#and there were comments complaining that i estimated the date a couple months off based on like one small thing that was said in it

[keepwaitingforyou]

still kind of surprised at how nice most of the people in the tcc are about info posts and stuff bc when i was posting rare information and videos about Brand New there would always be a bunch of people complaining about small details or going "erm actually 🤓☝️" about things i was 100% correct and had evidence on

[sol1056]

S7 data cronch pt2: get the hot dogs, the fandom’s on fire

Before I jump into the more tangled datasets, there’s something interesting I want to call out, and that’s the vlogs. 

In September of last year, DW released vlogs for Coran, Keith, and Allura. A month later, we got vlogs for Lance, Pidge, and Hunk. Shiro’s vlog finally arrived on June, this year. That final vlog now shows a July date, but when it was first discovered, its posting date was 6/28. (I have no idea why it was changed. Ask @ptw30.) 

In the first part, I mentioned audience engagement. The vlogs are a good object lesson. If we take the number of views divided by the number of days since posting, we get an idea of the daily ‘value’ of each vlog. 

Shiro clocks in at 6877 views per day, while the next closest, Keith, has 4796 per day. Hey, so maybe that’s just everyone excited after waiting almost a year. 

So, how about this graph?

Shiro has 4,293 comments. The next closest are Allura and Hunk, with 692 and 976, respectively. All told, Shiro got 1.5 times as many comments as all the rest of the characters together. Now that is audience engagement. 

Alright, now that you’ve got a bit of data on which character clearly gets the fandom engaged and talking, let’s see what else we can learn about S7. 

Hop to, behind the cut. 

so about that twitter debacle

There’s no way to fully illustrate just how incomprehensibly bonkers twitter was for awhile. I know there’s a toxic side to the fandom that weaponizes twitter, but... in general, the VLD fandom isn’t noisy, compared to other fandoms. Daily counts range from 30-100 tweets. That makes it harder to tell when things go dead quiet, but it sure makes it easy to tell when things explode. 

So let’s go back to the Sunday after S7 landed. For this season, I included sentiment analysis. At first I searched on #voltron, then I realized one of the trackers lets me go by keywords, so I did a comparative search on ‘voltron’. Hashtag use seemed to be for being seen by others, while keyword seemed to be more for conversation, reassurance, and reflection.  

That’s... pretty strong, for both. And I honestly had never seen a twitter stream get a sentiment analysis as negative as the one on the right. After working my way through 11,889 tweets (from Aug 10th to the 25th), I can tell you one thing for certain.

Everyone was angry about something. 

One group, predictably, was angry at being denied their long-awaited affirmation. A second was furious at the queerbaiting; that group overlapped with a third enraged at the Bury Your Gays trope. A fourth dismissed the BYG trope yet were angry at the lack of explicit relationship beyond a single break-up scene; that caused a few flare-ups between the 3rd and 4th groups for the latter treating Shiro as queer purely on his facebook status. A fifth group (oddly, calmer voices, for the most part) was upset at VLD’s treatment of Shiro in general, from his isolation to his tokenization. 

On the other end of the spectrum, the majority of positives loved the season but were angry that others didn’t or wouldn’t. A much smaller percentage took their own shots: insisting children don’t need LGBT+ rep, calling LGBT+ fans entitled, telling DW not to pander, or complaining DW/Netflix had mixed politics and entertainment. (There’s an answer to the last one, but that’s for another post.)

I believe the technical term for Aug 10th-25th would be clusterfuck. 

going deeper for context

Getting a clearer picture than the donut chart meant considering the context. In other words, for every seemingly-neutral tweet, I’d open the feed, and majority of the time I found threads voicing bitter disappointment, frustration, and hurt. These deeper threads almost never tagged anyone, and they tended to be more nuanced, compared to upper-level mentions loaded with easily-classed negative or positive keywords.

Here’s a snapshot of the twitter stream on August 10th, which includes metrics for those deeper contextual threads.

There’s just no way to spin that much of a backlash. By the end of the first day of release, the signs were already there that --- at least as far as the majority of the internet-based fandom was concerned --- S7 was an unmitigated disaster.  

it’s just twitter, no one’s paying attention

That sounds like something a Boomer-aged exec might say. They’d also be wrong (not to mention ignorant).  

Note: I used two different analysis apps. Both were rather blunt-force, rating “S7 wasn’t half bad” or “brutal but what I wanted” as negative, while "go to hell, I loved VLD but not anymore" was rated positive. One of the two apps let me re-evaluate, but it only allowed for negative-neutral-positive. (Lesson learned: set up a twitter scrape ahead of time, so I can run it all against a good AI.) 

For this part, I used the second tracker and manually evaluated the values for ‘voltron’ mentions. Unfortunately, I had to rely on the tracker’s value for most non-English tweets. I designated ‘positive’ for explicitly pro-S7, and ‘negative’ explicitly con-S7. For any mentions that were ambiguous, incoherent, or personally-directed, I defaulted to neutral. My goal was to measure who was or wasn’t happy with the season itself, and not attacks on or support for the staff, DW, Netflix, or other people in the fandom. 

With that madness done, here’s the entirety of August.   

On the day of release, a total of 1853 mentions created a social media reach of 1.46 million. My next question was: is this low-influencer unhappiness vs high-influencer happiness, vice versa, or something else? This next chart is the data filtered down to influencers with a score of 7 or above (based on followers, retweets, and replies). 

That’s 78 negative mentions, 16 positive, and the remainder neutral. All told, 194 mentions had a social media reach of 1.36 million. That’s a lot considering the voltron keyword usually has a social media reach of 50K, tops.

This was a groundswell reaction. The reach was driven by big voices, but the bulk were individuals unhappy for any of a variety of reasons. Any apology --- after four days of fever pitch --- was going to have an uphill fight to calm the crowd, no matter how gracefully it was written.

On the 14th -- when news outlets began reacting to JDS’ apology -- we got a second spike. 1573 mentions with a social media reach of 1.3 million; the new megaphones in the stream were news outlets promoting articles. (Also, most of their tweets are strongly click-bait in tone, compared to the actual article titles.) 

If you googled ‘voltron legendary defender’ on the 14th, you got these results: 

Voltron Showrunner Apologizes to Fans Following Outrage over Gay Character’s Storyline [Syfy Wire]

Voltron Showrunner Pens Open Apology Letter [The Mary Sue]

Voltron Showrunner Apologizes for Series' Handling of Gay Relationship {CBR}

Voltron's Complicated, Imperfect LGBQT Representation Is Tearing the Fandom Apart [In-Depth-Gizmodo]

Joaquim Dos Santos Shares Letter About Voltron Queer Representation [The Geekiary]

The ‘Voltron’ Showrunner Apologized For Making a Mess of the Show’s Gay Representation [Hornet]

Of course, Josh Keaton got sent out to calm the anger, too. 

'Voltron' Star Josh Keaton On Season 7, Shiro's Sexuality, and How a Leader Grieves [Comicbook.com]

Shiro Voice Actor Responds to 'Voltron' Season 7 Controversy [Inverse]

Exclusive: Josh Keaton talks 'Voltron' season 7, Shiro's new arc, love and loss [Hypable]

You had to scroll past all that before you could get to anything remotely like a positive news item (and nowhere near the usual post-release deluge of compliments to the creators). 

On Aug 15th, more articles: 

Voltron: Legendary Defender’s Showrunner Offers a Genuine Apology to the Fandom [Gizmodo]

Voltron's Complicated, Imperfect LGBQT Representation Is Tearing The Fandom Apart [Kotaku Australia] (reprint)

Either these were latecomers, or DW was pulling out all the stops to hit every possible venue. Didn’t matter; the furor wasn’t dying down. Josh wasn’t sent out again, either. DW may’ve realized that ship had sailed (so to speak). 

On Aug 16th, these articles appeared: 

Voltron creator addresses fans over season 7's queerbaiting controversy [Polygon]

How “Voltron: Legendary Defender” Queerbaited Its Fans [NewNowNext]

Voltron showrunner apologises to fans after backlash over treatment of gay character [DigitalSpy]

Voltron: Legendary Defender showrunner apologises to fans after killing off gay character [PinkNews]

Why 'Voltron' fans are furious after season 7 [The Daily Dot]

Voltron Showrunner Apologizes for Season 7's Treatment of Gay Couple [ScreenRant]

'Voltron' Shiro: Stop Preemptively Outing Gay Characters To Generate Buzz [Inverse]

And it kept going through Aug 17, 2018.

Voltron: Legendary Defender Showrunner Joaquim Dos Santos Apologizes For Alleged Queer-bating Of Fans Over Handling Of Shiro’s Sexual Orientation [Inside Pulse]

Who's Sorry This Week? Lindsay Lohan, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and other public apologies [Mic]

Meanwhile, as of the 18th, the predictive algorithm for #voltron (the actual hashtag) was estimating +6% for the upcoming week, and +6% for the month. Not even half what S6 had in its first week after broadcast, but remember, the majority of S7′s traffic wasn’t happening on the hashtag. It was happening in mentions. 

You might think from the above that things quieted by the 19th. You’d be wrong. It’s still going on. Keep in mind these pie charts are cumulative by month. On the left are the totals through the morning of Aug 22; on the right, the totals through the afternoon of Aug 25.

Midday on the 22nd, we had another spike, one large enough to offset that these are monthly totals, not daily. (The most likely culprit is the DW marketing gif that showed the scene where Adam dies, thus kicking the hornet’s nest all over again.)

As we entered the third week, the predictive algorithm for #voltron dropped to -1% for the month, and -5% for the week; for #vld, it’s -2% for the month and -6% for the week. 

In fact, almost every related hashtag is predicted to drop in popularity and use over the next week or beyond. That includes: 

voltronlegendarydefender, -2%

keithkogane, -8%

keith, -3%

shiro, -9%

lance, -6%

lancemcclain, -1%

takashishirogane, -20%

allura, -5%

princessallura, -10%

hunkgarrett, -6%

lotor, -4%

katieholt, -5%

Even ship names: 

klance, -2%

shadam, -8%

adashi, -3%

plance, -2%

pidgance, -5%

sheith, -2%

lotura, -10%

kallura, -1%

The exceptions? allurance (4%) and pidge (1%). 

It took a bombshell EP interview to knock S6 off its upward rise. This time around, the fall looks more like people tiring of the fight and checking out.

one more part coming

Thanks to the additional manipulations I did on twitter this season, this section took more words (and I cut it down from walking you through every agonizing step, no need to thank me for sparing you). I’ve also added a new dataset, and that pushed the total word count beyond even my long limit.

I’ve broken the last part out, where i’ll cover the long-term impact and possible fallout of S7.  

[maboz352-blog]

Walmart Black Friday

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