the shipper's triangle
categorizing shippers based on the pairings they gravitate towards
originally written 18 september 2023.
we all know about the soil texture triangle, right? that chart where you look at what percent gravel, sand, and clay you have with your current soil sample, and then you use the triangle to determine how to describe its texture?
anyway, this triangle i have devised to describe shippers is based off that:
(view full size in another tab)
(it's low quality bc i'm frugal abt site storage allocation.)
this is technically still a draft, as i don't really have a lot of data on shippers who are predominantly into f/f but maybe a little more than incidentally into m/m, but let me just kind of explain it first, i guess!
so the way you calculate a placement on this chart is that in three columns, you list out all the ships you feel at least neutral-positive about (col 1); categorize them into m/m, m/f, or f/f by their canonical genders (poly ships work by listing out each combination separately) (col 2); and then rank them on a scale of 1–10 (col 3) based on this flow chart i made bc everyone kept wanting a frame of reference other than just "vibes" when i asked them to guinea pig for me:
(view full size in another tab)
full image description:
do you enjoy fanworks which focus mainly on this pairing?
- if YES, continue to "Are they OTP?"
- if YES, then rank 10
- else if "Maybe someday/they're close!", then rank 9
- else if "Not really", move to #2.
- do you ever search tags for them?
- if "YES, regularly", then rank 8
- else if "YES, occasionally", then rank 7
- else move to #3.
- if "Recs only": have you ever sought out recs for them?
- if YES, then rank 6
- else move to #4
- will their inclusion on the side/in the background affect your view of a work?
- if "YES, i [actively] enjoy them as a side/background pairing", then rank 5
- else if "Maybe…", move on to #5
- would you rather…
- see them mentioned as being together, then rank 4
- else if you would rather not see them paired up w/anyone at all, then rank 3
- if neither of these things: are you okay if they are paired w/another character?
- if "only if it's not a ship i already dislike", then rank 2.
- else if "yeah, anyone's fine", then rank 1.
(since poly ships get separated into combinations of 2, then it's up to the person ranking to decide if they want to rank each facet of the ship separately based on how much they like that particular dynamic w/in the polycule, or if they simply want to rank them the same.)
let's have a sample dataset: my own tastes in genshin (current as of 18 september 2023.)
| ship | category | weight |
|---|---|---|
| xiaoven | m/m | 10 |
| ganqing | f/f | 8 |
| yantao | f/f | 7 |
| chilumi | m/f | 7 |
| thomaya | m/f | 6 |
| beiguang | f/f | 6 |
| kazuhei | m/m | 5 |
| eimiko | f/f | 5 |
| albether | m/m | 3 |
| xingyun | m/m | 4 |
| bennefischl | m/f | 1 |
| jeanlisa | f/f | 4 |
| cynonari | m/m | 5 |
| guili | m/f | 4 |
| kokosara | f/f | 2 |
| scaramona | m/f | 1 |
| clorivia | f/f | 5 |
so the easiest thing to do with this data is to find what percent of each category you have by just counting how many m/m, m/f, and f/f ships you have and dividing that by the total: in this case 5 m/m ships divided by 17 total ships yields 29.41% m/m.
you may have noticed that i labelled the ranking column "weight" rather than "rank": this is because the rankings rankings are basically weights to see how much that ship counts towards each category, so if you ranked a ship 10 and it's m/m, it will be processed as if that m/m ship ten times. this weighting process is important because it helps offset the placement of the genre of m/m shipper which is in the habit of only ever passively enjoying a variety of f/f ships whilst funnelling all their energy into a few m/m pairings.
anyway, so the gist of how the weighted values are processed is that you take the sum of the weights for a category of ship, then divide it by the total sum of weights. to continue the example:
(xiaoven (10) + kazuhei (5) + albether (3) + xingyun (4) + cynonari (5)) / (83) = 32.53% m/m.
(for those too lazy to do the math for my whole example table, i shall provide:)
| category | raw | weighted |
|---|---|---|
| m/m | 29.41% | 32.53% |
| m/f | 29.41% | 22.89% |
| f/f | 41.18% | 44.58% |
this lands me in around the "no preference" zone, which i'd say is pretty accurate these days. it's pretty near "just likes gay people", but maybe i'd be more firmly in "no preference" if genshin actually Had more decent m/f pairings. (¬ ‸ ¬)
now, this weighting system isn't perfect and i still feel like it fails to achieve what i had originally designed it to do— which is, as i said earlier, account for the genre of m/m shipper that will passively enjoy f/f ships whilst funnelling all their investment and energy into m/m pairings. this is mostly bc i feel like my own weighted placement places me too close to "average f/f fan"/"average enjoyer of women" when my otp and much of my energy is devoted to xv, a m/m pairing.
however, i feel like there is a method of interpreting these numbers that is an accurate reflection of a shipper, which is that one's placement suggests the likelihood of a shipper to get into a ship of that category: the closer you are to any one vertex, the more likely you are to invest in a ship of that category. this interpretation, i do find reflective of my shipping habits.
or maybe xiaoven is just ~*the yaoi exception*~, as we've taken to calling it! this triangle is still a work in progress, and your feedback would be appreciated.