StarTrek.com ranks the most popular Trek fanfic ‘ships

Spock and Kirk in Star Trek

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, StarTrek.com has posted a list of the top 15 Star Trek fanfiction ‘ships. Now, for those of you who don’t know what a “‘ship” is in this context, the Urban Dictionary describes ship as “short for romantic relationship, popularized in fanfiction.” You can also use ship as a verb, as in “I totally ship Data and Guinan”. Sometimes, it’s even used in a portmanteau-ed version of the subjects’ names, like “I ship Quarak” (for Quark and Garak).

StarTrek.com referred to Archive of Our Own, a large online community that calls itself “a fan-created, fan-run, non-profit, noncommercial archive for transformative fanworks, like fanfiction, fanart, fan videos, and podfic”. There, they tallied up fanfiction references to various Star Trek pairings to rank ships by the number of fics referencing them. The resulting list is heartwarming and at times funny, and marked by queer inclusiveness.

Among the popular pairings were those actually depicted in part on screen, like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Riker and Troi at #14, and Discovery’s Stamets and Culber at #10. Then there were some that displayed palpable sexual tension on Trek, but were never realized, like Deep Space Nine’s Garak and Bashir at #3, and Voyager’s Janeway and Chakotay at #2. And then there were a few that were a little out of left field, like TNG’s Data and Geordi at #13, and TOS’s Chekov and Sulu at #5.

But by far the most popular ship, with over 23,000 stories, was some combination of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, which of course covers the very visible “Spirk” ship of Spock and Kirk.

To read more for yourself, and check out the world of Star Trek fanfiction, simply head to archiveofourown.org.