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mecachrome · 2 months

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landoscar ao3 stats — 2023 overview

notes

retrieved ~sometime in march 2024

methodology: scraped metadata for every fic in the landoscar tag and...... that's it. however one important constraint is that all temporal data is date updated (not posted), so the above timeline isn't exactly a true representation of fic growth but rather how many fics were last-updated at that time. of course this is still its own reflection of fandom health in a way since dead fandoms don't update old fic but well... it's just not quite the same!

this is just info about general trends, fic content, tags etc... so nothing about kudos/comments or any authors specifically

i decided to focus solely on fics last-updated in 2023 (unless otherwise mentioned) because i wanted a tidy set that i can maybe compare & contrast in a year's time, because i expect a lot of details to look different then (tho as stated above this set isn't exactly static... 🤷‍♀️)

ngl i had to re-scrape a bunch of times because i forgot about it for like 3 weeks and then there were 100 new fics 😭 so if there are some minor discrepancies across the post it's because of that halfskh.

also i wanted to include more global comparisons (aka how 814 stack up against the f1 rpf tag in general), but this is also considerably difficult in some contexts since i can't exactly scrape 31,000+ fics can i... or i didn't even want to entertain the thought of trying to do so!!!

why did i do this? who knows.

anyway here's some viz T__T

ship growth

as evidenced in the opening graph, landoscar have been a very fast-growing ship over the past year — although interestingly enough they didn't really start growing substantially until july / the ~better half~ of the 2023 season. here are two views showing their "growth" (by date updated) alongside two other ships on the fringes of the f1 rpf top 10 (sebchal & galex):

landoscar are very much on-track to surpass them and officially enter the top 10 soon, likely before mid-april ❗️ :o

ship characteristics

onto the ship content — another thing i was mildly curious about was how landoscar differs in certain areas from other f1 ships, or the f1 rpf "global" average you could say. for example, here's a breakdown of rating popularity in their ao3 tag:

seeing as explicit is their most common rating, and that i don't necessarily expect this to be true for all ships/fandoms, i compared these percentages with the general f1 rpf tag to see whether some ratings are more commonly represented in 814 fic than average, which produced interesting results:

do lando ships simply skew more HornyTM in general? is it oscar? a secret third thing??? who knows... actually i think it would be fun to do more analysis in this direction but that can wait for another time!!!

similarly i also wanted to see which ships are the most "public" on ao3, as in have the highest share of fic that isn't user-locked... i will refrain from peppering in my feelings about the 4th wall too heavy-handedly but i was curious to see whether some sort of perhaps... er, generational gap (?) of sorts between ships that are more public vs. not could be identified. however i don't pretend to have any takeaways from this LOL i conclude absolutely nothing. (for ref landoscar is currently 72% public, vs. a global avg of 63%)

note that this graph is current stats, not filtered for 2023

looking at relationship tags, i also wanted to know whether landoscar suffer noticeably from Second-Ship Syndrome, so i tallied the first-tagged ship of every fic to find out. i know this doesn't necessarily mean that it's always the "main" ship but it's a good enough approximation. the results were quite positive!

filtered to top ships with count of >1 only

i then also calculated the number of ships tagged for each fic to discern the profile of multi-shipping in 814 ficdom; i did have to do a little bit of string standardization (all instances of implied / background / hinted collapsed to hinted for simplicity's sake + removal of other redundancies), but otherwise i left everything mostly untouched.

as you can see, landoscar also have a fairly promising amount of OTP: TRUE fic:

by the time you get to the fics with 10+ ships tagged, landoscar are less likely to be the primary ship, which makes sense just on a basic statistical level... this is also a very small sample size though

i also lazily tallied the 10 most common ships that weren't NOR/PIA or NOR & PIA to diff their shares of the 814 tag vs. of the general f1 rpf tag, to see which other pairings are more represented in the 814 tag than on average (because lestappen are the most popular by pure count but this is also true of fandom in general, so it would be a misrepresentation to say that their popularity is out of the ordinary):

maxiel's gap isn't really that surprising since i think that, generationally, in terms of when both pairings were teammates there is quite a gap; with carlando—actually let me tally this again but including all instances of "implied" and "past" as being part of the same ship, since that's how ao3 tag-wrangles as well:

Aha ! obviously as a direct ship there is competition between 814 and other lando or oscar ships, but this difference is somewhat less pronounced once we include all formats. tbh none of this really means anything but i thought i'd add it anyway... (it's also very possible that there are several errors in this, in which case my b 😔)

before we move on to additional tags, there are a few more basic characteristics of 814 fic we can calculate. i realize i never offered an overview of Super Basic Stats, so here are a few:

plus, looking at word counts, here is a distribution of those in 2023-updated fic, which shows that a majority of 814 fics were under the 5k mark:

85% of landoscar fics were under 10k & nearly 97% under 25k

i don't really have any reason to believe that landoscar's wc stats differ significantly from average ? so this is kind of just Data To Have Data, and it most likely reflects normal ao3 trends in general... but i thought i'd include it anyway because i already made it lol. similarly, here are word count distributions but stratified by rating:

& same info but heat map view:

i feel like this is also probably something you'd find across fandom in general — that gen fic is likely to have a higher share of under 1k works, since Building Up to sexual content often takes... Literal & Metaphorical Foreplay ! and the longer a fic is the more opportunities an author has to include a sex scene or other explicit content (ofc, not necessarily just porn but also graphic violence & so on). but i thought this was fun to visualize haha

additional tags & aus?

back in my old f1 rpf stats post, i made a table comparing fluff/angst "ratios" (not exactly a direct ratio because of how tag wrangling works, but an approximation) of the most popular f1 ships, and now that landoscar are somewhat popular i thought i'd first do an update:

also current data, not 2023 to make things easier

just like before, simi are one of the most fluffy ships and brocedes are by far the most angsty, but it's interesting to see 814 also extremely high up on the charts, with far and away the lowest % of angst. will be exciting 2 see how that holds or changes as the seasons progress !

finally, i also wanted to do a bit of au/additional tag analysis because you can kind of see this when you use additional filters on ao3 but the previews are limited and get bogged down by the prevalence of *checks notes* Fluff, Angst, PWP, Anal Sex and what have you. which are nice stats to have and all but what of the rest !

disclaimer that the set for these tables is a biiiit outdated because by the time i'd wrangled everything i was like I Am Not Changing It Again. unfortunately i clean my data with shoddy queries and regex functions in googsheetz...

there were 48 tags with at least 10 instances from 2023 fics, shown below, with ones that are (some ~vaguely) nsfw in red just to kind of get a rough sense of which tags get commonly used in M/E fic:

getting a bit too much into small sample size / specific fic territory so if you're an author i sincerely apologize for that... do not mean 2 put u on blast... TT__TT but i also tried to tally the most popular aus people write for 814, which is a bit dubious because people tag in really different ways and i had to accommodate for a lot of string formats but ... it's close enough ! (?)

i feel like this is very little interesting info but idk what else to add so i will stop here for now... well!!! if you made it to the end i hope u learned something or even vaguely enjoyed reading T__T and most of all thank you :')

#*m #landoscar #in a sense 😔#tfw don't have a tableau license so i live life on the edge across multiple unsaved desktop public files......#if ur interested in anything specific pls lmk before my computer inevitably Dies and deletes everything...!#this is so useless nsdflshdfh. Anyway

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grayseekerswritinglife · 2 years

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Prolificity: Toward a New Definition

Welcome to the third entry of my blog series on How to be a Prolific Fan Author! If you've read the previous two entries, you'll know this isn't going to be a straightforward 'how to' series, despite the name. It's more about me figuring out how to become prolific, and bringing you along for the ride!

In a previous entry, I wrote that Step One of my journey has been to escape the comparison trap. That is, to disentangle my idea of 'prolific' from my mental image of some other writer who seems able to perform feats of productivity that I can only dream about. We're talking about the Nora Robertses and Stephen Kings of the world, only in a fandom context.

I think it's worth noting, by the way, that those supposedly 'prolific' writers may not see themselves that way. The word counts and posting schedules that I find so baffling and miraculous might not seem like a big deal to them at all. And there's a reason for that:

The word 'prolific' has no set definition.

Technically, it means "an artist, author or composer who produces many works." But what does that mean, exactly? How many is 'many?' When it comes right down to it, the only way to define 'many' is through comparison.

At the time of this writing, I have 35 stories (418,548 total words) published on Ao3. Is that 'many?' Sure it is, at least in comparison to the number of published works I had in 2014 when I was first starting out under this pseud. But there are authors who have published hundreds of fics in that time-frame. There are also authors who have published far fewer; they might even consider me 'prolific!'

So where am I going with this?

Well, the bottom line is that there is no external measurement that can define what it means to be Prolific. There is no particular word count, no specific posting frequency, and no number of published works that will bring any of us past the magic threshold of Prolificity. It's like chasing after a rainbow; the goal-posts will always move as you do.

Honestly, the word 'prolific' is kind of toxic. It relies on comparison in order to have meaning, so it invites us to compare ourselves to others, thus sowing the seeds of insecurity and competitiveness. And yet here I am, blogging about how to become *more* of this Prolific thing.

Why is that, you might ask?

Well, I think there are two approaches one could take. If the word 'prolific' makes you feel bad about yourself (as it does me), you could nuke it from your vocabulary and replace it with something healthier. Or you can reclaim the word and make it mean something that actually works for you. That's what I'm trying to do.

I'm taking that second approach of redefining Prolificity in a more personal sense. I'm asking myself: what does MY Prolificity look like? What does it consist of? How can I measure it? Can I assign a threshold beyond which I can feel free to call myself Prolific, by my own definition?

As soon as I started looking at Prolificity that way, rather than in the "why can't I be more like THAT writer over there" kind of way, I quickly realized that it's not just about word-count. Writing many words and publishing frequently might be the cornerstone of Prolificity if you're writing for money, but fandom is more about community.

I realized I need a definition that reflects fannish values, which encompass so much more than just how many words you write or how often you post. And that's what my next entry will be about. Fannish values, at least as I perceive them, and how they're shaping my personal definition of Prolificity. In the meantime...

What about you?

Do you consider yourself to be a prolific fan author (or artist, or other creator)? Do you have a personal sense of what Prolific means to you? Have you achieved it, or are you still working on it? I would love to hear about it!

Note: This was cross-posted from my Dreamwidth account, which is where most of this blog series is gonna happen. I will put some of the main posts here on Tumblr, but most of the discussion will be taking place on DW. If you want to join the discussion, you can do so here.

#writing #fanfic #productivity

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muselin · 3 years

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Hi! Another lurking anon! About that “I don't quite see how interactivity governs the preference for heterosexually-oriented vs homosexually-oriented content on each site though.” There is actually a connection, and it’s social acceptability! Tumblr is a social media, which is geared towards “family friendliness” and social acceptability, and AO3 is an archive, which was set up with the explicit purpose of archiving everything that anyone ever could find objectionable. And guess what has been VERY not socially acceptable in the US in the past, is still stigmatized today, and is illegal in a lot of other countries? Homosexuality.

Before you say this is homophobia, please remember the purges of ff.net that you also lived through - they censored MUCH more heavily any m/m content than het. Fics that contained as much as a kiss between men were deleted together with the most graphic het rape/torture. And it’s always been like that! Young users today seem to think that non-het content is Ok today and treated exactly the same as het, but that’s just not true.

So anyone who has been on the fic writing scene for longer than the last big purge knows that non-het content isn’t safe on mainstream social media sites, even if it seems “chaste” or “wholesome” by the standards of today (and boy do they change quickly!) Such older authors take their work to AO3 precisely to shield it from future purges, thus creating a community and “culture” there as THE place for such fic. Not to mention that older and more experienced authors typically produce higher-quality work, on the whole, and that attracts more fans, too.

By comparison, tumblr is a social media and ideal to reach as wide an audience as possible with mostly unobjectionable het content, since het is seen as “socially acceptable,” which is not likely to change. Sure, once in a while someone will start screaming that trope A is toxic or ship B is abusive, but the fads come and go as fast as the turnover of content. That is, in short, what drive the separation of het on mainstream and non-het on AO3.^^

Those are some excellent points, lurking anon #2! (I gotta start giving my lurking anons numbers lol. Or you guys can give yourselves anon names or emojis) And I definitely agree with most of your points, historically non-het content has been purged and been considered unacceptable for most spaces. Wattpad and Lifejournal were once havens for that kind of thing, along with adultfanfiction.net and later on, AO3.

The only thing I would say is that my point stands about how the user demographic of tumblr has changed, but is not reflecting LGBTQI+ friendly attitudes towards fanfiction as we would expect. As I mentioned, tumblr have stated that 50% of their user base is Gen Z (age 22-23 and under), and as you rightly pointed out, this demographic is more LGBTQI+ supportive in general and also, has more young people identifying as part of those groups themselves in the ideological West in general, but also around the world. So in light of that, I would expect that this massive het and non-het fiction difference between tumblr and AO3 would have diminished by now, but that isn't the reality. Maybe things are happening too slowly for other reasons, regardless of how quickly the shift in attitudes is occurring in general society.

It could also be that we have no idea what percentage of tumblr users use the platform for fanfiction. Even though tumblr users far outnumber AO3 users as we saw in the user statistics, AO3's only purpose is fanfiction whereas tumblr is all sorts. It is theoretically possible that the users who come to tumblr for fanfiction specifically are fewer than those who go to AO3, and this is why we are not seeing a change in the het and non-het fiction divide - maybe their footprint is still too small to see.

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