#even if hq wasn't the culprit in particular here then the data strongly suggests that it was a sports anime

[hua-fei-hua]

@charlataninre-d you MAY bc i LOVE to talk abt it!!!

first let us have a long story to contextualize everything:

basically, aside from my summer in the mlp fandom (which is kind of its own thing online), i entered fandom via anime n manga, w/my introduction to fanfiction itself (again, aside from fimfiction.net) being through my friend nat. since she got into fanfiction via pokemon and the serebii forums, she brought me to fanfiction.net in february 2016, as it was basically the only fanfiction site she knew of at the time.

bc i was just starting to be active on fandom tumblr at the time (this blog was born in april 2016!! :D), i saw a lot of people in the snk fandom talking abt how they were migrating away from ffn to ao3, which was my first introduction to the fact that there were other fanfiction archives on the internet aside from ffn.

i think i noticed that some anime fandoms that were small on ffn were surprisingly big on ao3 and vice versa (haikyuu!! in particular comes to mind), but i didn't think much of it, since i felt i either got equal or greater feedback n viewership on ffn compared to ao3, until the tumblr porn ban happened in december 2018, n i started seeing a bunch of fandom history posts on my dash talking abt how this is basically a cycle that goes all the way back to livejournal and strikethrough blahblahblah and this is why ao3 exists at all.

this basically got me interested in fandom history as a subject, which i have basically committed to ever since as like, hobby study. kept on seeing people say that animanga/video game/asian source material fandoms have historically been underrepresented on ao3 bc it was founded by a group of friends who mostly hung out in western media fandom spaces (star trek, stargate, harry potter, etc).

this lined up pretty well w/the experiences of myself n a lot of my friends who joined fandom via anime/manga/video games at around that time frame, which made me curious abt when exactly the animanga/video game fandom sphere started shifting from ffn to ao3. so i picked some fandoms (at the time, just naruto, hetalia, snk, and bnha), opened up ye olde wayback machine, and started writing down how many fics each fandom had on the different sites at comparable points in time.

you can kind of see how this has been turning out from the data i collected at the time (which is labelled as "old" bc i realized in order to most accurately compare site growth, i needed to have consistent dates between fandoms n websites, which i didn't pay much attention to when first doing this):

(these graphs just show the total number of fics archived to ffn vs. ao3 for naruto, hetalia, and snk: fandoms born in 2001, 2009, and 2013, respectively)

(this screenshot is of my spreadsheet page for supernatural, which i find relevant to the study for obvious reasons. the yellow cells represent dates which were not present on the wayback machine for that date and thus had to be estimated using the surrounding data. the green cells are just there to remind me to correct the formulas there lol)

from the raw data of "how many fics are archived to this particular site", i then take down the total number of existent fics (assuming no/insignificant crossposting) and figure out stuff like the rate (in fics/month) at which fics are being posted to each site, the % of total fics archived to each particular site, and of the total increase of fics, what % went to which site, if that makes sense.

however, i also realized that although i could now pinpoint around when fandoms started posting more to ao3 than to ffn, these dates were all abt the animanga fandom sphere, and i'd have to gather a bunch of the same data for western tv shows, the fandoms ao3 initially blew up on, so that i could get a practical sense of how much later their shifts were.

along the way, i also got curious abt which fandoms in particular basically bridged the gap btwn ffn and ao3 for animanga (the current theory is that it was haikyuu!!, which made me very upset at the time bc i had chosen on purpose not to include it at first bc i didn't care abt it <3), so using my own vague knowledge n experience of Being In Fandom(tm) i started picking fandoms to also track via the wayback machine, and by this point it's basically "in for a penny, in for a pound" LOL

*opens up spreadsheet project*

*takes a deep breath*

oh boy here we go