#Ao3 stat observations

[thetentaclecommander]

Interesting Fic Traction Notes I'm not a stat/views whore but I do look at them in fascination. I swore I read somewhere that long fics don't get the most hits and that Ao3 tends to skews towards short fics and porn but in looking at my stats the highest engagement (hits/favs/comments/subs/bookmarks) is mainly on longfics (fics longer than 2 chapters and over imo is a longfic). In order it goes: -2 chapter smut (that reader fic of all things, odd.) -longfic smut fics -a one shot smut fic -longfic that isn't smut centered (makes sense cause of the amount of years it has been up) -more smut one shots -a smut compilation -longfics that aren't smut centered -that one canon compliant one -brutal violent sex fics (the rapey and or heavily murderkinky ones) -then one shots that are just dreamy weird plot heavy -newer canon compliant or not as smutty stuff at the bottom (or new stuff less than a few months old in general) Sorting by views/hits renders mostly the same result (and hits, like okay that's a lot to me even including my rereads to edit and read my own stuff and before I was cross posting to here).

So in one way, yeah 'smut sells' proves true, but the length doesn't. If anything my short fics tend to get passed over faster especially anything sub 1,000 words (in context my largest longfic smut fic is over 35k words). My highest engaged fics tend to with a lone 2k exception, cap out around 7-8k words. Also, only straight forward pwp or little plot are like this as too much emotional/plot investment ranks way lower. Well, the murderkinky violent ones rank lower too, intentionally as I know what I wrote - but also brings in a certain niche of reader so there's that. I can't even go by comment threads as sure, the top three are longfics understandably, but then it evens out to a similar range across the board no matter the length. Usually due to regular commenters (I <3 u guys!). Oddly, I find my human focused/human shippy ones aren't as well viewed but I also think it's a combo of my set niche of 'monsterfucker', doing exclusively rare pairs and being 'that asshole that writes N/J all the time' together so it could be simply not writing as expected of my account. Though getting engagement on those is pretty cool because of these 'hurdles', not in spite of them! I enjoy being convincing outside of my wheelhouse, too. So what I get from all this is the Ao3 adage of 'what is more likely to be engaged with' is on crack and just not reliable, at least in my case. Pretty on brand for me really (with the self-awareness I am niche in general). I both prove the adage both true and false oddly. Resi to note is not a huge fandom just vocal (we don't even rank in the larger Ao3 fandom poles) so that could be what's causing the skew? I also I see what you folks cheer for overall (readers, pwp and hyper erotic murder/violence in that order). I also think that one reader fic* I think hit the DBD crowd unintentionally - I've never played lol. Also to note, I see those bookmarks. The sheer amount of private ones for an account that is hard to miss in larger Resi tag and almost always in that specific rare ship tag is so high and it's hilarious and amazing to me. The thing about people who hide their porn habits through bookmarks is *very* true - I hope y'all were well fed! I cackle every time cause christ on a cracker the sheer amount of them solely on the porn, I see you /wink *Though I might...do that male!reader/Nem fic I've been saying that for like 2+ years now at some point because I like balance since I've already done female and gender neutral readers.

#thetentaclecommander writhes and speaks #Ao3 stat observations

[kitausuret]

Was looking through my ao3 stats and realized that two of my personal favorite fics - What Binds Us Together (Wanda Maximoff & Victoria Montesi) and Blue Morning, Blue Day (Liz/Harry/Flash) both have under 50 hits. Granted, Blue Morning hasn't even been out for a full month so I'm sure it'll attract some kind of attention eventually, but still, it's kinda curious.

Mostly it's because like yes the pairings/character dynamics are rare, but the characters are not? Well, I guess Vicki is a little bit more obscure, but certainly everyone knows who the Scarlet Witch is by now. But I suppose it's also that sense of looking at the fandom list/summary and going "I am/not interested in this". Similarly, Flash and Harry are both staples of Spider-Man lore, and so is Liz as part of the supporting cast and historically someone closer to the main five coffee bean gang than most other characters. But I do get that most people going into the Spider-Man (comicsverse) tag are probably looking for the titular character. 😂

My only Venom-tagged fic under a hundred hits is, surprise surprise, also HarryFlash LMAO but again it's only been out for a couple months. However! It also has fourteen comments on it and makes me very happy. And it's fairly light on actual symbiote content, focusing more on Harry and Flash's evolving dynamic and identity reveal shenanigans.

Tumblr lied to me, I thought writing about Harry Osborn would bring me fame and fortune

no I'm kidding I know I write rarepairs. And I'll continue to do so! Creating the content I want to see in the world until I can bully others into joining me.

#personal #ramble #contrary to how this might come off #i don't like.. obsess over my ao3 stats? #but i do like to observe them and puzzle over why certain fics attract attention where others don't #my best hope is that in creating the niche content; that someone else who really wanted to see it will feel joy when it's in the tag #that someone will go 'wow it's not just me

[worldoflis]

sometimes u just scratch an entire fandoms id. is how it is.

Apparently so? It's just weird, cause I'm not even involved in the yr fandom much, I barely even read fic... so it just came completely out of left field.

But fun! It's fun :)

#like I'm not complaining #it just boggles my mind #esp since without the ao3 stats #I wouldn't think anyone cared #not a single reblog #not a single follow #(none of which was the goal btw! just an observation) #(I got a multifandom eclectic blog there's a million reasons not to follow even if you liked one (1) fic - I am aware) #just a very different fandom dynamic than I'm used to #is all I'm saying #lis answers asks

[imogenleewriter]

Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson AO3 Works Stats

The other day, I was curious to see what the trajectory of uploads of Larry fanfic on Ao3 was and if it was increasing.Anyway, it was a pretty simple process, and here were the findings:

Perfect right? Done. Time to go to bed? No, because ya girl got hyper-fixated. So grab a cup of tea and enjoy this absolutely ridiculous waste of time...

Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic profoundly affected various aspects of societal behaviour, including participation in online communities. The ‘Larry fan fiction community’ had a notable influx of new participants and emerging writers during this period. My antedotal observations suggested a significant number of authors have been publishing their first works as recently as this month. This study aims to quantify the trends in Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson fan fiction uploads on AO3 (Archive Of Our Own) over the past decade, with a particular focus on discerning any noticeable uptick in contributions corresponding to the pandemic’s timeline.

Method

The data collection was executed over several days, starting from the 16th of October 2023. Due to this, the 16th of October was used as a reference point for all of the 12-month periods. The following parameters were employed for filtering:

Relationship Category: Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson.

Inclusivity: All pieces that included this relationship, irrespective of the presence of other pairings. The result of this means there are likely some works included where they are a side pairing.

Language: All languages were included.

Work Status: Both individual pieces and those parts of a series were included, as were completed and incomplete works.

Accessibility: Being logged in allowed access to members-only works.

During the analysis, two works were excluded due to backdating, to ensure the timeframe remained consistent. Due to the dynamic nature of the fan fiction platform, some works underwent updates or were removed during the data collection process. While these fluctuations did cause some inconsistencies, they were negligible and did not significantly impact the overall dataset.

For the 12-month periods under consideration, three main categories were analysed: total, completed, and unfinished.

Results

A comprehensive analysis of Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson fan fiction uploads spanning from 2011 to 2023 revealed the following insights:

2011: A total of sixteen works were documented, all of which were completed.

2012: The total number of uploads rose to 417. Among these, 409 were completed works, while eight remained unfinished.

2013: A significant surge was observed, with total uploads reaching 4,795. Completed works accounted for 4,251, whereas 544 were left incomplete.

2014: The growth trend continued, recording a total of 6,303 uploads. 5,296 were completed, and 1,007 were in-progress.

2015: The first decline was witnessed, although minor, with 6,105 total uploads. Completed works comprised 4,919, and unfinished ones stood at 1,186.

2016: A slight decline was noted, totalling 4,805 works. Completed pieces were 3,765, with 1,040 still in-progress.

2017: Uploads further decreased to 2,898. Of these, 2,297 were completed, and 601 remained unfinished.

2018: A modest rise was seen with 2,784 total works. Completed contributions were 2,275, while 509 were ongoing.

2019: The total dropped to 2,064. Completed pieces stood at 1,700, and 364 were still under development.

2020: A slight increment occurred, totalling 2,572 uploads. Of these, 2,071 were finished, and 501 were ongoing.

2021: The count increased to 3,195. Completed works reached 2,483, with 712 in-progress.

2022: A total of 3,767 works were uploaded. Completed works were 3,090, while 677 were yet to be finished.

2023: The most recent data showcases 4,018 total works, with 3,104 completed and 914 still ongoing.

After collating the primary data on completed and uncompleted works, I wanted to look at the distribution based on word count. The intention behind this exploration was to discern if there were patterns or preferences within the writing community regarding the length of the stories. (Please note that on diagrams representing word count, the years are now in descending order)

The categorisation of word count was structured. Works were segmented into word count brackets that started from the shortest stories, ranging from 0 to 1999 words, then progressively moved up in intervals: 2000-4999 words, 5000-9999 words, and so on due to the high prevalence in numbers in the shorter works. This structured approach allowed for a visual representation of how numerous works fell into each bracket for each year.

If you click on it, you might be able to see the distribution.

Results: Word Count Analysis

The following overview encapsulates the distribution of word counts for fan fiction uploads from 2011 to 2023:

0-10,000 Words:

2023 observed the highest concentration within this frame with 2507 works. Over half of the total published works for the 12-month period were found within this bracket.

The trend experienced notable growth from the 14 entries in 2012.

2014 saw a peak with 4994 works in this category, followed by a fluctuating pattern in subsequent years.

10,001-50,000 Words:

2023 recorded 1,031, a slight increase from 1,010 in 2022.

2015 led the chart with the most works in this range.

50,001-100,000 Words:

The count in 2023 showcased the highest number in this category, with 293 works.

2016 and 2021 were equal second, with 219 works in this category.

100,001-300,000 Words:

2023 had the most works in this segment, followed by 2022 and 2021.

Prior to this, the peak was in 2017.

300,001 Words and above:

The numbers in this range are comparatively limited, with 2023 having the most works surpassing 300,000 words.

Most years witnessed very few works in this extensive word count bracket, with numbers often remaining in single or low double digits.

I was also interested to find where most work stopped being completed. This is the percentage of completed works in each range.

Limitations of the Analysis:

AO3 Filtering System Limitations: The AO3 filtering system does not readily display the initial posting date of a fic. A fic could have been started several years prior to its completion but only shows up in the filtering system in the year it was last updated. This poses a significant limitation as the actual duration taken for the completion of a work might not be accurately represented.

Human Fallacy: There's always a potential for human error in manual data collection and analysis. Overlooked details, misinterpretations, or unintended biases can inadvertently influence the results.

Deletion and Date Modification of Works: Authors may delete their works or modify posting dates. This becomes significant for older works with a higher likelihood of deletions or date changes. Such actions can skew the numbers, offering a misrepresented view of the works available during a particular year.

Variability in Word Count Reporting: While categorising based on word count is useful, it's possible that authors might update or expand their works after the initial posting, leading to changes in word count categories over time.

Conclusion:

The data spanning from 2011 to 2023 shows that over the 13-year period, there has been a marked increase in both completed and uncompleted works, with the total number of works increasing more than 250-fold from 16 in 2011 to 4018 in 2023.

From 2011 to 2015, there was a notable surge in the number of completed works, culminating in 2014 with a total of 6307 works. This could potentially reflect an increased growing interest or a pivotal shift in the community or broader fandom dynamics during this period.

From 2016 to 2019, a noticeable decrease in the total works emerged, with 2019 seeing the steepest drop. This decline aligns with the onset of One Direction's hiatus. While causation cannot be conclusively established, it does provide a reasonable explanation.

Beginning in 2020, a revitalisation is evident, with figures steadily climbing and nearing their zenith by 2023. While this remains speculative, anecdotal accounts suggest that the pandemic, affording individuals more leisure for social media coupled with the growing popularity of TikTok, may have reignited interest in the fandom, steering them towards both reading and potentially writing fanfiction.

In summary, the AO3 community showcases dynamic growth, decline, and resurgence patterns over the examined period. While completed works have seen fluctuating trends, the spirit of initiation remains unwavering, as observed by the consistent number of uncompleted works.

Length of works

In 2011, the publication of longer stories (10,000 words and above) was almost non-existent. The numbers began to rise steadily, with a significant jump in longer stories from 2015 to 2017.

The number of stories with a word count between 10,000-14,999 went from 2 in 2011 to a peak of 458 in 2014. Similarly, the 15,000-19,999 range saw an increase from 0 stories in 2011 to its peak at 253 in 2015. As we progress through the word count brackets, there's a discernible growth trend, albeit with some fluctuations. For instance, the 80,000-89,999 bracket jumped from 0 stories in 2011 to a peak of 48 stories in 2023.

While there have been fluctuations in the numbers for some years, the overall trend does show growth in the publication of longer stories over the past decade.

The data shows that extremely long stories (those above 200,000 words) have always been a rarity. However, there's still a perceptible trend.

The 200,000-249,999 word count range sees the most action, with a peak of 27 stories in 2023. This is growth from the previous years 17, and then to 14, and so on. The numbers decrease as we progress to the right into the higher word counts, but occasional stories reach these impressive lengths.

The 250,000-299,999 word count range has peaked at 6, with numbers generally dropping with previous years. Higher word count ranges, such as 300,000-349,999 and 350,000-399,999, are sparser but maintain a presence.

Word counts of 450,000 and beyond are sparse, with very few recent entries.

In conclusion, while very lengthy stories remain uncommon, they exist and have seen publication in varying numbers. There's a trend towards fewer stories as the word count increases, which is expected given the monumental length of these works.

Upon examination of the data, there's a pronounced resurgence in the publication of longer narratives, particularly following a noticeable decline post-2016. The trajectory of this resurgence hints at an evolving literary landscape, with authors and perhaps readers veering towards more extensive works. Although the factors underpinning this shift remain speculative, the upward trend, especially in the realm of extended narratives, cannot be dismissed.

Monitoring developments in this sphere to ascertain whether this resurgence signifies a phase or a deeper, more sustained transformation in literary predilections will be interesting.

#hlcreators #hlsource #larry stylinson #Why am I like this? #harry styles #louis tomlinson #ao3 fanfic #ao3 harry styles/louis tomilson #ao3 larry

[atthebell]

Updated QSMP AO3 Work Language Stats-- as of April 1st, 2024 (no, this is not an april fools' joke)

June 6 2023 stats, July 9 2023 stats, August 13 2023 stats, December 3 2023 stats

Hello! I meant to get this done around the year anniversary of the server, but that ultimately didn't end up happening, so we have it now about a week late-- considering the growth rate for the fandom, this shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Before we get into it, I want to say that the last year of QSMP fandom has been amazing. There's been a lot to deal with, but there's also been plenty of amazing fanworks, and I really do want to celebrate that along with the multilingual nature of the fandom.

Fun tidbits/disclaimers to start:

QSMP has 8739 works as of today!! That's about 6x as many works as it had in June of 2023, when I started doing these stats.

AO3 has 12,750,000 total works as of today (this is a rough estimate that displays on the front page when you're logged out, not an exact number).

There's a few more languages since my last update, including new languages on the server!

I've mentioned my methodology on previous stats posts, but just as a reminder, I gather this data manually by filtering by language within the QSMP tag. On occasion I miss a new language, but on the whole the significant numbers should be accurate.

QSMP Numbers:

[Image Description: A table with three columns; the first lists languages, the second the number of works, and the third the percentage of total works. For the languages column, each language is listed first in that language and then in English in parentheses, and English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Korean, and German are all color-coded to indicate that they are spoken on the server. End ID.]

English has 7305 works and 83.71% of total works in QSMP.

Spanish has 893 works and 10.22% of total works.

Brazilian Portuguese has 452 works and 5.17% of total works.

French has 47 works and 0.54% of total works.

Korean has 0 works and 0% of total works.

German has 2 works and 0.02% of total works.

Russian has 7 works and 0.08% of total works.

European Portuguese has 5 works and 0.06% of total works.

Mandarin has 4 works and 0.05% of total works.

Polish has 2 works and 0.02% of total works.

The last nine languages, Latin, Esperanto, Malaysian Malay, Filipino, Vietnamese, Turkish, Danish, Finnish, and Swedish, all have 1 work and 0.01% of total works respectively.

Observations:

English has maintained 80% or above for the last year; the current percentage (83.71%) is the highest it's been at that I've observed. Spanish has been at a slight decline since the start of the server, with its high happening in June (again, from my observations) at 17.73% and the current percentage (10.22%) being the lowest. This could be attributed in part to a steady decrease of active Spanish speaking members over the course of the server but I wouldn't want to assign causation. Brazilian Portuguese works have stayed around 5% since December, French is at 0.5%. Korean is at 0, which isn't surprising to me; Korean has low numbers on AO3, and I assume most Korean speakers use other fanfiction websites. German is at 2 works, which I believe have been there for a bit (as in, since before Hugo was added).

European Portuguese obviously makes sense to be on here, as do Russian and Chinese (two of the most used languages on AO3 aside from English), and their numbers don't surprise me-- they haven't changed much over the course of the server's history. The other one-work languages are interesting, and to me demonstrate the growth of the server & fandom along with the way the fandom incentivizes and encourages creating fanworks in one's native language(s).

AO3 Numbers Across the Site:

[Image Description: The same table as above, with AO3's site-wide stats inserted into the latter two columns. End ID.]

To repeat, AO3 has 12,750,000 total works across the site as of today.

English has 11,180,000 works and 87.69% of total works in QSMP.

Spanish has 154,900 works and 1.21% of total works.

Brazilian Portuguese has 35,980 works and 0.28% of total works.

French has 61,620 works and 0.48% of total works.

Korean has 2,957 works and 0.02% of total works.

German has 26,170 works and 0.21% of total works.

Russian has 266,200 works and 2.09% of total works.

European Portuguese has 1,150 works and 0.01 % of total works.

Mandarin has 766,200 works and 6.01% of total works.

Polish has 18,270 works and 0.14% of total works.

Latin, Esperanto, Malaysian Malay, and Danish have 95, 125, 116, and 344 works respectively and 0.00% of total works.

Filipino has 9,665 works and 0.08% of total works.

Vietnamese has 8,354 works and 0.07% of total works.

Turkish has 3,400 works and 0.03% of total works.

Finnish has 2386 works and 0.02% of total works.

Swedish has 1,039 works and 0.01% of total works.

All these numbers come from AO3's Languages page.

Observations:

The only changes I see here from June that I find interesting are that English has gone down over a percentage since last year-- I'm not a statistician, so I'm not sure if it's a super significant amount of change, but since English is by far the most tagged language on the site, I think any notable change is interesting. Mandarin is up slightly, but again, I'm not sure how to go about measuring what is a significant amount of change. Otherwise there's not a ton of changes I've seen over the last year, at least not in regards to the languages I've been tracking.

QSMP Changes Since June 2023:

[Image Descriptions: Two tables like the ones above; one is the QSMP numbers from June, as linked at the top of the post. One is the QSMP numbers for this month, as displayed above. End ID.

Biggest thing of note here is just the amount of languages-- we've gone from eight tagged languages to 19 tagged languages, more than doubling the number of languages from June. Super impressive! I hope we continue to see more and more languages used in fanworks.

Brief personal opinions time

In previous stats posts, I talked about reasons as to why these languages break down like this and what makes people interested in various characters. I think those points are all still pretty true, particularly the ones about interest in certain characters because of roleplay skill and centrality to the narrative, along with the usual reasons people like certain MCRP characters (hot creator, existing fondness from prior series, etc.) but I think the ways the server has changed and the characters people have latched onto as time has gone on have shifted somewhat, which is interesting to me.

This is less related to AO3 numbers and more the general fandom, but it's interesting to me to experience the fandom on Tumblr, Twitter, and AO3, where the language usages and focus on certain characters differs so much across platforms. We've all talked about this before, but the lack of an autotranslation feature on here really prevents a lot of multilingualism, whereas I've noticed a decent amount of people reading fic in various languages, probably bc the level of interactivity is very different on AO3 versus here.

If I have any more interesting analysis/theories/opinions/etc. I'll rb with those.

Final disclaimers:

Fics often get deleted from the archive for a myriad of reasons, and in the last several months there have been a lot of things that could and have led to works being deleted. This means both the growth rate for the fandom (which I'm not numerically tracking but do keep an eye on more casually) as well as these specific stats are impacted by these deletions. Not to get on my soapbox, but as someone who finds fandom history and archiving really important, I want to encourage people to orphan works rather than delete them. Here is the AO3 FAQ section on orphaning.

Languages are manually tagged by users; they are not double checked by the archive nor by me (I am not looking through almost nine thousand fics to check if the language tagged is actually accurate). Sometimes people tag the wrong language for various reasons, I can't do anything about this and on the whole most works are tagged correctly.

People sometimes tag for the wrong fandom, either on purpose or by accident, or works are wrangled into QSMP even though they don't necessarily involve the server. Wranglers make decisions based off usage, but if you genuinely feel there is some error in how something is wrangled, you can make a polite request for it to be fixed with Support and Feedback.

I am a volunteer tag wrangler for AO3; this does not give me any extra data-gathering capabilities nor do I agree with all actions/statements the org makes. I am disclosing this, and always disclose this, to make sure people are aware of any bias I may have. This is not free reign to harass me or any other wranglers who disclose their volunteer work.

If I did any math wrong, please politely let me know and I will fix the data. Again, I am not a statistician nor particularly talented at math, I'm just a nerd about languages and I enjoy looking at stats. Also sometimes people post or delete works while I'm in the middle of doing stats (this has happened, without fail, every time I've done these), so the numbers are inevitably a little off. I've learned to live with it.

#bell.txt #qsmp #qsmp stats #ao3 stats

[atthebell-moved]

Updated QSMP AO3 Work Language Stats-- as of July 9th, 2023

Hello! Doing an update to my June 6th, 2023 QSMP AO3 stats post going over the languages QSMP works are tagged with, one month (approx.) later. Feel free to refresh yourself with last month's data, as I'll be referencing it throughout this post.

We're just going to start off with the plain stats, and then we'll do comparisons to a month ago as well as analysis. The analysis will probably be similar to last time, as I don't think a ton has changed. Long post ahead!

Fun tidbits at the start:

QSMP has 2147 works as of today (July 9, 2023)! That's a difference of 714 works from the original 1433 works, so about a 50% increase.

English is still the most commonly tagged language, and its percentage has actually gone up a small amount since last month. Brazilian Portuguese has also gone up to 3.07%, while Spanish has slightly decreased in terms of percentage.

Some new languages added to the mix! There's now one work written in Malaysian Malay, and French finally has some works.

Speaking of! There's now works in all of the four spoken languages on the server :D

I used the same methodology as last time, which was to manually filter by each language I expected to have works, then do the math to make sure I wasn't missing any. You can check the previous post to find that info as well as how I got my AO3 total works stats.

Okay! Now onto numbers:

Getting into the stats:

QSMP Works

[Image Description: A table with three columns; the first lists languages, the second the number of works, and the third the percentage of total works. For the languages column, each language is listed first in that language and then in English in parentheses, and English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French are all color-coded to indicate that they are spoken on the server. End ID.]

The most commonly tagged language, like I said above, is English, with 1751 works or 81.56% of total works in the QSMP fandom tag.

The second most commonly tagged language is Spanish, with 317 works and 14.76% of the fandom. Next is Brazilian Portuguese at 66 works and 3.07%.

French has works now! There are 5 works, which is about 0.23% of works in the fandom tag.

And the next four are not spoken on the server, but several are unsurprising (discussed in the previous stats post, but reiterated below): Mandarin at 3 works and 0.14%, Russian at 2 works with 0.09%, Latin at 1 work with 0.05%, Esperanto at 1 work with 0.05%, and Malaysian Malay at 1 work with 0.05%.

Preliminary observations! English, like I said, has gone up a bit in terms of percentage, as has Brazilian Portuguese, while Spanish has gone down. It's not a huge percentage difference, but I'll discuss my limited theories as to why that change might've happened.

The only really new language this month, as French was expected to get works since it's spoken on the server, is Malaysian Malay. I don't know a ton about Malay in general, so I don't want to speak too much about it in terms of population, but if any Malay speakers or Southeast Asians familiar with it have anything to add, feel free! This work is a translation of an English work by the same author, which is rad; I'll talk a bit more about translations below. Otherwise I don't have any particular observations other than wanting to note that it's a new language and I'm happy to see it!

Across All fandoms

[Image Description: The same table as above, this time with numbers for all fandoms across AO3. End ID.]

The most commonly tagged language is English at 10,154,701 works and 89.31% of all works on AO3.

Spanish has 133,743 works and 1.18%

Brazilian Portuguese has 31,218 works and 0.27%

French has 53,917 works and 0.47%

Mandarin has 638,576 works and 5.61%

Russian has 241,121 works and 2.12%

Latin has 165 works and 0.0015%

Esperanto has 106 works and 0.00093%

Malaysian Malay has 119 works and 0.001%

I don't have a ton of new observations for this, as I don't think any changes were all that significant, and QSMP is so much smaller than the total works that comparison is more helpful in terms of indicating which languages are typically used on the site versus commonly spoken languages, which don't always align.

Changes Since Last Month:

[Image Descriptions: Two tables, identical to those above aside from the numbers in each cell. One is the QSMP numbers from last month, as linked at the top of the post. One is the QSMP numbers for this month, as displayed above. End ID.]

Like I said above, English, Brazilian Portuguese, and French have gone up in terms of percentage while Spanish has gone down.

Mandarin and Russian have both gained one work each, and Latin and Esperanto have stayed at one work.

New language! Malay has gained one work, a translation of an English work by the same author.

Time for analysis!

Analysis/Theories:

First thing I want to look at is the fact that Spanish has gone down in terms of percentage, and why that may be. The change is not wildly significant, and the fandom is growing fairly quickly, so I don't think it's a huge difference, but I still wanted to talk about it briefly. My biggest theory is just that as other languages have gained more works, Spanish has not grown quite as quickly in that time. Portuguese went up a bit, meaning its percentage has likely cut into Spanish's, alongside a few others gaining works. Remember that percentages work like a pie chart-- when one percentage increases, one or more of the rest must decrease. I don't have many other theories, and again, I don't think this is that huge of a difference.

French has works now! Honestly, this is completely unsurprising to me. French creators have had far more time to settle in, get involved in lore, and French fans have had more time to get interested in the server generally. Hope to see many more to come!

I don't have any significant analysis when it comes to the Malay fic, other than that I think the nature of QSMP will continue to encourage new fics in new languages. QSMP is about cross-cultural communication and encouraging people to speak their own languages as well as learn about others'; I think it makes perfect sense for people to want to write fic in their native languages, even more so than a typical fandom. Excited to see this continue, particularly in the case of minority and endangered languages.

Translation! I brought this up in the last post, so I don't want to carry on about it too much, but there are still plenty of works that are translations, which I think is very cool. Translation is a huge element of the server and of the fandom and I think it's really lovely that people took on the very arduous effort of translating theirs and others' works into other languages. Massive kudos!

Otherwise, I think my analysis from last time stands-- tl;dr, QSMP is far more likely to have Spanish and Portuguese works than AO3 generally because of the nature of the server, the server members, and the way that Spanish MCYT fandom in particular has grown in the last several years.

Last time I talked about Eng, Esp, and Prt-br speakers being really central to lore, and this time I would just add that I think several French members, namely Baghera and Etoiles, have made themselves significant within lore and just all-around fan favorites, so I hope to continue to see more works in French but also just more works about them in general. Cellbit is still hot, that hasn't changed, and I think the dynamics of streamer attractiveness aren't really something key to this kind of analysis, although they're certainly interesting.

Disclaimers, Conclusions, Final Notes:

I am not a statistician! I just think fandom stats are interesting. If I did any math wrong, please let me know. I also want to note that I'm not doing any particularly quantitative analysis here aside from turning work numbers into percentages, and that is partially intentional, as I don't think there's enough works at this time to do anything really strenuous, just to make some observations.

Going to copy-paste this note from last time, as well, as I think it's an important element about the multilingualism of the QSMP that is less common in other fandoms:

Due to the nature of the server, there is also a huge number of works that contain elements of multiple languages, ranging from a few works to a decent chunk of the dialogue swapping between languages. This is not completely unheard of in fandoms, of course, as there are many fandoms which provide the opportunity for multilingualism, but this is fun to note because it's so present in the canon itself. I would argue there's a decent number of fics that are themselves bilingual/trilingual/multilingual, and I wish AO3 had a way of tagging them as such. I'm not sure if there are any freeforms along those lines, but I have seen some folks noting in their tags that there's some amount of Spanish/Portuguese in them as well as English, and the same goes for the Spanish fics I've looked at.

^ I hope that continues to be a trend in fic, and I think that it continues the spirit of multilingualism both on the server and in the fandom.

Once again, here is the link to the stats as of June 6, 2023, and I hope you all enjoyed looking at these numbers!

#bell.txt #qsmp #qsmp stats #ao3 stats

[cheetahing]

mlc favorite character/ship poll takeaways

so this poll ended recently, and i thought it would be interesting to do a little number crunching. image of the poll results and also a graphic of some ao3 ship tag stats under the cut.

general disclaimer that this is just for fun and i'm not an academic, etc.

li lianhua and ot3 are king

llh/ot3 won by a handy 24% by itself before we even start adding up the rest of the numbers. ot3 did not surprise me at all since i already knew ot3 was big on tumblr, but somehow llh being the favorite caught me off guard. it's probably just that i'm rarely a protagonist person and mostly hang around with other perennial side/background character likers; it really should have been obvious.

overall favorite stats

llh won handily, with over 40% of the vote. fdb and dfs were much closer, and I was surprised by which came out on top!

li lianhua: 41.2%

di feisheng: 26.6%

fang duobing: 22.8%

overall ship stats

ot3 won by a large margin! dihua was fairly steady, and there's a surprisingly low number of pure fanghuas on tumblr, especially when contrasted with the overall ao3 stats further down.

difanghua: 47.2%

dihua: 30%

fanghua: 13.4%

the "other" option

from tags, the main reasons people used the "other" option in no particular order:

difang, almost exclusively with fdb favorite (one person picked llh, no one picked dfs)

couldn't pick

no preference/like all equally

only one person actually named a different favorite from the three given options iirc

favorite character vs favorite ship

so, this was the original purpose of the poll-- i was curious to see if ship preferences would fall along favorite character lines. granted, including difanghua threw a wrench in that a little bit. i considered running it with difang instead and placing difanghua in the "other" category but ultimately decided against it since i felt it would just heavily skew the poll to "other" winning and lose out on a lot of favorite character information. so what did we end up with?

people are least likely to ship the thing their favorite character is not in (see: fdb/dihua, dfs/fanghua)

dfs lovers are more likely ship dihua than difanghua

fdb fans are more likely to ship fanghua than llh fans

llh and fdb faves are more likely to ship difanghua than solo ships

that's literally it; the breakdown of ship by character is in the poll results

ao3 stat observations

fanghua is the overall most popular ship but is literally cut in half in english fandom; it's smaller than both dihua and ot3

dihua is pretty consistent and actually slightly higher in english fandom than overall at the moment; non-english dihua fic is mainly in chinese and russian

difang has 45 overall fics, 10 of which are in english

the vast majority of ot3 fics are in english

it's interesting that ot3 seems to absorb fanghuas moreso than dihuas, but that vibes with my very unscientific observation that there seem to be a lot of fanghua-leaning ot3ers

keep in mind that the overall numbers INCLUDE the english fic. how did i end up with this count? what does 'multiship' mean? see the methodology section at the end.

tumblr vs ao3

the contrast is interesting! dihua is strangely steady.

dihua: 30% (tumblr) vs 28.4% (eng fic) vs 26.7% (overall fic)

fanghua: 13.4% (tumblr) vs 17.3% (eng fic) vs 34.5% (overall fic)

difanghua: 47.2% (tumblr) vs 19.8% (eng fic) vs 9.2% (overall fic)

conclusions

honestly there are none, lol. i just thought the breakdowns are interesting! also i'm hardly unbiased, so feel free to make your own conclusions with the information presented.

ao3 methodology

i did this really quick and dirty yesterday afternoon and can't guarantee 100% accuracy. i didn't check for the overall tag, but this method left about 5 english language fics unaccounted for. there may also have been slight overlap in some categories.

difang: anything tagged difang EXCLUDING dihua, fanghua, and ot3 tags

dihua: anything tagged dihua EXCLUDING difang, fanghua, and ot3 tags

fanghua: anything tagged fanghua EXCLUDING difang, dihua, and ot3 tags

ot3: anything tagged with the ot3 tag

multiship: anything tagged with dihua AND fanghua but NOT the ot3 tag

gen/other: anything NOT tagged with ANY difang, dihua, fanghua, or ot3 tags

#mysterious lotus casebook #li lianhua #di feisheng #fang duobing #dihua #feihua #difang #fanghua #huafang #difanghua #poll #stats #rambling

[conarcoin]

Some fun AO3 stats for QSMP real quick:

Because observing how a fandom evolves is very interesting to me and I want to grab a baseline I can compare to later on.

Works

Works on canonization (4/17/2023): 192

Works as of 4/20/2023: 276

Increase (past 3 days): +84 (43.75%)

Characters

The top 8 CC characters with the most works in QSMP as of 4/20 are, in order:

Slimecicle (95 works)

Quackity (88 works)

Wilbur Soot (85 works)

ElMariana (82 works)

Roier (80 works)

Foolish Gamers, Vegetta777 (65 works)

Spreen, Philza (51 works)

Jaiden Animations (35 works)

The top 5 NPC characters are:

JuanaFlippa (68 works)

Tallulah (57 works)

Tilín (50 works)

Chayanne (29 works)

Leonarda (27 works)

Relationships

Notable relationships, in order of works in QSMP:

Romantic:

ElMariana/Slimecicle - 50 works

Foolish/Vegetta - 41 works

Roier/Spreen - 34 works

Quackity/Wilbur - 24 works

Missa/Philza - 5 works

Rubius/Vegetta - 4 works

Platonic:

Wilbur & Tallulah - 47 works

JuanaFlippa & Slimecicle - 20 works

Quackity & Tilín - 15 works

Philza & Wilbur, Jaiden & Roier - 11 works

Chayanne & Philza - 10 works

Chayanne & Tallulah - 9 works

Quackity & Wilbur - 8 works

#qsmp #my meta posts

[fansplaining]

In addition to finding the hardcore fans who migrate in between seasons and those who stick around longer, I also saw fly-by fans who posted just a single work. I found fans who were only inspired by one older season before permanently moving on. I found polyfandom folks contributing to several fandoms for extended periods. And baby fans who joined AO3 specifically because of this show. All this has gotten me wondering: what percentage of fans and fanworks come from each of these clusters of fan behavior, and how much does that vary by fandom?

— in our 8th anniversary episode, the Steve Martin of Fansplaining, @destinationtoast, mused about behaviors they observed in their fandom this year (and teased at future stats analysis???). Click through to listen to their whole voicemail or read a transcript!

#fandom #fansplaining #fanfiction #ao3 #fanworks #destination toast #fandom stats #(in the future)

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

ok so i was actually kinda surprised to find that looking at the ao3 stats and adjusting for how long ofmd’s existed (a year and a half) vs how long the stucky fandom’s been around (coming up on a decade), not only is gentlebeard on par with stucky but it actually beats stucky for amount of fics written. but i’m making a prediction now just based on how i’ve observed fandoms to work: i do think the gentlebeard popularity will peter out faster than stucky did

i’m not saying bc i think gentlebeard is worse or the ofmd fandom is weak or anything, i’m saying this bc in fandom it seems like the white masc queerbait ships* have like, an absurd amount of longevity that goes way beyond the general fandom surrounding whatever media said white masc queerbait ship hails from. im thinking abt the protagonist/rival ship from the TERF wizard series that nobody decent talks about in public anymore. before we all cut jkr out of our lives, people were still churning out fics abt the main character and that racist blond kid pretty regularly. and another example, we have those scientists from pacific rim that are more popular than any of the main characters from that movie. it’s been years and the newt/hermann fandom is still going strong.

and i say “newt/hermann fandom” intentionally, bc that’s the thing that i think actually gives these ships their longevity: when there are fans who are primarily invested in a piece of media because of a noncanonical masc4masc queerbait ship, they’re not really fans of the media itself. i mean, some of them might be, but if they are then that’s in addition to being fans of this alternate queer interpretation of the media in question. they’re a fan of the fandom mass hallucination that the fans collectively and collaboratively invented of a romantic/sexual/homoerotic relationship between two guys who on-screen might hug like once or twice (or sometimes even never)

and i’m pretty sure the reason this sort of fandom phenomenon tends to have so much longevity is bc the fans have already created this whole extensive romantic storyline using what is often some pretty minimal canonical material to work with. so when the movie franchise or the tv show ends and the shippers no longer have any new canonical material to work with, they can keep going for years because really, they were already making shit up from the start.

so compared to that, gentlebeard is way different bc everything the fans might have invented on our own the show pretty much already did for us, and anything the show didn’t do yet is probably coming for us this season (or in s3, fingers crossed). i’ve mentioned before how a lot of fanfiction seems to fall on a spectrum between “fix” and “expand,” and by the end of ofmd i doubt there’s gonna be a whole lot that gentlebeard fans feel like they need to “fix.” versus stucky, where there’s so much that needs to be fixed that you might as well just throw the whole canon out.

i don't really mean any of this as a criticism or an attack on fans of queerbait ships like this, im just pointing out fandom trends that i've noticed. i myself have been deeply invested in stucky, newmann, and the gay wizard boys at different points in my life. like there is something very fun abt putting on slash goggles and making queer content out of nothing. personally though, now that we're in an age where we're getting canon queer content, im not so engaged in a lot of the ships i used to care so much about, but i don't think it's inherently wrong** for people to still enjoy some classic fandom queerbait ships. it's just a very different thing from enjoying canonical queer ships like gentlebeard

*im using “queerbait ships” loosely to include popular gay ships in media that was never in a million years going to make these characters gay.

**a clarifying point: i don't think it's inherently wrong, however there are a lot of problematic elements to this kind of fandom activity, namely the way a lot of these queerbait ships will dominate a fandom while other characters who are important in canon get completely sidelined (and yes, the sidelined characters are often women/poc). also, less importantly, when people's primary media consumption revolves around strip mining canon for shipping content, this absolutely destroys their media literacy and critical thinking. again, im not saying this to attack ppl who engage in fandom primarily through fic/art of noncanonical gay ships, i myself have done the same thing. but i think ppl who do should also make a conscious effort to also engage with fan content that centers women/poc, or at the very least need to be aware of the issues around this kind of fandom activity.

#txt #meta #mine #og #ofmd #our flag means death #gentlebeard #pacific rim #mcu #stucky poll #fandom crit

[destinationtoast]

Toastystats: F/F, F/M, and M/M on AO3

I'm starting to post my deep dive stats that started out as me looking into "F/F vs. M/M on AO3" -- it has turned out to be really useful and interesting to include F/M in most of these analyses (I'd like to also look more at other categories eventually; see further discussion about nonbinary characters). Here are some of the topics I'll be covering: Length, Ratings & Smut, Dark content, Tags & tropes, Growth rate, and Case studies of parallel-ish ships of different genders.

You can read the intro & fanwork length chapter now, and more will be posted soon! You can also listen to me discuss a bunch of the data on the latest @fansplaining episode, Femstats February.

Below are some excerpts of the fanwork length chapter -- but please click through to AO3 for elaboration/clarification/corrections, as well as for descriptions of the images.

---

(Terminology: "F/F-focused" means I filtered out every other relationship category else except "Gen," so as to remove ambiguity, and similar for F/M- and M/M-focused.)

A few observations:

These breakdowns are a lot more similar than I’d expected. There are differences, but they’re not overwhelming. It’s not like F/F is mostly just drabbles.

F/F does have the highest proportion of short fic, followed by F/M, and then M/M...

But the long fic end of the scale isn’t what I expected at all! M/M is the least likely to have works over 50K words (this graph doesn't actually show the decimal points due to lack of space, but M/M only has 2.0% of its works above 50K words, while F/F has 2.4% over 50K). And F/M is the most likely to have [works over 50K words]!

....Next, I wanted to look at reader response to long fic.... First, let's look at the word count breakdown for the works with the most kudos...:

We can see that, probably unsurprisingly, many of the works that receive the most kudos are long -- but I was surprised how strong that bias is. Nearly half of these popular works in the F/F and F/M categories are over 50K+ words (I -- or someone else -- should follow up by further subdividing the "over 50K" category, but I haven't done so yet; for now I only used the same word count buckets that I used previously.). Surprising to me is that M/M has a lot more shorter works that get a lot of kudos; only around 1/3 of the M/M works with the most kudos have over 50K words. I'd be curious to hear any theories about why this is.

....Okay, so lots of popular fic is long -- not too surprising. But now let's flip things around. instead of looking at how long popular fic is, let's look at how much reader feedback long fic gets, and see if any category clearly gets the most or least feedback.

For this, I took a very specific slide of [long fic]: works 100K words to 101K words long. I did that because I wanted to compare long fic of the same length across the different categories. But these specific numbers are therefore not accurate for most definitions of "long fic," and should not be taken too seriously -- hence the asterisks on the following slides (Edit to clarify: I did also look at a couple other long slices to check that these general patterns seem to hold... but I haven't confirmed it for all long fic). I did this just to try to get a rough sense of the ranking or the categories. Let's take a look:

Wow! I was surprised to see that F/F averages the most kudos! And that F/M gets the least of all these types of feedback by quite a lot!

Is this because readers don't seek out F/M as much as the other works? Or is it because F/M readers don't tend to leave as much feedback after they read something? To answer this, we need to look at the number of hits (views) that each category gets:

Fascinating! F/F long fic gets the largest number of hits on average. (Maybe this is because F/F works are the rarest, so more people seeking out long F/F fic view each fanwork, on average, as compared to the other categories?) And we can see that F/M long fic gets the fewest hits per fanwork. (Again, maybe this is because there are a lot of long F/M fics out there, so there's less scarcity, and fewer people view each one?)

Okay, so to follow up on the question of whether F/M readers are less likely to leave feedback after viewing a work -- we can compare rates of feedback. For each work I calculated kudos/hits (I actually looked at kudos per 1000 hits to make the numbers easier to think about), and then I took the median of all those numbers to find average feedback rate. I did the same for comments and bookmarks:

The main takeaway here is that the reader feedback rates are remarkably similar. (Again, this is based on one narrow slice of long fic, so I wouldn't take the small differences here seriously.) More people view F/F long fic on average, and fewer people view F/M long fic -- but the rate at which they leave feedback appears to be roughly the same across all categories.

---

Read more on AO3 (including analyses of drabbles and one shots)

#fandom stats #toastystats #ao3 #relationship categories #f/f & f/m & m/m #though my original tag was #f/f vs. m/m #when this was an earlier wip #word count #op #long post #50 #100

[consistentsquash]

5 Meta recs for Friday!

Happy Friday!!! <3 I read some really good meta on one of my fav author's writing process yesterday. So Meta Recs Friday! :D

My Writing Process by @squibstress

My name is Squibstress, and I am an unrepentant pantser.

This post is super poignant and really funny. It really shows fandom esp writing fic can be a lonely hobby and a social hobby at the same time. Also it's a super insightful look at not just the writing process because it's also about how the author thinks about the readers/reading experience.

I love, love, love the thoughtfulness Squibstress has for making reading more accessible. This is something you really only get in fandom. This extra attention to detail because it's a community and fandom is a garden <3 Personally I use a screen reader a lot and I can really tell the difference between fics which are going the extra mile for accessibiity on that.

Also TIL one of my fav authors is a pantser :D

Snarry-a-thon Recs by @danpuff-ao3

This is an incredible rec lists effort. Danpuff is making rec lists for Snarry-a-thon one of the longest running HP slash fests ever <3 Normally I don't have rec lists for meta posts but I feel this is such a brilliant meta level list. It's an amazing look at HP slash fandom evolution and also Snarry evolution. Insane levels of genres/tropes/characterization coverage! If you want to get a big picture Snarry fandom fic history this is the rec list for you!!

About Laugh and Forget (1) by @saehaerys

I am a big sucker for meta esp for fic meta for my fav fics. Laugh and Forget is a really dirtyhotbadwrong and super intense House of the Dragon/ASOIAF darkfic. PforPheobe's writing gives me serious Master and Margarita vibes because of that combo of darkness/humor/intense emotion. I have a Big Crush on their writing. Like I am not even a het incest reader but they sold me with their super dark emotional stories.

A bit under a year ago, one day in February, I had a horrible idea that Jaehaerys had coveted Saera and in his terrible covetousness he messed it all up, sending her away for cold repentance, and she fled from his face in mischief and utter disillusionment of their bond. It became increasingly unbearable for me to regard this passage of faux history.

I love fics written by authors with 100% commitment and love with their biggest Canon Feelings/Character Feelings inside it. This fic totally has that vibe. Really raw and super emotional.

The Lightning Struck Tower: “It is My Mercy, Not Yours That Matters Now” by @ashesandhackles

I really love the canon analysis meta from AshesandHackles. Honestly I am not a big reader of HP meta because it's a pretty old fandom and I feel like I don't really see a lot of value in meta at this point. But Ashesandhackles is brilliant at analysis and I feel like I just find new things to love about my fav characters and their parallels when I am reading their meta.

Harry recognises the flaw in the ending chapters of Deathly Hallows, and wins the Elder wand with an Expelliarmus too. Interestingly, it’s a spell Harry learnt by observing Snape in Duelling Club with Lockhart.

This one has incredible, incredible analysis of Snape, Harry and their relationships with Dumbledore. This is definitely not a shipping meta but I feel it's like 10x more powerful than a shipping meta because it just uses the canon to show the similarities/difference between the characters.

Re: Metrics by eldritcher

This is a funny and poignant personal post on writing stats/fandom stats.

Participating in fandom while refusing to buy into fandom's current metrics is a difficult position to take, because it's led to edgy questions now and then re: what keeps me in fandom since my metrics are pathetic (not my wording; my cousin deems anything below five-hundred kudos pathetic). 

Artists/authors have a lot of emotional connection with stats for lots of valid reasons. I feel bad when my fav authors are worried about stats but also I totally get it. Eldritcher is pretty idgaf about stats except comments because they love being super chatty and meta on comments. But also it's totally impossible to ignore other stats sometimes. The meta has an interesting point. If you are somebody who cares a lot about your progress, then you got to measure something. But like what's the right thing to measure?

#meta #recs #squash recs #meta recs #multifandom #different types of meta

[likeadragonfruit]

Ship Stats for Azula (Updated)

Back in September, taking inspiration from @phantomstatistician I did an in depth survey on who Azula is shipped with on AO3. It was all based on curiosity regarding how Azula ship works have evolved over time. Back then, I said I’d give an update in January, and now that time is finally here.

Here are the finalized 2022 ship stats for Azula.

Methods

On January 1, 2023, I took a survey of works on AO3 for 35 Azula ships from 01/01/2013 to 12/31/2022. This includes ships unintentionally omitted from the previous survey as well as new ships added since September.

Data 

This chart is for the totals of the sample surveyed. And the other is a table of the chart’s raw numbers.

This is the chart of the total Azula ship fics broken down by year. It included the top 10 ships (tyzula, Sokkla, Azutara, zucest, Azulaang, Maizula, Ozula, Tophzula, Yuezula, and Azuki)

And here’s the table for the both the 10 ships in the chart, as well as one showing all 35 ships in the sample

Then there’s this chart that shows the year to year output of works rather than the total. It features the same 10 ships as the previous chart.

And then the raw data tables for this chart

And finally the annual output by partner gender

Observations

Total sample of works by year

Before 2020, the growth of the sample never exceeded 150 works

2021 and 2020 are the years where the most Azula ship works were added

2022 is on track to be either the third most productive year

Since September, over 100 works were added

2022 saw five new Azula ships added to AO3: Azula/Kyoshi, Azula/Lian the Maker, Azula/Long Feng, Azula/Michi, and Azula/Yaling

Cumulative count by year

in terms of total fic count, tyzula has consistently remained the Azula ship with the most works.

zucest was tied with Tophzula for second place in 2013. Then zucest became the sole holder of second place from 2014 to 2017. In 2018, Sokkla took second and has held onto it since then

Sokkla was in fourth place in 2013, then tied with Tophzula for third. Sokkla became the sole holder of third place from 2015 to 2017. In 2018, when Sokkla took second place, zucest took third place. Zucest held onto third place from 2018 to 2021, but for Azutara took third place for 2022

Annual output by year

In 2020, a majority of Azula ship works were tyzula (54%). This is something had never happened before or since.

Back in September, tyzula’s output by percentage for 2022 appeared to be 29%, but the final result for 2022 was 28%. Either way, that’s the lowest it’s ever been

The Azula ships with the second and third highest output of works for 2022 are Azutara and Zucest

Despite not being shown in the chart, Jetzula’s 2022 output ranks higher than Tophzula, Azuki, Ozula and Jinzula.

Despite Azulaang’s 2022 output by percentage surpassing its 2021 output by percentage, by raw numbers, 2021 was greater (90 works to 2022’s 77 works)

Several ships saw a greater number of works added in 2022 than 2021: Jetzula, Jinzula, Junezula, Azutara, Kueizula, Maizula, Azula/Ursa, Yuezula, Azula/Zirin and zucest

Other observations 

Most years, the annual output of F/F Azula works to M/F Azula works is around 60% F/F to 40% M/F. 2022 continues this tradition

The exceptions are 2015 (72% F/F to 28% M/F), 2017 (52% F/F to 48% M/F) and 2020 (75% F/F and 25% M/F)

#azula #azula ship stats #atla ship stats #ty lee #sokka #katara #zuko #aang #mai #atla mai #ozai #toph beifong #yue #suki #tyzula #sokkla #azutara #zucest #azulaang #maizula #ozula #tophzula #yuezula #azuki

[sflow-er]

Some thoughts on writing and posting fic

In the last few days, there have been some lovely posts by fic writers, encouraging an anon who was thinking of posting their first fic but worried about readership. That kind of got me thinking as well, especially as my magnum opus just reached a bit of a milestone on ao3:

Those 50,000 hits (and 1,151 kudos) blow me away, and I'm forever grateful for each and every one of them - but this isn't a post about that. It's a post about how there is no point in comparing these stats to my latest fic, which will take a while to even break 500 hits (and hopefully 50 kudos). Or any of my other fics, for that matter.

Below are some of my personal thoughts on fic writing, the factors that I believe affect the popularity of a fic, and the motivational impact of engagement. My perspective is obviously that of a niche writer, but I think these observations could also be of interest to new writers or anyone struggling with such comparisons. I'll put a cut here because this got very long, but the TL:DR is this:

I write for myself, not for my readers. I post for my readers, not for the numbers.

A quick bit of background info: I have a pretty long history of sharing my writing. When I was little, I used to make comics & picture books for my younger brother, and in secondary school, I used to write stories in my English notebooks that only my teacher ever got to read. In my teens, I wrote fanfic in a couple of obscure fandoms and even a novel-length original story. The readership was just a handful of people, including my closest Internet and IRL friends, and I was very happy with that.

Before YR came along, I had not managed to write a creative text in over a decade. My studies and work had put out the spark, and I thought it was gone for good. So when YR reignited it, I very much started writing for myself. I'm sure every writer knows that feeling of something taking shape in your head and begging to be let out, as well as the satisfaction of seeing it all come together on your screen. At least I really hope they do.

Still, I knew right off the bat that I wanted to share the fic. I didn't care how many people read it, I just really hoped someone would. I missed the feeling of seeing people get joy out of something I created and connecting with them through it. Especially as I didn't have any other outlet for my YR thoughts and feels at the time. I also wanted to contribute something to the fandom that helped me regain this long-lost part of myself - and of course I could use some encouraging feedback too.

So that was how my magnum opus started out, and because of the timing, it became more popular than I imagined. The fandom was young (I started posting in August 2021, S2 wasn't even confirmed until September) and everyone was just really hungry for more. The vast majority of fics were focused on Wilmon from the start, but people were interested in pretty much anything exploring the rich and still largely undiscovered world of the show. My fic was niche and I had neither the guts nor the platform to promote it, but many people still found it.

I consider myself unbelievably lucky to have started posting at such an opportune time. The fandom has evolved in these 2+ years, and things are quite different for authors starting out now.

For one thing, the chorus of writers has expanded as more people have discovered the show and been inspired by it. As wonderful as that is, it does make it harder for any single voice to stand out. I think promoting one's work in fandom spheres such as tumblr and writing compelling tags and descriptions on ao3 has probably become more important, and of course it also helps if you've got some existing readers who follow your work.

Because for another thing, the readership has changed. Some fans have either left entirely or only follow their favourite writers now, while others have joined. New fans tend to start with the fandom classics, other wonderful recommendations, or the fics with the most kudos or comments. Which makes a lot of sense when there are thousands of fics to choose from, but it inevitably puts newer and more obscure writers at a disadvantage. Furthermore, it feels as if the number of readers who prefer completed fics may have increased, as people have seen some fics get abandoned along the way (and they now have more completed works to choose from). Again, that's very understandable, but it can feel discouraging to multi-chap writers.

I also can't help but wonder if there's been a shift in the fandom's interests, especially since S2. There's more canon to follow or disregard now, and people have had more time to develop fanon and their personal headcanons. All that affects what they want to read.

For example, the developments in S2 may have put some people off certain characters/ships/dynamics or made them fall in love with others. They may have started curating their reading to their hopes and expectations for S3. Some might even favour AUs to avoid speculation or guarantee Wilmon endgame, or they might long for fics solely focused on Wilmon and their love after they spent so much of S2 apart. There's nothing wrong with any of these approaches - but they do curb the already lower interest in fics focused on other characters, gen fics, rarepairs, unusual takes, and so on

To circle back to the example of my first fic, it would not get that kind of engagement if I started posting it now. It might be more popular than my other fics thanks to Wilmon featuring prominently as side characters, but it would still be outsider POV. In fact, even readers interested in the characters I focused on might be deterred by, say, the slow burn and lack of sexual content (now that those characters are a more established non-canon side ship and there's more fic available).

In a lot of ways, it's paradoxical to even speculate on this. If I started my first fic now, it would either be a totally different story (compliant with S2), or it might not be finished at all. What those 50,000 hits don't tell you is that a large portion of them were people checking for updates. The project completely took over my life for 10 months, and I doubt I would've got through some of the rough patches without the wonderful readers who were excited to follow it as a WIP, even when my updates got sparse from all the stress. My other fics would either not exist at all or have far less engagement if it wasn't for the loyal readers left over from that first fic, and the first fic wouldn't have as many reads without all the people who have reread it (as I know some have). And of course it is now also benefiting from the large number of existing kudos.

Anyway. My point is that comparing stats is neither fair nor useful, and that doesn't just apply to my own fics or niche fics in general. Every fic is published at a certain point in time or over a certain period of time, in a fandom that is always in flux. The things that inspire us as writers may not align with the interests of the readers - or even if they do, the readers might not notice or be aware of it.

So the question is, how to reconcile the need to share your work and connect with people with the ever-changing odds of those people finding your work?

I'm not going to lie, sometimes it is extremely hard. I often feel really low and doubt myself a lot after posting, but I think I've made it to a point where I don't get too caught up on it anymore.

One key thing is to draw a distinction between the writing and posting. The writing itself should always be primarily for me, because it's my creative energy, time, and effort that goes into it. I should be able to retain that feeling of satisfaction and pride in the story itself, because if I hang my hopes on the audience and they simply don't find the fic, I will just feel like it was all wasted. The value of the fic and especially my value as a writer cannot be tied to anyone else's reaction or lack of it.

Still, the two distinct parts of the process are never completely separate for me. I'm sure they can be for some writers, but I do need that feeling of connecting with people through my creations, and the extra motivation to stick with the effort (to get through longer projects, or to start new ones).

So the second thing I do is, I try to hold on to the mindset I used to have as a kid or teen writing for my brother, my teacher, or my friends. To internalise that my readers aren't numbers on a screen, but real, human people who have taken an interest in this thing I've created. They've allowed me to share it with them and had thoughts on it (whether they put those in a comment or not). Maybe it was just a moment's diversion for them, or maybe it actually moved them. Either way, we connected for a while.

Here, I must acknowledge again that I am incredibly privileged. I've got a handful of regulars who have been reading me since August 2021, and another handful who have jumped on board along the way. Many of them not only read but also comment on what I post. Even that latest two-parter I mentioned at the start has 19 comment threads, and I'm fully aware of how rare and precious that is.

But the fact remains that the contrast to my first fic has still been an adjustment, and I find that thinking about engagement in terms of people rather than numbers has helped me put it into perspective.

I could never find a room full of people to read my writing in real life, but there they are, reading it on their phones or computers and leaving twenty hits on my fic. Every person leaving kudos is basically equivalent to my teacher returning my notebook with that single check mark that meant "I read this and I enjoyed it." As for the individual comments, they aren't too different from my very small group of friends in high school telling me they loved something and couldn't wait for more. In a way, they're even more amazing, because these people don't even know me, but they are still investing their time and emotions into my fics!

Of course this mindset also has its pitfalls. I often feel like I'm letting people down by not writing faster, for example, but that's just one more thing I need to work on. All in all, I feel like I'm definitely on to something here, so thank you for letting me share these thoughts with you!

#young royals #young royals fanfic #young royals fic #fic writing #writing motivation

[atthebell]

Updated QSMP AO3 Work Language Stats-- as of December 3rd, 2023

June 6 2023 stats, July 9 2023 stats, August 13 2023 stats

Back again with more language stats, after a long break! The stats were staying very similar, and I got busy, so I decided to set them aside for a bit and then see what they looked like. Because I didn't do monthly updates, discussions of the changes will be slightly different, as I'm not a statistician nor particularly talented at math. Focus will stay on the larger numbers and the comparison between QSMP specifically and AO3 at large.

Fun tidbits/disclaimers to start:

QSMP has 6211 works as of today!! That's 3175 more works since August 13, doubling the number of works in just under four months.

AO3 has 12,140,000 total works as of today (you can view this number on the home page when logged out); this is nearly a million more works since June when I first started doing these stats.

Filipino and Vietnamese works have been written since my last update!

I've mentioned my methodology on previous stats posts, but just as a reminder, I gather this data manually by filtering by language within the QSMP tag. On occasion I miss a new language, but on the whole the significant numbers should be accurate.

The numbers:

[Image Description: A table with three columns; the first lists languages, the second the number of works, and the third the percentage of total works. For the languages column, each language is listed first in that language and then in English in parentheses, and English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French are all color-coded to indicate that they are spoken on the server. End ID.]

English has 5169 works and 83.22% of total works in QSMP.

Spanish has 636 works and 10.24% of total works.

Brazilian Portuguese has 360 works and 5.8% of total works.

French has 29 works and 0.47% of total works.

European Portuguese has 5 works and 0.08% of total works.

Mandarin has 3 works and 0.05% of total works.

Russian has 5 works and 0.08% of total works.

The last four languages, Esperanto, Malaysian Malay, Filipino, and Vietnamese, all have 1 work and 0.02% of total works respectively, maintaining their numbers from last month as well.

Observations:

English still heavily dominates the work count on AO3 for QSMP, and Spanish has gone down 7.49% since June, which feels pretty significant. My guess would be the lack of active Spanish speakers contributes heavily to this, but it's also a matter of percentages interacting-- like I've stressed before, other percentages will go down when one or more others go up. In this case, Brazilian Portuguese works have gone up 3.92%, which could be cutting into the Spanish percentage, although considering English has also gone up I would venture a guess that Spanish speakers are writing less fic than they were in June.

The increase in Portuguese works is impressive, especially considering that from my knowledge Brazilians don't use AO3 very much (see below numbers). I would guess this is partially because AO3 is becoming more popular as multicultural fandom communities (QSMP in particular, since I'm not sure how common this level of multilingual fandom is elsewhere) interact and people move to AO3 rather than just Wattpad or Twitter. As always, feel free to tell me about other fic websites for other languages-- I won't do stats on them, as it's just far more difficult with other sites' UI & filtering, but it's always nice to hear about them.

AO3 Numbers Across the Site:

[Image Description: A table with three columns; the first lists languages, the second the number of works, and the third the percentage of total works. For the languages column, each language is listed first in that language and then in English in parentheses, and English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French are all color-coded to indicate that they are spoken on the server. End ID.]

To repeat, AO3 has 12,140,000 total works across the site as of today.

English has 10,797,442 works and 88.94% of total works across AO3.

Spanish has 146,087 works and 1.2% of total works.

Brazilian Portuguese has 34,078 works and 0.28% of total works.

French has 58,383 works and 0.48% of total works.

European Portuguese has 1,149 works and 0.01% of total works.

Mandarin has 709,088 works and 5.84% of total works.

Russian has 255,610 works and 2.11% of total works.

Esperanto and Malaysian Malay have 109 and 126 works respectively and both have statistically insignificant percentages of the total works.

Filipino has 9517 works and 0.08% of total works.

Vietnamese has 7769 works and 0.06% of total works.

All these numbers come from AO3's Languages page.

Observations:

Not a ton of significant difference since June, although English's percentage of total works has decreased somewhat and Mandarin's has continued to go up. I do think it's good to note that Mandarin and Russian, two of the largest language groups on AO3, are two of the more populated languages not spoken on the server within QSMP's numbers as well. It's also interesting to note here how low Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese's numbers are-- like I said, AO3 is not popular amongst these language groups, though I'm curious to see if it becomes more popular as time goes on and more multilingual communities continue to come together and interact in fannish ways.

Final disclaimers below the cut:

I did not include numbers for German even though it's spoken by a server member (& two admins as well) because it doesn't have any works in QSMP. I think if we get a full group of speakers for it, then the numbers will come. For fun, though, here are the AO3 numbers: 24,863 works.

Fics were posted as I was working on these numbers, so some might be just a touch off and even in the time it takes me to finish the post, even more fics will get posted. If I genuinely missed a language, please feel free to tell me, but otherwise any differences will be a matter of a couple of works and will not be statistically significant.

Fics often get deleted from the archive for a myriad of reasons-- there was a while where many Mandarin fics were being deleted, sometimes people leave the fandom and delete their works (this is especially common in MCYT fandom), etc. etc. This means numbers don't always go up; case in point, the one Latin fic was deleted and is no longer reflected in the numbers (note: this fic was tagged incorrectly anyway and was written in Spanish).

Languages are manually tagged by users; they are not double checked by the archive nor by me (I am not looking through six thousand fics to check if the language tagged is actually accurate. I did it with the Latin one because it was obviously wrong and there was only one work). Sometimes people tag the wrong language for various reasons, I can't do anything about this and on the whole most works are tagged correctly.

People sometimes tag for the wrong fandom, either on purpose or by accident, or works are wrangled into QSMP even though they don't necessarily involve the server. Wranglers make decisions based off usage, but if you genuinely feel there is some error in how something is wrangled, you can make a polite request for it to be fixed with Support and Feedback.

I am a volunteer tag wrangler for AO3; this does not give me any extra data-gathering capabilities nor do I agree with all actions/statements the org makes. I am disclosing this, and always disclose this, to make sure people are aware of any bias I may have. This is not free reign to harass me or any other wranglers who disclose their volunteer work.

If I did any math wrong, please politely let me know and I will fix the data. Again, I am not a statistician nor particularly talented at math, I'm just a nerd about languages and I enjoy looking at stats.

#bell.txt #qsmp #qsmp stats #ao3 stats

[lololollywrites]

LoloLolly's 2023 Year in Review

Thank you for the tag, @discordantwords! It seems apt, as you're one of the reasons I was productive (for me, that is) this year - I so appreciate your FTH bid! I participated for the very first time in 2023 and published TWO FTH fics. Such a cool experience.

Here is my 2023 stats page from AO3. I know it's modest for most seasoned AO3 authors, but as a relatively new poster on the site, I've been thrilled so see the constant growth and explosion of support.

Completed fics:

*I currently have no WIPS, nor did I publish any ficlets this year. We'll see what 2024 brings!

Never Been Better

John gets married. Sherlock leaves the wedding reception early, but he’s fine. Fine. The seven percent solution? It helps him think. If only Baker Street didn’t seem so empty. But he’s perfectly okay. Never been better, in fact. Never been better. (Published January 30, 2023, completed February 24, 2023; Chapters 3/3, 16,109 words)

Pressure Points

(My first FTH entry for @discordantwords)

The bonfire doesn't happen during The Empty Hearse. Instead, both John and Sherlock are placed into a life-or-death situation. One that may prove too much for a still-wounded Sherlock. Excerpt: “Pressure p-points. They’re observing our reactions to the situation. It’s possible they’ll intercede should w-we be in any real danger of dying – it’s an ex-experiment. It may or may not be attempted m-murder.” “May or may not be?” “We must operate un-under the assumption that it is, of course.” “Already there, Sherlock. The water’s up to our fucking ribcages.” “Mm. So it is.” (Published May 26, 2023, completed June 14, 2023; Chapters 4/4, 19,892 words)

Cold Inside

(My second FTH entry for @shakespearelovedladymacbeth)

Sherlock has just shot Magnussen, and John feels adrift. Everything is wrong. He's fairly certain he hates his wife, too. The regrets are too numerous for him to count. Sherlock is in prison, his ultimate fate unknown and the isolation slowly (or, rather, worryingly quickly) whittling away at his sanity. Mycroft is equally untethered, scrambling for options. Perhaps John can help. And perhaps, just perhaps, they can manage to save Sherlock and rid themselves of Mary in one fell swoop. (HLV fix-it) (Published October 6, 2023, completed November 3, 2023; Chapters 5/5, 26,843 words)

#my fics #year in review #2023 year in review #ao3 #bbc sherlock #thanks for the tag!