For the uninitiated, “shipping,” or the act of creating a romantic pairing between two people or characters who may not already be romantically involved, may seem like an uniquely internet phenomena.

But really, it IS the stuff of legend. From today’s Tay/Trav, to Shakespeare’s Romeo/Juliet, to Homer’s Achilles/Patroclus, to Adam/Eve. Romantic shipping (denoted by the “/”) is practically biblical.

It's human nature to pair Human A and Human B (and possibly Human C, D, etc.) together and hope for the best. But how do we collectively decide WHO gets shipped?

We set out to try to answer that question by looking at 11 years of Archive of Our Own (AO3) data compiled by centreoftheselights.