#doing the data cronch

[sol1056]

a quick data cronch

I don’t have time these days (this year, really) to take the multiple days of compiling, researching, crunching, analyzing, and arranging into a coherent post. Life is too busy right now, and that means I’m going to instead just drop a few simple but (hopefully self-explanatory) stats. (Check the data cronch tag for an explanation of how I extrapolate viewership rates, given Netflix’s black box.)

Note: I didn’t include gen:LOCK, because it’s not on a platform anywhere near Netflix’s reach, and it was also released weekly, not as a single bingeable season. That changes viewership patterns significantly.

First, SPOP’s S1/S2 total viewership is just barely (and by ‘barely’ I mean ‘by about one-fifth of a percent’) more than VLD’s viewership for S7/S8. 

3Below, the continuation of Del Toro’s award-winning Trollhunters, couldn’t manage more than 37% of SPOP’s S1/S2 viewership. 3Below peaked lower than VLD S8, and despite a healthy tail, its total viewership ended at 28% less than VLD’s S8.  

Meanwhile, tDP’s S1/S2 total viewership clocks in 174% higher than SPOP’s, 175% higher than VLD’s final two seasons, and 470% higher than 3Below.  

Which is to say: DW did its level best to bury VLD’s final season, but it sure looks like DW just ended up burying everything, instead. 

No wonder people keep thinking tDP is a DW production. It’s the only American animated series on a global platform that’s performing at anywhere near the level you’d expect from a major studio. 

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 275: YAAAAY but Also AHHHHH

Previously on BnHA: Endeavor was all “I’M FIGHTING TOMURA AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME” and set everything on fire. Unlike SOME people, however, it turns out fire is NOT Tomura’s weakness, so he basically just shrugged it off. But before things could progress any further, AFO was all “psst, go get One for All” and Tomura was all “? One for All?” and Endeavor was all “?? One for All?” and Deku and Kacchan, who were listening in on their earpieces, were all “!!!” Having thus realized that Tomura was targeting him, Deku sped off to lead him somewhere away from the civilians... accompanied by his good friend Bakugou “274 chapters of character development have all been leading up to this” Katsuki. Because like hell are you going to have an EPIC BATTLE with the FINAL VILLAIN without him, you damn nerd. Who’s he going to heroically sacrifice himself for if you’re not there?? Hahh!?

Today on BnHA: Deku and Kacchan fly off to battle Tomura after confusing Endeavor into giving them his location (which wasn’t very hard lmao). En route, Deku finally thinks to ask Kacchan why he’s tagging along, and Kacchan is all “DON’T GET ME WRONG, IT’S JUST BECAUSE I WANT REVENGE ON TOMURA, AND DEFINITELY NOT BECAUSE I CARE ABOUT YOU AT ALL, HOW DARE YOU, WHY WOULD YOU EVEN SAY THAT”, which is super convincing and didn’t make me roll my eyes at all. Anyways so then Tomura shows up and is all “EYO TIME TO KILL YOU NOW” and Deku and Kacchan are all “OH SFFKDFK”, but fortunately Gran shows up to save them in the nick of time, because BnHA is literally the only shounen manga in which grown-ups will see kids trying to lead a battle and be like “lol wtf” and actually try to stop that shit instead of being all “what are your orders, children.” The chapter then ends with the heroes doing EXACTLY WHAT THEY SHOULD BE DOING??Namely, having the guy who can TURN OFF QUIRKS battle the guy with the ultimate death quirk! I’m so proud. But also I swear to god, if Tomura so much as breathes suspiciously in his direction...!! What the fuck. HORIKOSHI.

y’all what in the fresh hell is this bs

not yet there isn’t son but if you keep trolling like this I can give your nervous system something to actually be nervous about

anyway. this was his comment from last week’s issue of Jump, and I have absolutely no idea what it’s referring to, is the fun part! did he cry because of something he was working on in a chapter that’s coming up? or is he just tired from a combination of stressful mangaka schedule + 2020 in general?? or hell, for all I know he just recently watched Titanic or some shit

(ETA: KILLING AIZAWA SHOUTA WOULDN’T MAKE SOMEONE CRY OUT OF JOY, THOUGH. RIGHT?!)

anyways I guess it’s time to read and see if I feel like sadly happily crying for two hours afterward

-- oh shit I just realized there are two scanlations out for this?? one from readjump.com, and one from readheroacademia.com. lol now what. uhhh

lulzes. I guess I’ll go with RHA for now and keep checking back to RJ after each page and I’ll go with whichever translation I liked better

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, OUR MILLENNIAL VILLAIN

or would he actually be gen z. he was already in his twenties when this manga started like six years ago, so I’m going with millennial. but on the cusp though I guess. anyway, he plays video games though is the point

and I see he’s already decided to contradict me and my inane speculations not two panels in! I GUESS I AM JUST A FOOL. that’s really interesting though. I wonder if it’s just Monoma’s quirk that doesn’t take the accumulated “save data” from the people he copies from, then? guh. how many of my AFO/OFA theory notes do I have to scrap now

and there’s a little quirk blurb about Search, which is fairly useless given that we already know how it works (actually in even greater detail than shown here), but at least it comes with a cute little picture of Ragdoll in her hero costume, to make us all sad and stuff

so anyways Tomura who are you looking at?? this was a topic of some contention last week! also why were you only seeing nine people then. Ragdoll had seen everyone in 1-A along with Aizawa and her fellow Pussycats at a minimum, so is this confirmation that Tora and Mandalay and Pixie-Bob are all really dead then, because I CAN AND WILL HUNT DOWN A MAN AND MAKE HIM CRY FOR A GOOD DEAL LONGER THAN TWO HOURS IF THAT’S REALLY THE CASE. was Kouta not traumatized enough already?? LET’S JUST ORPHAN HIM AGAIN WHY NOT THAT’S A GOOD PLAN

(ETA: I really hate that we are still up in the air regarding this? and I mean, sure, why not, we only had like a dozen lady heroes to begin with, so why not just kill off two more of them, offscreen, in one fell swoop??)

WHAT IS A SHAME. TOMURA. DAMN IT

(ETA: ??)

-- well hello there

OR MAYBE I WAS NOT A FOOL AT ALL?? lol guys. please do not tell me my hobo husband is flying his vengeful ass over to where Tomura all heedless of the danger because I really do not need that just yet. CAN MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS PLEASE FUCKING TAKE TURNS BEING IN TERRIBLE DANGER INSTEAD OF ALL AT ONCE

sob we’re cutting back to Endeavor and Deku and Kacchan. ACTUALLY THAT’S GOOD THOUGH why am I complaining. I’m just gonna have to get used to the fact that no one is going to truly be safe for the next god knows however many chapters, and make my peace with that. hahaha. yeah right

lmao Deku. “HEY WHAT’S UP, ME AND MY FELLOW CHILD HERE ARE GONNA LURE SHIGARAKI TOWARDS US, BUT WE’LL EXPLAIN OUR REASONS FOR THAT LATER. IF YOU SEE HIM MAKING ANY SUDDEN MOVEMENTS PLEASE INFORM US SO AS TO AID US IN THIS PLAN.” Endeavor if you just go along with this I will lose so much respect for you lmao

lol he is trying to argue a bit but then he’s suddenly cutting off. so in hindsight I don’t know why I said “lol”, really. I’M JUST NERVOUS OKAY

btw in the other translation Deku straight up asks if Endeavor can redirect Tomura towards them. “sure no problem bucko, let me just tell the walking apocalypse exactly where he can find you, my two sixteen-year-old interns whose safety I am responsible for. I was just thinking to myself that I hadn’t had my fill of crazy ill-thought-out plans with a high risk of death today”

holy --

okay I have not the SLIGHTEST clue what’s going on here, even after analyzing both scans, except that someone, probably Tomura, either just went CRONCH or just GOT cronched just now lmao. let us read on to find out who was cronched and who did the cronching

the rest of this page is not really much more helpful

but I am becoming increasingly suspicious that those were in fact Tomura’s new, improved and ridiculously thicc legs doing the cronching as he did a Marvel Superhero Landing from the most RIDICULOUS ANGLE POSSIBLE

LMAO NOW WHAT

so he just cronched onto the ground and fooshed Endeavor and then went flying off again huh

LMAO AT EVERYTHINNNNNG

THANK YOU ENJI. HE’LL LURE HIM AWAY. lols WHY THE FUCK DID YOU TELL THEM WHICH WAY HE WAS HEADED YOU BOOB

he really just fucking hung up on him afterwards too. just, “got it thanks amigo just leave everything to me, [CLICK]”

OH MY GOD

BECAUSE WE CAN’T HAVE ANYONE ELSE CONVENIENTLY INTERFERING WHEN YOU HAVE YOUR LITTLE THROWDOWN OF DESTINY HUH. THAT WOULD JUST BE TERRIBLE

-- oh shit

that’s just. a SLIGHT change in meaning, there. silly me. thinking “get rid of them” meant “get rid of their communications as opposed to FUCKING KILLING THE ONE YOU’RE NOT ACTUALLY AFTER. hmm. well that’s not good

(ETA: never have I been so happy that a translation was wrong lmao.)

so now Endeavor’s shouting at everyone else that Tomura is heading southwest and that he has “SUPER REGENARTION” (sic) and is no longer THE SAME THUG HE WAS BEFORE and yeah RHA you have officially won me over, flaws and all. listen up boyos. this ain’t your granddaddy’s Shigaraki Tomura. this one regenars

also “that damn kid...” like why the hell did my son have to go and befriend two protagonists. why is this my life now

AHAHAHAHA

“MIDORIYA IS IN DANGER...!!” STORY OF THIS MANGA. AHAHA. KACCHAN HE’S COMING. HE’S COMING, KACCHAN. for you two. someone please help me I am both terrified and thrilled beyond all recognition and my body doesn’t know how to handle the conflicting emotions. honestly crying for two hours is starting to sound more and more appealing

oh my god I forgot they didn’t know, though

fff. Kacchan especially didn’t know, because unlike Deku he doesn’t have random bits of other people’s souls going “heyyyyyyy... transcendent being at 12 o’clock.” what has this kid so bravely and stupidly gone and gotten himself into

look at them go

damn Deku can you really not float yet?? that’s going to be really inconvenient if that’s the case

(ETA: my boy really would have just straight up died. he would have died so hard.)

OH MY GOD

NOW YOU WANT TO ASK HIM LMAOOOO. well it’s because of all the character development!! if you must know

THAT’S NOT AN ANSWER BLASTY MCANGERTY

you’re not as smooth as you think you are, you know. we all know why you actually followed him. but fine, be that way

okay so now he’s giving a real-er answer though

“understand the situation”, the situation being that your best friend and his secret-trump-card-in-the-battle-against-evil quirk were being targeted by the guy who just obliterated this entire city. got it. you put it quite succinctly

and Deku is all

and Kacchan is all

love how he throws that protagonist crack in there too. because we all know that Deku absolutely is the protagonist lol, and so if that part’s obviously not true, we can make some inferences about the rest of what he’s saying too now can’t we

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh snap

YOU SURE DO!! and he does with you too!! :) it’s gonna be one big happy reunion! :) :) :) oh gosh golly

OH NO KATSUKI WHAT ARE YOU DOING

what are you doing to me, I should clarify. please be considerate of my feelings. you can’t just DUMP sudden Kacchan Kamino Angst on me without any warning, you have to let me know in advance so that I can buy some thank you cards

THERE’S MOREEEEE???

YOU REMEMBER TOO, DON’T YOU DEKU. HE WAS ALL CRYING AND STUFF. IT WAS A LOT. IT’S POSSIBLE THAT I HAVE NEVER PERSONALLY GOTTEN OVER IT

AND IT LOOKS LIKE HE NEVER QUITE GOT OVER IT EITHER

:’)

by the way in the other translation he says “I’ll make up for what I did that day.” so yeah. BOOM. right to the heart. shot of me collapsing to the ground in slow motion

but it’s interesting though that he still can’t admit to having selfless motives yet! even after everything he’s been through and all his character growth! he’s still all GET RID OF THE REFERENCES TO ME CARING ABOUT YOU, WE CAN’T LET PEOPLE KNOW WE HAVE FEELINGS

but even his Kamino feels are notably first and foremost about him feeling responsible for failing All Might. so yeah, buddy. where does that leave you? even your feeble excuses are still rooted in selflessness, JUST GIVE IN AND ADMIT YOU’VE BEEN SECRETLY GIVING A SHIT BEHIND EVERYONE’S BACK. and honestly he might be better off at this point if he didn’t! BUT HE DOES. and that’s that

anyways Deku I sure hope you and your big hero brain can see right through this nonsense

god. you’re both in so much danger though, do you even have any idea?! of course you fucking don’t. god

HELLO BAKUGOU NARRATION!?!

well that’s one hell of a rare sight!! all fresh and chock full of shrewd observations about his best rival’s current skillset. ah what a time we’re living in

ooooh

gonna hold off commentary until I read the next part of this lol

OOOOOH

goddamn. Horikoshi really went off this week. just a whole chapter’s worth of Stuff Makeste Really Likes, goddamn is it my birthday or what

so do you guys think he’ll be able to keep pace all the way up to 100%? I can see this part being interpreted in two totally different ways if I’m being honest. on the one hand we have the more pessimistic (some would say realistic) view that Bakugou is desperately trying to convince himself that he’s still on the same level as the rival he so desperately wants to surpass, but with the sinking feeling that he’s actually not going to be able to keep up for much longer. and then on the other side of the coin we have the more glass-half-full perspective that he actually is capable of keeping up with him right to the bitter end. that even as Deku grows stronger, he’ll continue to push himself and use that as motivation to keep getting stronger too. that Deku isn’t out of reach; that his goal isn’t out of reach

and I’m not completely sure which way this is leaning myself! I personally would like to lean more towards the second interpretation, because y’all know I love me some rivals. and also because imo one of the most commendable things about Bakugou’s development has been how he hasn’t once been envious of Deku’s strength or of his position as All Might’s chosen heir since he learned about OFA. he hasn’t once shown any kind of resentment towards him for it, or doubted whether or not he deserves it. and as minor a detail as that may seem to some people, I cherish it. and I don’t want that to change! but I guess we shall see

so now we’re getting the clearest shot we’ve had yet of the new AFO holes in Tomura’s palms as he gets ready to combine some more quirks. also! more information about the quirks he has and is using! fucking thank you, where was this last week

so “radio waves” is clearly going to be used here to disrupt the heroes’ communication, which is a shame for them, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved given the alternative! the RJ translation is clearly just a hot mess lol. but I still adore that one “I’ll make up for what I did” line though

WOW

THE DISRESPECT. LOL DID YOU JUST FUCKING KILL HIS ASS

(ETA: I just realized he’s nowhere to be found after this, though, so... did he?? or is he now lying somewhere now all wounded and waiting to be found by one, or, dare I say, two of his sons? ...)

LKDFJLSDKGHOSIDGHOISDflkwejfdfsdklggdflgnfdlgndakgalkgldfdfkwlfwiowelKLDSGKSL:DKGJL:DKFM?G?SGSDLKG?SDFSDF??LKJ@L!

HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT

HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT

even if you ask him nicely??! somehow I just can’t help feeling that he probably shouldn’t oblige you, though!?!?!

anyways. THAT AIN’T SAFE. and what the hell is happening in that bottom left corner ahhhhhh

AHHHHHHH

GRAN DM ME YOUR ADDRESS I WANT TO SEND YOU SOME FLOWERS AND A BASKET OF FRUIT AND CRACKERS AND SOME LITTLE CHEESES AND SAUSAGES

jesus christ it completely slipped my mind that there was one other person currently in the vicinity who knows about OFA. my good sir, maybe you would like to introduce these two dunderfucks to the concept of a “plan.” and maybe you can also find the single shared braincell they apparently dropped and lost somewhere back there in all the city rubble

oh fuck me

(ETA: does Kacchan look so rattled here because he is being lectured, or because he just saw a vision of his own death and is now having it explained to him just how close he came to being decomposed. you decide! I’ll just sit here and bask in the angst.)

fuck. main character gods were really working overtime here. anyways so how are you all doing this fine Friday afternoon. me, I’m just sitting here wrangling with the knowledge that Tomura’s quirk is even deadlier than I realized, and that my two little boys came within inches of dying horrible deaths just now. but anyways it’s not as humid today as it was yesterday so that’s really nice

anyways so now Gran is continuing to lecture the mayor of Dumb Ideas Town here, along with his friend the deputy mayor who still thinks he outranks the actual mayor

SHH NOW AND LISTEN TO YOUR GRANDPA

-- ohhhh shit son are they mounting a counterattack?? don’t tell me!!

also is Gran seriously faster than Tomura. that makes no fucking sense, and yet these two are only alive now because of it so I’M SURE NOT GONNA QUESTION IT

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

AND IS AIZAWA ON HER BACK THOUGH???

AHAHHAHAHAHAHA

AH, BUT IT AIN’T GONNA WORK THOUGH, IS IT!!! AHAHAHA YESSSSSS

excellent question sir. the short answer is “they’re idiots”, and the long answer is just a longer version of “they’re idiots” but with some more complicated BakuDeku feels mixed in. I’ll tell you all about it if you just promise me that you’ll actually live through this, all right?

“is he after the two of them?” listen boy if you don’t finally put two and two together after this I’m gonna be fucking beside myself lol. (though honestly, Deku and Kacchan have been targeted by the League so many other times already that he might just simply accept “yeah they’re after them again” without any further explanation)

my dear gentlefolk would you fucking look at how the lord has blessed us on this day

Aizawa Fucking Shouta and the motherfucking dramatic intro to end all dramatic intros. finally this man gets his moment

someone please teach me how to cast a force field. teach me how to reach into the manga and slap this man and tell him to stop talking about how everyone’s noble sacrifices to protect him and his eraser quirk have led him to this day and to this one encounter. my guy. my fucking dude. THERE HAD BETTER BE SUBSEQUENT ENCOUNTERS AFTER THIS

NOOOOOOOOOOOO

ISN’T HE THOUGH??? Tomura I love you sweetie but you better BACK THE FUCK. OFF

well FINE THEN! BE THAT WAY. it’s not like my life revolves around you and your stupid manga anyway!! it’s not like I’m obsessed with it or anything!! I have other hobbies!! well I actually do have other hobbies, so that doesn’t really work as sarcasm, so let’s see though. maybe something more like, “this isn’t by far my favorite out of all my hobbies!!” I don’t spend 80-90% of my free time on any given day either actively or passively daydreaming about this series and writing essays in my head and reading fanfic and scrolling through art on tumblr!! etc.!! whatever!! enjoy your break!! have fun living your life!!

please don’t kill Aizawa

[obscure-sentimentalist]

Because some interest was expressed...

Part 1: AO3 Tag At Large

Backstory in brief

I didn’t intend for this to get so detailed and comprehensive--honestly, it just started because I had a particular question and some free time to go digging for the answer. And I did get my answer, but in the process uncovered a wealth of other ways to expand my study. It’s been a ride (complete with a few anxieties thanks to some researcher part of my brain), but overall a fun one, and hopefully the resulting data-cronch will be intriguing.

As noted, this is the first part of a planned three-part data series. This installment will cover statistics for the contents of the Flommy AO3 tag as a whole, while the second part will zoom in a bit and break it down into smaller categories. The third will be a bonus post where the dataset will be narrowed to examine how it compares to the tag at large, which is how I began and previewed bits of my work before broadening the scope.

Below the cut, you’ll find a breakdown of the data collection and some information on the measures I examined, before we get into some stats. There are a number of charts included, as well as written overviews and additional facts. I’ll admit that it’s... a bit, even after being selective with the charts and data to highlight, but if you have questions (or are curious about any stats not included here), let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Methodology

The overarching goal of my study was to examine and catalogue the contents specifically within the “Tommy Merlyn/Felicity Smoak” relationship tag on Archive of Our Own. All works featured in these results are tagged as (or otherwise wrangled under) this relationship tag; though it’s doubtful that this is the case, any works featuring this relationship that are not tagged in this way (and thus do not appear) will not be counted.

As of data collection on August 5th, 2020, there are 441 works (inclusive of hidden works viewable and accessible only with an AO3 login) within the Flommy tag. Aside from the individual work name and author, each entry was catalogued with the following additional variables:

Publish Year

Year in which work was initially published

Update Year

Year in which work was most recently updated

Rating

Author-assigned content rating (G, T, M, E, or Not Rated)

Work Length

Categorized as Oneshot (single chapter with an expected chapter count of 1) or Multichap (expected chapter count does not equal 1)

i.e. Works that only have a single published chapter but more are anticipated (so the chapter count reads as 1/?, 1/3, etc.) are categorized as Multichap

Completion Status

Works marked as Complete in the AO3 system are counted as such; all others are counted as Ongoing

Additional Relationships

Works may have Flommy as the only romantically-tagged (/) relationship, or additional ships; works in the latter category also had the other ships logged

Since this study was more quantitative and centered on AO3 tagging, more audience-based measures such as kudos, comment, and hit counts were omitted from the dataset. Also would like to remind that this is something I started because I was bored and curious, and I am just one person handling this data, so please keep this in mind in terms of data validity and human error.

Publish Year and Update Year

Breaking the data down by year was, oddly enough, an afterthought for me, but one I’m glad I did eventually think to add. This provided a glimpse at various trends in Flommy works over the years. 

The first two sets of charts will feature both Publish Year and Update Year, as there were a few interesting datapoints I found when comparing the two of them. Moving forward, though, yearly data will be shown in terms of Publish Year, unless noted otherwise. 

I pulled together this first graph to see if there were any major differences in either curve as the years went by, and overall, they share a similar shape--to be expected, given that a number of works published in one year may also have been last updated in that same year. Either way, both show a gradual increase in Flommy-tagged works until 2017, before plummeting in 2018 and continuing with a coasting decrease as of August 2020.

However, there’s an interesting shift over time between the two yearly measures: while there are (understandably) more works first published than last updated within the same year from 2013-2015, this becomes about equal between 2016 and 2017, before reversing in 2018-onwards. This goes to show that, while fewer Flommy works are being published these days, there are still some older works that are getting updated even now. People are sticking with Flommy, in some way or another.

Below is another way to compare these two measures, in terms of share of works:

The chart on the left (Publish Year) shows that the majority of Flommy-tagged works were published between 2013 and 2016--about 55%. However, the Update Year chart gives us an exact 50/50 split between the first four years of the tag and the last four, proving that the tag activity is still going strong!

Some other Publish and Update Year Fun Facts:

Because I’m too used to examining change year-over-year (YOY) for other purposes, I pulled some of those stats to accompany the line chart, focusing on Publish Year

The smallest change YOY was from 2016 to 2017, experiencing a 7% increase in published works; the largest was the 176% increase in 2014 over 2013

The decline in published works that began in 2018 has indeed slowed in 2020. 2018 had a -55% decrease YOY from 2017, and 2019 followed suit at -52%; 2020 is only down -21% from 2019, and that number can only improve as the year goes on!

12% more Flommy-tagged works have already been posted in 2020 than were posted in 2013, the first year of the tag. As the two years with the fewest works, that’s at least something!

Rating

There are more than a few ways I could break this one down, but I think this one covers the gist of this particular measure:

As might be expected, T is the most common rating, accounting for almost half of all works. The remaining ratings (aside from Not Rated) are all within a very close range of each other, but those in the E-rated category do have the edge to take second place, which, I’ll admit, also isn’t much of a surprise.

Some other Rating Fun Facts:

Took a look at some YOY changes in Rating:

E is the only rating that experiences two consecutive massive increases: 300% in 2014 over 2013, and then another 500% in 2015 over 2014

Actually, 66% of all E-rated Flommy-tagged fics were published between 2014 and 2016

...For a rating into which I rarely-if-ever personally venture, it certainly has a wealth of stats.

Work Length and Completion Status

Combining these two under one header, as they’re pretty tied-together and didn’t yield too many significant results. About 71% of all Flommy-tagged works are Oneshots, which assures that completed works will hold at least the same share within the Completion Status measure before factoring in Multichaps (which brings it up to about 81% complete). I instead put these measures against the others in the hopes of finding some interesting call-outs; after making up a few charts, there was really only one that I felt had a story to tell. 

Let’s take a look at the Work Length trend over the years:

While single-chapter works hold the significant majority share, their reign over multichapter works doesn’t fully begin until 2016. In 2013, the Oneshot count was less than half the Multichap count, and the following two years showed a less than 10 work-difference between the majority category and the other. And while the year is not yet complete, 2020 is currently tracking towards following a similar pattern to the early years of the tag.

Additional Relationships

This one is going to serve as our jumping-off point for Part 2, and get us into the motivating factor for my research. Here’s one chart to say it all:

...Yup, that’s less than a quarter of Flommy-tagged works that a) have Flommy as the sole romantically-tagged relationship, or b) have other romantic relationships tagged that are not Oliver/Felicity. 

That’s an answer in-and-of-itself, but my research question was two-fold: how else does this break down? How many works tagged for both pairings are compilations, such as oneshot prompt collections where the pairing varies by chapter; how many are OT3s; how many fall into a different category, whether a platonic pairing is improperly tagged or one pairing is the endgame or any other reason that doesn’t fit in any of the other categories?

We’ll get this breakdown--and a zoomed-in look at the measures covered in this installment--in Part 2, coming soon.

[epiclesbian]

Ndrv3 girls react to you growing a foot fungus

angie: nyahaha~ atua told me that you would, so i grew one too! we’re matching, y/n chan!

maki: no,,, i can cut it off with my onethousand degree knife,,,, do you wanna die

iruma: O OOH GHOHGH H MMMMM *rips your leg of your body*

yumeno: *munch* not anymore

shirogane: w o w ! j u s t l I k e a ni m E !! ! !

kaede: Number 15: Burger king foot lettuce. The last thing you'd want in your Burger King burger is someone's foot fungus. But as it turns out, that might be what you get. A 4channer uploaded a photo anonymously to the site showcasing his feet in a plastic bin of lettuce. With the statement: "This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King." Admittedly, he had shoes on.But that's even worse.The post went live at 11:38 PM on July 16, and a mere 20 minutes later, the Burger King in question was alerted to the rogue employee. At least, I hope he's rogue. How did it happen? Well, the BK employee hadn't removed the Exif data from the uploaded photo, which suggested the culprit was somewhere in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. This was at 11:47. Three minutes later at 11:50, the Burger King branch address was posted with wishes of happy unemployment. 5 minutes later, the news station was contacted by another 4channer. And three minutes later, at 11:58, a link was posted: BK's "Tell us about us" online forum. The foot photo, otherwise known as exhibit A, was attached. Cleveland Scene Magazine contacted the BK in question the next day. When questioned, the breakfast shift manager said "Oh, I know who that is. He's getting fired." Mystery solved, by 4chan. Now we can all go back to eating our fast food in peace.

tenko: **chabashira**

kirumi toujou: hhhhhhhhhhh cronch

[ashesofeternity]

tagged by @heartoverblade, ay thanks for the tag koji

1. Real name :

2. Nickname(s) : Teb

3. Fav. color: This oscillates a lot, but I guess the most constant one would be indigo

4. Male or female : Male

5. Nursery/Kindergarten : Shit, I don’t remember, but it was like, half here half in Japan.

6. Primary School : Here in Brazil it was in a place called Third Millenium College (college doesn’t mean that in here), that had a crazy director and I think it’s closed down by now lmao, but there one or two years were in Japan too, brazilian schools though.

7. Secondary : Saint Germain College (saying school sounds wrong but just take it to mean school alkçsdfjlksdf). Good name because if you go google that you’ll find like 7 just here in São Paulo lmao.

8. College : São Paulo Technology (Word that’s not university or college help what do I do how do I translate this) - Eastern Zone

9. Hair Color : Black

10. Tall or Short : Tall in here, but average around the world.

11. Sweats or Jeans : it’s too hot for sweatpants but jeans are evil so uh these comfy things that I don’t know how to call sjdkfgk

12. Phone or Camera : Phone

13. Health freak : I’m probably dying but I’ll only go to the doctor once I’m dead

14. Orange or Apple : Uuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh this is... hard... ... ... apple

15. Do you have a crush on someone : not specifically lmao

16. Eat or Drink : CRONCH

17. Piercings : no

18. Pepsi or Coke: coca

19. Been in an airplane : ay

20. Been in a relationship : nope

21. Been in a car accident : nope

22. Been in a fist fight : ...technically I guess

23. First piercing : none

24. Best friend(s): Raf OH I WAS WONDERING WHO I’D TAG IN THIS

25. First award : some best student shit when I was like 8 or something whatever

26. First crush : Grape juice. that tasteless vegetable, “why” are the keywords here for that situation which I barely remember lmao, but it was not cool and I was like uh 7 or 8

27. First word : how the hell would I know

28. Zodiac Sign: leo

29. Last person you texted : mom probably, I only ever text her lmao no one still texts here everyone just uses whatsapp instead

30. Last person you talked to: uhhhhh mom? IDK

31. Last person you watched a movie with : Lily

32. Last food you ate : yakisoba

33. Last movie you watched : Chicago

34. Last song you listened to : Cruachan ~ The Children of Lir

35. Last thing you bought : shit... I’m not... I have... no idea...

37. Fav Food : T U N A (well not really I don’t really have a favourite I love too many types of food for this but)

38. Fav Drink : C O F F E E

39. Fav Bottoms : underwear socks and crocs, my daily outfit

40. Fav Flower : uhhhhhh orchids? 

41. Fav Animal : sto t

42. Color/s : HEY 

43. Fav Movie : gh I DK I don’t have one that’s a hard fucking question

44. Fav Subject : uh idk the semester’s just started i don’t even remember them all lmao

HAVE YOU EVER:

(Put an X in the brackets if yes) (? when probably but not that I FUCKING REMEMBER)

45. [x] fallen in love with someone.

46. [x]celebrated Halloween.

47. [x] had your heart broken.

48. [x] went over the data on your cell phone.

49. [x] had someone like you

51. [ ¥(人 ᴥ◉‿ ʖs งo ᴥ ==ᴥ◉%人‿ ◉ʖ₩ ͜ ◉ 人‿ ᴥ ◉ᴥʖ) ¥  ] got pregnant.

52. [ ] had an abortion.

53. [x] did something I regret.

54. [?] broke a promise.

55. [x] hid a secret.

56. [?] pretended to be happy.

57. [x] met someone who changed your life.

58. [ ] pretended to be sick.

59. [x] left the country.

60. [?] tried something you normally wouldn’t try and liked it.

61. [ ] cried over the silliest thing.

62. [ ] ran a mile.

63. [ ] went to the beach with your best friend.

64. [x] got into an argument with your friends.

65. [x] disliked someone.

66. [ ] stayed single for 2 years since the first time you had a boyfriend/girlfriend.

CURRENTLY:

67. Eating : paçoca cake

68. Drinking : coffee  

69. Listening : Sabaton ~ Resist and Bite

70. Sitting/Laying : Ehhhh laying

71. Plans for today: do the thing with the thing that you breathe, go to bed

72. Waiting for : gacha to be all four again so I can sepnd these 60 quartz aND DEFINITELY ROLL CASTER NERO

YOUR FUTURE:

73. Want kids : yes

74. Want to get married : yes

75. Career : Sell my soul to the system, make a shitton of money, spend it all on the gacha

76. Lips or eyes : eyes

77. Shorter or Taller : uh shor-ter?

78. Romantic or spontaneous : uhhhhhh both?

81. Hook-up or relationship : relationship I guess

82. Looks or personality: uhhhhhh bot h?

HAVE YOU EVER:

83. Lost glasses/contacts : just a part of my glasses, this little pin thing that keeps the right side together so I just fucking taped it because fuck this

84. Snuck out of a house : nope

85. Held a gun/knife for self defense : nope

86. Killed somebody : I hope not

87. Broken someone’s heart : not reaaaaaaaaaally

88. Been in love : wasn’t this already in the

89. Cried when someone died : ...fictional characters

DO YOU BELIEVE IN:

90. Yourself : the only thing I believe in

91. Miracles : nope

92. Love at first sight : nope

93. Heaven : idk probably not

94. Santa Claus: saber alter

95. Aliens: they’re here

96. Ghosts : mm not really

TRUTHFULLY:

97. Is there one person you really want to be with right now : eh nah

98. Do you know who your real friends are : sure

100. Post as 100 truths : I mean, technically not, I redacted that first one, but otherwise

tagging @rafswildridethroughtheinternet @kyuubi-hime @justanothersaberface @kitragnell @sil-heart @blazingpride @unbenchthekench @a-swiss-panda @hazzoitalianfast

[sol1056]

the bar was already so damn low it was practically underground

Well, I guess I’ll start with this quick correction, with thanks to @jeannettegray, who pointed out I mixed up days (for S1-S6) and weeks (S7) which would explain why it felt wonky when I was looking at it. Here’s the corrected chart of time in-the-tail versus not-in-tail: 

I included S8 in this version, but without a season coming after it, the only thing to track is the tail itself... and unless something truly wild happens between now and tomorrow, we’re already out of the tail. S4 and S5 had tails lasting 14 days each. I guess S8 isn’t the worst, since its tail looks likely to be 17 days. Yay, three more days of elevated viewership than the two worst seasons. 

Unfamiliar with the expression ‘long tail’? Here’s a reference image showing the rise and fall of a season’s viewership stats. More info in this S7 post, or you can just check my data-cronch tag. 

Or for a more pointed visual, here’s the past six months: S6, SDCC, S7, and S8... the last of which shoots up and comes right back down. Like a rock. 

For S7, I included IMDB rankings per season, and the range was wide enough I had to take good/average/bad and split it into four: great, good, okay, poor -- and S7 had more episodes in ‘poor’ than any other. That’s what I mean when I say the bar was so low the damn thing was underground... and yet amazingly, S8 utterly failed to hop over it.  

In fact, S8 did worse. Much worse.

viewer feedback via IMDB

Here’s all eight seasons, with their respective episodes averaged into each season’s value. It’s... well. Look for yourself.

For comparison, I also did a breakout, where the full seasons got split into 6 and 7, so we're comparing apples to apples with S3-S6 split seasons. The  pattern is pretty consistent, between first-half and second-half, in that the season-half (or half-season) with the ‘finale’ is usually the one with the higher score. People like big finale set pieces, and those tend to get highest ratings. 

Unless, of course, you’re season 8. Then people hate you. 

S1, S2, S5/S6 (as a two-part season), even S7, all have higher ratings for the finale-containing half. And then there’s S8. I usually try to avoid a word as strong as hate, but... there’s really no other word that fits when the difference is that stark. People really, truly hated S8, in case the Rotten Tomatoes score wasn’t enough to tell you that. 

Given the scores for S8, I had to create a new, even lower level to see how the seasons broke out in terms of ratings per episode. Now we have great (green), good (blue), okay (yellow), poor (red), and... terrible (maroon). 

Yeah. So. There you go. Remember when I said last season that The Voltron Show had lost its title as worst episode ever, unseated by the Feud? 

Well, the Feud has been unseated... by ten episodes in S8. Take your pick, there’s plenty to choose from. As of the time of this posting, the current three worst episodes are The Zenith (5.2), Uncharted Regions (5.3) and Clear Day (5.5). I’d list the ten worst but then I’d just be listing all but three episodes from S8, anyway. 

However, it’s interesting to see the pattern form when you put the split-seasons back together. You can see how in some ways, there’s a certain level of audience approval gradually building, I guess as people got used to the story’s vagaries, err, style.

The number of ‘great’ episodes (8.6 or higher) slowly climbs; the number of ‘okay’ episodes gradually declines. S7 breaks that pattern, with only one ‘good’ episode, a few ‘okay’ and the rest at poor. S8, well. Yeah. 

Okay, moving along, to the IMDB traffic. This is another viewership-style stat, since a site’s page tends to get hit the most when people want to know about the show they’re watching. 

The color-dot indicates the ranking for the week of release. S6′s biggest interest was the week it released, which tells me people were going direct to IMDB on the day of release or the next day. When that happens, it seems to correlate with viewers coming to rate every episode, often with a strongly positive slant. They want to get right in there and make their happiness known. 

S7, the leap upwards came a week later, and the utter wildness of the rating (plus the delay) seems to be related more to rubbernecking and controversy, rather than viewers reporting in. S8 not only debuted lower than the previous two seasons, it also had a delayed reaction (indicating more controversy)... and it dropped right back down, in one of the biggest post-peak drops I’ve seen yet.

viewer feedback via twitter

About six hours after S8 appeared on Netflix, I caught this sentiment analysis of the twitter stream for ‘voltron’ as a keyword. This is from midnight California time (point of release) to about 6am California time.

This is the tracker where I can’t review sentiment, and judging from the other tracker I use, the negative is higher... but more negative than positive is never good, no matter the totals. 

Twelve hours after release, I checked the other tracker. Traffic overall was pretty low compared to previous seasons (and nowhere near what S7 had prompted, not even in the same county). Sentiment was running about 3:1 negative --- that is, for every for-VLD tweet, there were three against. 

(If it makes anyone feel better, #Allura was the center of the maelstrom, with Shiro a not-quite-close second. No, despite the impression on tumblr, people weren’t sitting back and accepting Allura’s fate.) 

But seriously, the response was otherwise pretty subdued. This is a general traffic pattern + predictive, for #voltron as of two days after release:

Which is pretty much... nothing at all. If I didn’t know better, I’d think no season had been released at all. It shouldn’t look that flat when a season drops, and it sure as hell shouldn’t be predicted to fall within the week. 

And back to the sentiment analysis, showing the trends over the first week and a half after release. It’s continued to fall in a semi-regular pattern, so this is a fair-enough idea of what it looks like. (It hasn’t changed much; it just keeps gradually dropping.) 

24 hours after release, negative-to-positive was nearly 1:1; since then, it’s stayed pretty consistent with two positive tweets for every one negative. Which, okay, you might say, two-thirds of people expressing an opinion seem to be somewhat okay with things, right? 

Except I think there might only be like a few hundred of them. I mean, the peak up there, of total mentions? Maybe 1200, total. Sure, it’s great that 510 people had something nice to say while 498 were unhappy, but... that’s practically three people in an empty auditorium, if you go by twitter’s usual traffic levels. 

And no one’s sticking around, either. Once again there was a post-release bump thanks to the simmering controversy... and then everyone hung up the phone, left the building, went on vacation, but they sure checked out. 

That leap upwards? That’s not the week of release. That’s the week after. The week of release (second bar from the right) is flat for just a bit, before spiking upwards. And just like the wiki-extrapolated viewership stats, it falls promptly afterwards. Like a rock. 

(I so want to crack a joke about rocks fall, everyone dies, but... #TooSoon?) 

There’s one last chart to explore, but this one’s a bit of a doozy to explain. Once you see what it’s saying, though, hopefully you’ll find it as interesting (and illuminating) as I do. I’ll leave it here for everyone to ponder, and get into it in the final S8 installment. 

Coming in the next few days.

[sol1056]

What are the chances of this hypothetical sequel of Voltron having better representation when it comes to POC, LGBTQ+ Rep, and overall better story direction/management? Do you believe that DW would be willing to gamble on such an endeavour, especially now that LM and JDS no longer have any involvement with the show?

I think it’s time media companies realize the real gamble is continuing to think that a team of all-white, all-straight, all-abled, all-men can deliver stories that satisfy the breadth and depth of a diverse and intersectional audience.

The majority of VLD’s flaws can be traced to the combination of two inexperienced and limited-vision EPs, and their chosen staff of all-male (and nearly all-white) team of writers. Other than one woman of color (who was also under-assigned despite her proven track record) and a single freelancer episode by a non-white man, the rest of VLD’s writers were white men. 

As the showrunner, staffing was JDS’ responsibility; failure to affirm diversity behind the camera lies on his shoulders — and that of his boss, who approved such regressive hiring choices. No one was in the room to speak up for disabled characters, or female characters, or queer characters, or characters of color. Without those voices present, VLD’s progressive (and subversive, even) themes were even more easily dismantled in S3-S6. By S7-S8, those themes were practically torn out by the roots. 

Think bigger picture: it’s not just one show. It’s getting a company to recognize the days of the all-male and/or all-white creative team need to be left behind. 

But since there’s always the chance that VLD was a one-off, a complete anomaly in DW’s usual hiring patterns, I figured I could take an hour and do a sampling of credit listings on IMDB for DW's television division. 

Data cronching behind the cut. 

First: I grabbed directors and writers, as the easiest comparison points. I snagged 289 listings from 18 shows, broadcast going back to 2017 or so. 

(Too late, I remembered a staff writer gets credited for every episode while on staff, and their ‘written by’ credits are usually much less. For now I’m leaving it on the grounds that while it’ll inflate the numbers, it’ll also help illustrate who gets put on staff more often. I’ll leave fleshing out the exact ‘written by’ credits if I get time to do a deeper dive.)

Here’s the shows whose staff info I grabbed:

3Below: Tales of Arcadia

All Hail King Julien: Exiled

Dawn of the Croods 

Dinotrux Supercharged 

Dragons: Race to the Edge 

Harvey Street Kids

Home: Adventures with Tip & Oh

Kung Fu Panda: The Paws of Destiny 

Lego Jurassic World: The Secret Exhibit

She-Ra

Spirit Riding Free 

The Adventures of Puss in Boots

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle 

The Boss Baby: Back in Business

The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants

Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia

Trolls: The Beat Goes On!

Voltron: Legendary Defender

Here’s the breakdown of women-to-men in writing and directing roles. 

In hard numbers, that’s 17 women directing compared to 67 men, a 1-to-4 ratio. For writers, it’s 51 women compared to 110 men, a 1-to-2 ratio. 

Here’s the difference in the number of episodes they’re assigned/credited...

(It may be quite interesting to see how those values change, once the ‘staff writer’ inflation is taken out of the picture.)

If you look at the average for each gender, the split is somewhat close. Women direct an average of 8.5 episodes, while men direct an average of 8.6; women write an average of 10.2 episodes, and men write an average of 12 episodes. 

Not all writers or directors work on only one series. Of all the people of a gender in a category (directing or writing), here’s the percentages that have credits for multiple series. 

Just shy of 12% of DW’s women directors ever work on a second series. 37% of male directors do. The percents for writers is distorted out of context, though. In hard numbers, 10 women writers have worked on more than one series, compared to 9 male writers, which means 20% of DW’s women writers work on two or more series, vs 9% of men.  

I grabbed race where I could (or where it was obvious from photographs), but it’d take a lot more digging to really nail down that list. I would be very, very surprised if the percent non-white in either category is greater than 5%, though. Just a hunch, but if I can find a way to determine that, I’ll put it on the list. 

At the absolute minimum, DreamWorks has a gender issue... but I’d be willing to bet we’d find an even larger disparity for race, sexuality, or ability. (Note: those last two are a privacy thing, so the best anyone can do is a general guess. HR may have some idea, but it won’t --- and shouldn’t --- share self-reported details, so don’t think I’m holding out on you.)  

[sol1056]

this is how the world ends

It’s time again for a data cronch, or at least one that can compare the first two weeks of the final season to all the previous seasons. Before I get into S8, there’s one image from S7 that should give a stark sense of how S7 did. 

(If you’re confused about some of the terms --- the tail, the lull, the hype threshold, etc --- see this post for a complete explanation.)

This particular chart compares the length of time between seasons to the length of time a season was in the tail, meaning above a set viewership threshold.

[whoops did my math wrong, will fix in the followup]

And then there’s this, from Tim Hedrick:

Let’s just say it’s not necessarily as good a thing as you think it is, Tim.

I’ll explain what I mean along with viewership and engagement stats for S8, behind the cut. Spoiler: it’s a lot of whimper and not much bang. 

viewership stats comparison

Here’s the first two weeks of all eight seasons. S8 is the dashed line. 

It started even with S7, and dropped quickly to run above S4 and S5... and by the second week, it’d dropped to run at the bottom rung with those two seasons. It took a hard hit on the holiday (much harder than the previous two years), then bounced up again above the tail threshold. 

Here’s the same numbers, but adjusted to put each season’s peak together. This gives a better sense of the season’s tail, compared to the rest. 

It’s cutting across the seasons. It’s not as severe as S1/S2 (which began at tremendous heights and thus had farther to fall), but it’s not as flat as S6 or S7. It seems to be falling in line with S4 and S5, for the most part. In case you’re unaware, those are not good seasons to duplicate, numbers-wise. 

A third way to compare the tails is to look at their heights and their lengths. For this one, I adjust to line up the ends of each season’s tail (that is, when its viewership stats drop below the 3K threshold for more than two days running). Right now I’ve got S8 a little out in front of S4 and S5, duration-wise, but unless some bombshell drops in the next few days, I expect the tail to be done by the end of this week, perhaps as early as Wednesday. 

Since the above charts go day-by-day, it makes it a little hard to get a sense of just how each week stacks up, comparatively. Here’s a chart that gives you that, comparing each week across all the seasons. 

(Note: we’re only one day into week 3, so S8′s value is artificially low, there.)

In the first week, it’s not too bad. S8 is lower than S7, showing some damage from the lack of hype, but overall it’s middle-of-the-pack, being 5th highest viewership for its first week. (Seriously, you can see the impact when DW’s marketing puts the hype machine in high gear, and this isn’t it.)

The second week is where the bottom drops out, and it falls to only a few thousand above S4 and S5. The real sign will be if it drops below both of those in the 3rd week; that’s when we could safely say S8 really is the worst season.

Now I’m going to flip the script and look at the rate of change between the weeks. It’s a bit premature for this since we need to be into the fourth week to really have enough data for rate of change, but what the hell. Why not. 

In a rate-of-change graph, a positive number (bar going upwards) means an increase, and a negative number (which all of these are) indicates a decrease. The longer the bar, the bigger the rate of change. 

I’ll use S1 as the example in plain english. These values are from day-of-release to the following thursday (one week of broadcast). Think of it as: if 100 people watched in the first week, 60 watched the 2nd week. That’s a -40% difference. There was a further drop moving into the 3rd, of 30%. Again with our simpler numbers: if 60 people watched the 2nd week, 40 watched in the 3rd week. 

The 3rd-to-4th week is the smallest by far, and it’s a sign something must’ve happened. Marketing launched a post-release campaign, or there was a con that got people excited. Whatever it was (idk, ask @ptw30, who tracks these things), it halted the drop-off, keeping the loss down to 11%. 

Now you can see why this chart shows the real meaning behind the one above: of all the seasons, only S3 had a bigger drop between its 1st and 2nd weeks. S8′s rate of change is -64%. That’s pretty bad for what should be the final season. Buzz should continue a little longer, as viewers process where and how the story concluded. 

(The second bar looks horrendous for S8, because it’s comparing the full 2nd week to only one day’s value for the 3rd week, so ignore that for now.)

engagement stats comparison

I’m going to hop over to look at how much people are talking about VLD. I track searches on three terms -- “Voltron Legendary Defender” (series title), “voltron” (term), and “Voltron” (series title). I average the values, chart ‘em, and we get this lovely picture, with the release week marked in the season’s color.

There’s one oddity I don’t think I’ve pointed out before: the level of engagement dropped slightly, between two weeks before S7 and the week of S7′s release. That’s... not how these things are supposed to work.   

There’s a particular detail I look at in this chart, and that’s the drop-off. Here’s a closeup of S3 through S8. The blocks in lighter green indicate where the 3rd week level of engagement remained above the week of release. The blocks in red indicate a drop in engagement. 

Every season has some chatter in its release week, followed by a jump in the second week. In S3, S5, and S6, the chatter remained above the release week level. In S4, S7, and S8, chatter drops off precipitously. 

In other words, inside of two weeks, the engagement levels have dropped to below that of the week of release. You could characterize this as the audience taking a week to react... and then dropping the topic. Something in S3 and S5 had audiences lingering a bit more. S6 is the ideal -- it didn’t just get people engaged, it kept them engaged, staying above the release-week levels all the way up to SDCC. 

demand analysis comparisons

Now let’s take a quick look at Parrot’s “demand analysis,” which is not actually viewership statistics. It’s how much people are talking, overall, on a variety of platforms. While Parrot isn’t about to release its algorithms, reading between the lines tells me it’s taking traffic on twitter, facebook, instagram, news sites, forums like reddit, and other platforms, to arrive at a single value. It does this for however many series, and then ranks the results. 

Here’s the historical track of VLD, with S8′s values added. 

Note: white circles are placeholders, because I couldn’t find data for every single week. Given the way demand cycles tend to work, it’s likely that VLD stayed on the chart in the gaps, so I put in placeholders for those weeks.

Yes, Tim, VLD has leapt up to sit at #7, but it debuted at #9, which it hasn’t done since S3. (S4 never charted at all.) Worse, S8′s second week -- and judging from previous behavior, its highest peak -- only just brought it up to the level of the opening weeks for S5, S6, and S7. 

What makes the demand analysis somewhat questionable as a point of pride is that this doesn’t track viewership but chatter. When you consider S7′s 2nd week was marred by significant controversy, and S8 prompted a rash of the same (if at a lower volume), I really can’t say that #7 ranking is necessarily a sign everyone is cuing up the show on Netflix. 

It just means there’s a lot of talk. It doesn’t necessarily qualify this talk as good. 

What drives home the dubiousness of this value (in terms of judging demand analysis as some sign of popularity) is the Business Insider article Tim linked to, which has this line:

Which I guess is somewhat more diplomatic than showing this:

That brings me to audience reactions, which are a fascinating (if you like trainwrecks) view of what people really thought. I’ll get into that in the next part.

[sol1056]

for those of you wondering

I went ahead and compared the six weeks previous to release night (iow, stopping at the day before release) for VLD, TH, Castlevania, tDP, and She-Ra, in order of release. These are traffic rates for the first season of each show. (For explanations on how this equates to viewership, look at previous posts under the data cronch tag.)

There’s a bump for She-Ra in the 6th week out, probably due to the timing of NYCC. Same goes for tDP, whose bump was at like 7 weeks prior. I can’t recall the con where VLD got its last bump, but it was at 5 weeks before release. 

What’s odd is TH is the sleeper hit of the five, with almost no run-up buildup in hype. Castlevania pretty much comes out of nowhere over a five-week stretch, but I can’t recall if I saw any promos for it before suddenly it was plastered all over Netflix’s banner. Comparatively, it looks like She-Ra’s had a decent number of people checking in on its wiki page, compared to the run-up for other shows. 

And then there’s this. 

That’s the wiki/viewership stats for tDP, in green, and that tiny blue spike at the far end? That’s the first night of She-Ra’s release. It’s pathetic. Even Trollhunters and its minimal hype did just shy of 20K on its release night. She-Ra barely managed 13K. 

It probably doesn’t help that DW and/or Netflix decided to move it from its planned friday slot to a tuesday, four days early. If that confused the audience (or not enough got the memo), there should be a huge spike come friday night from people (finally) checking in. If there’s not, then either the release spike has ended up spread out over several days or more due to confusion, or... there’s no real release spike. 

At this point? Barring a later spike, She-Ra’s buried. Hell, tDP’s long-tail is higher than She-Ra’s pre-release hype. 

I don’t have enough data to say why this could be; what is clear is that She-Ra skews younger. But it could also be the usual sexism of boys (and often, also their parents) dismissing girl-centric stories as something boys can’t relate to (and we’ll leave for some other time the unpacking of that issue). 

Then again, unlike DW’s other productions, She-Ra is absolutely toy-driven, thanks to having Mattel in the mix. So it could be that there’ll be a huge spike in She-ra related merchandise that’ll warrant continuing the series, even if the viewership and other stats appear to be low. Some signal of that might show up when I compare google/bing stats, but that’s not a certainty.  

We’ll just have to wait and see. 

[sol1056]

about the data cronch

Been watching the numbers. Looks like so far, S8 is on track to either be somewhere between S4 and S5 in terms of the damage. It has potential to end up worse than S5, but will have to see how it goes in the next week. 

Yeah, DW clearly intended to bury the season. So far, looks like that’s at least one thing DW didn’t half-ass.

[sol1056]

Something I don't understand. According to those stats you posted, VLD has got more or less similar traffic rates as other shows like Castlevania and The Dragon Prince. So why is its Twitter and Tumblr presence so massively higher? For example the trailer for S8 on Twitter has 12k likes, but the trailer of S2 of Castlevania has only got 3.6k, almost just 1/4 of Voltron. I know you said Fandom can't be used to detect actual traffic, but I thought different Fandoms could be compared to each other.

You can compare fandoms, yes, but what you’re comparing in twitter stats vs the stats I listed is the difference between engagement and viewership.

We can determine engagement by looking at traffic on twitter, tumblr, facebook, instagram, and google searches. As google is the only one of those five that has a reach beyond 20% of the internet-using public, I find it’s the best for a blunt-force measurement of audience engagement, which really boils down to “how much people are talking about it.” 

Wikipedia’s page views are an extrapolation of viewership. That’s a massive segment of the population who don’t get on twitter, use facebook for family stuff, aren’t into instagram, and have never heard of tumblr (yes, lots of those people exist). 

Remember, a controversial show can get people talking but that doesn’t translate automatically to them watching. If you go by twitter stats, S7 should’ve been THE most watched season of VLD ever, ‘cause boy was it blowing up the charts in terms of engagement. Thing is, its viewership stats were just fractionally higher than S6, and still nowhere near S1/S2 levels. It didn’t bring in that many more eyeballs; it just got talked about. A lot. 

The other thing to keep in mind is that you’re comparing one show’s seventh season to another show’s first season and a third show’s second season. VLD has had 2 more years to build up its audience than tDP, and a year more than Castlevania (which also doesn’t come with the massive marketing push that DW puts into even its half-assed-marketed shows). 

On top of that, Castlevania’s audience skews older, and those of us with jobs don’t have the time to spend all day on various platforms, so our engagement may be as strong but it’s rarely as noisy. (in other words, we’ll miss stuff ‘cause we don’t have the time to go back and see everything in our feed that happened while we were busy elsewhere.) Meanwhile, tDP’s audience skews slightly younger, and twitter is much more a 18-30 kind of platform. So tDP’s audience is either slightly too young for twitter, while its other audience (parents) are just a little older than twitter’s core audience. 

So, comparison graphs. Colors for each show in each graph are:

blue: Voltron (VLD)green: She-Ra (SPOP)red: The Dragon Prince (tDP)orange: Castlevaniapurple: Trollhunters (TH)

Viewership stats (via Wiki)

Stats run from 6/1/2016 to 11/17/2018. 

VLD’s S1 viewership peaked at about 38K; TH’s S1 peaked at about 21K, same as SPOP over on the far right. Castlevania hit about 72K in its first season, so its S2 drop to around 48K is about standard. tDP managed almost 50K in its first season. 

Viewership drops by 30-40% with each subsequent season for the average show; a drop of less than 20% means you have a major hit on your hands. The last season almost always shows a spike, as people come back to see how it ends. If a show ends without that spike, consider it dying a quiet death.

That reality of each subsequent season losing viewers means SPOP is in a really bad place right now, unless it can do a turn-around like TH and have a powerful ending. If SPOP has more than three seasons, by the time it gets to its final season (and that resurgent viewership for the finale), it might barely be a blip on the scale. The longer the show, the higher you want the S1 levels, to offset that expected decline over the seasons. 

Engagement stats (via Google)

Here’s the chatter, of people searching for each show (or related topics like toys, merch, news, fic, art, etc). Same colors as above, for each show, for the same time period. 

Unfortunately, Castlevania drowns everyone else out by such a degree that we can’t really see much until we get that out of the way. So this second one, I narrowed it down to ‘Castlevania netflix’ to temporarily quiet it, a little.

Compare this to the viewership, and you can see some interesting behaviors. People talked about TH a lot more than VLD, despite TH having such lower viewership stats. There was a major spike when SPOP released its character designs, and kerfluffles get people talking. For VLD, its S3 viewership dropped as in standard but the chatter went up; S3 and S7 came close to matching S1 levels of engagement (for not always good reasons, natch). 

Notably, tDP may be somewhat quiet (comparatively) over on twitter, but it’s got people talking, too. If you’re wondering, the most common related search terms are for the cast overall, then ‘avatar the last airbender’ and then Ralya, Callum, Amaya, and Claudia. Going by frequency, Rayla is the most popular character by a large margin.  

The dotted line in green, at the far right, is Google’s prediction based on the past few days’ traffic, as we haven’t quite completed the first week. (A query for a year+ gets compressed to a weekly Sun-Sat view.) 

Speaking of which, let’s take it down to just the past 90 days, and remove the narrowing filter on Castlevania. This graph has a bumpier view because it’s back to a daily value for each. 

tDP and SPOP look very close, and there’s really only a few points difference: tDP maxed out at 43%; SPOP maxed at 37%. (Basically, take Castlevania’s highest-rated day as x, and tDP’s highpoint is 43% of x.) If I narrow Castlevania down again, we can see tDP vs SPOP chatter. 

People are talking about SPOP but still not quite to the degree of engagement as tDP. Then again, SPOP also hamstrung itself by releasing three days early without a lot of warning, so it’s possible we may see another spike similar to tDP’s once word gets out that the series is actually released. Or, once early adopters create buzz and lure more people into watching. 

bottom line

What people talk about isn’t always what they’re watching. And people will watch and not have the place, time, or energy to chat about it online. All of these shows are on Netflix, too, so no advertising income as a comparison point. That makes engagement a more useful data point, because the income doesn’t change based on viewership. 

By that measure, TH is probably DW’s most successful series of these, followed by VLD, and then SPOP. TH is the only one inside shouting distance of what tDP managed it its first season, and none of them come close to competing with Castlevania’s numbers. 

Hell, if I were DW, right now I might be having serious regrets of making VLD a Y7 property, considering Castlevania’s M rating. By platform and viewership, Netflix might be the best home for adult-oriented series where stories can explore darker themes. Of all the franchises DW has right now, VLD was possibly the best candidate for taking advantage of the platform. That M rating hasn’t hurt Castlevania in the least, and in fact may’ve been part of what propelled it so high. 

[sol1056]

tfw a friend forwards a position for content strategy that would be so awesome and has all the data viz and data cronching that’s so much fun, working with large data sets and benchmarking kpis and setting metrics for marketing and analyzing to decide strategy and oh man so much wow and then I get to the requirements: 

“Proficiency in Excel and PowerPoint“

...that’s it? no python? R? even SPSS? oh come on, at least be using tableau... no? this is all in excel spreadsheets? sure, I can run data cronches but that’s itty-bitty stuff (and most of the real cronching is happening at the source, since I’m not dealing with the raw data). we’re talking thousands upon thousands of rows of raw data, if you do it right and for real. 

and don’t even get me started on the madness of doing in-depth data viz in excel. why would I bother, when I can hook to a data source and spin up a solid viz-based analysis inside five minutes, in tableau? and filter on the fly per exec questions? the last thing you ever want is to show data tables to execs. that just confuses them, and then they panic, and it’s all downhill from there. 

ehhhh, too bad. guess I’ll just have to wait until they get serious.  

which reminds me, I believe I’m overdue for giving all y’all a tDP data cronch.

[sol1056]

about demand expressions

So, I’ve had a few questions on my S8 data cronch part 1, curious as to why I say S8 is so bad, when the numbers seem kinda mostly okay. A lot of those asks will have the context I’m referring to once I post the next part. I figured I’d give this particular comment a longer response of its own, though. 

In the one with the coloured dots, S8 is doing about as well as S2, which is widely considered one of the best. And even if 7th place is not as high as it got historically, it's still very high.

I'm guessing you mean this particular graph.

First, other than S4 (which didn’t chart at all), the only other season that debuted at only #9 was S3, and it only charted for its release week... and disappeared. By that measure, well, sure. S8 is doing somewhat better, since it’s held on for two weeks. We can’t really say how well it holds up to other seasons, in terms of longevity in demand expressions, until we’ve got a few more weeks to compare. 

Here’s what this chart isn’t showing you: the actual values. When S2 came out in January 2017, A Series of Unfortunate Events sat at the top, with a demand expression value of 17.4M; VLD had 9.4M. Main in the High Castle was 3rd, with 11.3M, and Stranger Things was 6th with 9.7M. VLD came in above Luke Cage (8.2M) and Orange is the New Black (7.3M). 

For S8, VLD debuted at 9th with 19.6M. Some of the series above it: Star Trek Discovery (20M), Daredevil (28M), Sabrina (29.3M), Narcos (31M), Marvelous Mrs Maisel (33.6M), and Stranger Things (47.6M). I honestly think Parrot’s been expanding and tweaking its algorithm to include additional platforms and a wider global net. It means you can only really compare within maybe a few months; a breadth of two years has too much difference in the base math to be worth more than as a series of snapshots. 

Because if I map out the actual values, you can see there has to be some inflation going on, as Parrot shifts things around. 

Most of the major platforms -- twitter, tumblr, instagram, facebook, and so on -- existed two years ago, and none of them have ballooned sufficiently in traffic to make me believe that a #9 two years ago only needed to be 7M while getting #9 now requires a score of almost 20M. But since I don’t know precisely how the company is calculating its so-called ‘demand expressions,’ I can’t say for sure the cause of the value inflation.

Is it due to better data collection? Or a broader net (are they including weibo now? or some other massive non-english platform)? Did they change up how they weight an expression on one platform, vs another? Are they now counting every mention instead of bundling counts? I have no way to know, and that makes the numbers highly suspect in terms of any standalone comparison. 

So the one thing I can do is say that given the context of other shows’ popularity at the time of each season of VLD, this is where it stood in contrast. The other thing I can determine is how long the season remained as a topic of popular conversation. In that, S1 and S2 were outstanding, with 8 weeks’ and 6 weeks’ longevity, respectively. S6 returned VLD to that level of engagement, staying on the charts all the way through to S7′s release, 8 weeks’ total. S7 managed six weeks and fell off again. 

Here’s the other thing you need to remember: like I said in my previous post, this doesn’t measure viewership. It really only measures chatter. S1 and S2 stayed in the public’s awareness, but the chatter gradually faded. S6 got people talking above the initial release; honestly, Shiro’s return fired up the fandom to a huge degree. 

And S7... well, there’s the sticky part. This ‘demand expression’ doesn’t say what people are discussing, only that there’s a continued audience chatter about it... and you have to take into consideration how the fandom completely blew up VLD’s corner of the intarweebs. I mean, it was off the charts, and it was hugely angry. Add in the various news zines catching onto the controversy, and the simplest explanation is this:

People weren’t talking about VLD as a show they liked. They were talking about VLD as the centerpiece of a controversy that raged high enough and hot enough that it took nearly five weeks to burn out. This wasn’t S1, S2, or even S6 levels of excitement. It was rubbernecking: there’s little the internets love more than converging on a fandom mid-implosion.

I’ve known marketing and upper-level execs who will swear that this is just fine, because at least people are talking. I can also tell you they’re only fooling themselves, because a brand will take a massive reputation-hit when the talk is that overwhelmingly negative. It’s one thing if people are talking about you approvingly and recommending you to your friends; it’s another if people are actively plotting your immediate and messy demise. If an exec wants to see the latter as positive compared to the alternative of no talk at all, go ahead, but don’t drag the brand down with those delusions. 

But this is also what makes S8 an interesting comparison case, because it also left a lot of the fandom swirling in anger... but after the heights of S7′s fire, a lot of people are burned out, pun semi-intended. There’s still chatter, as befits the final season of a long series, but once you look at it in context of everything else... it’s as negative as S7′s response. It’s just not as strident. 

And that context is what I’ll be covering in the next data cronch part. That’s coming up as soon as I can compile it into something resembling an organized post.

[sol1056]

So I've seen someone point out the EP's have been unusually silent since August (Santo's letter was the last time he spoke about the controversy). Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm sure that people are seeing this as a sign that S8 is going through revisions after the S7 controversy but I doubt it because the EP's seem content with their story and I don't see DW wanting to spend their time and money on a series that's going to end soon. What are your thoughts?

Well, if there was any doubt in anyone’s mind that the S7 reaction had been a PR disaster, absolute radio silence for five weeks after is a pretty big sign. Twitter is a huge promotional platform. Those of us who use it for work (and who are not Big Names in our own right) know you can’t just drop off. That’s ignoring that twitter, like every platform, is designed to be addictive: you get in the habit of checking at regular times: on your commute, at lunch, before dinner, before bed. Going silent means willfully setting aside what’s probably been a daily habit for awhile.  

Fact is, most people tend to underestimate their impact, and overestimate their ability to be even-keeled. If laying low were JDS’ choice, I’d have expected him to, y’know, not mention VLD but otherwise keep on as usual. Unfortunately, that’s just a different kind of fuel: you’re still engaging, but now you’re adding insult to injury by refusing to engage with responses to your statements. Sure, you’ll talk, just not about this one thing, and that’s going to come across as willfully ignoring the very people you’d already offended. 

Which means that someone savvy enough in PR probably told him it wasn’t enough to just ‘not engage,’ he had to just stfu completely for awhile. Seeing how little PR seems to have been involved previously with the VLD staff, I bet someone finally gave PR the power, and that means an exec. Someone – probably several someones – probably told JDS et al to just get the hell off twitter, and stop helping. Ergo, radio silence. 

That has me suspecting any oversight suddenly became more intense. The size of that PR fiasco was massive, and worse, it’s braced the fanbase to be ready to do it again. A good exec would go over the entire season with a fine tooth comb, to make sure anything that could be filed off or edited out or just subtly changed would be. 

For those of you wondering about the backlash, try on these stats for size. In the past thirty days, there have been 6,190 mentions for voltron (keyword) or voltron (hashtag) on twitter. 

From Aug 30th to Sept 12th, traffic remained above its usual mid-season lull, averaging around 300 tweets a day. Get to Sept 15th (and the release of a brand-new series that’s captured a hell of a lot of people), and boom, mentions of voltron drop to less than 100 a day. We had a spike again on the 28th, but notice the negative also went up, too. (I’m not sure whether that’s from the comics or the NYCC announcement or something else, and I haven’t the time today to go looking.) 

From the day of S7′s release to one week later, there were roughly 10,500 mentions. In one week. The first day of S7′s release, there were 1853 mentions, which is more than all the mentions of voltron in the past eighteen days. That’s way beyond what you can just shrug off, and JDS clearly took blame for inflaming those reactions by his likes/retweets, too. 

The only thing I can say with any degree of certainty is that JDS (and his staff) probably got their wings clipped. We’ll have to wait to see what S8 brings to know whether this included better oversight of the story itself. 

[sol1056]

Are TDP's numbers available on Parrot yet? Feel free to ignore this, I don't want to be a bother, I'm just waiting on pins and needles XD

People need to get a LOT noisier. tDP is up against some serious powerhouses in terms of cultural reach. Get out there on twitter and instagram and facebook, and be sure to use keywords or hashtags (and on a public post) so your noise can be found. 

[sol1056]

I’ve had several people ask if I’m going to continue doing data cronches. I could, but if you were asking in particular about tDP, well. 

To compare, this is Voltron’s first weekend for S1. 

Here’s Trollhunters’ first weekend (which was admittedly a rough date, releasing 26 episodes on Dec 23rd).

and here’s Dragon Prince’s numbers for its first weekend:

Totals are:

47,041 for Trollhunters 

82,157 for VLD

119,322 for the Dragon Prince

Looks pretty good to me.

Chatter’s still low out on the wild intarweebs, but it’s rising fast. I’ll be curious to see if it shows up on Parrot’s rankings, but I’m not seeing any reason to worry.