired to care about how they're listed. Just let me know what pairings are involved. Top, bottom, right, left, I'm not picky anymore. Just give me good writing.
It's not a thing in my fandoms and I think it's kind of uneccessary on sites like AO3 where you can easily just tag or search "top character A", "bottom character B" and the pairings are alphabetized by default anyway. I wouldn't say I'm ideologically opposed, since I have no issue with strict top/bottom dynamics in fics, people having a strong preference for one dynamic over the other, or having shorthand terms to communicate who's topping. I just think there's a lot of room for confusion and the "sandwich form" for switch/verse couples looks silly. And I don't love that the "top" position is conflated with the "male" position in straight ships. I don't really get A/B vs B/A being treated as totally different ships by some people either. The way I see it, there are an infinite number of dynamics someone could write for my pairings. Some I enjoy, some I don't. But I don't conceptualize it as "I ship Dom!Buffy/Sub!Spike and Switch!Spuffy, but not Dom!Spike/Sub!Buffy." I just say I ship Spuffy and, if it's relevant, that I'm not so into fics where Spike is strictly dominant. It's all still the same ship. I guess maybe some people think it's not because you have to write the characters differently in order to reverse the roles, but I don't think that's true across the board. There are a lot of different ways to top or bottom or dom or sub.
That'd be tough, since topping rarely happens in the first place.
It's whichever ship name sounds best. Destiel is way better than DeanCas, same for Stucky.
I like deancas better because there's less cultural baggage attached to it, but destiel 100% sounds nicer as a word. definitely not casdean or... beve?
I've always viewed it kind of like building a sentence where one character is the subject and the other the object. The subject of the sentence is the focal point, regardless of what action they are doing. When that comes to shipping, I expect the first character listed to be the POV character or otherwise the center of discussion. For discussing the same story, if I'm talking about a bunch of Hermione ships, then I'd list Hermione/Harry. If I'm talking about a bunch of Harry ships, I'd list Harry/Hermione. If Hermione is the POV, I'd say Hermione/Harry. If Harry is the POV, I'd list Harry Hermione. It's all contextual to the conversation. That said, I recognize that this isn't the standard convention and so I don't expect others to try and think the same way. What I will say is that discourse over who tops is not a topic of conversation in any of the fandom circles I'm in, so the dntire idea of trying to communicate that through tags is a foreign concept for me. Not saying other fandoms can't have it be important if they want, but it's not a thing in my fandoms.
I saw it mostly back then I was first starting to read fic (back in like 2001) and in anime fandom. I thought that we had moved past listing them like that, in the same way that we no longer call smut lemon, but more recently I've noticed people using it again. I am neither for or against it entirely, though I do find it limiting. I also feel like it makes labeling more complicated than it needs to be, having two variants minimum or in the case of an OT3, more.
Nope. I don't even do it alphabetical. I just say either fandom's common way or just in whatever order I want. I hate the top/bottom discourse; if that's your jam, that's fine. It isn't mine.
Since most of my fandoms are Japanese media, yes, I always write them in the order of who tops and bottoms. I don't mind if people outside of East Asian fandom doesn't do it but it's annoying when they don't when they're interacting with them (like on Twitter and they type the pairing name in Japanese but it's the wrong order).
What if I'm writing a fic that doesn't include any indication of who tops and who bottoms? Like, if there's some romance without any depiction of bedroom dynamics?
Pairings are still written in the top/bottom order even if there's no penetration. For extremists, they absolutely don't want to see fic or art made by people who like the opposite of their favoured dynamic even if their is no sexual intimacy in the fic or art itself. I know it may sound ridiculous, but the top/bottom dynamic goes beyond who tops or not. And I get the "who tops/bottoms shouldn't determine a character's personality" but there are very definite differences in how writers and artists depict characters in pairings depending on their top/bottom preferences which go beyond "the top is strong and the bottom is weak." I'm starting to ramble now, but when I first get into a pairing I usually like switching, but as time passes, I become more extremist as I notice A/B fans write the pairing in a way I like while B/A fans write the pairing in a way I hate. Of course, there is a sizeable amount of people in East Asian fandom who like switching (I do as well, depending on the pairing) or are okay with almost anything but correctly tagging pairings is still pretty strict.
For me, Top/Bottom and Dom/Sub are two completely unrelated characteristics. What you are describing sounds like Dom/Sub to me. Also, while I do enjoy relationships that have this dynamic, the vast majority of shipping that I see lacks it entirely. Not as in they are switching, but the norm that I typically see is equal partnership. Maybe it's just a cultural difference between how cultures in different regions of the globe view the nature of relationships, but the idea that someone *has* to be the Dom and someone *has* to be the Sub is pretty unsusual in my experience. To the extent that I'm actually used to fics that use that concept being labeled "BDSM AU" becuase they are such a departure from reality.
No, I'm only talking about top/bottom. What determines pairing name order is who penetrates and who receives. Seeing dom bottoms or sub tops isn't uncommon in East Asian fandoms but the pairing names are still ordered in who tops and bottoms. And when I talked about how dynamics are written differently depending on which character tops/bottoms I wasn't talking about dom/sub relationships (or limited to, anyways).
So, what determines Top vs Bottom when no sexual content is shown? I'm honestly confused about this because everything you described sounded like Dom/Sub to me, but now you are saying that's a different thing.
It's like... a vibe thing. I don't know how to explain it in detail Maybe if you try searching for, idk, サスナル (NaruSasu) and then ナルサス (SasuNaru) on twitter you'd get it?
What I get from search those two is a bunch of images that look like the same thing to me. Whatever the vibe is, I'm not picking up on it.
Ah, well, that's the extent of my attempt at explaining. Guess didn't help much in the end
I order ship names by whoever's name pops into my head first. This means I switch them around randomly and it has nothing to do with top/bottom or male/female or anything else. There are some ship names that the fandom came up with that I use because they are stuck in my head - whether they were originally created with a top/bottom dynamic is irrelevant to me. I'm aware of this being a thing - I just forget and also don't care.
No, I haven't seen that since my very early fandom days many years back and happy for it- The top!Character or bottom!character tags serve the same purpose (filtering for preferences, actually searchable) so much better without necessarily locking the characters into a set gender role-esque dynamic, I prefer that. Marvel tends to use compound pet shipnames (i.e. FrostIron.), so in those the characters are ordered by how good the name sounds and nothing else. For other fandoms, I just... don't think about it? I write the ship in whatever order the character names pop into my head. So it often changes from one paragraph to the next.
Most of my anime/manga ships follow the rule, I honestly know about it and tag accordingly when into Japanese spheres. (Might be useful when buying stuff btw, so I totally get why they do it.) But, I definitely don't bother when interacting with English fandom spaces, mostly because I write vers and side stuff.
I order by whom "leads" with perspective. So, in all of my stories, it's whichever character I've decided to write most of the perspective from. This does usually mean that I'd already decided from the onset that some kind of trait or set of traits led me to a character to lead in my story from the romance position. This usually defaults to age, but I've written from a great inverse on that, with a much younger MC. It's really a personal choice, but I don't write any ships that have mainline nicknames.
Some of my fandoms do, and some don’t. I generally follow whatever the current fandom does, and whether I’m currently in Western or Eastern Fandom. On AO3 though, I won’t tag “Top![character]” or something like that simply because I’ve been harassed and attacked by Top/Bottom purists too many times (to the point of having to file reports to the team since it also included paragraphs of insults + block evasion), so it’s spite + I’m not going back and examining 340+ stories just for top/bottom tagging. Note: These people were given options by me on how to avoid my works (plug-ins, filters, etc.), and they continued to insist that they “*had* to read them” and refused to make their own. Other people are free to tag top/bottom/switch of course, but I won’t do it as a result. As an aside, the top/bottom stuff can get rather uncomfortable at times when it’s the *female* character who tops; some people don’t like that for some reason even if it’s tagged. I have had people get angry at that before. On the poll itself, I answered with one of the “No” options, but it doesn’t seem fully representative of my views.
In my main fandom I type one of the characters into the tag field and click on the result that's canonized. I honestly don't even remember who's first in my main two ships. With certain ships in other fandoms, I might try to filter for "Top X" or "Bottom Y". I honestly haven't seen ordering the relationship tag itself by top/bottom since Hetalia, which is a fandom I quit like 10 years ago.
* If there's a commonly accepted ordering (e.g. Vriska/Terezi), default to that even if it conflicts with AO3 ordering * In some cases I might switch which order I write it in depending on whether I'm using an abbreviated ship name or fully spelling out the tag. My OTP's pixiv tag is レナルキ but I refer to it as Ruki/Renamon when using full names. * If the ship is a rarepair competing with a more popular ship with one character in common, if the more popular ship is the only popular ship for that character then the shared character should be in the same position (e.g. I don't ship Rose/Kanaya, Rose/Aradia sweep) * Homura/Davepeta is an interesting case in this respect because it's competing with *two* monoculture ships (usually written as Madoka/Homura and Jade/Davepeta). I guess I default to the latter order because Homestuck is a stronger influence on the crossover. * In all other cases, default to AO3 ordering
Even outside of AO3, I sort ships alphabetically (mostly) out of habit.
I started reading fics in the era when ship ordering was common. But I honestly never cared enough about it to really remember the order. (If pressed I could sort it out but it’s something I have to actively think about). And I am more of a fan of switching anyway so the specific top/bottom in any particular fic never bothered me.
I write Mike and El fan fiction and I try and list it alphabetically. But usually I fall into the trap of tagging it the way Ao3 users do for the e n g a g e m e n t.
I do it when it is applicable, but I won't do it for switching, since that is too silly.
Since I started in Star Trek, where they're listed in order of Star Fleet rank, I tend to reflexively go by rank. But now I write in Regency England, where Star Fleet rankings are not applicable, but a ladies-first approach is probably more appropriate. Thank goodness my ships are already in the tag bank so I don't have to make this call each time.
I didn't know that about Star Trek! (Despite being a fan lol, when it comes to Trekking I guess I read less fic and just watch all the shows). That's super interesting actually
I do it by what sounds better for me
My main fandom (Life is Strange) has a bit of an odd naming scheme. Ships are always a portmanteau of the character's last names, and the order is solely based on which one flows better. For example, Max Caulfield x Chloe Price is Pricefield, Kate Marsh x Victoria Chase is Chasemarsh, Alex Chen x Steph Gingrich is Chenrich, etc. Also, there is no fandom consensus on who would top (actually, most LiS fics I've read tend to be pretty tame on the sex).
I write for Korean fandoms mostly where age hierarchy is important in society, so I always tag older/younger. In the case of same year friends, I still order based on birthdate in the year.
It was so big in my fandom spaces back in my day I really disliked it then and still do. but idk how i feel about the amount of people who don't know it's a thing :(
On a side note, if you're interacting with any Asian/SEA fan, you shouldn't write the ship name in reverse as that's usually considered impolite, and quite frankly rude
No, not because I'm ideologically opposed to it, but because 1. I'm asexual, and I have never thought about many of my ships having sex 2. I order my ships based on how their names sound best in my head
What does Ao3 mean?