#f1 rpf analysis

[tyrannosaurus-maxy]

Top 15 F1 pairings tagged on AO3 from 2014 - 2024

This is part of my F1 RPF Analysis based on a dataset of the almost 42k AO3 F1 Fics pulled on 9 Dec 2024. Fics were analysed based on date of last update.

Feel free to follow the tag #f1 rpf analysis for more, and let me know what else you’d like to see! 

[chiliconsharls]

So, I caved in and I did it in detail! A few days ago I posted a meme of the Charlos lore iceberg but then I had some people asking about some bits and I thought, oh, might as well make the whole masterpost. LOW AND BEHOLD, it is here; an extensive compilation of the rich Charlos lore

Below the cut because boy is this bitch long

DISCLAIMER: before we begin I must note a few things. First, this isn't a whole detailed timeline of Charles&Carlos' relationship and every single bit of their moments bc I would've genuinely gone insane, so, like with the iceberg meme, this is merely key details of their relationship that make ME particularly unwell. This is also almost 2K words long. Lastly, not all points are linked as some of them are rather quite simple to find with an easy Google search

They have the same name in different languages. (In fact, Carlos has explained that his ‘chilli’ nickname comes from the fact that a lot of his friends went from calling him ‘charlie’ to calling him ‘chilli’). Their name is of Germanic origin and it means “free man”. Charles is the French/English version of it, Carlos is the Spanish one.

Beginnings & Pre-Ferrari era (2017-2020)

“I knew you before you knew me” – Charles said he had heard about Carlos when he was coming up in racing while Carlos was competing in KF3 (2008-2009)

They were already hanging out by 2017, when Charles was still only a Ferrari academy driver – as told by a reddit user who works in the Yas Marina circuit and shared the story with a tiny Renault helmet signed by Carlos

“I said this guy’s not beating me, no fucking way” – Carlos in Drive to Survive S01E02 after his battle with Charles in the Azerbaijan GP. (Sidenote: The first episode of DTS dedicated to Charles –S01E08– also showcases a battle with Carlos briefly)

Marina Bay Sands pool story – in several instances now, they both have shared the story of their first meeting/first ‘real’ conversation back in 2018, during the race week of the Singapore GP. They both said they saw each other at the pool of Marina Bay Sands hotel (it’s still unclear whether they were inside the pool or just by), and they had dinner where they talked for a while.

Carlos’ said that that first conversation made him think Charles was a good guy but also that when he first talked to him, he seemed innocent

2018 Autosport Awards interview  – Charles is giving an interview about how his exciting new season is coming and Carlos pops in and tugs him by the ear, making as if to give him a little smooch

“Carlos! My future teammate!”

Ferrari era (paper & cotton years – 2021-2022)

Youngest Ferrari duo

Lord Perceval nickname is born – despite claims that Charles disliked the nickname Carlos gave him (as requested by Charles himself that Carlos ‘from now on, call me Lord Perceval”), Charles went on to have it as his personal tag on his cap –made for driver use only. He’s also used ‘Perceval’ as his aviator call sign when he did some training with the French Air Force.

Jenga challenge video

Fiorano music challenge – this is their core happy memory, as they have said a few times themselves

“I started to listen to some jazz in the mornings” “Jazz?”

Chess – chess is one core activity they do. They would play a lot, even online. Charles would even stop talking to Carlos when he lost sometimes, and Carlos has stated that he only plays it with Charles.

Charles’ said Carlos plays better at night, and he plays better in the morning to evening. “The flights together are probably the ones I enjoy the most (...) we will put our phones away and play chess. That’s where we have the most interesting and deep conversations and I have really, really good memories of that”

“You haven’t showered together?” “We’re not that close yet” // “I find you spontaneously funny” “Carlos doesn’t do anything but he makes me laugh” – Sky Sports game interview in 2021

Charles going to watch Carlos on the podium in Monaco – Carlos talked later in 2024 about how much it meant for him to see Charles there

“Mate! You are looking at me!”

Red porn couch debriefs videos – not much to say, tbh, Ferrari sat them in a sus red couch to shoot the debrief post-race videos. Some of them are quite something

“Come on, Charles, don’t do this!” – Carlos’ radio in Saudi Arabia ‘21

Jean Alesi calling them ‘la bella coppia’ (“the beautiful couple”) // also, Jean Alesi doing photoshop manips when Charlos fought in 2024

Carlos: “good looking couple” “we make a good couple” “most beautiful pair”

Carlos showing off his strength to Charles in that Ferrari party thing

Everything that was written in the GQ article (by Tom Lamont) as well as the photoshoot

Calling each other beautiful

Charles sharing a sandwich with Carlos

Them calling each other ‘sweetie’, ‘honey’, ‘baby’, ‘love’ // ‘like this or more, darling?’ // ‘thank you, my love’  

Bahrain 1-2

Carlos checking in on Charles before his post-race interview in Monza 22’ despite being told he had to go some other place

Ferrari era (leather & forced divorce – 2023-2024)

Football watching together (despite the fact that Charles’ said he doesn’t really follow football) // “Yes, Carlos will be really happy” – Charles after someone asked him if he watched El Clasico and Real Madrid had won that time

Paddle playing too

“Can I choose the position he needs to be in? Take off your clothes, Carlos!”

The gingerbread cookies video

“He loves me” – the whole shell challenges in Zandvoort actually

Talked about racing Le Mans

Charles being jealous of Lando

“Together or nothing. We come as a package”

Charles hiding in Carlos’ closet to surprise him for his birthday

Monza 23’ battle

The Curious Case of Charlos and Pierre Gasly’s PR accusations – During a fan forum in the Singapore GP ’23 weekend, Carlos joked that he would’ve picked Charles to be stuck with in a deserted island, saying: “You see, I would’ve picked Charles, Esteban, I like my teammate” (because Esteban had been asked the same question just before and upon being told he wasn’t allowed to pick his own teammate, Esteban jokingly went: “I wasn’t going to pick Pierre anyway”).

Pierre and Esteban Ocon had a rocky relationship as teammates in Alpine, on top of having an already complicated past together since they’ve known each other since they were kids. Nearing the end of 2023 season, after Pierre (and Esteban) had been criticized for their poor relationship, Pierre talked about friendships in the paddock in an interview and he name-dropped Carlos and Charles, claiming that people “shouldn’t think that they’re all friends”. Despite Pierre having also named Mercedes and Red Bull pairs, people seemed to only latch onto Charlos

It’s important to note that Pierre Gasly is the driver Charles is famously closest to in the whole grid (as they’ve been friends since childhood) but also, he was teammates with Carlos in Toro Rosso for two races in 2017, and is fairly one of the drivers that are close-ish to Carlos as well. In fact, Pierre sometimes hangs with both of them, too.

Puma couch picture we never got the context of

Fred: “are you still single?” Carlos: *looks at Charles* “anyway, changing subject…” – DTS S06E08 // (Sidenote: theres some joking that Charles’ current girlfriend, Alexandra Saint Mleux, and Carlos’ current girlfriend, Rebecca Donaldson, seem to have a slight resemblance to Carlos and Charles, respectively (and the girls also seem to get along quite well))

New York event

Charles timing Carlos’ laps

“I want to give this to you, so you remember me for the rest of your life. For our post teammate era” // “You’re going to leave it there” “No, I won’t" – Carlos gifting him a chili plushie.

“Tell Charles to come close to me and we celebrate this one together” – Australia 24’

China Sprint 24’ incident: “He’s fighting me harder than the rest” // “A kiss on the mouth, everything okay”

Spanish reporter calling them roommates

Insane sim racing videos (almost all of them have some degree of craziness but specially Saudi Arabia, Austria, Dutch, Monza, COTA, Brazil)

Both of them thinking about their morning wood live on camera… then Carlos knowing Charles’ a sleepy guy

Miami merch promo video being cut just right as Carlos seems to go for Charles’ face

“We go from hating each other to loving each other real quick” – actually, that whole motorsport interview for Miami was awesome

Spain 24' inchident - Charles: “He was trying to do something extraordinary because it’s his home race and important moment in his career” // Carlos: “It’s too many times he complains about something”

“Charles and I have one or two ding-dongs a year”

“We look at each other and we smiled like we’re used to” // “We look at each other in the eyes and we understand immediately”

Gladiator II premiere

“Complicate me. Complicate my life, like you always do”

Charles letting Carlos drive his Ferrari in Monaco and show Carlos Sr

“I wanna smash you”

Carlos grabbing Charles’ balls in Mexico 24’

“You should try the chilli crab … I am the chilli crab”

“Try in Spanish” – Charles post Vegas 24’

“Carlos is not my girlfriend, I’m not gonna miss him like crazy”

“I would listen to you for hours”

Abu Dhabi 24’ radio: “it hurts a lot… I really wish we could’ve won it also for the last season with Carlos”

Charles goodbye to Carlos: “Now, I can call him a friend outside of racing” // Charles calling him 'chilli' in IG post (Carlos' said his personal friends call him chilli)

“I wouldn’t be the driver I am today if he hadn’t been my teammate”

“I was happy with Charles. I would’ve continued with Leclerc for life”

“Amazing four years fighting for Ferrari” — Carlos on IG

Fred: “I have never in all my time of racing seen two teammates so intensely preoccupied with what the other one is doing”

Charles being in Fiorano for Carlos’ last farewell with his father driving a Formula 1

Timeless traditions/Uncategorized info

Starting almost all videos with: “Helloooo” “hola”

“Are you ready?” “I’m always ready, Carlos”

Zero concept of personal space

Charles often looks smaller than Carlos despite actually being taller

Hand size difference

Yapper & Yapper

Carlos’ love language is physical violence

Carlos –a self-proclaimed butt guy— often taps Charles’ butt

They had 9 podiums and three 1-2s

They had 90 races together and never crashed

They’re each other’s longest teammates as of date

[valyrfia]

Hi! I hope you are doing great. Can you please do a detailed reading about Charles Leclerc future spouse? Who is she? Her character, job, look etc. How they going to meet and their first impressions about each other? What charles' friends (especially close ones) and his family (especially his brothers and mother) will think about her? How they will confess their feelings to each other? What are fans and society going to think about their relationship? Will the relationship be successful? Thank you :)

Hm so I’m getting….blond-ish, blue eyed. They’ll meet through work. Character….well they could be a bit abrupt and brutally honest at first but their honesty is one of their best traits, they wear their heart on their sleeve. Charles’ family already loves them and has known them for a while. Their job is…..multiple F1 world champion. The relationship is giving written in the stars, casually embedded in the very fabric of the universe kind of thing.

[bottas-valtteri]

I am once again BEGGING people to tag their fics. By all means write and post them I have no problem with it but as a person who isn't interested in rpf please just tag it as f1 fic or f1 imagines or really anything.

[hulknussen]

a brief look at the history of hulknussen on ao3

as I was writing up my hulknussen fanfic recommendations masterpost I realized that someone coming into the ship just now is probably missing a decently sized amount of lore on their "meta" history - that is to say, how fandom has treated hulknussen and how it has changed over the years. I'm making a post on it that so I can reference it in the aforementioned masterpost, but you can also just read this if you want to know more about hulknussen's position in f1 rpf fic on ao3. they're no lestappen, but they've had their moments

I'll try my best to boil down the key factors that influenced them, dynamics, characterizations, etc for the three - and soon four - "eras" I have determined for their ship.

the oldest fic currently in their tag dates back to 2015, which was about a year after kevin joined F1. there were a few people writing for this ship back then, and it didn't really gain traction until 2017 with the infamous "suck my balls mate/honey" incident. there was a small but steady stream of fics uploaded to ao3 over the following years. around late 2020/early 2021 was when they started getting put into the background of fics, as well as into compilation works a lot more, slowly but surely earning them the status of a pairing with bruce banner syndrome.

around this, I have determined three eras you can divide hulknussen fics into. this is based on when they were written and posted, not when the fic itself takes place. I can write something today that takes place in 2014 but it (read: characterizations, dynamics, plot devices, etc) would still be influenced by things that have happened since.

anything from before hungary 2017 kmag joins the grid in 2014, when nico is in his fourth season. they didn't really interact much, but had some interesting parallels in their career for these years. there really aren't a lot of fics from this era, which is a shame in my opinion. I know I technically can't write something for this era, but I really want to try to play around with the dynamics common for them at this time. both of them are younger (kevin 20-23, nico 25-28) with everything to prove. nico still has more of a heartthrob status, kevin is the young and impulsive new rookie. nico also doesn't hold the "beloved by no one, cheered on by everyone" status he has nowadays. he's just kinda there, doing nothing with a friendly smile and never bothering anyone (as opposed to the rest of the grid borderline trying to murder each other in their rivalries).

the last thing I think you can point out is that it was a lot of au's - and I dont mean canon divergence or what if's, but "hulknussen except one is an angel and the other is a demon" "firefighter", "showjumper", that sort of level of au. it is how fandom used to be. nowadays it's more focused on tropes and "canon" (in quotations because rpf) plays a bigger role than it used to.

suck my balls, honey, and all that it brought this part is pretty straightforward. they had their moment in hungary and it spawned a few hate fucking/sexual tension/enemies to lovers fics. there was for sure an uptick around 2017 and even into 2018, but what this moment did way more importantly was cement them as a pair with both history and a "canon" dynamic at all. think of it; hungary is the first time anyone really saw them interact. for a lot of people that was the number 1 thing connecting these two and was basically expected if they were tagged in a fic.

their portrayals boiled down to two, really: the horny one, and the less-horny one. the first is pretty self explanatory, we got two guys who really don't seem to like each other and we make them bang because it's hot. the latter might involve repressed feelings, "secretly together but putting on an act for others", soulmates and making up because of it - kind of, the typical enemies to lovers trope.

(fun fact I want to include; kevin said in 2019 that he never felt much of a grudge towards nico after hungary and held a lot of respect for him. he also said that nico was refusing to even just look at him, and simply determined that nico must have taken hungary very personally while he himself didnt care a lot. it's one of my favourite hulknussen tidbits that I think can really be played around with when writing fic set in this era/using this dynamic.)

it's also worth mentioning that this was when a/b/o as a whole was going mainstream in fandom spaces (and honestly even outside of them, but I wont dive into the implications of that here) which of course also reached F1/hulknussen. some fics fell into the trap of "uwu bottom" and "strong top" stereotypes as a result, usually with kevin as the omega and nico as the alpha. I'm mentioning it because I think that, like hungary 2017, it left its mark in their dynamic and how people cho(o)se to portray them even outside of a/b/o contexts. I will also be honest and say that it's not my personal preferred interpretation, but I acknowledge that it exists, and I won't even deny that maybe it's influenced my own portrayals in ways I haven't noticed.

up until 2019 most of the fics tagged as hulknussen still centered on them. then around 2020-2021 they started getting tagged as a background, side, etc pairing more and more, slowly taking over their tag. I think it was mainly because they had a (at first glance, anyway) simplistic and familiar dynamic with the archetype of enemies/rivals to lovers. it was easy to slot into the background of a fic, easy to use as a catalyst for the main pairing, that sort of thing.

that doesn't mean there were no hulknussen fics being written. I'm mentioning it because it's a development that has stuck around, and they are still often delegated to the sidelines in favour of younger and more popular ships. the fics that were written about them didn't all stick to the enemies to lovers archetype, however! fluff, making up and fics that simply ignored hungary and kept going like before were still being written.

making up (and making out?), haasbands, "my favourite dane", kevin's defence masterclasses, and probably so much more *you are here they make up sometime in 2022. both of them are older, they have matured. both of them are now married and both of them are fathers. they have survived a pandemic (together, kinda) as well as survived being out of the sport and returning. then they're announced as teammates for 2023. it is, of course, a decently huge deal in the wider F1 community. not everyone knows they made up, and media does what they do best, which is stir shit. they didn't manage to convince everyone that they wouldn't implode and take haas with them, but they proved themselves a decent duo in 2023.

it's 2024 when things really kick off. günther is fired from the team and replaced as team principal by ayao. gene decides to invest more capital into F1 over NASCAR, and somehow haas is the only team on the entire grid that didn't have super misleading wind tunnel analysis results (that's not entirely true; theirs were misleading, but theirs were telling them their car is worse than it actually is, whereas everyone else went into 2024 expecting to be better than they ended up being at the beginning of the season). so, overall, haas is in a good spot and on an upwards trajectory.

cue jeddah 2024. kevin racks up penalties like crazy because the fia is trying to be stricter and punish more harshly by giving out 10s instead of 5s penalties. which, credit where credit is due, it did what they wanted, which is ruin kevin's race, and ruining someone's race is a solid way of making sure they don't become a repeated offender (you would think so, anyway). kmag uses the opportunity to hold back the entire back of the field so the gap between him and nico is big enough to buy nico an entire pitstop. that is a crazy feat on so many levels. that takes slowing down without being overtaken. like, forcing the other race cars to slow down when they could easily go faster, in a race where the entire point is to go fast. he needed to speed off into the sunsent during the straights and slow down crazily fast in the corners, all while managing tyres. and the madlad did it and then gives interviews with a big fat smile, saying he "had to do [his] thing to protect nico". okay, we get it, youre married, get a room

the "enemies to lovers arc" and "haasbands" jokes go mainstream. nico calls kevin his favourite dane and describes their relationship as "[their] little romance". they watch the euros together and post pics of it with them smiling at each other like they are actually married. nico wants kevin to go to audi with him, kevin keeps playing the team game for nico even off-track, spending way too much time defending him and his actions. the haasbands as we know them have been birthed.

(before I go on a tangent any longer about this era, let's actually get to what fics from "then" are like. it's the current state of things, so I can't give conclusive statements, but I can make some deductions already.)

before the hard launch of the haasbands, around 2022 and 2023, their fics went into the direction of slow burns, making up, and (mutual) pining. 2024 shook things up again.

with the 2024 season still going, this is pretty much as close up to date as possible as we can get. the current dynamic that has been crystalizing is what I like calling feral dog kevin and lovestruck nico. it's very descriptive, so, you know, Im sure you can imagine what I mean. kevin's attempts at securing nico points also hasnt gone unnoticed by the mainstream community, and jokes about nico getting his first podium because kevin chose to play pinball with all the 18 other drivers are getting more frequent. there is also the upcoming "divorce", courtesy to both of them leaving haas at the end of the season and haas being the sole reason haasbands exists in the first place (both the moniker and the new dynamic).

I predict we'll be entering a fourth era soon, which is the post F1 era. while I don't like to think about it, it seems less and less likely that kevin will get the audi seat, and it is also the only seat left on the grid currently. nico will stay for some longer I do believe, but even his end is approaching. the number of fics being written will start dying off. I can't really say if a new dynamic will come up; I would think not, unless kevin decides to be unhinged and starts coming to races acting in borderline wag capacity to nico, or both of them move to indy or wec or something.

now, just for self indulgence's sake, the fourth era could also be kevin goes to audi, they turn into… audibands? stakebands? and Audi actually develops a great car and they get off the ground running and kevin can break that record of "most career starts without having lead a lap" while nico gets his first podium and breaks his undesirable record. we get an uptick in fics, the feral dog kevin and lovestruck nico dynamic evoles a bit further to be just a little bit deranged with an edge of codependence to it and then they retire and take their ship with them, if maybe a bit less abruptly than in the first "fourth era" I described.

or, who knows; maybe we don't get a fourth era. maybe their tag has reached the end of it's evolution. we'll just have to see.

[topnotchquark]

Sometimes I come across gifs of Sepang 2015 or leading up to it posted in real time by some now defunct account and it's literally the long term nuclear waste warning in my head legitimately just "This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here."

Even worse is when I see blogs from 2013-14 talking about how Marc looks at Vale or something literally 5 seconds before disaster.

i do love the extremely low rez 2013 rosquez gifs hashtag we are the daughters of the rosquez truthers you could not burn… they do always make me wonder how those absolute warriors reacted to sepang live. how did they cope. what was the climate in the group chat. were there bbc sherlock reaction gifs

[girldriveroscar]

Re: size of landoscar. Love your write up haha. Truly any narrative can be validated bc every pic looks different ‼️I do have two pics that are crucial landoscar comparisons imo:

https://www.tumblr.com/answerringg/770682515577077760/their-size-difference-oh-lando-is-getting

This pic is a screen grab from a vid but just in general he looks huge this whole video 😭 like you mentioned I think his bad posture eventuates that + optical illusion but wow. What a satisfying visual re: him vs Lando. Like FINE I’ll buy into the whole ‘Lando’s so small🥺’ that both Lando and Oscar like to perpetuate🤷‍♀️

there’s also a vid of Oscar+ a fan and the comments/fan all mention how surprisingly tall Oscar is. Like Lando said in that first Mclaren vid… Oscar doesn’t seem tall.. but he is. (tall being like 5’10/11 lol)

https://www.tumblr.com/mara-xx/770330916757372928/needed-a-last-minute-birthday-cake-so-i-called-up

^ And this one is just self explanatory 💗

Anyway sorry for the length but my last random thoughts — even as someone who’s never paid attention to lando til like 5 seconds ago, I can tell he’s gone through a massive glow up. And to make this rpf bc why not, how lucky for oscar —the guy who’s been a fan of forever— to experience Lando in his prime (thus far). Oscar said #invest #manifest 

THIS and THIS for ease…

THESE SUITS WERE SO. fuck that ugly ass diagonal suit broOAUGH. this era..peak landoscar size diff cus like oscar Jus grew n lando had Not.

but ok like they r Literally always changing sizes. frm the front to the back to the outfit to the angle

i could find a Billion examples atp !!

why doesnt the big twink eat the little twink seeing this Reformed my brain n the way i see them bc. from the front they r so

0 and o

like oscars small horizontally (again FROM THE FRONT!) while landos smaller vertically. but theyre both Small Basically. (#f1drivers)

but at the same time. theres a lot of muscle mass packed into their frames. and as they shift arnd / have better or worse posture / flex and unflex. theyre either Twigs or Big.

its shrödingers landoscar… theyre big and small… i think the only real conclusion for this wld amount frm seeing them in the flesh. which i dont intend to do or ever report on. LOL. probably.

i fully believe oscars taller than he looks tho. ESP after this year. end of 2023 vs start of 2024 and end of 2024 for reference. i think its a slight growth spurt maybe i am… being kind to oscar though…

anyways thank u for the oscass pic. that photo genuinely makes me Claw and rattle the bars of my enclosure like he is so Perfectly bouncy in that. n lando is my pancake in a way…

and bc youre landoscaring im landoscaring. Under the cut tho.

the fact oscars not even.. big… n they stil BOTH push this narrative of lando is sooo itty bitty…

the way sue Cs it oscar is so giddy about being in on the “lando is the small and fiercely dominant” joke after following said smallest boys career When He was Actually the Smallest… like he is living out his 15 yr old dream please excuse his excitement he Literally is just in on the joke now. of course hes milking it. ijsk he wanted to b george russell soooo bad. hes Crazy. let him have this bit.

lando i think leans into his smallness as a shield bc its all hes ever known and been told. but thats a whole deeper convo. still cannot bring myself to edit that lando analysis Very apologetic the thoughts might hv to die in my drafts <\3

the #invest made me LOLLLL. hes so true. following a guy frm his feeder series bc u Saw the potential in him. Watching him get to F1. Moving frm adolescence leaving everything familiar to u behind to kart with the same team. Stumbling behind in his footsteps. Getting to F1 right by his side. And then u won a championship w him. brought glory back to ur team through the power of Literally Just getting along.. and u have these weird charged events of tension that Somehow get ironed out Somehow.. And ur so completely the opposite of everything he knows and yet the longest teammate he has Ever Had..oOh My Goooood

we rlly dont… give enough time and energy to JUST HOW crazy of a coincidence that is. js think ab how exciting it is for Us when the F2/F3 driver ur following makes it into F1 !! like if Luke Browning or Fred Vesti ever got a seat im Doing Actual Backflips. IT RLY IS LIKE. #invest #manifest now add on everything else??? LIKE WHAT!!!!! god they make me crazy. and somehow lando got super stupid hot and hes a race winner and can actually groan out loud when he fucks instead of whimpering pathetically. that’s crazy man. 🚬🚬🚬🚬

[tyrannosaurus-maxy]

State of the F1 RPF Fandom on AO3 (2024 update)

This is part of my F1 RPF Analysis based on a dataset of the almost 42k AO3 F1 Fics pulled on 9 Dec 2024. Fics were analysed based on date of last update.

Feel free to follow the tag #f1 rpf analysis for more, and let me know what else you’d like to see! 

[mecachrome]

landoscar ao3 stats — 2023 overview

notes

retrieved ~sometime in march 2024

methodology: scraped metadata for every fic in the landoscar tag and...... that's it. however one important constraint is that all temporal data is date updated (not posted), so the above timeline isn't exactly a true representation of fic growth but rather how many fics were last-updated at that time. of course this is still its own reflection of fandom health in a way since dead fandoms don't update old fic but well... it's just not quite the same!

this is just info about general trends, fic content, tags etc... so nothing about kudos/comments or any authors specifically

i decided to focus solely on fics last-updated in 2023 (unless otherwise mentioned) because i wanted a tidy set that i can maybe compare & contrast in a year's time, because i expect a lot of details to look different then (tho as stated above this set isn't exactly static... 🤷‍♀️)

ngl i had to re-scrape a bunch of times because i forgot about it for like 3 weeks and then there were 100 new fics 😭 so if there are some minor discrepancies across the post it's because of that halfskh.

also i wanted to include more global comparisons (aka how 814 stack up against the f1 rpf tag in general), but this is also considerably difficult in some contexts since i can't exactly scrape 31,000+ fics can i... or i didn't even want to entertain the thought of trying to do so!!!

why did i do this? who knows.

anyway here's some viz T__T

ship growth

as evidenced in the opening graph, landoscar have been a very fast-growing ship over the past year — although interestingly enough they didn't really start growing substantially until july / the ~better half~ of the 2023 season. here are two views showing their "growth" (by date updated) alongside two other ships on the fringes of the f1 rpf top 10 (sebchal & galex):

landoscar are very much on-track to surpass them and officially enter the top 10 soon, likely before mid-april ❗️ :o

ship characteristics

onto the ship content — another thing i was mildly curious about was how landoscar differs in certain areas from other f1 ships, or the f1 rpf "global" average you could say. for example, here's a breakdown of rating popularity in their ao3 tag:

seeing as explicit is their most common rating, and that i don't necessarily expect this to be true for all ships/fandoms, i compared these percentages with the general f1 rpf tag to see whether some ratings are more commonly represented in 814 fic than average, which produced interesting results:

do lando ships simply skew more HornyTM in general? is it oscar? a secret third thing??? who knows... actually i think it would be fun to do more analysis in this direction but that can wait for another time!!!

similarly i also wanted to see which ships are the most "public" on ao3, as in have the highest share of fic that isn't user-locked... i will refrain from peppering in my feelings about the 4th wall too heavy-handedly but i was curious to see whether some sort of perhaps... er, generational gap (?) of sorts between ships that are more public vs. not could be identified. however i don't pretend to have any takeaways from this LOL i conclude absolutely nothing. (for ref landoscar is currently 72% public, vs. a global avg of 63%)

note that this graph is current stats, not filtered for 2023

looking at relationship tags, i also wanted to know whether landoscar suffer noticeably from Second-Ship Syndrome, so i tallied the first-tagged ship of every fic to find out. i know this doesn't necessarily mean that it's always the "main" ship but it's a good enough approximation. the results were quite positive!

filtered to top ships with count of >1 only

i then also calculated the number of ships tagged for each fic to discern the profile of multi-shipping in 814 ficdom; i did have to do a little bit of string standardization (all instances of implied / background / hinted collapsed to hinted for simplicity's sake + removal of other redundancies), but otherwise i left everything mostly untouched.

as you can see, landoscar also have a fairly promising amount of OTP: TRUE fic:

by the time you get to the fics with 10+ ships tagged, landoscar are less likely to be the primary ship, which makes sense just on a basic statistical level... this is also a very small sample size though

i also lazily tallied the 10 most common ships that weren't NOR/PIA or NOR & PIA to diff their shares of the 814 tag vs. of the general f1 rpf tag, to see which other pairings are more represented in the 814 tag than on average (because lestappen are the most popular by pure count but this is also true of fandom in general, so it would be a misrepresentation to say that their popularity is out of the ordinary):

maxiel's gap isn't really that surprising since i think that, generationally, in terms of when both pairings were teammates there is quite a gap; with carlando—actually let me tally this again but including all instances of "implied" and "past" as being part of the same ship, since that's how ao3 tag-wrangles as well:

Aha ! obviously as a direct ship there is competition between 814 and other lando or oscar ships, but this difference is somewhat less pronounced once we include all formats. tbh none of this really means anything but i thought i'd add it anyway... (it's also very possible that there are several errors in this, in which case my b 😔)

before we move on to additional tags, there are a few more basic characteristics of 814 fic we can calculate. i realize i never offered an overview of Super Basic Stats, so here are a few:

plus, looking at word counts, here is a distribution of those in 2023-updated fic, which shows that a majority of 814 fics were under the 5k mark:

85% of landoscar fics were under 10k & nearly 97% under 25k

i don't really have any reason to believe that landoscar's wc stats differ significantly from average ? so this is kind of just Data To Have Data, and it most likely reflects normal ao3 trends in general... but i thought i'd include it anyway because i already made it lol. similarly, here are word count distributions but stratified by rating:

& same info but heat map view:

i feel like this is also probably something you'd find across fandom in general — that gen fic is likely to have a higher share of under 1k works, since Building Up to sexual content often takes... Literal & Metaphorical Foreplay ! and the longer a fic is the more opportunities an author has to include a sex scene or other explicit content (ofc, not necessarily just porn but also graphic violence & so on). but i thought this was fun to visualize haha

additional tags & aus?

back in my old f1 rpf stats post, i made a table comparing fluff/angst "ratios" (not exactly a direct ratio because of how tag wrangling works, but an approximation) of the most popular f1 ships, and now that landoscar are somewhat popular i thought i'd first do an update:

also current data, not 2023 to make things easier

just like before, simi are one of the most fluffy ships and brocedes are by far the most angsty, but it's interesting to see 814 also extremely high up on the charts, with far and away the lowest % of angst. will be exciting 2 see how that holds or changes as the seasons progress !

finally, i also wanted to do a bit of au/additional tag analysis because you can kind of see this when you use additional filters on ao3 but the previews are limited and get bogged down by the prevalence of *checks notes* Fluff, Angst, PWP, Anal Sex and what have you. which are nice stats to have and all but what of the rest !

disclaimer that the set for these tables is a biiiit outdated because by the time i'd wrangled everything i was like I Am Not Changing It Again. unfortunately i clean my data with shoddy queries and regex functions in googsheetz...

there were 48 tags with at least 10 instances from 2023 fics, shown below, with ones that are (some ~vaguely) nsfw in red just to kind of get a rough sense of which tags get commonly used in M/E fic:

getting a bit too much into small sample size / specific fic territory so if you're an author i sincerely apologize for that... do not mean 2 put u on blast... TT__TT but i also tried to tally the most popular aus people write for 814, which is a bit dubious because people tag in really different ways and i had to accommodate for a lot of string formats but ... it's close enough ! (?)

i feel like this is very little interesting info but idk what else to add so i will stop here for now... well!!! if you made it to the end i hope u learned something or even vaguely enjoyed reading T__T and most of all thank you :')

[n1-lance-defender]

How has the dehumanization of celebrities/athletes has affected the perception people have of Lance, and it has caused so much harm over the years. A rant/ threat/analysis.

Yes, I have seen so many (3) of these post over the last few days, and I think it is my turn to speak about my views regarding Lance and what I find most upsetting about his situation. Then I proceeded to wander and explain how it also connects to other drivers, and it’s one of the weird phenomenons of the digital era.

Btw I care a lot about this topic, but this is probably (aside from school) the most I have written in English, because this is my second language. So if something doesn't make much sense, just tell me so I can correct/improve the explanation.

During the last decade we have seen the rise of social media, and with it, the fanaticism of sports started showing characteristics we associate with fandoms and literacy. For example, even thought it doesn't seem that way, fan fiction has existed for at least 50 years, being more notorious with the Spock x James (Star Trek) whose fan fiction goes back till 1966. On the other hand, the oldest fanfic we have evidence of, in F1, was written in November 2009, almost 2010. This has made, over the last decade, the perception we have of drivers shift to a more personal matter and increase the importance of having an attractive internet image.

I do not condemn RPF, I enjoy reading about it and probably, like most of us, won't stop doing it. However, I think it is beneficial to talk about similar behavior has had an impact over mainstream media and social media (influencers in particular) and it has been the cause of irrational hatred us, lance supporters, are so used to seeing.

I used to believe it was extremely weird how in random TikToks or YouTube analysis there were being made jokes of lance. Some that stood out to me were “then we have the C4 tires that, except for Stroll's car, will make them go faster” or “we are about to see 19 drivers and Stroll race in the great circuit of X”. Before and after these comments were made, I was just watching videos on tire degradation and race lines of a circuit analysis, respectively. It didn't add anything to the video, it wasn't even a video that was made to be funny. That is when I started thinking about it, and realized, mainstream media has done the same as us, they have turned him into a character.

Brief statement. Every one makes “characters” out from people. We have wide imaginations in which we think how others will behave with some evidence we have, not just in social media. We daydream for example about our crushes and things we think they will say, we idolize them in our heads. The same thing happens here in social media, we decide which driver is which fruit, animal, or teddy bear. Because we do it positively, there are no impacts, and it is more than likely that this information will never reach the driver himself. However, means of communication whom do have access to them are also doing this, but not with the right intentions.

There are stereotypical characters in movies/series, we have all see that at some point. Most times we agree that their writing is put in a way that makes them very one dimensional and not relatable at all. Sometimes they write characters whose only purpose in the series will be to act as comic relief, so then the scene doesn't feel heavy or boring. They become the internal joke of the show.

That is what it is happening to Lance, his internet image has being corrupted enough, so then people have no problem using him as a comic relief, because they are so convinced that is what his “character” was written for, to ease up tension. It seems like it has been normalized making fun of him to a point where it is expected you are into the “joke”, and there is absolutely no shame in making fun of him while talking about f1.

He is not a character. He does not fall into a common stereotype made by poor written movies. Because he is an actual person, with layers and self-awareness of the things said about him. The fact that this is how we treat people is terrible and extremely harmful, cause 90% of F1 fans do not have the time or care about little things that happen to them or mind their personality to deeper levels. They take the first input they get from social media, use that to make an opinion and move on with the other important thing in their live.

Example of this, my dad. He loves F1, he is the one that made me love it as much as I do. He has his F1tv subscriptions and talks with me about it all the time, watches all practices, qualys and races. He wants to take me some day to see a race, there is no denying he is an F1 fan. But that man does not have Instagram, does not have TikTok. I have tried to explain to him what an edit is multiple times and still he doesn't get it, so I won't even try to explain what are fan works. So when I told him “OMG MAX IS HAVING A BABY” his reaction was “oh, with his current girlfriend? cool” that man pretended some interest because I was excited. He couldn't care less about the personal life of anyone.

So then the image he has of the drivers is the little description over the Facebook posts of sky sports and danz. So when that description only reflects a character they themselves created, that is what gets in the mind of their readers. That is what their personality is to the rest of the world. That is why now more than ever, drivers care so much about their perception. There isn't enough time to get to know them, so it is usually that headline they get what makes the opinion of the public over them.

Lando is seem as childish. Charles is seem as pretty. Yuki is seem as angry. Franco is seem as flirty. George is seem as girly. Lance is seem as useless. Try asking someone older, their opinion over these drivers, and they will say something between these stereotypes. We could debate it is better or worst to not get one of these labels, because the problem of always flying under the radar (which is now almost impossible) is that nobody is sad when they leave, there is no recognition, goodbye, appreciation, or thank you, which to me, it is beyond sad.

We have gotten into a point where media training and curating social media is part of the rookies' preparation, being popular has become a requirement to be a successful f1 driver. I am just left to wander, what is the best approached we can take about it? We can't stop the dehumanization of drivers and then let them put them into stereotypes. That is just a sad truth and problematic of the internet. So I guess what we have left is to defend, create narratives against the hatred they receive and hope eventually media will become more empathic and joke around just because they can.

Who knows, people are becoming more critical of stereotypical characters and are less willing to believe one dimension personalities. Hopefully with new generation this marketing strategy will become useless and media portrayed would change.

[39oa]

(nonsensical hrpf data exercise) degree centrality graphing & other archive insights

intro/prior work

hello 🙇‍♀️ i'm not sure this post will make any kind of sense at all, but i love analyzing ao3 data and i especially find it fascinating in the realm of sports/hrpf because of the amount of player- and team-related attributes that offer dimensionality to fandom analysis when examined in parallel with archive metrics. i've already kind of done hrpf overviews on two separate occasions over the past year or so, but my method of collection differed in each instance and also always gave me new things to chew on and potentially explore, such as expanding on the link between player talent and shippability and whether high-draft picks have more fic written for them on average.

i most recently examined player data based on aggregated relationship counts since 2022, but this was a limited snapshot meant to piece together recent ficdom trends (see top ships since 01/01/22) and not be representative of fandom overall. basically, things i want to visualize/talk about now are:

hockey is so widespread as a sports fandom because there are 32 teams in the league, which when compared to a community like f1 makes it difficult to succinctly summarize primary relationships for. there is no self-contained grid of 20 drivers that remains generally fixed within a season, where every move in/out of that "roster" is highly reported upon and instrumental to fandom makeup, but instead a more amorphous network of malleable rosters featuring high-variance cascading orders of character visibility; in short, the difference between the most and least popular driver in f1 fandom is not the same as the difference between sidney crosby and that one ahl lifer who was called up to your 4th line two months ago because your team is utterly decimated and gunning for bedard.

Still: because rosters are so malleable and trades happen with some amount of frequency, and because hockey is still an "insular" ecosystem in terms of geographic accessibility and junior-age development (for better or worse; mostly for worse, but that's neither here nor there), players intrinsically have a low degree of separation between one another, whether it be as teammates now or as friends growing up in the ohl, ntdp, etc. i therefore wanted to take that a step further and look at it through fic metrics especially: can we use a summary of ficdom's real, tangible output and visualize it through a similar network? (+ where and how does that network differ from player connections in practice?)

back to the impact of draft pick # and assessments of talent relative to popularity, i also wanted to look at the most "successful" ships in ficdom from this network and evaluate the different distributions and impacts of their respective attributes. are certain player positions more popular? which nationalities are the most commonly shipped?

etc. But let's just get into it.

process

getting any kind of information from a 60%-locked fandom on ao3 is a nightmare and introduces a myriad of data-collecting limitations, so i do feel it important to disclaim that what i present in this post functions more in the realm of Approximate Interpretation and Potential Correlation than any actual 100% objective representation of fandom metrics.

a perceived limitation i have with character tagging metrics on ao3 is that they don't exactly reflect shippability; that is, if q.hughes is tagged as a character in a n.hischier/j.hughes fic, it gets attributed to his character tag but doesn't actually say anything about how many Relationship Fics exist for him on a whole. my best solution for this was essentially uncovering most of a player's relationships and summing their individual fic counts to create an approximate # of "relationship fics" for each player. so any kind of shippability graph going forward will use that metric.

i used ao3's relationship tag search and filtered by canonical in the men's hockey rpf fandom and only pulled relationship* fics ("/" instead of "&") with a min. of 20 works. ao3's counts are... Not the most accurate, so my filtering may have fudged some things around or missed a few pairings on the cusp, which again is why all the visuals here are not meant to show Everything in the most exact manner but function more so as a "general overview" of ficdom. although i did doublecheck the ship counts so the numbers themselves are accurate as of time of collection.

(*i excluded wag ships, reader ships, threesomes to make my life easier although i know this affects numbers for certain players, hc/gm ships, and any otherwise non-NHL Player ship. for ex., this eliminated anna kasterova/evgeni malkin, tyler brown/tyler seguin, and kyle dubas/william nylander, just to name a few)

all ship data was collected march 16, 2023.

PART 1. SC87 ship networking

when i first began this exercise i tried graphing ships for all the first-overall picks from 2003-2022 because i wanted to get an overarching sense of their connections. however, doing so made me realize that sidney crosby was by and far the most-connected node in the graph (and basically all hrpf in general) with a degree of 11, and that he was centering one huge component to which only two ships failed to connect (op/kj and slaf/xhekaj). basically:

so then i was like, right! let me instead use sidney crosby as my sole starting node, map out all ships with 20+ works from him specifically, take the players he connects to and map out their corresponding ships (excluding sid) and just keep iterating until i basically reach a final child node. through this, i yielded 112 ships and 98 unique players, with my final connecting node coming 9 degrees of separation away through brady tkachuk ↔ tim stützle/quinn hughes. unfortunately i can't actually host this little code snippet anywhere lol but i also wrote an input to check the pathways between any two players which was kind of fun:

here is the actual network graph with colors from automatically generated clustering, which doesn't really mean much but i thought was one nice way of presenting it. the edge width refers to the sum of fics for each ship and the node size refers to the degree, or number of ships, for each player.

i then also joined my player set with a dataset that included draft year, drafted team, position, etc... and through that color-coded the graph with the team each player was originally drafted to (i always struggle between using current team and draft team because which one matters more is super contextual, but... using draft team made my life easier this time so i hope it's still interesting.) here i only included colors for 13 teams that had 3+ players each:

→ [full-size graph]

we can do a bit more analysis based on this specific sidcros network, like which players are the "most-shipped" or overviewing cross-team shipping tendencies:

but! of course, not ALL big hrpf ships lead back to sc87. using him as a central node essentially just helped me filter out excess "noise" when searching for relationship tags on ao3, because now i could exclude anyone connected to him at all (note: the relationship fics from my set equaled upward of 19,000 works, accounting for 60.4% of the entire men's hockey rpf archive) and hit other significant tags more efficiently.

through this method, i singled out a new set of 76 ships and 134 unique players (notice the significant decrease in overlap), which i then combined with my sid ships to create one massive set of Hockey Ships With Over 20+ Works On Ao3 that i could analyze holistically. no idea if this makes any sense but bear with me:

PART 2. general ship insights

i won't bore people with endlessly listing out ship rankings but here's the previous top chart with the new ships slotted in:

now for some overall player analysis!

first i wanted to look at how attributes like draft round, nationality, and position (F/D/G) are represented in the player set.

the nationality distribution is pretty close to all active nhl players this season, so there aren't major disparities there. however, the vast majority of players 1) were drafted in the first round and 2) are mostly forwards, with the forwards also seemingly reflecting the general philosophy of faster development/higher recent-round representation. we can take this overview a step further and actually examine the fic averages for each characteristic as a proxy for measuring shippability/ficdom popularity.

first, i scatterplotted all players by their draft pick and number of fic to (try and) show the heavy skew toward top picks (inspired by the gar draft pick value curve and other similar plots). this is... well, limited in many ways, and if i had an actually adequately large dataset i could specifically plot averages per distinct pick number and try to present something there, but the problem is that a lot of these later pick numbers only have like one player so there's way too much variance LOL.

but just for the sake of this exercise i excluded j.benn as an outlier and grouped fic averages by round (left below). again, noting the sample sizes, let's just say that first rounders on average seem to have the most fic written about them, even if it's not a particularly shocking insight. we can also try creating a histogram for "shippability" by draft year, binning here for every 2 years, to see which draft years appear to have had the most success (right below). note the peaks around 2005 and 2015, aka the sc87 and cm97 ~Generational Years~ 🤔

i've also been interested in figuring out which positions are commonly preferred—since centers are so often the faces of a franchise and are essentially the most sought-after position, and since goalies occupy a positionally static role/are less oriented toward contact (and the presumed homoeroticness thereof) in the way skaters are, is that reflected in the fic metrics as well? turns out: yes.

some ship analysis

learning more about player data in a vacuum is fun, but we also have all of this relationship data that lets us examine how different characteristics interact with each other, which is meaningful as well! for example, we know that forwards are heavily represented in the dataset, but is center4center the most common combination? or is there love for a franchise center and his beloved winger or the team's dependable 1d?

(fought for my life trying to figure out how to map this properly so please accept a horrible bar chart instead) as it turns out, the most common combination is centers/wingers, followed afterward by centers/centers. i don't know whether this really means much to me because i'd like to dissect the combos even further (is C/C more often 1C 2C or cross-team rivalry 1C shipping? are C/W usually linemates? etc.) but 🤷‍♀️ here's a graph.

i also distributed ships by their nationality combination, displaying to the surprise of no one a heavy preference (a whopping 66.4%!) for north american-exclusive shipping. i also thought stacking by "draft year" (= averaging the draft year between both players for each ship) offered some interesting insight into usa4usa shipping having slightly younger representation. also i do think usa/germany being singlehandedly driven up this chart by one family is remarkable and hilarious LOL.

also in the realm of draft year analysis, i wanted to look at draft year differences and whether fandom preferences seem to lie by way of same-age-ish pairings and In-Class Bicycling so to speak. graphing ships by these differences spanned a range of 20 years, with the oldest "age" (draft) difference being 20 years between zdeno chara and charlie mcavoy. overall, of 175 ships with a drafted player, 60.5% were drafted within 2 years of each other (18.2% in the same draft), and only 5% had a draft difference of 10 or more years.

then, of those 32 ships drafted within the same year, i distributed their counts by year to see which draft classes featured the biggest in-class clusters, leading us again to the Famed Class of 2015:

closing thoughts

i'll stop here :saluting_face: something else i had on the agenda that i don't really know how to adequately explore with this dataset is basically stanley cup champion stuff, e.g. looking at players and ships and fic counts from winning teams and how/whether a sort of "winning bias" has been trending down as of late (see the relative success of ships from teams like phi/ana compared to tbl/stl)—temporal data is so particular and difficult to wrangle with ao3 though so i'll have to let this one percolate a little bit.

finally, another thing (!) that i love examining is captaincy and how it often helps inform shippability; C/A/guyswithletters shipping obviously generously overlaps with being drafted early, high-impact players, some positional stuff like Young Star Center having the role foisted onto him, etc. and many of these aspects are immediately identifiable in top ships like 8771, 1634, 1386... just to name a few obvious ones. unfortch i don't really have the time or space to look at that here but it's something i'm still interested in maybe expanding on, and i also never ended up collecting actual skater *performance* data which would be super fun to eventually get to, e.g. mapping ficdom output to not just background identifiers like draft year/pick but also 1) actual tangible evaluations of player goals/points/(salary?!?)/etc. and 2) some dimension of draft outperformance/underperformance, which is pertinent for scenarios like late-round picks who have defied career expectations (see outlier jbenn having a shit ton of lifetime fic) AND early-round picks whose trajectories have not panned out as expected for whatever reason; often the ~tragic~ frustration of being a bust actually invites more narrative focus and scrutiny, but at the same time ficdom trends have pointed themselves to being attracted to many historic, talented, generational, and so on players, who more often than not are also winners, which potentially posits a need for some sustained line of access/visibility to high-expectation players significantly before they're regarded as "busts" in order to organically grow and generate initial interest that can survive the renewed reality of their situation. but who knows

again, i don't know whether any of this even makes sense or is interesting to literally anyone at all, but i personally enjoyed just dicking around graphing shit and getting to join a ton of tables together for absolutely no reason lol. that's all!

[valyrfia]

(edited it some so it’s actually closer to 700 words but it’s me the hypothetical anon. uh. yeah. not sure where this came from. or why i let the real life stats play such a huge role in my rpf analysis lmfao)

hi i have a lot of thoughts about charles and oscar also. especially what you said about oscar being one of the first to grow up with charles’s legacy. i was thinking about how like, f2 doesn’t really have legends, not yet. however, charles leclerc is sure as hell the closest they’ve got. to this day, no one has beaten his point rate (oscar is the closest, 51.6 to 53.4) or his pole record. no one has surpassed his win record or his win rate. and he did that in the inaugural season. charles leclerc haunts the halls of prema racing etc etc.

speaking of chronically haunting the narrative i do not think choscar are sebmark pt2 but i do think they are kind of like mirrors with fucked up reflections of each other. mark webber looked at oscar and knew why he’d never won a wdc and simultaneously sebastian vettel looked at charles and knew he’d never win one again. 

oscar entered the junior series just as charles was graduating; he won his first championship as charles won his first f1 race. and then he signed with charles’s former team and he kept on winning until he set a career record that’s unbroken to this day. but oscar *still didn’t beat charles.*

finally they were in the same series, but it wasn’t going as well as f2 had for oscar, or as 2022 had for charles. in their first race, neither of them even finished, and oscar spent most of the season multiple places lower than charles, slowly closing the position gap. 

but when oscar got his first GP podium, a third place finish, what position was charles in? fourth, of course. following closely. oscar has stood on a GP podium 10 times; in half of them charles has been there with him. and yet, they have *never* split the podium. they’re always 1-2 or 2-3, following each other the way oscar has been following charles since he was sixteen and watching him set the standard, since he was eighteen and racing with his former team, since he was twenty-one and sharing the grid with him for the first time. charles makes jokes on twitter and seeks oscar out to talk with him and inevitably they are in each other’s orbit, not magnets, but circling, following.

oscar is calm, cool, collected; charles is charming, a PR team’s wet dream. except oscar happily declared that he loves charles during a radio interview, and charles used to talk about how much oscar deserved an f1 seat. except oscar’s entire face lights up when charles approaches him after the race, and charles puts his hand around oscar’s waist like it’s natural. except there was Monaco, and Monza, and Baku, and Qatar.

it’s hard to imagine they would be predestined. they aren’t childhood rivals like max and charles; barely gave the other so much as a glance last year. but, well, they race against each other like it’s natural, instinctive until it’s not, learned somewhere but never consciously taught. charles calls oscar’s bluff, nurtures his tires through an impressive one-stop and makes oscar work to stay on him; oscar takes the long way around, dares charles to hold off on the brakes for as long as oscar dared to in order to get past him, and they’re both attached to the other when they get out of the car, following them to the cooldown room or the weighing station. talking or maybe just soaking it in.

not fated, not intentional. just, well, oscar has been trying to beat charles leclerc in some way since he signed with prema. just, well, charles has been able to win over oscar without even having to try since at *least* their Monaco shenanigans. (and don’t even get me started on how MAX haunts this fucking narrative).

so like. it’s papaya and rosso corsa but it’s also bold overtakes and fierce defending but it’s also just oscar and charles. despite my rambling I think that is the core of it; together, they are simple. oscar and charles easily become oscarandcharles on the track, in the cooldown room, outside of the paddock. etc etc

Choscar anon, welcome. You are music to my ears. I think the brilliant thing about Choscar which you've summarised so beautifully in this ask is they are the ship for the pure F1 rpf ENJOYER. They are made so much better by the intertwining narrative and parallels to all these other ships (and if you ever want to come back with a part 2 as to how Max haunts the narrative....I WILL be seated).

[stripedstarsblueflags]

is it too far?

okay, so, obviously logan posted. like a summer photo dump like EVERYONE ELSE has been doing and what the drivers are probably contractually obligated to do by 11:59 on some specific day like a google classroom assignment. but whatever.

the thing is... i could do an analysis/breakdown of that post. of some very key factors of that post.

but since this was like.. hours ago? the pictures from within the last week? that's... recent. very recent. i don't know why that changes it for me and i know fan content stays in fan spaces but i'm questioning whether or not an analysis of a post is too far compared to an analysis of a video. so let's ask the void.

[inchidentally]

https://www.tumblr.com/piastrisms/738775293993549824?source=share

I NEED YOUR ANALYSIS OF THIS VIDEO! PLEASE <3

okay listen this has spun me out into a whOLE thing so let's take another trip down a road I like to call Why is the Non-RPF Real Life Relationship between Oscar and Lando So Endearing and Boyish and Sweet:

so my absolute favorite thing about Lando's face when he's relaxed or in his natural element is how absolutely every. single. emotion. he's feeling is broadcast at equal volume. his vulnerability is a massive part of his charisma. but! he has to have the right habitat! streaming, Youtube, his lifelong friends - those are the right habitat.

F1 is not naturally the right habitat.

when Carlos found Lando on his proverbial driver's doorstep he did not know what to make of him and Lando was barely able to squeak out a few words around anyone new or when a camera was around. but! Carlos trained Lando into how to bounce a dynamic between the two of them just like he'd been doing with his last awkward baby, Max. interestingly Max was much more excitable and eager to please of the two and Lando's intense shyness took a LOT of work to get past. but once Carlos had gotten the drift of Lando's super silly sense of humor it was smooth sailing. and then with Daniel it was even easier because half the time Daniel knew he was expected to carry the conversation. it's interesting because Lando allowed a bit of that old shyness to come back and it definitely disarmed Daniel a bit in a satisfying way. but thanks to those big personalities, Lando found his F1 self and even started to deal back and lead occasionally. of course DTS and a lot of media pilloried him for this because apparently what Carlos and Daniel do naturally is seen as snottish and bratty for him to do. the Youtube/streamer personality where he felt so safe did not at all translate onto other platforms and media.

so it hasn't been smooth sailing for Little Lando Norris to know how to be as a person in F1.

cut to 2023 and with the advent of Oscar we've seen a slow dismantling of Lando's F1 PR personality completely in his content with Oscar over the season. their very first unboxeds Lando was still wearing his guarded PR face and assuming he should lead and carry all the content. it was still sort of around for the Jenga/Garden Games challenges but had started to soften around the Austin filming (including the Finish the Lyrics classics). at some point, Lando truly realized that Oscar would still be fond of him even when Lando was in a terrible, low blood sugar type mood (Tic Tac Toe etc) and oh wow!

their content could really just be Lando being whatever he was feeling that day/that moment and Oscar smiling and finding him funny/cute/fascinating! that was enough! he didn't even know that was allowed! (and maybe it wouldn't have been if Oscar wasn't there to bolster him)

and that's when we started getting unguarded, authentic Lando instead of entertaining Lando. and it's because Oscar was the person next to him representing all of us, trying to tell Lando that we just wanted to see him. we didn't care if he was 'on' or not. he's just an interesting outdoor cat we want to watch go about his life.

which is why we got Lando letting himself sit and stare right back at Oscar like this.

where we can see his expressions do that slow blossoming thing, and right in full view of just Oscar. it's the anti-DTS material because it isn't open to the camera and easy to manipulate. narrative television hates when two people go into quiet, subtle communication because it can't be made into a false dramatic arc. (trust me they'll invent one using chopped up footage and even more chopped up commentary lol they always do but it'll be uphill work)

but when you contrast this with the nonstop, quick back-and-forth Lando has with Carlos and Daniel it's where we pick up on the something that's so unique to Lando with Oscar. it's wrong and making way too big an assumption to say it's a closer friendship bc you can't quantify other people's friendships that way. but it's very, very different to those friendships. and the biggest difference that we on the outside can see is that Lando allows himself to determine exactly How He Will Be. and that might change from one minute to the next! and that doesn't always go down well with most people!

but every time, no matter what, Oscar smiles and laughs and everything Lando does is alright. he gets it. Lando means no harm and he's got a good, warm heart. if he likes you then that won't change just because his mood changes.

like their end of season message. Lando went from doing a great job summarizing his thoughts for the viewers, handed it over to Oscar and just... watched. didn't get bored and stare at the camera or off into space. I actually compiled just how often Lando spends staring openly at Oscar into one long gif lol:

he fully knows he's still on camera but he turns himself into a viewer instead of bouncing around and off of what Oscar is saying. Oscar gave him that, he can give it right back.

and there's no specific Lando-Oscar dynamic like there is Lando-Carlos and Lando-Daniel. hell, Lando's got a dynamic with just about anyone. except! Max F, Martin Garrix (and probably quite a few of his friendships that we're never actually even shown) and Oscar. with those people we see Lando be precisely whatever he's feeling at that moment because they'll either indulge it or enjoy it depending on how good or bad the mood is. if it's Lando, it's all good.

I feel like there's a commonality with those people of being quiet but strong as opposed to the big and bold of most of the F1 drivers on the grid. Max F absolutely has obvious similarities to Oscar (I still love how much he sided with Oscar when he watched the 'most likely to' video). I don't know a lot about Martin but it's literally a DJ's job to be enough apart from the crowd to read it and they set the energy passively through what they spin. Oscar is a fun guy who loves being around the people he cares about but he's never The Guy that it all turns around.

and for their own reasons, they find Lando inherently fascinating and lovable. whereas Lando has to inhabit Carlos', Daniel's, George's, etc etc worlds because they are in themselves The Guy Everyone's Watching just like Lando. Lando has to share. he has to figure it out. but guys like Max F and Oscar do not have the energy or interest in being The Guy. they'd choose privacy over popularity every single time if they were made to. and actually come to think of it, they have actively chosen privacy at the expense of popularity quite a few times.

because let's look at Oscar's face when Lando teasingly brings up Oscar's sprint win:

Oscar gives Lando that genuine, affectionate smile and ducks his head because he wants Lando to know that he appreciates it. in truth, that Sprint win was hailed by wider F1 community as being a massive achievement for a rookie in the Max V era of dominance. they both know that it is. but Oscar didn't posture or show off about it and for that Lando has made sure to bring it up on his behalf time and again. Oscar gave him that, Lando can give it back to him.

which is even sweeter going back to that post race video because Oscar gives Lando that same affectionate, private smile. he's had to throw the video's content over to Lando and Lando gave him that big affectionate smile first because this is how they do these videos. it's always awkward - especially if their results that day weren't great - but they know that together they can do these videos and share a laugh over how absurd it feels sometimes.

and the hint of a private joke between the two of them is there early on and you can just feel Lando relax into it.

and when you skip all the way to their last race media duties and this interview, it truly surprised me how much Lando kept checking in with Oscar - the rookie! -as he was answering. when he found himself giving boring PR answers he threw in a joke that he knew Oscar would crease up over. sure enough it loosened them both up.

and like, that's where the vulnerability and openness comes from now with Lando. he's got a teammate who is basically the same age, who gets him and who actively wants Lando to just be Lando. who clearly threw Lando at first by inadvertently foiling those attempts to establish a dynamic or a bromance. who Lando probably at first thought was just shy and awkward. but Oscar stayed true to who he is and kept that door open for Lando to eventually walk through.

so when it's the two of them, it's everyone else who's on the outside looking in. they're just being themselves. if that doesn't make everyone else feel entertained or happy they honestly don't care - and will probably share a secretive little smile about it.

it's also why they sometimes do that twinning thing and creep everyone out asfgjlaflsgjf

[lil-shiro]

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[girldriveroscar]

2024 lando v 2020 oscar — yesss let’s talk about it!! My only question is would 2020 oscar convert to his 2024 ways instantaneously due to the lando™️ effect… (aka coming face to face with his long time crush🫤thinking about all the pre-mclaren landoscar interactions). But given the answer is no. Yes, I need to see it

Also i noticed prema oscar is sooo different from him in McLaren, with lando. Theres a lot of natural/obvious reasons why buttt imo he’s just different with Lando in general. Oscar always seems pretty static and not overly outwardly fond, even towards ppl he clearly likes, like Logan on that Williams podcast, Mark Webber, etc. But with Lando— he’s giving affected, amused, accommodating, etc.

OK TO NOT MAKE THIS THE LONGEST REPLY EVER. Here's my awfully parasocial analysis of Oscars' easy affection towards Lando, but I wanted to jus keep this a reply to the RPF bits hehe.

ngl I do fear no Oscar cld survive the Lando effecttm but also, for sakes sake, pre-prema Oscar who's not yet used to accommodating to the needs of a whole team of other people wld definitely be a little more selfish and sharp methinks.

2020 Oscar geeking over the fact that funny likable Lando is now really hot and kinda mean (Lando has an age complex and thinks any Oscar is a challenge esp one who's even younger) So when Lando whines that His Oscar changed breakfasts to match Lando's preference, '20 Oscar remarks that the guy sounds like a total pushover.

And bc Oscar is still a Bit of a fanboy he fumbles to turn his dorky charisma up around the guy who's stream clips are still half his camera roll. But put him in front of any other successful F1 driver and it's game time, he's ready to use that confidence to make a name for himself.

and Lando can't decide between crying bc he misses his pushover Oscar or teaching the kid a lesson about his role in their team, or begging Oscar to direct his boyish flirtations to him instead of Charles who's always been unthinkingly nice to every rookie But Lando (extra salt in the wound) (Oscar's doing it on purpose to see how far he can push Lando before Lando does something about it.) I just imagine '20 Oscar to be much more conniving with the knowledge that Lando's kinda a mess about him. Payback for him getting really hot and having complexes that prevent Oscar from the easy top he should be getting given the chance circumstance.)