#this will be my ‘general tumblr population poll’

[peach-pot]

(if you don’t mind reblogging this post, that would be groovy ^_^)

#first and last time I ask people to reblog a post on the post lol #hannah talks sometimes #this will be my ‘general tumblr population poll’ #and then I can compare it to my blog one #it’ll still definitely be like. my side of tumblr because it’s starting on my blog but. eh you get it #asexual #aromantic #polls #aspec #arospec #acespec #asexuality #aromanticism #lgbt

[astronomodome]

Tumblr Poll Tournaments & MCYT

So a while ago I made a post expressing my frustration with the way a lot of tumblr poll tournaments seem to exclude mcyt characters- or if they are included, people in the notes are rude about it. The first situation of these- the poll organizer including rules against submitting characters from mcyt- is something I can easily quantify. I've crunched some numbers in order to find out two things:

How common is this phenomenon, really?

Why does this happen in the first place?

A note before I start: I'm not blaming the poll organizers for this, and I don't want anyone to get angry at them for excluding mcyt. At the end of the day, it's up to them to curate what they want their poll to be, and if they don't want to deal with the toxicity that often comes with letting mcyt characters run (or if they just don't like it for whatever reason), that's their decision. Trust me- poll organizers have to put up with a lot of shit already, and I don't want to add to it, regardless of their opinions on mcyt. If any poll organizers recognize their own words in the later part of this overview, they can contact me and I'll remove it. This is also why I have chosen not to identify the blogs from which I took the examples- I mean no harm to any poll organizer. They are a symptom of a much larger problem and they haven't done anything wrong except be a little misinformed at worst.

Excluding mcyt characters from poll tournaments really isn't that big of a deal on its own- though it is frustrating- but it does speak to the larger attitude of the general tumblr population towards mcyt. While not without its flaws, this can be used as a metric to measure the extent of this attitude and maybe get a hint of why it exists.

...Please note, also, that most of these polls date back to around March-June 2023, when poll tournaments were a big thing on Tumblr. Not super outdated, but I still should note that opinions might have changed since then.

Also also, be warned that there are examples below of some organizers being pretty toxic! It's not a whole lot, but if you don't want to expose yourself to that, maybe pass on this post!

With that out of the way, let's get started.

Part One: The Numbers

The first thing I decided to do was figure out a rough percentage of how many poll tournaments have a rule that excludes mcyt characters from being submitted. To get a sample batch of poll blogs, I used one of the blogs that pits the winners of tournaments against each other and checked each blog included in that. This ended up being a more tedious process than I had thought, since there's a lot of variation in the way poll organizers, well, organize. I ended up with 123 blogs sorted into three categories.

The first category included tournaments where a rule for or against mcyt characters wouldn't really make sense, for a variety of reasons. Most commonly, the tournament was between letters of the alphabet or animo acids or government agencies, not fictional characters, so I counted them out. There were also a handful of blogs where the contestants were determined by the organizer, not by nomination at all. Combined, blogs that did not fit my criteria made up 60/123 of my samples.

The second and third categories were the blogs that either had a rule against mcyt characters, or didn't. Most of the blogs I looked through had rules I could find, and some were more thorough about it than others. For my purposes, I counted the blog as a no only if they explicitly had a rule against mcyt characters, or clarified later that they weren't allowed. Most poll blogs didn't mention mcyt at all. (This will become relevant later.)

Of the 63 blogs that fit my criteria, 11 (17.5%) of them had a rule against mcyt characters, while the remaining 52 (82.5%) did not.

To me, this seems like pretty good news! I had honestly expected the percentage of blogs that excluded mcyt to be much higher. This is definitely a good sign! But I wouldn't really jump to assuming that mcyt characters would actually be accepted in all of these blogs. I will explain this in the next part of my research.

Part Two: The Examples

The second thing I wanted to find out with this research was why organizers end up having rules against mcyt in the first place. Is it just the bad reputation the mcyt space has (largely a result of one green man in particular)? Let's look at a few examples of poll rules against mcyt characters. Some of them are from my sample blogs and some of them aren't.

Type 1: Not understanding the difference between real people and characters in mcyt

The majority of the rules against mcyt I saw were of this type, and honestly, it's pretty reasonable. It's a pretty major debate in the mcyt community over whether mcyts' characters are separate enough from their content creators to count as fictional. However, there are a considerable number of mcyt characters who are explicitly stated to be different from their cc in the same way as a character in a movie played by an actor is different from the actor playing them. Excluding all mcyt characters for being 'real people' is just incorrect, though I can kinda understand where the organizers were coming from with this one.

It should also be noted that the vast majority of poll blogs had a rule against submitting real people. There's a possibility that some poll organizers might have lumped mcyt characters as real people even if they didn't specify it explicitly. Therefore, an attempt to actually submit an mcyt character into one of these tournaments might be against the rules based on what the organizer thinks. I have no way to quantify this, which is why I said earlier that the results of my initial test might not be accurate.

Type 2: 'Problematic fandom' (toxicity warning for some of these)

This type of rule is usually broader than just mcyt, but lumps it in with other fandoms known for being associated with bigotry (often hp, which is... yeah i'm definitely not going to argue in favor of harry potter but yikes. really? we're as bad as terfy potter? really.) At least one of them let dsmp characters in with the exception of dream, which is a lot fairer than... some of the others.

If we want to give the organizers benefit of the doubt here, we can say that these rules are made to keep the poll less toxic than it would be otherwise... but to be perfectly honest, some of these might be more about that phenomenon of purity culture that has had a habit of popping up in fandom spaces since forever. That's a whole other conversation I'm not ready to have now, but it comes as no surprise to me that mcyt has become a little taboo in some places (likely to a large extent because of dream and all the drama he's generated). There's also no telling whether the poll organizers in these cases even know that there are other smps besides dsmp... but that's besides the point, since there are other dsmp characters that aren't associated with dream at all. Excluding them reveals a misconception about the mcyt genre anyway. And of course, I think we can all agree that some of these are just pretty rude.

Which brings us to our conclusion.

I feel like a lot of the toxicity towards mcyt as a genre and mcyt characters boils down to people either not really understanding what mcyt is (i.e. mcyt -> minecraft youtubers -> real people) or hearing stuff about dream and assuming the entire mcyt space is reflective of that. Of course, it's a frustrating issue that some people think this way. I think it's nice to be reminded, though, that this sort of thing isn't very widespread. Alongside the bad examples, I saw a lot of organizers confronting their preconceived notions: one organizer let in an mcyt character after admitting their 'unfamiliarity with the source material', another allowed mcyt characters 'on the condition that you can explain how they are a separate character' and a few others fiercely defended mcyt characters against toxicity in their polls. Every day we grow as a community and we can't let a few people with misguided notions of what we are keep us down. Keep watching, keep creating, and as Zedaph once said, It's okay to be silly!

#this ended up being a larger project than i expected. i hope it doesnt ruffle anyone's feathers too much #i don't like dipping my toes into discourse-y stuff but i thought this was pretty fascinating #if anyone has any questions or imput feel free to speak up #i don't bite and i love discussion #mcyt #astro speaks #idk what else to tag this as. i dont want to be spamming fandom tags for this #but i also want people to see it since i worked really hard on it #so uh. i dont like to beg for reblogs but if you find this interesting at all please consider reblogging

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

since people have been commenting in the tags on the poll for The Silmarillion to the effect that they’re “skewing the results”, I wanted to elaborate on my feelings on the “methodology” (as it were) of this blog.

in particular, taking this comment by sesamenom as a starting point:

the reblogs (even the early ones) do indicate the post reached multiple medium-to-large silm blogs, plus the original post is tagged w silmarillion. so this probably is less of a survey of general silm readership and more of an indicator that 32% (47% now) of this post's audience is the greater silm fandom.

this is obviously one of the core “problems” of running polls like this through the medium of tumblr: it will be impossible to get “accurate” / “scientific” results, because who sees the post is entirely determined by (1) who follows the specific blog (a self-selecting audience) and (2) who reblogs it and into which communities / networks. in this case (and others), it is clear from the notes that the post is circulating heavily within Tolkien fan networks on tumblr, and this is, indeed, likely to be “skewing” the results relative to the general population (whatever we take that to mean in this context).

however!

this blog and @haveyoureadthisscifibook are not intended to find information about a general population. rather, I’m interested specifically in the much narrower group of people who are habitual fantasy and/or science fiction readers. my goal is not to determine “what percentage of people have read The Lord of the Rings”, but “what percentage of fantasy readers have read The Lord of the Rings”.

for these purposes, the self-selecting nature of tumblr is actually an advantage! I can safely assume that anyone who’s choosing to follow a specialized poll blog for fantasy books identifies as a fantasy reader at least to some extent, and if they reblog a post they’re doing so because they anticipate that the book in question is or could (or should) be of interest to their followers — in other words, they do so because they expect their followers to also be fantasy readers, or at least fantasy-adjacent.

given that the poll for The Silmarillion appears to be circulating in specifically Tolkien-oriented fan networks here, it’s probably still true that the result is going to be disproportionate, but the disproportion relative to the target larger group of fantasy readers is also likely much less dramatic or significant than the disproportion relative to any general population. we’ve certainly had some amusingly misleading results in the past (notably (to me): a random recent Warhammer 40k novel getting >25% yes on the sci-fi blog; In the Hands of the Goddess getting only 40% yes vs. the rest of Song of the Lioness hovering around the 50% mark), but since I’m interested first and foremost in averages, a few individual disproportions will even out in the long run.

so. reblog away!

#faq #not a poll

[comicaurora]

I mean, there is a rather large population of aces on tumblr. I've seen three or four different "What's your sexuality?" polls and Ace was generally second place, behind bi.

That being said, I actually found out I was ace because I followed blogs that had less shipping on them, and then it turned out most of those blog people were ace, and when they started talking about it I was like, "Oh. OH!" So yeah, there might be a touch of selection bias just by virtue of your blog being not obnoxiously horny

some aces are truly skilled in the horny arts, but I have neglected my training 😔

#asks

[haveyouheardthispodcast]

There are so many actual play podcasts! Is that just because this is tumblr? Like people here are more likely to suggest those (we're all nerds after all), or are there really just a huge percentage of actual play podcasts in general??

I'm guessing this is Tumblr's bias, but I don't actually know what a true representative sample of podcasts overall would look like.

Of the 474* podcasts posted so far:

59.9% (284) are Nonfiction

8.0% (38) are Actual Plays

30.8% (146) are Fiction (but not APs)

And 1.3% (6) I was unable to categorize.**

These box-and-whisper plots come from the 453* polls that have finished. In general, Tumblr has not heard of most podcasts. We have heard non-AP fiction podcasts slightly more than actual plays, and all types of fiction have better numbers than the nonfiction results.

Given that it's a running complaint that news media loves to talk about fiction podcasts like they're brand new at least once a year, despite the fact that Radio Drama Revival has been going on since 2007(!), I would hazard a guess that 40% of all podcasts in total are not fiction podcasts. However, it is possible that news media has their own bias towards podcasts like the ones they put out.

I don't know where one would get more representative data. I kinda don't remember how sampling is supposed to work from my statistics classes. (Sorry to my professors! One of you were excellent! This is my fault not yours!) iTunes is obviously the go-to, but they didn't have a "fiction" category for years so a lot of older podcasts are under different genres. "Arts" was pretty popular, but I know actual plays often tend towards "comedy" and additionally that podcasts about games are often under "leisure".

So overall, I don't know but I would guess that this is a sample specific to the Tumblr population.

*The duplicated podcast has been removed from these charts.

**If someone would like to help me categorize these, I've listed them below the cut.

Bonus: I was surprised that so far we've posted not one, but two actual play musicals! Mythic Thunderlute and bomBARDed!

Podcasts I would like help categorizing!

Pounded In The Butt By My Own Podcast

Creepypodsta

Fictional

Sleep and Sorcery

Get Sleepy

Siblings Peculiar

Wait hold on we have Morrison Mysteries (our first poll!) listed as nonfiction and true crime, but is this actually fiction and books/literature/mystery?

—Mod Nic

#Not A Poll #Ask #Anonymous #Statistics #This was supposed to be short. #I nearly just attached the pie chart to the ask before I left this morning but I wanted to update it to include the past few days. #EDIT: I don't know why the boxplots are being shown stacked instead of side-by-side. Tumblr reasons I guess.

[thedawnofcrime]

ASSHOLE

POLL RESULTS

Note: if you don’t agree with trans people, don’t reblog. Instead go take a cold shower and maybe stub your toe on a metal table.

Earlier today I polled the LGBTQ and LGB hashtags to see if the general population of queer people accepted those who want to separate queer and trans people from the rest of the community. This wasn’t actually my goal, because I know perfectly well how you bitches operate.

I really didn’t care about the results from LGBTQ hashtags, because I know from legitimate demographic studies that most people, let alone queer people, do not agree with their sentiments.

What I did learn however is that their goal isn’t to separate the LGBTQ community down the middle, it’s to build their own hateful group and convince everybody else that they’re bigger and stronger. Their biggest tactic seems to be the abuse of language, by claiming homophobia when queer people refer to themselves as queer, and insisting that being against LGB groups is against all lesbian gay and bisexual people, they hope to victimize themselves when faced with even equality with trans people.

They spread my poll like the plague, reaching over 250 votes in a couple hours (thanks for that), and I couldn’t give less of a shit, because those votes came entirely from the group who already hates trans people. They REALLY want community, but without the icky trans people. They think our pride is tainted by grooming and fetishists, because they can’t look at a history book and realize homophobes have been saying that about them since the 1900s. Either way, don’t give them that community. Protest their groups and don’t show up to their pride, because there’s no pride in hate. Love thy neighbour unless they want to control your life, your gender and your language.

When you look at the poll demographics though, most votes came from under 0.5% of the queer community on Tumblr. Despite all they might say, the answer to whether trans people deserve to be in the community is a resounding

•YES•

The LGB hashtag has so few members that the numbers don’t even show up. Add the T and you go up OVER TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND.

You’re loud as fuck, but less like a crowd, and more like an angsty teen in their garage with an electric guitar and 3 speakers.

TRANS PEOPLE ARE HERE, AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, YOU CAN

✨ROT IN HELL✨

#transgender #lgbtq #trans #queer #lgbt #queer is not a slur #lgb with the t #trans rights #trans rights are human rights #lgbtqia #lgbtq+ #lgbtqia+ #queer community #hate is unworthy of love #rot in piss

[dollsome-does-tumblr]

ways i feel irreparably different from most people!!!!!:

allergic to almost all food

no substance use whatsoever ever in my entire life. this is very important to me, which is embarrassing and off-putting because i know it's not an attractive quality in a person.

don't wear any makeup

still wearing a mask and feeling really stressed about the pandemic

no kids

can't drive, don't have a car

don't like traveling

couldn't write sexy fanfic to save my life!!! (but in a way where i'm at peace with it because it's just not my style, baby. sexless banter forever!) this one is, to be fair, pretty fandom-specific. i think there are probably a lot of people out there in the general population who couldn't write sexy fanfic to save their lives.

most of the time i'm okay with being so weird but sometimes i feel as insecure as a middle schooler. today is one of those days! I AM AN ALIEN

but also i kind of feel like i should make this into a poll and see which of these weirdo traits is the most popular 👀 (on tumblr my guess is it's 'can't drive'. oh wait. maybe 'no kids'!)

#dollsome's deep thoughts

[hotvintagepoll]

what I’m learning from these 2nd round polls is that my taste more often than not is directly contrary to the general tumblr population’s. rest in peace my old English kings, rest assured if this was an audio-based poll you’d all be soloing 💔😔

(thanks sm for all your hard work in running this though, even if my faves r losing badly it’s a lot of fun!!)

Thank you!

#:D #asks

[especdreamy]

Hey guys since my friend ended up being one of those "makes character playlists based on what music they'd listen to" people, I'm making a poll to ask what's more common in the general tumblr population...

Reblog for sample size etc etc ^_^

#dreamy talks

[dnd-smash-pass-vs]

Loooove this content, keep it up! I'm confused about the qualifying round tho. Nobody wanted to fuck the mummy so why is it in the tournament? What does it mean to "make the cut"?

It had come to my attention that a lot of the early passes were less because nobody wanted them, more because they had like 10-20 votes. We got things like the wereboar, which was originally s huge failure when we had like 2 dozen people, but once we had a significant sample size it had 77% smash. because ultimately that wasn't the opinion of the general tumblr population, it was the opinion of like 2 specific blogs and their followers. Since I didn't want to just re-do a third of the qualifiers, I decided to make this Last Chance bracket, basically a loser's bracket. I'm taking the top contenders from this and slotting into the real tournament, which will start in a few weeks. Seemed like the quickest way to sort the ones who were passed for being disliked from the ones who were passed because the entire poll was one friend group.

In the future I might only pull these out for larger tournaments, but that's why the mummy's here. This isn't the main tournament, it's basically an extra round of qualifiers to give a second chance to those who didn't get the same fair treatment. Seems to be working, as creatures with low sample size like Bone Devil have been dominating.

#not tournament #answers

[moonshinemagpie]

Discovering my mother and I have very different moral compasses when it comes to corporations, and now I'm curious about how we line up with the Tumblr general population:

Please don't sidetrack this poll with "buying from Amazon is always wrong." Not the point of my question.

#poll #amazon

[idonthaveacontract]

I always think Mad Men is so oppressed on here and it is lol but for years I had it in my head that at least The Sopranos was given its due on tumblr to the same level it is amongst the general population but as time goes on I see more and more instances of it being completely disregarded in a very strange way by the so-called prestige lovers community. Like I kind of think people acknowledge it to be great because they know they have to in a way that they won't do for Mad Men but when the anonymous poll comes around they suddenly aren't so invested in joking about Tony and therapy speak anymore

#personally this is not my cause celebre but it's very odd #like not to dig up old grievances but why was it not in the final of that one tv poll #only on Tumblr truly

[silvathemagicalgirl]

Look not enough people on here are upset about TikTok rn and it's a problem.

I don't care your opinion on TikTok as a platform. The US banning TikTok is an objectively terrible move and you should be mad.

And don't go saying "um actually it's a divestment" because TikTok has already stated they will not sell and a pretty small minority of their revenue is from the US in the first place. It's a ban.

It's infringing on the first amendment right to free speech. The government is saying what website its citizens are and aren't allowed to visit.

The government should not be allowed to just ban a business. Or force a sale. Especially when that business has not broken a single law.

If they're worried about privacy, they should be writing a over-reaching Privacy Law. Make it apply to all platforms. If you don't want the Chinese government to have access to US citizen's data, make it that NO government can have access to that data. But then the US wouldn't have access to it, so we're gonna just blame China and TikTok instead.

There is some inherent xenophobia in the fear of China behind this ban.

Meta, Twitter, and other US based social media companies have been publicly caught and documented selling/leaking this exact data to the US government or other private companies such as advertisers. In fact, TikTok has some of the best security of any social media platform. But we are concerned about China. Okay.

If they do this to TikTok, it sets a precedent that they can do this to tumblr or any other social media platform.

They have added this ban (which has now passed the House and Senate) inside another bill providing aid to Palestine and Ukraine. They added it to a must-pass humanitarian bill because that was the only way they could see getting it through. Why is the US government allowed to put unrelated topics up in the same bill for the same vote.

Thousands of US small businesses who depend on TikTok to run (creators, sellers on TikTok shop, etc.) will be completely out of work.

The ban in its current form is almost unenforceable.

The US government could be solving literally any other problem right now. Instead, this is what they want to push through right before election year.

Despite polls showing that this is NOT what the US population wants, our elected officials insist on putting it through anyway. They claim there is some secret information that they have that we don't, but refuse to share. And it means that the younger generation who uses TikTok is losing even more trust in the government and the voting process. They do not feel like their voice is heard. They will give up, and stop voting. This will continue to widen the gap between what the constituents want and what the elected officials actually do.

I could go on and on about what TikTok the platform personally means to me, but honestly it shouldn't matter. This ban will infringe on my right to free speech. And I haven't seen anyone outside TikTok talking about it.

#tiktok #tiktok ban #im so angry

[jariktig]

What happens on AO3 (stays on AO3)...

So, I have finally hit the end condition for my TF pairings sample - I’d estimated I’d have to go through about 100 pages of AO3 search (or around 4% of the total) to get to the point of finding 10 pages with no new pairings.  It actually took 357, or around 15% of the total, or around a year’s worth of fics to search and some days of my free time, so I am going to get some use out of it if it kills me!  Accordingly, while I’m waiting for Tumblr to give me polls so that I can run the Rare Pairs Battle Royale that was the original intent of the thing, I present  some silly analysis, below the cut because it’s a bit long.

First, some caveats:

1.  This is based entirely on fanfics as presented on AO3; no FFN, no Wattpad, no LJ etc and no canonicity except insofar as the patterns on AO3 match those in canon (which is very firmly left as an exercise for the reader);

2.  It’s a sample survey, taken at a single point in time (around early Feb 2023; could look more exactly if anyone’s desperate to know).  That means there will be some pairings that have appeared since (@quetzapapalotl’s Optimus Prime/Primus frex) and some that I’ve not yet picked up (a couple that I remember because I liked the relevant fics are Megatron/The Nemesis and Laserbeak/Swoop).  That said, the big conclusions should be pretty robust at this stage and the list of rare pairs also won’t be greatly off.  As an extra check I can put up a link to the latter and ask people to suggest additions;

3.  I’ve excluded relationships including OCs (because I’d included foreign language fics and so reading through all the individual ones to try to disambiguate OCs was beyond me; also I didn’t want to read through a large number of Prowl/OC fics and the like), and relationships including generic types of TFs such as Vehicon or Seeker (on the premise that those are effectively OCs with backstory).  I’ve also excluded TF/human relationships including reader self-insert for similar reasons.  Non-OC TFs are defined as those findable on TFWiki.

Right, on with the actual findings:

1.  There are at least 639 individual pairings in TF fandom as represented on AO3; of those, around 12% (at least 146) are one-fic wonders whose supporters I can only salute.  The median number of fics per pairing is 7, which is surprisingly low.  (I’d been thinking of my favourite Megatron/Jazz as “rare”, but it’s only just outside the top quartile in reality).   At the other end of the scale, there are 55 pairings with over 100 fics and 4 with over 1000.  All of this is not nearly so impressive as the combinatorics someone did in the great TF/Homestuck discussion, but I expect that is my own fault for excluding OCs, vehicons and the like.  Also, if someone wants to repeat this trick for Homestuck I’ll gladly compare results, but I know my limits.

2.  The most popular pairing (somewhat to my surprise) is Jazz/Prowl, with 2632 fics.  Megatron/Optimus Prime (including Megatron/Orion Pax etc and correcting for overlaps) comes to 2407, Megatron/Starscream 1783, and Drift (Deadlock)/Ratchet 1386.

3.  At a faction level, Autobots have more fun, even if corrected for the fact that the population of named Autobots is higher than the same for Decepticons: using lists of named G1 characters as a rough proxy for population likely to appear on AO3, Autobots get 2.4 relationships per capita and Decepticons 2.3.  Which is not that different, but Autobots also get 126 fics per capita, as opposed to the Decepticons’ 104.  Decepticon advocates (including me) point out here that how much sex you have is not necessarily related to how much fun you have in the process, but still.  Neutrals are harder to do pop stats for, but on the face of it underrepresented, and the Variable category for people who canonically shift factions during the war or whose name is shared with other TFs from the opposite faction is definitely overrepresented.  That last one is entirely a function of Drift (Deadlock).

4.  Still at a faction level (and again correcting for population), inter-faction relationships are definitely more popular than intra-faction ones, with 0.35% of the theoretically possible inter-faction pairings actually appearing on AO3 and only 0.26% of the intra-faction ones.  Must be the lure of the forbidden, or something.  Also clearly a lot of untapped potential out there.

5.  More on this to come when I’ve done the arithmetic properly, but at a glance the most obviously underrepresented group is beastformers.

6.  At an individual level, I have a few awards to give out:

The Little Black Dress Award for the TF who goes with absolutely anything (credit to @cleverthylacine for the name) goes to Megatron, by some distance and on either of the obvious metrics; he has 53 pairings and 6484 fics (correcting for overlaps again).  He can presumably store the trophy with the Best Wife one...  Vying for second place, Optimus Prime and Starscream with 35 pairings each; Starscream has 4843 fics and Optimus 4736 so it’s Starscream by an Insecticon’s whisker.  And also close for fourth and fifth, Prowl (29 pairings, 3583 fics) and Ratchet (25 pairings, 3439 fics).  Slightly stunned that Rodimus isn’t in the top 5, but there it is.

The Serial Monogamy Award for the TF with the highest ratio of fics to pairings goes to Chromedome (676 fics across 2 pairings, with Rewind and Prowl).  I’m pretty sure this surprises exactly nobody.  Second is Breakdown, with 969 fics across 4 pairings - Knockout and Starscream are the big ones, but Motormaster and Drag Strip also feature.  And third is Tailgate, with 735 fics across 4 pairings (Cyclonus, Whirl, Arcee, Glyph).  Nobody else anywhere near, once you correct for the fact that Orion Pax is also Optimus Prime.  Soundwave: a sufficiently superior husband to be paired up with 23 other TFs, which reduces the ratio somewhat.

The Lifetime Monogamy Award for the TF with the most fics given that they have only a single pairing goes jointly to Anode and Lug, who have 76 fics together and no pairings with anyone else on either side. Second is Chase, with 56 fics in Chase/Heatwave (not shared with Heatwave, who has quite a few other pairings; I hope that’s a properly negotiated deal).  Third a three-way tie between Airazor/Tigatron (28 fics, no other pairings for either) and Devcon (28 fics with Smokescreen, who has quite a few other pairings).

The Jack Harkness Fragging with Added Space-Time Award goes to Megatron, Optimus Prime, Brainstorm and Tarn, all of whom feature as their own partners in more than one fic.

And that’s all I’ve got for the moment.  Next steps: do ntuples for N>2, add mech/femme and frametype/group/combiner to the set so that I can cut by those, try to work out a quicker way of repeating the exercise for pairs including humans, and wait for tumblr to give me polls.  Drop me a line if you’ve questions or suggestions for future analysis.

#maccadam #dubious statistics

[tanadrin]

I don't think tumblr users are going to be representative of the general population when it comes to genital preferences. Or even of the LGBT population. We probably have an unusual openness to and interest in new sexual experiences. Who wants to be the kind of square who only has one kind of sex with one kind of person? Probably most of your followers don't. But from what I've observed, I think actually quite a lot of people are content with exactly one kind of sex with one kind of person

I certainly don't think tumblr users on this corner of tumblr are going to be representative. But it's still fun to run polls as a way of generating discussion, which was mostly my aim.

[crabussy]

🪨 <- rock that represents my appreciation of your use of a joke poll to show the inherent fallacy of data collection in a closed system leading to skewing or sheer inaccuracy of data

🪨 <- no this one is just a rock <3

THANK YOUUU ^_^ adding both of these to my stupidly large rock collection [: I'm surprised at how big the poll got, and I'm glad so many people find it interesting or useful because man. I've seen (and made!!!) wayyyy too many polls on tumblr that are trying to gather accurate information about the general population...

#ask tag #!!!!!