Toastystats: TV fandom fix-its on AO3 - Stranger Things

Following the previous cross-fandom look at TV fix-its, I'm doing fandom deep dives. (See also: Supernatural)

For lots more data, explanations of all of the above, plus any clarifications & corrections, click through to AO3.

Toastystats: TV fandom fix-its on AO3 - Stranger Things

Following the previous cross-fandom look at TV fix-its, I'm doing fandom deep dives. (See also: Supernatural)

For lots more data, explanations of all of the above, plus any clarifications & corrections, click through to AO3.

Toastystats: TV fandom fix-its on AO3 - Supernatural

Following the previous cross-fandom look at TV fix-its, we're starting fandom deep dives. We're starting with the strongest fandom response to a finale I've ever seen -- Supernatural.

For lots more data, explanations of all of the above, plus any clarifications & corrections, click through to AO3.

Another Update Regarding "No Fandom" tags

AO3 Tag Wranglers recently began testing processes for updating canonical tags (tags that appear in the autocomplete and the filters) that don’t belong to any particular fandom (commonly known as No Fandom tags). We have already begun implementing some of the decisions made during the earliest discussions. By the time this post is published, you may have already noticed some changes we have made.  Several canonical tags are slated to be created or renamed, and we will also be adjusting the subtag and metatag relationships between some tags to better aid Archive users in filtering.  Please keep in mind that many of these changes are large and require a lot of work to identify and attach relevant tags, so it will likely take some time to complete. We ask that you please be patient with us while we work! While we will not be detailing every change we make under the new process, we will be making periodic posts with updates on those changes we believe are most likely to prove helpful for users looking to tag or filter works with the new or revised tags and to avoid confusion as to why changes are being made. 

squinting at the 'fix it fic' tag on any given story on Ao3, trying to discern if it's intended in the sense of:

(because these are all extremely different vibes)

Calling Game of Thrones fans with knowledge of the fandom's history! [see also: Supernatural version]

I'm in the midst of putting together some fandom deep dives as part of my analysis of TV Fandom Fix-Its on AO3, including GoT. I'm trying to give context for how many fanworks the fandom was producing overall, and when overall spikes in fandom activity were happening, and I could use help.

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

otp:true will return results where there is only 1 relationship tag on the fic. If you want results where there are 2+ relationship tags (and no fics with only 1 relationship tag) then you can use otp:false

Meme + helpful search tutorial ftw!! Also saving the tags, because AO3 volunteers are indeed awesome:

Calling Supernatural fans with knowledge of the fandom's history!

I'm in the midst of putting together some fandom deep dives as part of my analysis of TV Fandom Fix-Its on AO3. I'm starting with Supernatural and trying to give context for how many fanworks the fandom was producing overall, and when overall spikes in fandom activity were happening, and I could use help.

Specifically, I'm trying to label the activity spikes with what episodes/events seemed to contribute to them. But I'm not in the fandom, so I'm probably missing important context. E.g., I know there were other events like fanwork exchanges happening that might have been contributors to some activity spikes, or things the show creators said/did might also have contributed sometimes.

If you have theories about why the red spikes happened around July 15 and Oct 7, 2023 (both after The Winchesters was done airing), that would be excellent.

And if you think I'm missing important context for some of the earlier spikes, or I made goofs on some of the labels, please LMK!

If you prefer to look at the raw data, it's too long to list here, but you can read it in this spreadsheet. And you can view the graph and labels bigger in this slide.

Thanks so much in advance!!

(If you have questions or critiques, please click through and read more context on AO3 or click through to the OP version of this post, which I will update with clarifications as needed.)

I thought it would be interesting to see if I could easily determine which ships had the most works updated in 2023.

It turned out to be fairly easy, though a little time consuming. I think these results should be reasonably accurate.

Some points to note:

I did this on my own account, and I have like 2 people muted. So I am capturing the effects of archive-locked works, but my numbers might be off by one or two works due to muting.

Works updated in 2023 is a number that constantly changes as works are deleted or updated again in 2024.

I didn't scrape the entire archive or anything like that, so it's possible I missed a ship that would bump one of these down below 100. I'd take the last few at the bottom there with a grain of salt. But I think we can be reasonably sure the top ones are accurate and that the kinds of numbers that we see at the bottom there (eighteen hundred plus works updated in 2023) are about where the cutoff will be even if we find a ship I missed.

--

As for how I did this, I went to the category tags and the rating tags, filtered for updating in 2023, then excluded ships in the sidebar till I got to 130-150 ships excluded. I also grabbed ships that are big in general from tag search, which you can use to find all relationship canonicals, ordered by frequency.

I combined those lists of ships, cleaned off the works numbers, and generated a list without duplicates. That got me three hundred and something (yes, they were mostly duplicates). I generated the relevant AO3 URLs, opened them in batches with Open Multiple URLs, and copied the works totals into a spreadsheet. Not as tidy as using a script but honestly pretty easy if you know a few spreadsheet formulas to clean up data.

The key here is that if you're only going for pretty good and not accurate beyond a shadow of a doubt, all you need to do is generate a list of likely ships, then check them.

It's possible that there's some much-updated ship that is so evenly spread across these various other tags that it just missed showing up in the sidebar. Hopefully, grabbing more than just the top 100 avoided this problem.

This method also doesn't take into account backdated works. If a whole archive was imported in 2023 but all backdated, there could be some ship that didn't have new works but where AO3 users experience in 2023 was of an influx of content.

I also did this just now, in late March/early April, so some 2023 works have inevitably been deleted or updated again. So the exact work counts don't represent the experience of using AO3 throughout 2023. A fandom active in early 2023 might not have much updating in early 2024, while a fandom active in late 2023 would. This could demote the latter a few places in the rankings since I didn't grab numbers on January 1st.

Even if a person scraped AO3 every day or was monkeying around in the databases, you also have to ask what conceptual answer you're after. Is it works a user could have read at some point during 2023, whether they were deleted by the year's end or not? Is it new-to-AO3 works or only newly-created ones, not including imported archives? Does it matter if the works are fic? If they're in English? What about accidental double-uploads or translations of a single work?

I hope this makes it clear why a definitive ranking is not actually possible.

However, despite these drawbacks, I am confident that the rankings above accurately represent the broad trends on AO3 in 2023. Just don't get too fixated on whether a ship should be at number 73 or number 74.

And, of course, I excluded these from the top 100:

Here's a spreadsheet if you want to see the actual numbers not as a shitty screencap. I left the next few below 100 for context.

Doh. First error caught!

There was still a ton of updating because of the live action coming out, but no, it wasn't that high. That's just a copy and paste error.

ETA: Whoa! It's not a copy and paste error. It's a super weird error that occurs when you try to go to the URL, filtered by date, but the canonical tag got changed after you created that URL.

I've updated the original post with these:

In the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 - an unofficial demographics survey of 16,131 AO3 users - 37% of respondents identified at least partially as Bisexual or Pansexual, 27% as Asexual, and only 12% as Heterosexual or Straight.

To see more analysis, including lists of the common write-in answers to these questions, please view the full results on AO3.

IFD 10th Anniversary Survey Report

Our report on the results of the IFD2024 Survey is now available! Get your copy in English at https://otw.news/rwv or in additional languages at the links below.

Bahasa Indonesia • Български • বাংলা • català • Čeština • dansk • Deutsch • eesti keel • Ελληνικά • English • español • français • 한국어 • hrvatski • italiano • lietuvių kalba • 日本語 • polski • português brasileiro • português europeu • Српски • Tiếng Việt • 中文

Toastystats: TV fandom fix-its on AO3

I took a look at TV fandoms* that have a lot of fix-it fanworks on AO3. Tagging varies a bunch by fandom and the type of event fans are responding to, so I looked at a bunch of different types of tags. I'll be doing deeper dives into some specific fandoms in future chapters.

Click through to AO3 for more explanations, more graphs, and any corrections/clarifications. Also note that some of these analyses and the explanations of them contain spoilers for various TV fandoms.

*The character death analysis also includes non-TV fandoms, but these analyses are mostly TV-focused.

In the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 - an unofficial demographics survey of 16,131 AO3 users - 81% of respondents identified as LGBTQ+, and 25% identified as transgender.

To see more analysis, including comparisons to general population trends, please view the full results on AO3.

The detailed write-up is definitely worth a read if you're interested in fandom demographics. Some bits I found particularly helpful for thinking about the above data:

I'm so excited to see the results of this survey starting to come out!

Update on "No Fandom" tags

AO3 Tag Wranglers recently began testing processes for updating canonical tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete and the filters) that don’t belong to any particular fandom (commonly known as No Fandom tags). We have already begun implementing some of the decisions made during the earliest discussions. By the time this post is published, you may have already noticed some changes we have made.  Several canonical tags are slated to be created or renamed, and we will also be adjusting the subtag and metatag relationships between some tags to better aid Archive users in filtering.  Please keep in mind that many of these changes are large and require a lot of work to identify and attach relevant tags, so it will likely take some time to complete. We ask that you please be patient with us while we work! While we will not be detailing every change we make under the new process, we will be making periodic posts with updates on those changes we believe are most likely to prove helpful for users looking to tag or filter works with the new or revised tags and to avoid confusion as to why changes are being made. 

Tag update info that may be useful for people who want to include/exclude any of the following from their AO3 searches, or who use related tags on their own fanworks -- and also folks doing fandom stats/research related to the following:

Edit: also let's give a hand to the tag wranglers, who are working to help with smut language disambiguation, smut gender inclusivity, and the hottest fandom discourse topics all at the same time! 😂😂😂👏👏👏

AO3 tag search, my beloved! Tag search has gotten much more useful recently, with the introduction of Sort by uses. I've been using it lots lately for some stats WIPs. Glad to see others also enjoying it -- using it to generate polls seems like great fun! :)

Only a few days left to complete the AO3 Demographics Survey!

The survey is closing on 1 Feb 2024, so if you haven't submitted your response yet make sure you do it soon.

We have just passed 15,000 responses, which is brilliant! But the more responses we have, the better our data will reflect the people who use AO3.

From the comments:

Toastystats: The sizes of fandoms on AO3

When I share data about fanworks on AO3, I often limit my analyses to the biggest fandoms. I generally do that because it's quicker to collect data about and analyze just the biggest fandoms -- not because those are the ones that matter most, and also not because most fanworks are in big fandoms. But I wanted to take a moment now to visualize the sizes of different fandoms on AO3 in a couple different ways -- and to highlight just how many of the fandoms on AO3 are smaller fandoms.

Read more on AO3 (and get further explanations, clarifications, and corrections).

I love this way of looking at it! :)

And for the commenters who are sad for all the tiny fandoms out there -- every fandom on AO3 starts with a first fanwork! Some of these fandoms will grow. And even for those that stay small -- remember that there are so many more pieces of media that don't have any fanworks. All of these tiny fandoms mean there was a piece of media (or a person) that caused someone to care so fiercely about it that they created and shared art with the world as a response. I think it's kinda wonderful how many times that has happened.