Shipping ... Now With SCIENCE!
Gather ‘round, children, for I am about to reveal information to you on the exciting secret lives of the Thirty Minute Ponies mods!
As much fun as running TMP is—and it’s a heck of a lot of fun—the truth is, we put a lot of time and effort into the blog. It’s a labor of love, to be sure, but still, we strive our best to balance out prompt themes, ponies used, etc., etc. One of our recurring discussions is on Whether There Is Too Much Shipping.
I am, naturally, of the opinion that there is no such thing as too much shipping. If left to my own devices, every prompt I ever run would probably be some variation on “Someone’s in love with Pinkie Pie; make the ponies kiss!” (I am kidding … kind of.) But I have been informed that this is excessive and, begrudgingly, I have attempted to demonstrate restraint. I leave it to others to determine whether I have been successful or not in such attempts.
This caused me to wonder, though: How shippy are the prompts, on the whole?
These are my research findings.
“A HIGHLY SCIENTIFIC STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE SHIPPINESS OF THIRTY MINUTE PONY STORIES WRITING PROMPTS”
D. Boy, Ph.D.
University of Baltimare
The Journal of Magical Pony Love
ABSTRACT
This is an analysis of the romantically-inclined (“shippy”) writing prompts that have appeared on the My Little Pony writing prompt blog Thirty Minute Pony Stories (“TMP”). It uses the basic arithmetic that the researcher still vaguely recalls from high school.
METHODOLOGY
The researcher looked through the entire backlog of the eighty-four TMP prompts run (plus today’s prompt, which has not yet run), which gave the researcher a data set of eighty-five prompts total.
In determining the shippiness of a particular prompt, here are the criteria the researcher used:
1. Did the text of the prompt itself suggest romance as a topic (e.g., did it mention two specific ponies, did it request romantic situations, etc.)?
2. Did the text of the prompt warnings or prompt introduction suggest romance (e.g., basically all of the prompts during Guest Week)?
3. Did submitters’ possible knowledge of the moderators’ biases make it likely that romantic stories would be submitted (e.g., if Baby Seal Burritos ran a prompt specifying Twilight Sparkle and Pinkie Pie as the protagonists, if Bombastic Bookman ran a prompt specifying Fluttershy and Rarity, etc.)?
In determining the shippiness of a particular prompt, here are criteria the researcher did not use:
1. Did the prompt actually result in a high number of romance stories written (as this survey was designed to measure moderator bias and not submitter bias)?
2. Could the prompt be used to write a romantic story (as nearly any prompt could be used to do so, given a creative and/or determined enough submitter)?
In tallying up shippy prompts, the researcher erred on the side of inclusion—if the researcher thought it was arguable whether the prompt was shippy or not, the researcher counted it as a shippy prompt. Therefore, the actual number of truly shippy prompts may be in actuality lower than the number the researcher has calculated.
RESULTS
Out of eighty-five total prompts, twenty-five have been shippy in nature. This is, roughly, 30% of all TMP prompts run thus far.
The full list of prompts determined to be shippy in nature is as follows:
1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 12, 17, 23, 24, 25, 30, 39, 45, 50, 53, 57, 61, 64, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 84
Further, the general trend in prompts has been towards less shippiness over time. There was clustering of shippy prompts towards the early numbered prompts that has declined over time (with the exception of a temporary spike in shippy prompts during the aforementioned Guest Week). If one groups the prompts using a base-10 system, one will be able to better note this trend:
Prompts #1-10: six shippy prompts
Prompts #11-20: two shippy prompts
Prompts #21-30: three shippy prompts
Prompts #31-40: two shippy prompts
Prompts #41-50: two shippy prompts
Prompts #51-60: two shippy prompts
Prompts #61-70: four shippy prompts (includes Guest Week prompts)
Prompts #71-80: three shippy prompts (includes Guest Week prompts)
CONCLUSION
NEEDS MOAR SHIPPING!
I have peer reviewed this paper and I concur with the conclusion. NEEDS MOAR SHIPPING!
