Fan-fiction site AO3 has put together a 2023 roundup of the most popular romantic pairings on the website, and a Call of Duty pairing of all things is among the top 10.
This comes as part of AO3’s own annual statistics, with the list (spotted by Kotaku) charting how many new fan-fics were written in 2023 for each of its many, many ships and their cumulative totals. The pairing of Simon “Ghost” Riley and John “Soap” MacTavish, two of the main characters from the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games, takes sixth place, having jumped 75 positions from 2022 thanks to 7,704 new fan-fics centered around them. This brings their all-time total to 8,864.
What I find especially shocking is that this ship beat the pairing of pretty boy vampire Astarion and Tav (the default name for custom characters) from Baldur’s Gate 3, which exploded in popularity upon its August launch and is a fan-fic writer’s paradise for allowing all manner of romantic pairings since any of its core cast can be the main character. Between Astarion’s personality and backstory and Tav essentially being a self-insert for fans, I’d have thought this ship would have easily broken into the top five on AO3, but it only managed 10th place with 4,969 fan-fics total.
It’s so bizarre to me considering Call of Duty is a rather unromantic, hyper-masculine military shooter, hardly a hotbed for an LGBT+ audience, but maybe that’s precisely why it performed better. Baldur’s Gate 3 already lets you play out romantic fantasies with its cast, so perhaps people are less inclined to pen their own stories. Ghost x Soap also enjoyed a head-start since those characters have been around for over a decade. Baldur’s Gate 3 launched in early access in 2020 but didn’t really gain widespread popularity until its official launch in 2023.
That said, Ghost x Soap wasn’t the most popular video game ship on AO3. That honor belongs to Alhaitham x Kaveh, a pair of male Genshin Impact characters. They saw 8,390 new fan-fics in 2023, with a cumulative total of 9,402, landing fifth place overall. If you’re wondering, AO3’s top ship of 2023 is Aziraphale x Crowley from the Good Omens TV series, which saw a whopping 13,469 fan-fics that year alone. But if you’re familiar with Good Omens, you know exactly why this ship is so popular.
