#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 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.

[tacticalgrandma]

I love how fandom and ao3 are gay gay queer utopias right up until someone mentions how these environments seem to replicate the misogynistic patterns of the societies they come from, at which point all writers are cishet women.

[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.

[zoloteh-volossya]

BG3 Fanfiction Statistics, Part 1

I’ve seen some discussions of BG3 fandom trends floating around tumblr that spoke from experience but lacked hard data to refer to. As a fan of Baldur’s Gate 3, fanfiction, and graphs, I therefore thought it would be neat and illustrative to go through AO3 and document some of the statistics this fandom.

I did a similar exercise back in January and posted the results here. However, I was a bit unhappy with this analysis – it was missing some data that I consider to be relevant, I didn’t end up discussing the results much, and I only posted it to reddit. Most discussions for the creative side of fandom seem to happen on tumblr, so I made this account to post it here.

I will try and be as transparent as possible when discussing how I obtained and processed this data. A copy of my spreadsheet can be found here and contains all of the data I will be discussing. Most of the data I feature in this essay will be presented as graphs. Below each graph I will discuss the patterns shown in the graph and provide what I believe to be some relevant and/or interesting number values. If you want to see all the numbers, please refer to my spreadsheet. If you don’t care about the numbers and/or my thoughts about them, feel free to skim through and just look at the charts!

A note before I start – I gathered this data between July 21, 2024 and July 24, 2024. It is out of date as of my writing this and will be even more out of date by the time you read it. However, I believe the general fandom trends will hold up over time – the same patterns that I observed in January are largely still present in July.

Due to the tumblr post image limit and my preponderance of graphs, I will be breaking this behemoth of an essay into two parts:

General Fandom Statistics, the Player Character, and the Women

The Men, a Character Comparison, and a Pairing Analysis

We are currently in part 1. Part 2 can be found at this link. The rest of part 1 is below the read more because this is very long.

GENERAL FANDOM STATS

This information was found by looking at the side bar when browsing Baldur’s Gate fics. Therefore, this data set includes fics from the previous two Baldur’s Gate games. However, given that the games were released in 1998 and 2000, respectively, most of the fanfiction for them was likely posted to FF.net and the error from including what little fic for them was posted to AO3 is likely small.

At the time of my data gathering, there were 31,043 Baldur’s Gate fics on AO3.

RATINGS

To the surprise of nobody in the BG3 fandom, Explicit fic is the largest category, at 38% of all fics produced. It’s followed by Mature (24%), Teen and Up (20%), General (12%) and Not Rated (6%). Not all of the Explicit and Mature fics are necessarily horny – those warnings also apply to extreme violence (hello, Dark Urge). But let’s be real, most of them are tagged that way for sex.

WARNINGS

Speaking of extreme violence, let’s take a look at the warnings used for fics in this fandom.

Just about half (50.2%) of BG fics have no warnings at all. About 17.6% have warnings for graphic depictions of violence – lower than I would have expected, honestly, for a video game that features as much murder as this one does (at least, how I play it...). About 5.4% of fics feature a warning for rape, 4.7% feature major character death, and 0.5% feature underage sex.

CATEGORIES

AO3 allows users to select any categories from a list of possible options (F/M, M/M, F/F, Gen, Other, and Multi). F/M, M/M, and F/F are pretty self explanatory, Gen fics don’t focus on a relationship, Multi fics focus on a relationship between three or more people, and Other is a catch all for fics that don’t fit into any of the previous categories very well. For shipping with nonbinary (NB) characters, I have seen a variety of approaches. Some people select the category closest to the NB character’s presentation, some select multiple categories, and some select Other.

One very useful tool that I will be introducing here is the use of “otp:true.” When “otp:true” is entered into the “Search within results” bar while filtering tags, AO3 will only return fics that have just one pairing tagged. This filters out all fics that have background pairings or multiple focus pairings. Results with “otp:true” are typically solely focused on that particular pairing.

With all that explanation out of the way, the results:

We can clearly see that the most common category for Baldur’s Gate fics is M/F, with 43.3% of all fics featuring a M/F pairing. 36.4% of all fics feature a M/M pairing, 10.6% feature a F/F pairing, 11.7% are more General, 8.0% feature Multiple people in a pairing, and 10.9% are Other. These percentages add up to more than 100% because a fic can be tagged with multiple categories.

Things change a bit when you filter for “otp:true” and only include fics that focus on just one pairing. In this case, M/M predominates, with a whopping 46.0% of fics. M/F follows with 31.2%, F/F with 11.1%, 7.7% are General, 9.7% are Other, and 3.0% are still tagged as Multi (presumably for fics where the only pairing is a threesome or such).

CHARACTERS

As a last look at more general content before I begin a deep dive into looking at the various characters, I took a look at the 30 most popular character tags.

This was a surprise to me the first time I looked at it in January. In the previous two video game fandoms I was in that had a player character (Mass Effect and Fire Emblem: Three Houses), the player character was the most popular character tag in that fandom. In this case, though, Astarion has the most fics that feature him, and by a pretty significant margin (~5,000 more fics than Tav). He appears in 63.0% of fics. Tav is next, at 46.7% of fics. Then we have the rest of the six Origin characters: Gale (34.5% of fics), Shadowheart (23.7%), Karlach (20.5%), Wyll (18.6%), and Lae’zel (15.9%), as well as Halsin (15.8%) and the Dark Urge (15.3%). That they all are next to each other makes sense, as fics that focus on one character or pairing will often tag the entire ensemble. Lae’zel only showing up 16% of the time seems low, though, for a member of the main cast. To me, this indicates that not many fics are true ensemble fics that include all of the main cast.

After this block of main characters, we drop a bit to Gortash, who shows up in 7.4% of fics. He’s the most popular villain by far, followed by Cazador (4.7%) and Raphael (4.6%). Orin only shows up in 2.9% of fics and Ketheric is featured in only 1.1% of fics.

Jaheira shows up in 4.4% of fics, but her values may include fics from the earlier Baldur’s Gate games. Poor Minthara is the 16th most tagged character and only shows up in 2.5% of fics. Rolan (a tiefling NPC) shows up in more fics than she does.

Despite being featured in previous Baldur’s Gate game fics as well as BG3, Minsc does not seem popular – he’s #25, being tagged in 1.3% of fics.

One thing I did note was the comparative lack of focus on the overarching plot of the game in BG3 fics. I’ll use the Emperor as a barometer for this, as it’s inextricably interwoven into everything having to do with the Absolute, the mysterious artifact, and our protagonists’ immunity to it. Yet, it only appears in 535 fics of over 31,000 – approximately 1.7% of all BG fics. This tells me that there isn’t much engagement with the actual illithid plot of the game in most fics – at least not to the extent where major plot relevant characters are being tagged.

CHARACTER PAIRING STATISTICS

Most of my time for this analysis was spent collecting data for the various pairing tags. I went through the top 300 pairing tags by order of popularity (ending with Mystra/Cazador, of all things) and recorded how many fics each rating had and how many fics each category had both with and without “otp:true” applied. Coincidentally, this included all the pairings with 5 or more fics in them at the time – by sheer luck the 301st pairing tag had only 4 fics. I judged that I could ignore pairing tags with fewer than 5 fics without affecting the results of my analyses too much (also it had taken 4 days to get this far and I was tired).

However, a lot of authors tag their fics with both, say, Astarion/Tav and Astarion/F!OC. But for this exercise I’m not really looking at how authors refer to the Tav/Dark Urge/self insert character in their tagging nomenclature. I’m more interested in how many fics exist for, say, the pairing of Astarion and the player character.

To this end, I combined the numbers for Tav, Dark Urge, OC, F!OC, M!OC, NB!OC, Reader, and You for each character ship. In order to avoid double counting fics, once I had added the numbers for a particular tag I excluded that tag from all future counts.

[X]/PC = [X]/Tav + ([X]/Dark Urge with the [X]/Tav tag excluded) + ([X]/Original Character with the [X]/Tav and [X]/Dark Urge excluded) + ([X]/Reader with [X]/Tav, [X]/Dark Urge, and [X]/Original Character excluded) and so on.

This process dropped the total number of pairings from 300 to 162. However, it also introduces an error. Some fics ship characters with an OC who is not a Tav/Dark Urge/self insert. In condensing all pairings with original characters to the “PC” supercategory, I am ignoring that and counting their original character as a Tav/Dark Urge equivalent. Unfortunately, this is just something I have to live with in order to be able to make the data more manageable, as there is no way to tell which fics are using the OC tag to represent a Tav/Dark Urge and which are not on a mass data scale. I don’t think it will skew the results too much, at least.

I pulled out the top 20 ships for each major character in BG3 (Tav, Dark Urge, the PC, Shadowheart, Karlach, Lae’zel, Minthara, Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin) before and after I combined the player character tags into the PC supercategory. For each character, I then determined how much of each fic category (M/F, M/M, F/F, Other, Multi) they had, both for all of their pairings and for their pairing with the PC specifically.

Let's start by looking at the player character and its two representatives.

TAV

Tav is in 71 of the top 300 ship tags in the BG3 fandom.

Astarion completely dominates Tav’s ships, with a whopping 9,235 fics (1,839 otp:true fics). In fact, in order to be able to see the tiny little boxes that represent everyone else, here’s another version of this chart, this time with Astarion excluded.

There, that’s a bit more legible. The next highest is Gale, with 2,909 fics (652 otp:true) – less than a third as many fics as Astarion. Halsin comes third with 1,304 fics (207 otp:true) and Shadowheart is the first canon woman to show up, with 806 fics (132 otp:true). Astarion has more than 11 times as many fics with Tav as Shadowheart does. Karlach comes next, with 724 fics (186 otp:true). Raphael comes sixth, with 176 more fics than #7 Wyll who has 442 fics (100 otp:true). Lae’zel is #11 with 300 fics, under Gortash, Rolan, and a threesome with Halsin and Astarion. Minthara is the least popular main character to ship with Tav. She’s #15 with 146 fics (33 otp:true), and has fewer fics with Tav than Zevlor, the Emperor or Haarlep. In a marked improvement from the state of affairs in January, however, she no longer has fewer fics than Kar’niss.

Taking a look at the fic category breakdown, we can see that M/F and M/M predominate for Tav, while there is very little F/F. Dividing the values by the total number of fics, 59.8% of all fics and 50.2% of otp:true fics are tagged M/F, 35.6% of all fics and 34.9% of otp:true fics are tagged M/M, 7.6% of all fics and 4.4% of otp:true fics are tagged F/F, and 13.2% of all fics and 14.2% of otp:true fics are tagged Other. As the proportions of M/F and F/F fics drop when otp:true is applied, I assume that it is more common for M/F and F/F pairings to have background ships or be a background ship (remember that if it is not otp:true, we have no idea if the pairing with Tav is the pairing category being counted.)

THE DARK URGE

The Dark Urge is in 38 of the top 300 ship tags of the BG3 fandom, a bit over half as many as Tav.

While Astarion once again is the most popular character to ship with the Dark Urge (2,165 fics), this time he actually has competition! Gortash/Dark Urge comes in at a very respectable second place with 1,594 fics (about three quarters of Astarion/Dark Urge’s total fic count) and actually beat Astarion by over 100 fics once you apply otp:true (562 fics for Astarion vs 691 fics for Gortash). But after Gortash we once again drop down to numbers we struggle to even see on the chart. Gale is the most visible with 402 fics total (Gale has fewer fics total with the Dark Urge than Astarion or Gortash have with otp:true applied). After that we have a group of Halsin, Shadowheart, and Karlach, all with between 120-150 fics. No other pairing has over 100 fics.

Dark Urge/Tav (99 fics) and Dark Urge/Orin (87 fics) have more fics than Dark Urge/Wyll (83 fics) or Dark Urge/Minthara (80 fics). For Wyll, this is a sign that his pairing with the Dark Urge is not very popular (he drops from #7 with Tav to #9 with the Dark Urge). For Minthara, however, this is a significant climb in the rankings – she was #15 with Tav and #10 with the Dark Urge.

But what’s really interesting to me is the fic category breakdown for the Dark Urge.

The Dark Urge has noticeably more M/M content than Tav does (47.0% vs 35.6% for all fics, 56.9% vs 34.9% for opt:true) and slightly more F/F content than Tav does (10.2% vs 7.6% for all fics, 5.2% vs 4.4% for otp:true), and correspondingly less F/M content. At 13.4% for all fics and 12.8% of otp:true fics, the proportion of Other fic stays just about the same as for Tav.

THE PLAYER CHARACTER

The PC is a combination of Tav, Dark Urge, Original Character, Reader, and You. The PC is in 64 of the top 162 pairings of the BG3 fandom (losing 5 pairings from Tav as I combined Tav/Tav, Tav/Dark Urge, Tav/Reader and so on into one PC/OC category).

The player character was involved in 76.0% of all pairings and 62.1% of otp:true pairings (that is, if you add up every fic for every pairing which the PC is in and divide it by sum of all fics for all BG3 pairings I tracked). This means that over three quarters of shipping in the BG3 fandom is with the player character. It’s not surprising, but it is notable – that’s a very large proportion.

Holy smokes, Astarion! He dominates the rankings even more than before. This time, I was curious to see how much. See below for a proportional representation of all of the PC pairings (note: because many fics have multiple pairings, this circle does not represent the total number of fics but rather the total number of times any pairing with the PC has been tagged).

Astarion composes a full 45% of all pairings with the PC, Gale is bit over 13%, Gortash is 7.3% for all fics and 11.3% of otp:true fics, while Halsin has the opposite trend with 6.3% of all fics and 4.9% of otp:true fics. Shadowheart, Karlach, Raphael, and Wyll all are between 2% and 4% (with Raphael once again beating Wyll). Lae’zel is down at #11 with 1.4% and Minthara is all the way at #16 with 0.9%.

Out of curiosity, I went through all of the PC’s pairings and sorted them by the gender of the person being shipped with the PC.

Oof.

85.7% of all PC ships are with men, 10.4% are with women, and 1.9% are nonbinary beings (Haarlep, the Emperor, and Omeluum). When you apply otp:true, 87.1% of the player character’s ships are with men, 9.9% are with women, and 1.3% are with nonbinary beings.

SHADOWHEART

Welp! Let’s take a look at that 10%, starting with Shadowheart.

If you add up all the fics for all the pairings that include Shadowheart and divide that by the sum of all fics for all 162 pairings I collected, you can see that she is present in 7.0% of pairings. Interestingly, this is true both for all fics and for otp:true fics. She is in 30 of the top 300 ship tags and 24 of the 162 pairings that remain once the player character tags are consolidated.

(I have shortened Shadowheart's name to SH and Shart in various charts to keep the labels from taking up too much room in the graph.)

Lae’zel/Shadowheart is in close competition with Shadowheart/Tav. When all the player characters are condensed into the PC, though, that gap widens.

Shadowheart has 980 fics with the PC, 694 with Lae’zel, 226 with Karlach, 111 with Gale, 61 with Astarion, 51 with Nocturne, 36 with Halsin, 26 with Minthara, and 21 with Wyll (her least popular ship with a main character, at #12). 7 of her top 20 pairings are threesomes – Aylin/Isobel/SH at #8 with 35 fics, Karlach/PC/SH at #9, Karlach/Lae’zel/SH at #10, Astarion/PC/SH at #13, Halsin/PC/SH at #14, Karlach/Wyll/SH at #17, and Gale/Lae’zel/SH at #18.

Lae’zel/Shadowheart has an unusually high number of otp:true fics – almost half of its total fic count. It seems more popular to ship Shadowheart with women than men – both her ships with Lae’zel and Karlach are more popular than Astarion, Gale, or Wyll and her threesomes with women have more fics than her threesomes with men.

The fic category breakdown for Shadowheart matches this expectation.

Boy howdy is Shadowheart fic gay! She has over twice as much F/F fic than M/F fic, just looking at raw numbers of fics. Looking at the proportions of her total fic count, F/F fic represents 71.4% of all of her fics, M/F fic is 35.2%, Other is 10.0%, and Multi is 18.8%. (These percentages add up to more than 100% because many fics tag multiple categories.) This also means that we can’t know that these numbers necessarily include Shadowheart – witness the numbers of M/M fics. All it means is that these categories were on fics in which a Shadowheart pairing was also tagged.

Looking at the otp:true numbers gives us a better picture of what fics where only Shadowheart is in a relationship are like (though this not necessarily an accurate idea of patterns for her overall, as less than a third of her total fics are otp:true). 76.4% of otp:true fics are F/F, 19.8% are M/F, 3.8% are Other, and for some reason 1.2% (9 fics) are M/M. Over three quarters of Shadowheart’s otp:true pairings are femmeslash.

Shadowheart’s fics with the PC character follow pretty much the same pattern as her ships more generally, albeit with slightly less F/F (likely from the loss of the relative behemoth that is Shadowheart/Lae’zel).

32.9% of her pairings with the PC have the M/F tag, 68.1% are tagged F/F, 11.3% are tagged Other, and 18.5% are tagged Multi. Applying otp:true, 25.7% are M/F, 62.6% are F/F, and 12.3% are Other (this likely includes a substantial portion of nonbinary PCs).

KARLACH

Karlach is present in 6.0% of all fic pairings and 5.4% of otp:true fic pairings. She has 31 ship tags in the top 300 ship tags, which condense down to 26 pairings when all player character stand ins are combined.

Her second most popular ship after Tav is with Wyll, though unlike with Shadowheart the pairing is not popular enough to give Tav a run for his/her/their money. Condensing all the player characters widens this gap significantly.

The PC is overwhelmingly Karlach’s most popular ship, with 890 fics. Wyll is second, with 327 fics – less than half as many. Shadowheart and Astarion follow with 226 and 157, respectively. Dammon is next, with 91 fics, and then Lae’zel has 65. She then has a number of threesomes, Minthara (#9 with 32 fics), and Gale (#11 with 18 fics). Halsin is her least popular pairing with a main character, coming in at #15 with 11 fics.

Surprisingly, for all that Karlach is fairly butch, her pairings with men are relatively more popular than we see with the more femme Shadowheart. The category statistics illustrate this clearly.

Compared to Shadowheart, Karlach has a lower proportion of F/F and higher proportions of M/F and Multi fics. F/F is tagged on 51.8% of her fics, M/F on 42.5%, Other on 12.3% and Multi on 27.7%. (Remember that fics can be tagged with multiple categories and that just because a category is tagged doesn’t mean that Karlach is involved in that category.) Looking at otp:true gives us a look at fics where she is the sole focus. F/F is 55.0% of her otp:true fics, M/F drops to 34.4%, Multi drops to 6.1%, and Other stays fairly high at 10.4%.

In Karlach’s pairings with the player character, things change significantly.

It immediately becomes clear that the large number of M/F fics in her general pairings were largely due to her relatively popular ships with Wyll, Astarion, and Dammon. F/F dominates Karlach’s pairings with the PC with 64.0% (67.8% with otp:true applied) of fics, which puts her at just slightly less than Shadowheart. M/F is tagged in 28.5% of her fics with the PC (14.0% with otp:true applied), Multi is tagged 19.4% but drops to 1.2% for otp:true, and Other remains high with 18.0% of fics and 20.2% of otp:true fics with the PC.

Back in January, I noted that of the main cast, Karlach had the highest proportion of ships with nonbinary OCs. I didn’t track the breakdown of OC subcategories this time, but the high numbers in the Other category bear it out.

LAE'ZEL

Counting all fics for all pairings in which Lae’zel is tagged, she is in a mere 3.8% of BG3 pairings, though it rises to 4.5% when otp:true is applied. She is in 23 of the top 300 ship tags, a number that drops down to 18 when I consolidate the player character tags together.

Shadowheart/Lae’zel has twice as many fics as Lae’zel/Tav. Looking at the situation with the PC does not change this much.

Unlike any other main character, Lae’zel’s most popular ship is not with the PC but with Shadowheart. She has 694 fics with Shadowheart, 355 with the PC, 65 with Karlach, 26 with Gale, 26 with Wyll, 25 with Astarion, 16 with Minthara, and 12 with Halsin. She is in an unusually low number of threesomes – only 4. It’s notable though how skewed her numbers are towards women – a threesome with Karlach and Shadowheart has more fics than any of her pairings with a canon man. The various whole team multiship pairings, none of which have more than 11 fics, comprise most of the tail end of her ship list.

Speaking of the tail end of her ship list, what happens when we condense the player character tags is that Lae’zel does not reach a full 20 ships – she drops to 18 pairings. She has more than this, of course, but my methodology ignores all pairings with fewer than 5 fics (which means that my friend’s Lae’zel/Astarion/Tav fic is not counted). Therefore, Lae’zel’s 19th and 20th most popular pairings have 4 fics or fewer. I have represented these missing pairings with little :( emojis, because this is a sad state of affairs.

This is a symptom of a state of affairs in which Lae’zel is just not very popular in the AO3 side of BG3 fandom. Her most popular ship is Shadowheart’s second most popular ship, and the numbers crater after that. No Lae’zel ship other than Shadowheart and the PC has more than 100 fics.

Lae’zel’s most popular ships being women is demonstrated clearly by the fic category breakdown.

Wow! At a whopping 76.3% of all of Lae’zel’s fics and 88.9% of Lae’zel’s otp:true fics, Lae’zel has a higher proportion of F/F fic than Shadowheart. Granted, they’re both sizable portions of each other’s total F/F count. 26.1% of Lae’zel’s fics have the M/F tag, though this drops to a mere 7.1% when otp:true is applied. Other is tagged in 11.6% of fics but drops to 2.0% with otp:true. 18.1% of her fics are tagged Multi but this likewise drops to 4.4% with otp:true.

The pertinent question for Lae’zel is how much of her F/F count is due to her pairing with Shadowheart? How gay are her pairings with the PC?

The answer is... still pretty gay! F/F is not quite as dominant, with 67.3% of all her fics with the PC and 80.0% of her fics where only Lae’zel/PC is tagged – but 80% is a still a really high proportion! This indicates to me that a lot of the M/F in the “All Fics” chart likely does not involve Lae’zel. M/F is tagged in 33.5% of her fics with the PC, a number which is more than halved to 12.7% when otp:true is applied. 13.2% of her fics are tagged Other, which drops to 5.5% with otp:true – much less than for Shadowheart and Karlach. It seems either Lae’zel is not as popular for nonbinary OCs or that a large proportion of the Other tag is from mind flayer Tavs/Durges and people don’t write Lae’zel with a mind flayer love interest.

One other notable fact is that Lae’zel is the only female companion without any otp:true M/M PC fic. It could be due to her low fic numbers in the first place, but I prefer to think that Lae’zel fans are simply more fastidious about correctly tagging fic. It certainly fits her character.

MINTHARA

Ah, Minthara. Unquestionably the least popular of the main romanceable characters in BG3, her pairings only comprise 1.1% of all BG3 fanfic pairings, a number that rises to a whopping(/sarcastic) 1.4% of otp:true pairings. She has only 14 ship tags in the 300 most popular ship tags for BG3, a number that drops further to a mere 9 pairings once I’ve combined all the player character tags.

What’s notable about Minthara’s ship tags is the popularity of the Dark Urge relative to Tav. Minthara has 146 fics with Tav and 80 with the Dark Urge. This is a higher proportion than other main characters have. It may be because more people write her on evil routes (which likely disproportionately feature the Dark Urge) or because she has some very good lines for the Dark Urge and their Slayer form.

Another observation is the lack of primary non-PC ships. The other characters that I look at all have a major non-PC ship – Shadowheart/Lae’zel, Karlach/Wyll, Gale/Astarion, Wyll/Astarion, Halsin/Astarion. Minthara doesn’t really have that. Her most popular non-PC ship is Orin, at #5 and with a mere 45 fics. This is illustrated clearly once all the player character tags are combined.

The PC dominates Minthara’s pairings to an extent not seen with any other character, not even Astarion. She drops from 234 fics with the PC (65 otp:true) to 45 fics with Orin (26 otp:true), 32 with Karlach (16 otp:true) and 26 with Shadowheart (11 otp:true). Every other pairing has 16 or less fics. Tying into that, Minthara has very few pairings with 5 or more fics. She does not even have enough for a top 10! I have replaced her missing pairings with the :( emoji because this is sad.

Another notable thing about this chart, though, is how few fics Minthara has just in general. Lae’zel and Wyll, the other neglected companions, both have at least 500 fics with their most popular partner. Minthara does not even break 250. In fact, none of her pairings with someone other than the PC have over 50 fics.

Another interesting fact is that Minthara is the only character in this analysis to not have any threesomes or moresomes in her pairings with over 5 fics. She doesn’t share, it seems.

For some reason, Minthara has 8 ships with Councillor Florrick of all people. And it’s not all by the same author, which is what I would expect for a somewhat out there pairing. Presumably someone out there wrote a really good fic which then inspired others to play with the idea. In a small fandom like Minthara’s, one fic like that can make quite a difference.

As can be expected, Minthara’s fic categories are pretty damn gay.

F/F is tagged in 79.0% of her fics (77.6% of otp:true fics). M/M is tagged in 21.3% of her fics (17.1% of otp:true fics), Other in 6.1% (4.6% otp:true), and Multi in 8.9% though it drops to 1.3% of her otp:true fics. With these numbers, Minthara is arguably the gayest major character in the BG3 fandom by fic count, though Lae’zel beats her when you take otp:true into effect.

This pattern holds true when looking at her ship with the player character. 77.8% of her fics with the PC are tagged F/F (73.8% of otp:true fics), 23.5% are tagged M/F (15.4% otp:true), 8.5% are tagged Other (10.8% otp:true), and 9.4% are tagged Multi (3.1% otp:true). The latter is a bit confusing given that she has no multiship pairings. It may include collections of Reader/[X] fics that include Minthara.

PART 2

Welp. I’ve run into the tumblr post image limit. For part 2 of this essay, which discusses Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin and then compares all 8 of the main characters against each other on a variety of metrics, see this link.

[cooking-with-hailstones]

The Legend of Zelda: stats of the kingdom

A Statistical Analysis of Popular Fanfiction in the Legend of Zelda Fandom on AO3

I like numbers and stats and for some unfathomable reason I find it calming. So over the past couple weeks, I’ve been making this spreadsheet!

DISCLAIMER: This is not a judgement of the quality, value, or merits of any of the fics on this list. It's just me being curious about what's popular with the Legend of Zelda fandom on AO3.

Feel free to go explore the spreadsheet. My own observations and analysis under the cut.

TL:DR, Link has a lot of kinky sex. Sidlink and Zelink are vying for who’s the most popular ship. Also, this fandom has a shit ton of sub categories that are truly islands unto themselves and have their own conventions.

Methodology: I'm including all fics from the first page of AO3 results (20 fics per page) sorted by:

Hits

Kudos

Comments

Bookmarks

Anything tagged under the Legend of Zelda and Related Fandoms tag that was in the top 20 most hits, kudos, comments, or bookmarks made it into the spreadsheet. This ended up including 51 fics in total.

I put all the fics into one single spreadsheet in order to compare the differences between fics that are really high on the kudos count but not the hit count, or what has a lot of comments but fewer hits. Basically, I'm throwing a lot of things together to observe what gets engagement and looking at patterns that emerge!

Popular fandom subcategories:

Botw (41 fics tagged as such)

Linked Universe (9, including one mostly set in the world of BOTW)

OoT (2)

(I do wonder what it would be like to run these numbers on other fanfic sites, given the popularity boom of ao3 over the last 15 years or so. But also, Botw was an insanely popular game even by Zelda standards, so… who knows?)

Tags:

Character tags: Obviously, Link was by far the most popular character, but here are the characters that had a minimum of 3 appearances per category. Yay champions!

Zelda

Sidon

Mipha

Urbosa

Revali

Daruk

Story tags: Again, just going by sheer numbers, here are the story tags that appeared at least 3 times in every category:

Slowburn

AU – canon divergence

With honorable mentions to fluff, angst, double penetration, anal sex, amnesia/memory loss, and mute or selectively mute Link, who all cracked above 3 instances in 2 separate categories.

Relationships:

This was a tight race, but shoutout to Sidlink for eking out the win for the most highly rated ship in the Zelda fandom with 13 fics qualifying in my ranking. Zelink is close behind at 10 fics. (That being said, Zelink takes it by volume: 7,797 fics tagged as Zelink vs Sidlink’s 2,193)

Other popular ships:

Revalink (8) (this one surprised me! I didn’t realize my beloved birb was so popular)

Miphlink (3)

Link/Monsters (2)

Sidon/Reader (2)

Ganzelink, Ganlink, Malink, Miphzelink, and Miphzel all made single appearances.

(Pls don’t start ship war discourse in the notes kthanx)

All right, let’s deep dive into the numbers!

Fics in all 4 categories:

Interim - starkraving

Sands of time -tirsynni

Congrats you are officially the most popular Loz fics across all of ao3! at least according to my particular scope of analysis.

Fics in 3 categories:

Displaced - socksock

Drown In Me - bacchanalia

Alone We Fight - SilvermistAnimeLover

Blood Moon Rising - MarquesGillette

Popular authors (people who show up more than once in multiple categories sorry comments georg)

MarquesGillette

MaryDragon

SilvermistAnimeLover

ObakeAri

Hits:

Top 5 most popular fics by hit count:

Displaced - socksock

Interim - starkraving

To Save Hyrule - orphan_account

Sands of time - tirsynni

Drown In Me - bacchanalia

First page by hits:

Min: 117,917 – Sidon’s Epic Pining Adventure (ObakeAri)  

Max:  189,622 – Displaced (socksock)

Average: 145,385

Average wordcount for fics with the most hits:

140,909

Kudos:

Top 5 most popular fics by kudos count:

Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy - Icka M Chif

Interim - starkraving

To My Dearest Friend - surveycorpsjean

26 Minutes and 42 Seconds - T_5Seconds

Blood Moon Rising - MarquesGillette

First page by kudos:

Min: 4917 – Finding Link (Umbreonix)

Max:  10321 – Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy (Icka M Chif)

Average: 6981

Average wordcount for fics with the most kudos:

41,136

Comments:

Top 5 most popular fics by comment count:

Carlos from MarvelandZeldaFan's Children of the Heroes - KR5

This is an Adjuration - notfreyja

My Art - KR5

Sidon's Epic Pining Adventure - ObakeAri

Priestess of War - KR5

Woohoo! You all get to meet KR5 aka Comments Georg. Comments Georg has long conversations and RPs in the comments of their ao3 posts, which are usually fanart. TO BE CLEAR, THIS IS TOTALLY FINE AND COOL! I think it’s quite delightful! However, it does completely bork my ranking system because outside of comments, these posts do not have a lot of engagement (like, less than 100 hits and less than 20 kudos) and I don’t think they count towards my analysis of “what is popular in the Zelda fandom writ large”. But they qualified based on my criteria. Which I think speaks to the weakness of my criteria more than anything else tbh…

Anyways, shoutout to Comments Georg for truly showing off what it means to be a statistical outlier.

First page by comments:

Min: 1568 – The Quiet River Rages (MaryDragon)

Max:  43808 - Carlos from MarvelandZeldaFan's Children of the Heroes (KR5)

Average: 4131 (which goes down to 2042 if we exclude KR5’s impressive max, which is a full order of magnitude more than notfreyja in second place with 3470 comments. Very much demonstrating the power of a statistical outlier!)

Average wordcount for fics with the most comments:

275,593

Bookmarks:

Top 5 most popular fics by bookmarks count:

Interim - starkraving

Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy - Icka M Chif

Sands of time - tirsynni

To My Dearest Friend - surveycorpsjean

Alone We Fight - SilvermistAnimeLover

First page by bookmarks:

Min: 973 – Expatriate (thehoyden)

Max:  2984 – Interim (starkraving)

Average: 1468

Average wordcount for fics with the most bookmarks:

70,027

Fic Ratings:

G: 3 (literally all fanart from KR5)

T: 22

M: 8

E: 17

Unrated: 1

Observations:

I ran this twice. Once including crossovers, and once excluding crossovers. This filtered out a lot of large drabbles and things like “flash fiction fuckings” which, no judgment, you do you, they just weren’t super relevant for what I was looking for. If you wanna see these stats including all the multifandom stuff that shows up, here’s the link for that:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DXDKXutIzVC-Iac93fFSDohAkphrn67yV-DmRt9xXmU/edit?usp=sharing

(I’m going to break academic professional analysis here and get on my soapbox for a sec – please don’t post big multifandom one shots where you tag like 20 different fandoms and every single kink that gets written about across 103 different chapters. This is literally what series are for. These kinds of things just clog up the tags, and it also makes it harder for people to find the things you’ve written that they want to read! I know this was a convention on ff.net, but this is not ff.net! We can make authors' lives and readers' lives easier!)

There were 38,427 fics in the tag “Legend of Zelda and Related Fandoms” (including crossovers, that goes up to 41,634). I manually added one back in though because it was entirely a botw story, just loosely inspired by another game.

Linked Universe fans comment a LOT. Strong correlation between high comment and Linked Universe fandom subsection. Y’all are very involved and active, and you show support to your authors. I salute you!

Sidlinkers, y'all are horny and I respect it.

Zelinkers, dear god we do love a slowburn.

All the most highly kudos’d fics are very low in the comment count. It’s almost an inverse correlation.

Excluding crossovers increased the correlation between hits and kudos quite dramatically.

There were not very many au’s other than canon divergence. Only one modern au as far as I could tell from a cursory examination of tags.

Lots more clustering, far less disparity between min and max numbers than when I ran this with A:TLA numbers.

Far less consensus on a vibe. Way fewer big writers, but lots of little writers doing their own thing.

Truly a lot of E fics. We are horny bastards.

We need more stuff written for games other than BOTW!!

There aren’t as many fics that are like “oh everyone in the fandom has read these fics”. There are probably those fics in each subcategory of the fandom, or within the specific ships, but there aren’t as many general fics that have entire fandom-wide appeal.

Thank you for reading! This was a lot of fun, and I hope you found it interesting. Shoutout to the Hateno Hangout discord for helping me refine this mess :P

Further shoutout to my partner who helped with writing some SQL to help with tag analysis. Truly partner of the year.

If you want more of this kind of egregious nerdiness, I did this with the top fics in the A:TLA fandom a couple weeks ago: https://www.tumblr.com/cooking-with-hailstones/751749202663669760/statistical-analysis-of-the-most-popular-atla

[olderthannetfic]

So i get the whole "Ao3 isn't social media, don't put so much value on comments and kudos, you should be writing for yourself not for external validation" thing, that's all fine and cool and true. What bugs me is the people who seem to get a weird sense of superiority from "not caring" or "not reading" comments etc.

Cause let's be honest, external validation feels good. No, it shouldn't be the reason you write and you shouldn't base your self esteem on that, but it's nice when people like your art and it's fine to get excited about that, and to be proud of that.

You wouldn't tell a director not to be happy about people liking their movie, right?

Yes, some people get super obsessed with checking their comments and stats and it's neither healthy for them nor their writing because it ends up all hinging on other people's opinions. But then some people seem to genuinely think that the moment you give even a single shit about what people think, that makes you vain and somehow takes value away from your art.

I've seen that with visual art too, where artists will say basically "oh i only make art for myself, therefore im not allowed to care what anyone thinks" but... you can do both. You can create things to express yourself and just have fun for yourself and not others AND you can appreciate the fact other people connect to it and like it. It's only human instinct, but some people really do act like it's morally wrong somehow.

--

You shouldn't rely on external validation because that's a good way to get eaten alive by insecurity. That's an observation about what makes it more likely that you'll finish a piece of writing and less likely that you'll feel terrible.

But liking to interact on AO3 is just what fandom is. Fandom is all about connecting with other people over shared interests.

[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.

[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.

[bunniehoneys]

track limits - WIP

In honour of coanda effect hitting 100K hits on ao3 today (how) here's a wip from the sequel! thank you everyone, love you all so much.

Any future wips will be posted to my ko-fi, just select the early access + wips tier to see them :3

March 2026

They get into Bahrain in the early hours of the morning, via AirGojo. Quite a few drivers plus Haibara end up on the flight, and most of them sleep through it. Megumi is mostly unable to, letting his leg bounce up and down as he scrolls through his phone whilst Yuuji lies with his cheek pressed to his thigh and snores lightly. It's sort of awkward because the only other person awake on the flight is Gojo, sitting cross-legged on one of the sofas, not really doing much at all apart from listening to music with one of those stupid sleep masks pulled over his eyes. For the light, he says. Despite knowing Gojo's pretty much blind, Megumi still feels painfully observed. 

That might be part of the problem. At the end of last season all the drivers and team principals had been notified that there'd be a film crew at most of the races, starting at the testing in Bahrain, filming-- something. Megumi's asked a good few drivers, now, and he still can't figure out what it is: a one-off documentary, or a series, or something else entirely. What they have managed to parse is that the producer worked on something for football in the UK last year and all the players complained about how it dug into their personal lives a little too much, opening them up to criticism. Megumi's been losing sleep over it. 

Nothing too bad would happen if it came out that he was with Yuuji, in theory. The team knows. Getou knows, too, so Keicho must have some sort of contingency plan should things go awry, but being looked at by TV crews the entire way through the season is still putting him on edge. Like they're looking for cracks, for reasons he still doesn't have a championship in his pocket despite having the fastest car for the first half of last season. He'll happily blame himself to the press, but the balance is hard to find. If he's too self-deprecating, he's not capable, and if he's not critical enough, he's a loser who can't get out of his own ass. 

Fun. It's super fun. 

Gojo had come out last year. He did it in a super controlled way, right when rumours about Megumi and Yuuji had been seriously picking up. Megumi suspects that it had something to do with it, but he can't be sure, so. He hasn't asked. It created the most insane media whirlwind in the lead-up to the season that the journalists pretty much forgot to ask him about the car, about his championship prospects, about the sport. He lost count of how many times he was asked Gojo is like a mentor to you, how does this affect your relationship? Does this change things? Did you know? 

Someone, later on, insinuated that Gojo had been sleeping with him and that’s why Megumi was chosen for a JTR seat, and then he’d really had enough, walking out on a written media session because of it. PR had sat him down and told him he needed to attempt to do damage control when this kind of stuff came up, but Megumi had snorted and told them that they could answer instead. 

Here’s the thing. Gojo is the greatest driver of all time, if the fans are willing to disregard Sukuna. His stats are better. He has two-thirds of a triple crown, he’s racing in other series. He lost his seat for Le Mans, in the whirlwind. He’d immediately gained one in Keicho, set until JTR decide to field an entry, but–

He’d lost his seat. 

It’s not like he needs the money. He’s racing for fun. He’s absolutely filthy rich. He knows firsthand that the wedding band he bought for Getou cost a fortune. But he’s the greatest, and enough people still decided it was enough of an issue to not want him on their team. 

Gojo had ruffled his hair at the time, said brightly, “it’s okay, they’ll lose because they don’t have me,” and they did, Keicho won and Gojo made the difference, but it didn’t feel like enough.

Megumi doesn’t think anyone blames him for being secretive, in the grand scheme of things. There’s– he’s not told Yuuji anything about the car. It’s good, being together with someone who understands. Who knows when to push and when to back off. Who knows that legally, Megumi can’t speak much about his job. 

He presses a hand to Yuuji’s hair, and watches where Nobara has collapsed on a different couch. Inumaki and Yuuta are around, somewhere, too. Haibara has woken up half an hour before they’re due to land, and is talking to Gojo quietly, who looks thoughtful, a hand pressed over his mouth. 

Gojo’s technically going as a pundit. As a presenter. Megumi thinks he might be in the comms box for a bit. Really, he’s there because he can’t get away. When he stepped in for some early races last season, Yuuji had been convinced he’d take an offer to come back to the sport, but Gojo had laughed when Megumi asked. Said he was happy not having to travel a million miles every weekend. Happy living in Italy. 

It’s not like Getou wouldn’t have given him a seat. There was talk about it for a while. But Megumi knows the entire grid breathed a sigh of relief when Gojo ruled out a full-time return. 

Equally, though, he’s always around. Mostly in their garage. He used to float around Keicho a lot, before he came out and people started speculating about him and Getou, so he stopped. He knows a few drivers will seek him out for track walks, or advice, or just to talk. Megumi doesn’t have to. 

“You might wanna wake him up,” Gojo says, nodding at Yuuji, and Megumi nods, tapping his shoulder a few times. 

--

Not quite the opening scene, but a very early one. Definitely sets the tone. Enjoy all :3

[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!

[exitvelocities]

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

[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

[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!

[imitationgame77]

Murderbot and ART reading each other's mind

Murderbot claims that ART does not read its mind – that it really knows Murderbot well. But sometimes, it DOES appear as though ART is reading Murderbot’s mind. As if its inner thoughts are leaking into its private feed where ART is sitting and watching.

Here are some examples:

[Quote]

I hate it when ART is right. “I can’t do anything about that.”

You can’t alter your configuration.

I could see the skepticism through the feed. “No, I can’t. Look up the specs on SecUnits.”

SecUnits are never altered. Skepticism intensifying. (Artificial Condition, p.42).

[Comment]

How can see the skepticism through the feed, unless they know each other very well? Murderbot has observed and calibrated ART’s various responses through the hours of joint media viewing, and can now interpret subtle changes in the feed. Basically reading ART.

[Quote]

Its arms were bare, and there was no metal showing and no gun ports. This was not a SecUnit.

I was looking at a sexbot.

That is not the official designation, ART said.

The official designation is ComfortUnit but everybody knows what that means. (Artificial Condition, pp.89-90).

[Comment]

I mean, how can ART tell that Murderbot is looking at a ComfortUnit, thinking of it as a sexbot, without reading its mind?

[Quote]

Without drones, I couldn’t see what it was doing. ART had switched over to Iris’s feed, using her enviro suit camera, and the resolution at this distance wasn’t good. ART needed a field equipment upgrade. Wait, a human would look at it, right?

ART said, Look at it. It’s obvious you’re avoiding it.

Maybe I’m a nervous human who’s afraid of bots, I told ART, but I looked at it anyway. (System Collapse, p.13)

[Comment]

By the beginning of System Collapse, ART is practically always in Murderbot’s head in order to monitor its stats. Murderbot also has the constant awareness of ART’s activities, because of their practically wall-free intimacy. ART can probably hear anything Murderbot is thinking in language (human or machine language) unless Murderbot tries very hard to think privately.

In this scene, it is also sweet that Murderbot does as told by ART, because even though it hates when ART is right, it knows when ART is right (which is always).

[Quote]

(Obviously this is not actually what I’m upset about, it’s just easier to be angry about B-E Unit1’s fuckup and/or disregard for minimum client safety.)

Safer to be angry about it, ART said on our private connection. (System Collapse, p.15)

[Comment]

It really is literally reading Murderbot’s thoughts.

[Quote]

I should have paid more attention. I’d fucked that up, too.

We both fucked that up, ART-drone said. No, it doesn’t read my mind, it just knows me really well. I should have banned refreshment items containing stimulants earlier in the day. (System Collapse, p.133)

[Comment]

Even if ART isn’t reading Murderbot’s mind (which I think it is), ART’s choice of expression is also spot-on.

[Quote]

On our private channel, I asked ART-drone, Is it one of ours?

There’s a 66 percent chance, ART-drone replied. If after our first message they decided to send assistance, they could have met the second pathfinder en route and received the map coordinates that would allow them to locate our exact position.

[…]

Sometimes the thing where it’s like ART reads my mind goes both ways. I said, But you don’t think it is.

No. (System Collapse, pp.191-192).

[Comment]

Murderbot says “it’s like ART reads my mind goes both ways” – even if it is not literally reading its mind, they are so attuned to each other’s processing patterns, that by noting spikes in the feed activities, they can read each other.

For more thorough analysis of implicit communications between Murderbot and ART, I wrote this piece on AO3:

[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.

[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.

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(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.

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