#manual of stats

[zazun]

necro-parenting

[fazedlight]

💗 7 years of supercorp fics 💗

It's been a little over 7 years since Lena came into Kara's life. This immediately prompted the first supercorp fic and has led to tens of thousands more. Despite the show ending two years ago, supercorp has had some massive staying power (look at that trendline!) and become the biggest F/F ship on AO3.

Something tells me we're going to be creating for a good long time 💪(Including me. If you'd like, read my supercorptober ficlet-turned-oneshot, Echoes of the Forest!)

[mintnoodles]

[ID: Coloured cartoon/anime illustration of 3 women (Lucia: Plume, Lucia: Crimson Weave, Luna: Laurel) in regular attire, with yellow lighting. They look like a schoolgirl, biker chick and a comfy gamer respectively. They're described further in detail ahead. In the background are doodles of several characters. Lucia Plume stands, looking down wide eyed at a kermit plush in her hands. She wears an oversized green coat with red lining over a uniform (blouse, red tie, black skirt with red lining, stockings, leather shoes). Her skin is tan, her pigtails are done with rectangular red bobbles. Tiny horns poke out of her hair. Lucia Crimson Weave stands next to Plume with a wide legged, confident stance, hand in jacket pocket. She gazes to Plume from aside. She's tan, her white high ponytail done with a large bunnyear red ribbon. She wears a white jacket with red lining/accents and decorative zippers, red goggles around her neck, black turtleneck crop top exposing some underboob, navel piercing, denim shorts with belt chain, black fingerless gloves and ankle boots. Her legs feature several scratch scars. From her left hand dangles keys and a frog keychain. Luna sits with fingers clasped across knees, looking up at both Lucias with a slight smile. She's pale. Black bobbles tie up her shorter white twin tails. She wears black headphones with red accents. Draped over her is a thin white cardigan edged with a grey diamond pattern. Under is a blouse with a red ribbon and grey moon charm, anklelength white skirt, and grey socks. In the background are several doodles of other characters. Liv and Lee in school uniform. Liv has a braided bun and cochlear implant. Lee has a blazer and pimples and a neutral look. Liv smiles wide as she says 'Lucia! You can sit with us!' Commandant (in biker helmet and jacket with gray raven emblem) rubs their head awkwardly while presenting a wrapped gift with tag reading 'to: Lucia' Rosetta (in neck brace and arm cast) glares determinedly with yugioh card between 2 fingers, saying ''Alpha'. It's time to duel.' Behind her Diana in a deer sweater worriedly says 'rosetta please rest.' Phone with group chat named 'ASS NET'. 3 speech bubbles surround it: Exaggerated smiling chibi Roland emanating hearts. 1 heart bounces off a tearful chibi goth Lamia. 1 screenshot of of a youtube page featuring Lamia: Lost Lullaby's mermaid design. End ID.]

punishing gray raven but it's just the postapocalyptic rpg run by a very determined Luna for her younger sister and her friends. Chapter 1 to 8 is their shaky start to getting used to the system before they hit their stride, Luna gets better at narration, and a couple very weird dice rolls lead to wild story adaptation.

Read more for closeup of the phone

[ID: Luna's phone. The ASS NET group chat features some reaction emojies: Heart, skull, fish. The youtube page is a torso shot of Lamia: Lost Lullaby. The cut off title is 'v] ORIGINAL SONG || 'Lost lullaby'. The 3 recommended videos are: 2 Bros try ghost pepper challenge. Thumbnail is chibi wide smiling Kamui, angry Camu and a pepper. Study with me | 9 hours. Thumbnail is Chrome at a desk with a book. ASMR. Thumbnail is blank eyed Wanshi with a syringe. End ID]

[toa-greatmind-nothingislittle]

here is my ao3 wrapped 2024 which is a very fun thing to do and maybe reveals too much about me.

[andacherrycoke]

Did you guys know a Harry Potter fic made Goodreads most read of 2024 🙃

[omtai]

found an app that scrobbles my local files on mobile we have never been more back

[holdingcourtwiththevoid]

Realising I never posted my hand-made hand-collected Ao3 wrapped last year to this place, the ONE SITE that would’ve gotten it ;-;

[dkettchen]

*laughs in still 923 characters in my data set after cleaning up all the duplicate names* 🙃 (down from 975 (unique) old names)

[doefrost]

can the nearest math autistic send me mind beams please and thank you

[sojourner-between-worlds]

Even though I don't post on FFN anymore, I sometimes still get on to look at my stats because its always interesting to me to see which fics are somehow still being found and read

But stats have been down since the middle of September.

(Somehow I don't think they're in any rush to fix that....)

[missholson]

Tumblr Stats of my profile in 2014-2024

Created by Tumblr Stats (manually screencaptured)

[fazedlight]

Supercorp Fic Trends

I was inspired by the femslash stats to take a look at supercorp fics, and graphed the history of supercorp fics created per month for the past 4 years. It looks like supercorp used to average about 330 fics/month, and now averages around 130 fics/month.

There are some very clear peaks like:

The S6 mid-season finale (May 2021)

Supercorptober 🎃 (run by @kmsdraws) every year

Supercorp Big Bang ⚡ (@supercorpbb) is creating a spike now!!

There's definitely fewer new fics these days compared to years ago... but the show has been finished close to 2 years at this point, and we're still getting an average of 4 new fics a day? We're still running events and getting excited on twitter about the actors?? I think that's very cool!

(There are plenty of ways to crunch data and we can debate on what gives the "best" view, but this is the least error-prone way I could think of. The trend line is exponential as the rate of change seemed more meaningful than the change itself.)

Anyway, was mostly curious, both as a supercorp author and an incurable nerd. The fandom may be calming, but we're nowhere near done 💗

[jesterwaves]

i wanted to finish v 2.0 of the little writing tracker i made but today i had so many ideas i wanted to try and implement so i spent the day ruining and fixing the code instead

but i can load images from the user path now

[scolek]

cons to playing a barbarian: no spells so you have to get the gnome to cast prestidigitation on your hand because you had to do a handshake with a Sewer Man who has Sewer Hands

pros: you dont have to draw armor when you draw them.

[osterby]

I may have found another methodology flub. Centreoftheselights lists the fandom for Kirk/Spock as the reboot movies, which makes it sound like the various series are being counted as separate fandoms and that New Movie Spirk had enough fics to make the list while ToS, All Media Types, and old movie K/S did not.

However, the list says there 18776 fics total, and a quick logged out glance at the James T. Kirk/Spock tag (which does not distinguish between the various series and movies) shows 18766 works.

A glance at the sidebar shows this:

It would seem that centeroftheselights simply snagged the top fandom within a ship's tag, rather than listing the actual fandom the way fans would understand it.

Randomist1031 more accurately lists the fandom for Kirk/Spock as simply "Star Trek", the canonical All Media Types tag.

This could also skew the listed fandom for canons like (off the top of my head) Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter, Good Omens, The Witcher, Batman, Percy Jackson, or any of the anime/manga fandoms which have multiple more specific subfandoms that any given ship could belong to. If everything else on the list is accurate, it's probably coincidentally so. I would recommend that anyone familiar with any fandoms like that on the list doublecheck and make sure that the fandom listed is actually the one the ship is from.

We've already been over this sort of thing earlier this year with the misguided attempt to wrangle Sherlock Holmes: All Media Types as Sherlock (BBC).

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

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

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[grandtheftautumn]

Playback just dropped!