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#competition? you're not even playing the same sport

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AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.

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You talk sense into me? That would've been interesting.

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EDDIE DIAZ 8.04 | No Place Like Home

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eddie diaz reading poem after poem after poem looking for the words that describe how he feels. “i will love you if i never see you again, i will love you if i see you every tuesday” and “not to me. not if it’s you” and “stain them. i don’t care” and “no one has ever known you as i know you” and “my heart is so full of you i can hardly call it my own” and “i want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees” and “it’s still you. it’s still you.” and “i think i wished for you all my life” and “i am prepared to be devastated by you” and “i would invent god if it made you happy” and “your love will be safe with me” and “you’ll never have to peel your own oranges again” and “i want you to eat well” and “the goodness inside of you is stronger than my fear” and “domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum dic verbo et sanabitur anima mea” and “if you are intolerable let me be the one to tolerate you” and “everlasting. deathless.” but none of them are big enough to fit all of his love and so he says buck’s name and prays he knows what those four letters mean.

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jjjj es muy gracioso el "vino de la nada esto". Literalmente el 90% de las escenas de ellos dos eran ALEJADOS nunca estaban en plano juntos. equals. noooo literalmente siempre estaban en diferentes lugares nunca mostraron algo de cercanía entre ellos dos más que el primer beso. En el único momento q le dice por el nombre preferido es cuando le corta. It's a plot point!!!! Literalmente cuando se fue todo a la mierda con taylor le pidió q se mude e hizo lo mismo

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EDDIE HEART EYES DIAZ

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buck meeting ali during the first big rescue he was partnered up with eddie for…… buck explicitly shown as having moved on from abby by coparenting with eddie…… buck getting with taylor practically with eddie’s blood still behind his ears…….. buck kissing eddie’s replacement after he no showed their hangout……. buck saying natalia understands him because of her relationship with death to eddie who literally restarted his heart…… buck kissing tommy after trying to blow him up with his mind for an entire episode for taking eddie’s attention away……… much to think about. the love triangle framing may only be becoming overt now but buck’s love life has always been a three person affair

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EDDIE HEART EYES DIAZ

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EDDIE’S HANDS in 8.05, “Masks”

+ bonus 🐺

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longing for something you can never return to

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real talk the absolute fucking selfishness of helena diaz to keep eddie out of the loop with the birthday party and the invitations and purposefully not bringing him to sing happy birthday to his son while also making the moment eddie’s been planning for god knows how long less than a 30 seconds video chat is repulsive. fuck you helena. fuck you

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Helena. He was your baby. Your baby first. Your first baby. And you took. His baby from him. You took your baby’s baby. You took him away. And are rubbing it in his face. That is not your baby. Your baby is in front of you but you won’t recognize that he is your baby because you made him your coparent. Ramon said your baby was the man of the house, and you made him the man of the house. And then you took his baby from him.

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Helena. He was your baby. Your baby first. Your first baby. And you took. His baby from him. You took your baby’s baby. You took him away. And are rubbing it in his face. That is not your baby. Your baby is in front of you but you won’t recognize that he is your baby because you made him your coparent. Ramon said your baby was the man of the house, and you made him the man of the house. And then you took his baby from him.

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Helena. He was your baby. Your baby first. Your first baby. And you took. His baby from him. You took your baby’s baby. You took him away. And are rubbing it in his face. That is not your baby. Your baby is in front of you but you won’t recognize that he is your baby because you made him your coparent. Ramon said your baby was the man of the house, and you made him the man of the house. And then you took his baby from him.

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not to give this show too many flowers but i do think the buck plot is good and fits with his character because he does need praise to live and he also historically has had issues following orders because he will always choose his own impulsive reaction over falling in line and he and bobby figured out a dynamic that worked but now he has to work under a captain who is Not His Dad, who not only isn't going to give him Special Baby Boy privileges he refuses to give buck even an inch of validation or praise like this IS bucks version of the torture nexus it's the anti-praise he cannot survive under constant negging it makes perfect sense that he started having a mental break and personally i love it when the show pushes and pushes right on bucks issues until he snaps, that's when he's at his most fun as an unhinged and imperfect character