"Teninch" fic

"Teninch" fic is the fandom term for fic pairing a David Tennant character with one played by Billie Piper. The term presumably derives from an old interview with Piper in which she jokingly referred to her nickname for Tennant: "David Teninch." (A short clip of her discussing this with Justin Lee Collins in a separate interview is available on YouTube.)

I knew some Tennant characters were more popular than others when it came to pairing them with Rose Tyler, but I was curious about the statistics: which were most and least popular, and why?

On Teaspoon, there are 70 Teninch stories. If you look at the results in descending order, there are clear winners – but it wasn't until I broke them down by character type that I formulated a theory about why those characters had risen to the top.

Tennant characters fell into three categories:

• Human Disaster: the character's personal and/or professional life is a shambles, and he exudes an aura of needing someone to care for him or provide the common sense he desperately lacks.
• Lovable Scamp: the character is a charming rascal the viewer can't help but root for.
• Posh Scoundrel: the character is smooth, debonair, and thoroughly evil.

Mapping the story results into a bubble diagram made it clear just how much fandom loves Tennant when he plays a disaster of a human being: an emotionally closed-off detective with medical issues he won't discuss and pathetic attempts at a social life (Alec Hardy); a celebrity fraud hiding a secret terror (Peter Vincent); a detective-inspector who allows his love for a suspect's wife to compromise an investigation (Peter Carlisle). Carlisle, in fact, crosses into Lovable Scamp territory purely because despite his disasterhood, he's so charming he can largely get away with some of his schemes; combine this with the fact that Blackpool's popularity in Doctor Who fandom rose as Tennant's popularity did, and you can easily explain the number of Carlisle stories. (Casanova, where Tennant plays pure Lovable Scamp, received a similar boost in fannish popularity from Doctor Who.)

The Human Disaster and Lovable Scamp character types also play into well-trod romantic tropes: men only the right partner can fix and/or tame. To an extent, the Posh Scoundrel falls into this trope as well, but is clearly less popular in romantic pairings for Rose Tyler. (It is worth noting that Barty Crouch, Jr., who also fits into this category and is part of the biggest media property of any of the ones represented here, doesn't have a single story on Teaspoon pairing him with Rose.) Both Brendan Block and Aiden Hoynes are, quite frankly, unredeemable creeps, and perhaps the desire to fix someone like that is a niche romantic kink, at least in Teninch fic.