@arcticwaters and i were talking about if rarilight could be considered a rarepair or not so for fun and bc i love to suffer, I decided to tally all the times the mane 6 ships appear in ff.net, ao3, and fimfiction. All the above percentages are out of 8190 fics!

so interestingly twidash is the most popular mane 6 to write about, while applepie is the least

see more numbers/each site break down under the cut bc i have no life

search was done selecting character a and character b, pairing checked

ao3 luckily has ship tags, though i specifically only used character/character (versus character&character, so the numbers just a little off)

fim doesn’t have ship tags, so these numbers were from searching for character/character + romance and character tag filters. these numbers seem HUGE though?? i really don’t have a way to confirm if every story actually featured the ship but i have to assume so, maybe someone more familiar with fim can double check my search

i may try to do fanart next but wowzer how do you even start