#we are having top bottom discourse

[some-call-me-menace]

"if juwon was a lesbian he would be a pillow princess"

[whatsver4739370]

All these people writing about nervous, easily flustered, damsel-in-distress Ishan simply do not get the appeal of a popular jock, hilarious backbencher, bad boy with a heart of gold Ishan and I pity y'all fr.

[halfbaked00q]

actually speaking of the sub!Bond enjoyers. realizing quite an oversight on my part here. but. where are my bottom Bond enjoyers. I imagine there's some overlap with the sub!Bond enjoyers but like they're not strictly mutually inclusive, so where my bottom Bond enjoyers at, can we make some noise

[lnkedmyheart]

Me watching people that actively refer to Sigma as she/her and act like that headcanon is borderline canon cause "long hair and dainty" behave like someone got murdered when a random artist draws bottom/fem/flamboyant gay Chuuya and claiming it's cause he's short and pretty and therefore harmful stereotyping.

[thisautistic]

there's no way earth's character in olt is a top. you can't change my mind

[illumi-nati-png]

.

[judasisgayriot]

sorry but I bravely refuse to pick a side in the worlds dumbest rpf slapfight, i am a top patrick AND bottom patrick enjoyer and i won't be swayed

[ryngtail]

the way ppl act abt the "height difference" in haikavehtham is absolutely crazy to me. the divide in this ship is insane l m a o.

guys!!!! you like the same characters kissing each other!!! you're on the same side!!!

[nullians]

.

[runekeepershymnal]

This is your daily reminder that every time you start/encourage/participate in top/bottom discourse, an angel can’t find the lube.

You monsters.

[floralegia]

No listen!!! Listen!!!!! The thing is it all comes down to how you characterize alphas. Okay? Like sure if the primary characteristic is Aggression then I agree, alphatrick may not always make sense. But I often like a version of A/B/O where the primary alpha trait is Protectiveness. And that's a different thing! More defense, less offense. More, I want to take care of my loved ones and make sure they're safe and happy. I want to be needed, perhaps. I want to be helpful.

[buckleysdee]

If I was in the writer's room I would flip a coin to decide if Buck was O- (universal donor) or AB+ (universal recipient)

[indigosfindings]

imagine how different the world woudl be if fast food restaurants had the option to buy like half a burger, but it's not that they cut a burger in half or anything it's that they like pair you with another customer who also ordered half a burger & they give you one sandwich to share & you have to decide amongst yourselves how you divide it like if youre going to cut it in half or alternate taking bites or if one person is going to eat half then pass it to the other person & in that last case thered probably be a bunch of firsties (thats what it's called when youre the one who eats the first half) who eat slightly more than half before passing it on & so thered be a bunch of #Relatable like ifunny type posts like "when the firsty eats 70% of the burger and it makes you So fucking angry" but there would also be people who say things like "i met the love of my life when we both ordered halfies, shell always be my secondy" & there would be a bunch of really corny posts treating firsty/secondy as like a "power dynamic" & they would eventually start replicating like top/bottom discourse & then there would probably also be movies about how difficult it is to be a secondy. thank you for listening

[phanologyphd]

when I was younger I thought the reason phan top/bottom discourse would have ended is because we were all older and more mature and definitely not because dan and phil just straight up told us

[x-neurotoxin-x]

No hate to this anon or anybody that likes bottom Shigaraki in general but I've gotta ask, wth is with the influx of ppl messaging/sending anons to/commenting on pages and works by primarily top Shigaraki / bottom dabi shippers and asking them to write/draw bottom Shigaraki when the person either predominately or exclusively writes/draws him as a top in ships? I keep seeing it, like, rather frequently and it's kinda leaving a bad taste in my mouth especially when bottom/sub Shigaraki is not rare whatsoever and there is plenty of writers and artists that portray him as a bottom or a bottom leaning switch. Hell, it used to be hard to find fic and art that wasn't bottom Shig in the shigadabi fandom. It's just kinda weird to me.

would you ever write a fic thats shigaraki focused? that or write him as a bottom. youre actually be my favorite dabi writer though shig’s my favorite character so im just curious!

I mean, i write fic that are shigadabi focused, though they're usually more dabi centric than Shigaraki centric. I wouldn't write bottom Shigaraki though. Personal preference, I don't like bottom and/or sub Shigaraki, just doesn't align with how i perceive him and it's kinda an ick for me. There's also just an abundance of shigadabi/spinaraki with bottom Shig and not a lot of the ships with him as a top, and i like him a whole lot more as a top in those dynamics.

[bewareofthenewphannie]

sigh....please don't kill me for this

AO3 Phandom Stats - Top or Bottom?

As many of you may have noticed there has been a shift in the depiction of Dan and Phil in fanfiction over the past few months from previously predominantly Dan being written as the bottom to now largely Phil bottoming. This post aims to put that trend into numbers and visualise it in a few overly convoluted diagrams below the cut.

Does any of this matter? Absolutely not.

Is it interesting? Oh boy, it sure is!

Disclaimer: This is an analysis of the fanfiction writing and tagging trends within the Phandom. It's at most tangentially related to the Real People Dan and Phil and is not meant to spark any type of discourse. I am doing this as an avid fanfic reader and with the utmost respect and appreciation for the authors of these fics, so I don't want to see any negativity directed towards them. Above all this is meant to be fun and interesting.

And as always - don't like it, don't read it <3

Note on accessibility: linked here is a doc with all the numbers shown in the screenshots of this post. Inspired by emma's stats I will be putting the cell range in the ID - if there's a better way to do this, please lmk!!

Methodology

To get the numbers shown here I filtered the works in the Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF) AO3 tag by "date updated" from the Jan 1st to Dec 31st of each year and by the following tags:

Bottom Dan Howell

Bottom Phil Lester

Top Dan Howell

Top Phil Lester

Short excurse on AO3 tags for those unaware:

The tags I chose are canonical tags, which means other tags that mean the same thing but are for example spelled differently are linked to this tag by tag wranglers and appear when you search for the canonical tag (see example below).

Additionally, the "bottom x" tags are metatags for the power bottom tags, which means fics tagged with "power bottom x" also appear when you filter works for these tags.

It's important to note that not every fic where one of them tops or bottoms is tagged as such. That means these stats very specifically look at the author's choice to tag fics with these tags and not the overall amount of fics where one of them tops or bottoms. However, I would argue it's fair to assume that it's at least somewhat reflective of the general writing trends within the Phandom.

For simplicity's sake I will refer to these tags as e.g. "Bottom!Phil" (b!p) going forward.

Stats 2013 - 2024

Here you can see how many fics were tagged with each tag in the respective year and the amount of bottom!dan and bottom!phil fics relative to the total amount of fanfic written in the same time span.

As expected, up until 2023 the split was about 2 b!d to 1 b!p fic (precise numbers: 71% to 29%; see pie chart above).

In 2018 we can see a peak in both in the number of phanfics written and the relative amount of fics tagged as bottom!dan.

Starting in 2023 (more on that below!) this flips and in 2024 the ratio of b!d to b!p fics was 1 to 4 (precise numbers: 81% to 19%; see pie chart above).

Furthermore, making up 4,62% of the total amount of phanfics written in 2024, the bottom!phil tag is relatively speaking twice as popular now as the bottom!dan tag ever was.

Sidenote: You can see that generally the amount of fics tagged with b!d and t!p, as well as b!p and t!d correspond to each other for obvious reasons (they're usually fucking each other). This year however there's 16 fics more tagged with bottom!phil than top!dan, which shows that there's been a very specific interest in writing and tagging bottom!phil in the last year.

Here you can see the total amount of phanfics written by year because I already collected the data, so I might as well put it here:

Stats 11/2023 - 12/2024

Now I want to take a closer look at the past few months post hiatus.

You can see that there's been a steady increase in the total amount of fics written per month!

That's incredibly cool!! (Love to all the wonderful writers out there <33)

Before we get into the actual stats, it's important to note that we're working with very low numbers here, so don't be fooled by overinterpreting percentages in the first few months depicted and look at the actual numbers! In the diagram below I excluded September and October 2023 because there simply wasn't enough data to produce useable results.

Contrary to what I expected, the increase in fics tagged with bottom!phil does not coincide with gamingmas 2023 (pour bot hem and top bunk kind of guy), nor phil's birthday live stream (topped by kakuna) but only really starts in June 24 and spikes in August for reasons I'm not fully sure about.

If I had to pin it on one thing it'd be the precious baby angel picture, which was posted in mid August.

Much more likely is though that this was simply a dynamic that built over months and had a wide array of reasons mentioned above and could very well be a self-reinforcing dynamic of more and more people looking for that tag and also writing for it.

If anyone has more insight on this, please share your thoughts :]

On that note, I'm finally done yapping, I hope this was at least mildly interesting!