3zun data analysis part 2 electric boogaloo
So in my first post on 3zun data analysis I said I manually excluded all non-3zun ships in the 3zun tag to figure out how many of them were actually centered around 3zun.
So that's... actually not how i first went about that. Instead, I decided to, one after the other, include each 2-out-of-3zun ship, and then manually exclude every relationship not contained in 3zun. (leaving te other 2-out-of-3zun ships alone) Then, I'd figure out how many of these fics were exclusively tagged the ship I included, how many included only one of the other 2 ships, and how many included all 3, which would allow me to calculate how many 3zun fics in total had 2-out-of-3zun ships included but no other side pairings, which, upon being added to the otp:true fics, should give me the total number of 3zun fics exclusively focused on 3zun.
"Wow! That seems really inefficient" yes! But it did give me more information for this post. Because with these numbers, I can somewhat crudely estimate what 2-out-of-3zun pairing tends to get more narrative focus within 3zun fics.
Here are the results, data collected on march 18th 2024:
There are 196 3zun fics tagged with xiyao and no non-3zun relationships. Of these, 151 are also tagged nieyao, and 137 are tagged nielan.
Coincidentally, nieyao has the same number, also 196, 151 of wich are also tagged xiyao, but only 117 are tagged nielan.
Then there are 159 3zun fics tagged nielan with no non-3zun pairings, with 137 of them also being tagged xiyao and 117 nieyao. (I hope you've all noticed those numbers matching up!)
by the way, here are the raw stats in just the plain vanilla 3zun tag, no filters, for how many fics are tagged with the different ot2s.
Also, this has nothing to do with anything, but for nielan and xiyao i mostly had to filter out relatively normal side pairings, a few crossovers with mxtx's other works or different danmei, nothing too weird. But the nieyao tag had THIS
JESUS/JUDAS??? IN MY NIEYAO?? It's more likely than you think!!
Anyway, to the complicated numbers! Selecting for all 3 after excluding everything else gives you 112 fics.
With these numbers you can now calculate some really fun stuff. Taking the fics tagged with both xiyao and nieyao (151) and subtracting the fics tagging all 3 (112) you get the number of 3zun fics that are only tagged as xiyao and nieyao, excluding nielan. In this case: 39
"Couldn't you just exclude nielan on ao3" you have to understand I like doing things the hard way.
Doing this gives:
Fics tagged nieyao and xiyao but not nielan: 39
Fics tagged xiyao and nielan but not nieyao: 25
Fics tagged nieyao and nielan but not xiyao: 5
Generally tagging 2 ot2 pairings in an ot3 signals that either the relationship is a V and the excluded ship are not together, or that- even if they're a triad- the excluded ship doesn't feature in the narrative much. As you can see, xiyao is by far the least likely to be excluded here.
Now doing some more math (or, if you're normal, clicking a few extra times on ao3) will give you the fics exclusively tagged with one ot2 pairing besides 3zun. Generally that means that this relationship is the narrative focus, even if all of 3zun are together.
And these results actually surprised me.
Fics exclusively tagged xiyao: 196 - 112 - 39 - 25 = 20
Fics exclusively tagged nielan: 159 - 112- 25 - 5 = 17
Fics exclusively tagged nieyao: 196 - 112 - 39 - 5 = 40
I checked the answers by actually filtering on ao3 (making all my work redundant) and uh. Yeah. I had expected that, with xiyao being the least likely to be excluded, the most commonly tagged ship in 3zun overall, and simply the most popular ship, they'd be first here too.
And yet, not only does nieyao have more fics, it has more than nielan and xiyao combined. Despite having less fics in total than either of the other 2!
Out of interest, I repeated the experiment without manually excluding all the unrelated ships.
Basically, for each 2-out-of-3zun ship, I only filtered out the two other ships. This data will give us the same insight into narrative focus, just without excluding all other non 3zun rleated side pairings.
This time I just included one ship, and excluded the other 2-out-of-3zun ships. (the hard math comes later)
Doing this gives:
3zun fics only tagged xiyao: 45
3zun fics only tagged nielan: 33
3zun fics only tagged nieyao: 59
It's a less drastic difference, but nieyao still come out on top!!
What this means, I think, is that people with nieyao as their absolute favorite side of the triangle are a lot more likely to write 3zun fics than those for whom the same is true for nielan or xiyao.
That is to say: Someone who likes all 3zun pairings equally is more likely to write 3zun where the pairings all share narrative balance. And if you really really really love xiyao, and think nieyao and nielan are pretty ok but you don't go crazy over them, you're a lot more likely to just write a solo xiyao fic than you are a xiyao-focused 3zun fic. Idem ditto for nielan. But if nieyao is your absolute fave, you wanna put those guys in a throuple anyway.
What I'm saying is I think nieyaoists are the subfandom of triangular desire. Which... *looks at my own mutuals*... is the least surprising thing i've ever said.
Anyway! I didn't stop there! I wanted to see which pairings were more likely to get tagged together again. I also decided to make things even harder for myself!
Instead of filtering one ship at a time and seeing how many of each of the others were tagged alongside it, like i did last time, I only gave myself a few figures to calculate it manually: The overall number of tags each had in the 3zun tag (348, 328, and 284, as pictured above) the afformentioned data about exclusively tagged fics, and the number of fics tagged with all three 2-out-of-3zun ships (175)
Rather than a simple subtraction, I had to... Well i'm just gonna let y'all look at my notes app. I wanna stress that i could have looked all of this up in minutes and in fact did later to check my answers! No time was saved! A lot was wasted!
But I like number so 👉👈
Tldr:
Fics tagged xiyao and nieyao but not nielan: 73
Fics tagged xiyao and nielan but not nieyao: 55
Fics tagged nieyao and nielan but not xiyao: 21
Once again, similar but slightly less drastic results.
With this I can only come to one conclusion: the fandom likes to joke about 3zun being a love triangle with xichen in the middle. But looking at these numbers? The real center is jiggy. Everything revolves around a-yao, baby!.
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