#Fandom maths

[phoenixcatch7]

Looking at spider info for Spidey and the wiki says he has super jumping. Not just as a result of super strength/speed/agility, but as its own thing. Understandable since apparently jumping spiders make up the largest percentage of spider species!

Apparently they can jump up to 50x their own length. For Spidey that's 100 metres!! But the hilarious part is they manage to do that at such speeds by literally SHOVING THEIR BLOOD INTO THEIR LEGS for maximum thrust. And in humans that kind of rapid change causes momentary sight loss and dizziness.

Forget web slinging and aggressive reflexes, whenever someone startles Peter he blacks out and wakes up five streets over.

[locusfandomtime]

The maths fandom is wild. “Real” and “imaginary” numbers? I think you mean canon and non-canon. You guys seriously go “this is my number oc his name is i and he is the square root of -1” when in numbers canon lore it’s actually impossible to square root a negative but sure whatever. “Complex numbers”? I think you mean a character x oc ship. “f(x) = 3x - 5”? That is self-insert fanfiction.

[kiaerinnn]

It's usually me that gets 12😞💔 (jk I'm pretty good at math lol)

[thevioletcaptain]

Almost a decade ago, in November of 2014, I became so exhausted by seeing people throw around the absurd claim that Dean/Cas fans made up only 1% of SPN fandom that I decided to prove how wrong it was. The most readily available data which didn't rely on conducting a survey or poll -- and was therefore a more accurate representation of actual fandom activity rather than just whoever happened to respond to a survey -- came from fic numbers on Ao3.

I made a post about it at the time (the pertinent figures are included below, or you can see the original post here) and then completely forgot about the entire thing. Until now.

Why? Well, largely thanks to a sudden resurgence of the same old nonsense this week, mostly cropping up in the comment sections of a couple of polls that crossed my dash. The temptation to check if there had been any significant changes to the fandom's activity since I last looked ten years ago was too strong to ignore.

Friends. Things have proven to be shockingly consistent.

With the same caveat from last time -- that this is only showing trends in the subset of fandom who actively uses Ao3, and therefore obviously doesn't take into account the "general audience" subset of fandom who don't participate beyond watching the show and occasionally liking a social media post -- here are the numbers:

Old count | November 9th, 2014 | 4 episodes into S10

Total SPN fics posted - 86,352 Fics listed as gen - 22,718 (26.3%) Fics with Dean/Cas - 33,762 (39.0%) Fics with Sam/Dean - 12,286 (14.2%) Fics with Sam/Cas - 1,634 (1.8%) Fics with Sam/Dean/Cas - 787 (0.9%) 

The remaining 18.6% of SPN fics were non-gen fics featuring other character pairings, including reader inserts and original characters.

New count | May 28th, 2024 | 3.5 years after finale

Total SPN fics posted - 290,707 Fics listed as gen - 61,343 (21.1%) Fics with Dean/Cas - 116,925 (40.2%) Fics with Sam/Dean - 34,673 (11.9%) Fics with Sam/Cas - 5,548 (1.9%) Fics with Sam/Dean/Cas - 1,957 (0.6%)

The remaining 24.3% of SPN fics are non-gen fics featuring other character pairings, including reader inserts and original characters.

Notes on data:

All data was collected while logged in on Ao3 to ensure no incorrect counts were caused by hidden works.

There is some overlap within these numbers due to fics which are tagged with multiple pairings. This might be possible to account for if someone felt like doing more intensive data collection, but I've already spent about an hour and a half on this and that's already a lot more time than I'd like to be doing voluntary math. I enjoy statistics as a point of interest, but goddamn do I hate actually crunching the numbers.

It bears mentioning that Sam/Gabriel (5.1%), Sam/Jess (2.2%), & Dean/Reader (2.5%) all have higher counts than Sam/Cas (1.9%) & Sam/Dean/Cas (0.6%), however I didn't make note of those pairings in 2014, so I'm unsure if there has been any change.

I shouldn't have to say this, but literally all of us are just smashing our fave characters together like dolls, so as interesting as these numbers are this post is not intended to suggest that any ship is "better" than any other ship. This post is intended to do nothing more than show the available data which disproves a baseless claim about the size of Dean/Cas fandom within the larger SPN fandom.

TLDR; the percentage of active Supernatural fans on Ao3 who are interested in Dean/Cas as a pairing is significantly higher than 1%, and that has been a consistent pattern within the fandom for the past ten years.

[zinxii]

Reflections of past memories.

[coolballoonsheep]

I was so bored in math class😭

[sun-e-chips]

I had to…

[idontdomathlol]

Poor Milo, first scoliosis, now this?

My man really needs some braces 🫤🫤

[ingravinoveritas]

It never ceases to amaze me that despite everything Michael and David have been doing for the last five years and Neil himself saying they are in love, people are still assuming (or just not wanting to believe) that two middle-aged men might possibly love each other in a non-platonic way...

[phoenixcatch7]

You know when I'm doing the maths that I'm having fun

[fromtheseventhhell]

It's "the Stark sisters have complementary skillsets" until someone points out that Arya is good at math and Sansa isn't. Then suddenly Arya is an unreliable narrator, Sansa is just being humble, and she'll magically have that skill if/when it becomes relevant

[locusfandomtime]

Doing the maths: Grian's failure at getting a mending book

lots of talk about maths and probabilities below the cut! but there's a graph and simple explanation at the end if you want to get the gist of it and are bad at maths.

(I am still young and learning maths, critique/advice always welcomed)

What are the odds of getting a mending book in Minecraft?

(I am assuming Grian has been doing all his fishing with Luck of the Sea 3)

The probability of a mending book is actually a bit annoying to estimate. The Minecraft Wiki lists fishing up an enchanted book as 1.9% chance. This is for ANY enchanted book. The Minecraft wiki talks about how the chance of an enchantment being selected is calculated. Mending has a weight of 2. Using the table, mending has a probability of 2/135.

However, Grian is looking for any book with mending, not just a pure mending book. Additional enchantments are calculated in a different way, involving RNG, which means it won't be as easy to model. Due to this reason, I'll just be using the odds for a pure mending book throughout.

TLDR: a mending book has a 0.028..% chance (2/135*0.019*100)

Grian's Data

According to this screenshot, Grian has used a fishing rod 5679 times. This number may not be fully accurate, as it includes the times he's fished other players, rather than just fished for items, but it is a good estimate.

To help visualise this data, with a median waiting time between catches of 17.5 seconds, Grian has spent over 20 hours fishing so far! He may have a problem.

Is this statistically significant?

Hypothesis testing (p-value approach):

H0: p = 19/67500 (the null hypothesis - he has no mending books because of chance)

H1: p < 19/67500 (the alternate hypothesis - he has no mending books due to different odds)

5679 trials, 0 mending books

X ~ B(5679, 19/67500) (binomial distribution, 5679 tries with a probability of a mending book being 19/67500, where X is the number of mending books)

p(X=0) (what is the probability the number of mending books being 0)

p = 0.2021473392

Now, the point at which data becomes significant is subjective. For instance, you *could* get a million heads in a row flipping a coin, it's not impossible, but at a certain point, you can begin to say "okay there's something not normal about this". For this approach, the closer the p-value is to 0, the more evidence there is against the null hypothesis . The p-value here is far above a significance level of 0.01, or 0.05, or 0.1. There isn't a clear line between significant/non-significant, but this is answer is quite a bit far from 0

With this, I cannot reject the null hypothesis.

Personal conclusion: this is not statistically significant, Grian is just unlucky.

Are other values statistically significant?

Gem's proposed 9000: results in a p-value of 0.079... more significant than Grian's number but I don't imagine Mojang would be too concerned. As said though, it's all subjective.

I am bad at maths, what does all this mean?

Here is a graph, showing what number of mending books you might have after 5679 tries. The height of the bar represents the probability of getting that amount. The numbers at the top are the (rounded) numbers I used in my calculation

The pink column is 0 mending books - like what Grian has! As you can see, it is less likely than getting 1 or 2 books, but not too uncommon to happen.

End conclusion: Grian has bad luck. Like, not as hilariously bad as he thinks, but still bad. If he keeps going, chances are he will get a mending book, but I think he should probably stop fishing because at this point he has a problem.

[getvalentined]

I saw another of these floating around that was...wrong, so I'm putting this together so people can keep characters' ages straight more easily. I'm not listing everyone, obviously, but characters whose ages get misstated most often.

Does this match up with the wiki or the Ultimanias? Absolutely not! The Ultimania says that Lucrecia was pregnant for three years! The wiki says that Vincent was shot after Sephiroth was born, even though Lucrecia was still pregnant when it happened! The source material, however, is 99.99% internally consistent with regard to the timeline, so I go with that, and that's what we're going by here.

Jenova Project S (1977 · [ μ ] – εγλ 1977)

Vincent: 26-27 (October 13, 1950)

Lucrecia: 27-28 (July 22, presumed 1949 or 1950)

Hojo: 32 (born 1945)

Pre-Crisis Core (2000 · [ μ ] – εγλ 2000)

Genesis: 23 (born early 1977, see first link below)

Sephiroth: 22-23 (born in late 1977, probably Christmas)

Angeal: 21-22 (born late 1977/early 1978, see first link above)

Zack: 16 (born in 1984)

Cloud: 14 (August 11, 1986)

Aerith: 15 (February 2, 1985)

Nibelheim Incident (October 2002 · [ ν ] – εγλ 0002)

Genesis: 25

Sephiroth: 24-25

Angeal: 23-24

Zack: 18

Cloud: 16

Aerith: 17

The Crisis (December 2007 · [ ν ] – εγλ 0007)

Genesis: 30-31

Sephiroth: 30 (physically ~25)

Angeal: 29-30

Zack: 23

Cloud: 21

Aerith: 22

Vincent: 57 (physically 27)

Lucrecia: 57-58 (physically ~34)

Hojo: 62

Advent Children (2009 · [ ν ] – εγλ 0008)

Genesis: 32-33 (physically ~30)

Sephiroth: 32 (physically ~25)

Cloud: 23

Vincent: 59 (physically 27)

Dirge of Cerberus (2010 · [ ν ] – εγλ 0010)

Genesis: 33-34 (physically ~30)

Cloud: 24

Vincent: 60 (physically 27)

Lucrecia: 60-61 (physically 34)

Hojo: 65 (physically nonexistent)

Edited April 2024, when Hojo's age was canonized by the Rebirth Ultimania.

[boneinator]

//robot gore in the last one kinda

Angst yay

Only the last one is actually canon but I'm not giving context for any of them goodbye nobody . allowed to ask

[autiacorart]

i'm going insane

[littleguyshowdown]

Congratulations to Kirby for being declared the Ultimate Little Guy!