beforeastorm

[beforeastorm]

the kids are not alright.

Ave Atque Vale, Bobby Nash. Your rowdy firehouse fandom children are in mourning </3.

First - just some appreciation for the amazing creators who are inviting us to join in their grief by sharing their works. I've read an embarrassing number of these over the past couple days and have cried during all of them. More info under the cut

Since 4/17, there've been 160 AO3 works posted with the major character death tag. This consists of over 15% of the MCD tagged works in the 9-1-1 fandom.

If we exclude multi-chaptered works with a last update in these past three days, those creators have written almost 260,000 words and their works have over 120,000 hits in just three days.

If we go back to the leaked funeral procession, we're talking 247 works in about three weeks. For comparison, after the first MCD tagged work was published in January 2019, the 247th work was posted in November of 2022 - almost four years later.

Here's basically the same chart, except the fics are broken down by day instead of month - it's a bit harder to read, but is striking:

(This is a split axis graph: - the blue line uses the left y axis counting in the hundreds; the orange bars use the right y axis - counting by tens). Notes:

This only includes works that are tagged as MCD - plenty of authors are using "creator chose not to use archive warning" tags, or, unfortunately, I've seen quite a few works that based on the summary clearly contain MCD but are not tagged as such. Please tag correctly! (and not for my weewoo data projects, but so that people have what they need to make an informed decision whether to read your work!)

Only unlocked works were counted. Data was gathered at 4:00 p.m. on 4/20/25 EDT

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fanworks for the networks

you know the drill, notes etc. under the cut

So, in this Screen Rant article, the author notes that "9-1-1 has the devoted audience of something more like a cult sci-fi drama than a network procedural" which, of course, made me want to compare it to, well, other network procedurals. And what better thing to compare them against than ao3 works?

TV genre conventions are muddy at best, so lest I mischaracterize a Crime Drama as a Police Procedural, I expanded the scope to live action (not cartoon) scripted series that are part of the US major networks' (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC) 2024-2025 seasons.

And whoo-ey. Not only does 9-1-1 have more than twice as many fics as the next show - that show has been running for three times as long!

Notes:

Pulled the data about 8:00 p.m. EDT on 4/15/2025.

Crossovers are a conundrum. If a work is tagged with multiple fandoms - how do you choose which, if any, fandom to count it towards? I went with the easiest option: all of them. (This is a silly little project, not a dissertation, so I was not about to individually evaluate thousands of crossover fics.) If a work is tagged with the Rookie, Chicago Med, S.W.A.T., and NCIS fandom tags - it gets counted each time.

The numbers are from the Fandoms -> TV Shows page. For whatever reason, there almost always is a slight difference between that number and the fandom works page (Lone Star, for example, is 10,509 vs. 10,492).

Here's a chart that didn't fit in the infographic but I thought was really fun! Just a stacked column chart, showing # of fics by network and show.

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if I don't see something like this in live action in 8x15, i'll have words 🫵🤨

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Tommy Kinard; 08x06 (Confessions)

She Is Made of Chalk by L.M. Dorsey; We Must Meet Apart by Jennifer S. Cheng; The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays by C.J. Hauser; So The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector; i am an observer, but not by choice by fatima aamer bilal

[beforeastorm]

it’s still april 4th somewhere! happy bi buckiversary 💖💜💙

companion piece to this 🫶

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[beforeastorm]

Methods, notes, etc. under the cut

Happy one year anniversary to "Buck, Bothered and Bi-wildered", to the kiss, to Buck discovering something new about himself, and to BuckTommy.

Methods: I used a data scraping tool to collect information from the works pages for the 'Evan "Buck" Buckley/Tommy Kinard' relationship tag on AO3. Although we're celebrating the one year anniversary, data for all works regardless of publish date were included.

The scraping tool can only collect information for unlocked works. No, data scraping is not prohibited by AO3's terms of service, but they reserve the right to boot you if you abuse it; I deliberately slow walked the tool to be a good partner. Information was collected on 4/4/2025 between 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. EDT. As this is a snapshot of dynamic data, it will already be out of date. Notes: Recognizing that not making editorial decisions is in fact making a decision, I did not exclude any tags or use additional filters to limit which works were included. I know some people may prefer this, but I decided to honor authorial intent: if they tagged it, I included it.

I am open and interested in potentially doing something similar for other ships/tags, but my artistic skills are very limited. If you'd be interested in collaborating on something, send me a message! Information from infographic:

Words: 38,688,046

Hits: 24,598,761

Kudos: 2,313,022

Bookmarks: 310,154

Comments: 215,801

Works: 7,396

Unique Authors: 1,567

many thanks to @aainiouu for their assistance with the infographic!

[beforeastorm]

What if I said that Bobby's death is actually the scene in Les Misérables where Valjean dies? Bobby's Valjean, Buck's Cosette, and there's a passed loved one from each of the fam (Marcy, Daniel, Kevin, Emmett, etc.) as Fantine and Eponine.

Take my hand, and lead me to Salvation;

Take my love, for love is everlasting;

and remember, the truth that once was spoken;

To love another person is to see the face of God.

[beforeastorm]

9-1-1 Characters: AO3 works per episode

More info, methodology, and the numbers below the cut.

This chart was created with data from AO3, including locked works, from about 9:00 p.m. EDT on 3/28/2025. As lovely creators are always adding new works, it is almost certainly out of date. The bars are color coded by character type: blue for main, yellow for love interests, green for family, purple for other first responders. What does this chart tell us? Good question. A reasonable person might conjecture that characters who appear on the show more often are written about more often, and so by controlling for that, we might see some interesting trends. Waaaay too many confounding variables to draw any kind of rigorous conclusions, but it's interesting nonetheless. I do feel comfortable in saying our dispatch friends need more love <3. Methodology: This divides # of works listed in that character's AO3 tag, by the # of episodes that character has appeared in per IMDb. So a character that appears in two episodes, and has 200 works, would have a WPE of 100. WPE is rounded to the nearest whole number. There's always some subjectivity on who to include, but I tried to give a balance between love interests, family members, and first responders, along with anyone who is or was a main (which does include Albert! I remember season 4). Family members tended to be close together, hence why you don't see Ramon or Margaret - they're so close to their spouse it just felt redundant. I fought the html gods to insert this as a table and not just an image, but they won. Many apologies. % of works is the number of works the character is tagged in divided by the total number of works in the 9-1-1 fandom tag.

[beforeastorm]

I'm dating myself here, but did anyone see the still of Eddie at what appears to be a used car lot and get flashbacks to The Brave Little Toaster?

(Mostly because I misremembered and thought the guy's name in TBLT was Eddie, not Ernie, but that's a minor hiccup).

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Broke: my side is winning/no my side is winning

Woke: Tim is playing both sides

Bespoke: Buddietommy canon imminent

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broke: buck is secretly in love with eddie

woke: if basketball is a metaphor for buck's attraction but pickup games were always more eddie's thing and the only reason buck ever played was because tommy was going to be there and he secretly thought tommy was hot then you can actually infer that buck is also attracted to the only other man he's willing to play basketball for — ravi panikkar, in this essay i will...

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RAVI'S LIKE MY JOB IS DONE BYEEEEEEEEE

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HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!!! 🔥

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🌈 i made a @bucktommyfluffebruary rainbow! 🌈

i just really wanted to see my drawings for the month all together and thought you might enjoy it as well 💖 there’s 30 in total and the first time i’ve ever completed a fandom project of this magnitude, i’m very proud. thank you to everyone for all of your support as always!!! 💖🦬

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Crack theory: buddie goes canon and it's all Margaret's fault doing. Walk with me...

IIRC, in some interview at the end of 8a, it was brought up that the Buckleys may make an appearance, so... They visit Maddie post kidnapping to check in (because they are good parents(tm) now or whatever) and then stop by Buck's loft while he's on the middle of packing it up. Buck tells them the story and that he's moving into Eddie's house.

Margaret: Oh Buck, how long have you been in love with Eddie?

Buck: *blue screens* what are you talking about

Margaret: well, he's very protective of you. And he snuck his son in to see you. We would've wondered if something was going on, but, well, we didn't know you were, uh, *wrist flick*

Buck: *too stunned to be offended*

Phillip, interjecting: which, you know, we support! We bought rainbow stickers for our car. We're *allies*. But kiddo, you're moving into his house?

Margaret: I had a question about that, actually. I was doing some reading - I thought that was a lesbian thing to move in quick?

Buck: *is hit over the head with the frying pan of realization*

[beforeastorm]

I need someone to point me towards, or make a gifset comparing the scenes in 7.04 and 8.09...

Evan Buckley: *has an abandonment issues crash out*

Tommy Kinard: apologizes, "I could never replace you"

Eddie Diaz: v. annoyed, "you make everything about yourself"