#fandom data analysis

[fanfic-thesis]

Day 2 Fanfic Bachelor's Thesis

Got sidtracked by the sidequest "I already started my master's degree". Cannot recommend.

But got the first participants for my research \o/ (Still need a few more. Feel free to look at my pinned post, if you write fanfics about BBCs Merlin.)

Also lost some sleep because somehow the middle of the night seemed like the best time to start the necessary data analysis for my BA. No better time to get some numbers from AO3 than midnight :)

[catcherwrites]

TDP Colour Association Survey

I wanted to try something a little wild and wacky with all of you. Below is a survey of different TDP characters - asking what colour you most associate with them:

I’d really appreciate it if you filled it out! I’d super DUPER appreciate it if you shared it with others to boost the sample size. When I have enough responses I want to be able to post the results here for everyone.

Just some things to mention first:

This is completely anonymous - I won’t have access to any personal information. All I’ll get on my end are the answers you’ve chosen

This is completely voluntary - I can’t force you to take this survey, you are free to skip any questions you don’t feel like answering

There is no guaranteed outcome - I really want to post the findings, but that depends on the number of participants I get in the end. I also can’t compensate you for your time with anything other than a thank you

With that out of the way, thank you for reading my spiel. If you’re interested in helping, fill out the survey and/or spread it around (reblog, share, etc) so others can respond!

[gnot-art]

=SUBSTITUTE(myFursona,"fox","lion") :: full body (midi) (2025)

He's broken into my spreadsheet

[dkettchen]

for any marvel heads that have survived my blocking purge and any fellow ex-marvel heads:

most shipped marvel characters (as in who made it into the most separate ships in the ao3 rankings between 2013 and 2023):

with 7 ships: Tony Stark

with 5 ships: Natasha Romanoff (4 of these are femslash, and then Clint is also there)

with 4 ships: Bucky Barnes tied with Loki (I cannot describe to you the level of validated my Lucky crack-shipper brain feels at these two being tied ((I need to stress Lucky is not one of them x'D)))

with 3 ships: Peter Parker tied with Steve Rogers tied with Y/N

(out of 33 total marvel ships)

[uniasus]

Netflix released, well, not a ton but some data about viewership recently and I couldn't help but look up the performance of my fandoms. They released the top 18,214 titles based on hours watched from Jan to June 2023.

Ordered in terms of rank.

ATLA: Avatar the Last Airbender (Not available globally - what countries are missing? IDK)

Woot woot! Avatar in the house. 45.5M hours for book 1, giving it a rank of 342.

Book 3 has more views than book 2. I'm gonna credit that to Zuko.

Teen Wolf (Not available globally - what countries are missing? IDK)

The top season is season 3, oddly enough, with a rank of 361! It got 43.9M hours streamed. What are you all rewatching?

Season 1 is the third most watched.

Jurassic World (Not available globally - what countries are missing? IDK)

A healthy rank of 536 with 34M views.

Yu-Gi-Oh (Not available in the US)

Season one is ranked 1,843, with 11.4M hours watched in the first half of the year. Wow! That's impressive for such an old show.

Only 54% of people moved on to the second season. Sad😢

Season 5 had more views than Season 4 or 3. Stop torturing yourselves with rewatching the ceremonial duel, y'all. It's not healthy.

Carmen SanDiego

Season one saw 5.9M hours watched, giving it a rank of 3,133! Not bad for a show from 2019. (How does YGO out rank this? And how is this show more popular than She-Ra? She-Ra is better imo)

I'm impressed the Steal or Not to Steal interactive story did as well as it did. (1.3M hours). But I also know there were some good JuliaxCarmen scenes that 100% inspired fics.

She-Ra (available globally)

Season 1 is ranked 3,213 with 5.7M hours viewed.

People then went on to watch Seasons 5 and 4. We're all rewatching the angst bits, aren't we? Or maybe it's the redemption arc.

Least watched season? 3.

Voltron

Season one is ranked 4,140 with 3.9M hours watched.

Why is season 2 the only one not available globally? Odd. 62% of people go on to watch it after season 1 anyway.

Season 8 is not the least watched season, season 5 is. However, season 5 is totally the one I rewatched twice when it first came out.

Fullmetal Alchemist (movies are global, anime are not)

It is an absolute crime nothing here is ranked high. The highest is the movie, The Revenge of Scar, with a rank of 5,666. 2.2M hours watched.

Only season 1 for both the 03 anime and Brotherhood is available, but the 03 anime is winning. It had an extra 200K hours viewed.

All of the movies had a higher hour watch count than any of the anime seasons.

BBC Merlin | Doctor Who (no data)

Want Data? Variety Article with download links.

[normcdf]

*remembers that this used to be an ethoslab blog* i have to make. a survey

[thebiballerina]

A lot of Batfamily fans like fan content which dives into the trauma of some of them being siblings with people that have tried to kill them. While they aren't wrong, I would posit that they need more fan content which addresses the real issue here: the Batkids should absolutely make fun of those of them that failed at murdering one (or more) of the others.

I'm just saying, if my sibling failed at killing me or another relative, I would mock them about that until one of us died for real. I would give them birthday cards talking about how they truly put the 'attempted' in 'attempted fratricide'. I would ask them if they remembered their cringefail murder skills. I would bring that up at the slightest provocation. Anytime they got annoyed at me for something, I would be like, "What are you going to do, kill me? It's not like you're any good at it!"

[uptoolateart]

Adrien Agreste…and Data from Star Trek. The parallels kept leaping out at me. Then I started talking about it with my husband and a friend and it spiralled. Bear in mind, this whole post is full of Star Trek spoilers, including the films, especially Nemesis.

Unnatural Creations

Adrien’s a sentibeing and Data’s an android. They’re both created by ‘unnatural’ means – created by a human rather than God/nature/whatever you believe. Consequently, they both begin their lives as blank slates, with no childhood memories, and they long to fulfil their programming. With Data, this is more literal, while in Wishmaker Adrien tells us all he ever wanted was to be what his parents wanted him to be.

This lends them a similar sense of naivety, leaving them open to being fooled or even used. In a way, they are both Pinocchio, wishing to be ‘real boys’. Pinocchio even wears a feather in his cap, which is what led me to do this drawing a few years ago.

Data and Adrien’s ‘fathers’ (creators) have made other children, too – other androids and sentibeings – not necessarily to public knowledge.

Dreams

Over time, both Adrien and Data come to desire individuality. An integral part of this is having dreams. Adrien’s dreams come in the form of personal ambitions, beginning with his love for Ladybug. Data has ambitions, too, but his dreams also come in a more literal form, i.e. as he evolves, he starts dreaming like a real human.

'Evil' Twins

Another crucial part of being human is self-reflection, highlighted by Data and Adrien’s ‘evil twins’. For Data, this is Lore, made according to the same design but with his own personality. He obtains the emotion chip intended for Data. Where Data is all logic, Lore is all feeling without boundaries. He’s the emotional potential exploding unchecked.

Adrien has a few ‘shadow’ sides, which I’ve explored before. An obvious one is Felix, wielder of the peacock miraculous, i.e. the power of emotion. Then there’s Cat Blanc, who is all of Adrien’s darker thoughts and feelings bursting forth uncontrolled.

What Lore, Felix and Cat Blanc have in common is that they are abused sons, bitter and resentful that their fathers never gave them the love they longed for. They lash out from grief and trauma. Also, Lore killed his/Data’s father, while Cat Blanc killed Gabriel in an alternate timestream.

Data needs to face and deal with this ‘shadow’ side before he’s ready to receive the emotion chip intended for him and find the happy medium between the two extremes of the emotional spectrum. We see this when he is forced to deactivate Lore, thus inheriting the emotion chip, learning from the mistakes his brother made and trying to do better.

Likewise, Adrien needs to come to terms with his ‘shadow’ before he’s ready to face the final battle with Monarch. In Conformation, this played out as Adrien having the emotional maturity to recognised when he was out of control and make the decision to remove his miraculous, stepping away from the battle before he could do damage.

This is without even getting into the mirror universes in both shows, where Data has a much more direct ‘evil’ alter, and Cat Noir comes head-to-head with Claw Noir. (Sadly, we never saw Data hug Evil Data the way we saw our two Noirs accept each other.) There was also the very brief Copycat moment. Adrien’s had a lot of doubles.

It’s interesting to note that Lore believed he was superior to humans and had a genocidal plan, much like Felix snaps all the non-sentibeings out of existence in Emotion. Lore also dresses like Data and poses like him to fool their father and others on the ship, like Felix does with Adrien, attempting to fool Gabriel and others in Adrien’s life. A key difference is that Lore never really gets the chance for redemption, whereas Felix is only 14 and has his whole life ahead of him, with the opportunity for positive evolution. He discovers the love he’s lacked as a child and chooses to change.

At one point, Lore also implants the emotion chip in Data and uses it to control him remotely, inspiring anger and hate in him, thus weaponising him. Felix makes it very clear that he would never try to control Adrien. Instead, it’s Gabriel who controls Adrien via the twin rings, the Alliance, and magical dust causing him to live out his worst nightmare. In Cat Blanc and Ephemeral, we also see Gabriel akumatise Adrien, using his darkest feelings to transform him into a weapon.

Perfection

When Data first meets his brother, Lore convinces Data that he was created as a 'less perfect' version of him. When they are later summoned back to their father's secret home, Data learns this is untrue and is fascinated to realise that he is 'not less perfect than Lore'. Adrien, too, is repeatedly described as 'perfect'.

Cats

Data has a beloved pet cat. Adrien, of course, spends all his private time with Plagg. I also can't help but notice that Data and Cat Noir's eyes are similar in colour.

Artistry / Education

Data is a keen painter and violinist, and well-versed in just about everything, bearing in mind he was programmed with encyclopaedic knowledge. Adrien is a pianist and, thanks to his father’s programming, is also highly skilled in multiple disciplines and languages…and seems to know a lot of very random information, e.g. Morse code.

Undead Mothers and the Demented Fathers Who Can’t Let Them Go

Adrien’s father can’t get over the death of his wife and keeps her cryogenically sustained in the basement. Similarly, Data’s ‘father’ was married to a woman Data deems his ‘mother’. She, too, died long ago, but his father transferred her personality and memories into an android body. She’s the only android in the galaxy who can pass as completely human, even in medical scans.

Self-Sacrifice

Cat Noir is always sacrificing himself for Ladybug. We don’t know if he remembers those moments of death or not. He seems to throw himself in front of her on instinct, as if it were the natural order of things. He believes he’s not as valuable as she is.

In Star Trek: Nemesis Data sacrificed himself for Picard – although he did see himself as of equal value. In fact, he argued strenuously throughout the series for equal status with humans. And to all of us watching Nemesis…I can’t begin to tell you how hard his ‘death’ hit me.

On paper, it makes sense for an android – a robot – to sacrifice himself so a human may live. But we spent seven seasons plus several films getting to know Data. Android or not, he was a beloved character, he was a friend, he formed relationships. That’s why the crew gave him a full funeral and eulogies.

Likewise, Cat’s sacrifices hit Ladybug hard, something many of us fanfiction writers have explored in depth.

Programming

Perhaps the biggest difference is that Data knew he was programmed. He knew he was at the mercy of his microchip. He knew when his emotion chip was installed. He was wholly conscious of his developmental journey.

Yet, even after five seasons, Adrien has no idea. He doesn’t know he’s been programmed because he doesn’t know he’s a sentibeing. Like something out of Blade Runner – and like Data’s mother – Adrien would pass the Empathy Test and be deemed human yet still have no idea of his origins.

The fact is, you can’t break your programming until you know you’ve been programmed.

Data was given all the chances he needed to live a full life and make a fully informed decision about what he wanted to do with it at the end when he made that final sacrifice. Adrien has none of that. He was edging towards revelation, realising his father was controlling him somehow, but all of that was taken from him at the end of S5. It’s like if Data were given a hard reset.

Marinette’s choice to keep the truth from Adrien mirrors Data’s choice to keep the truth from his android mother. She believes she’s a human, the original woman she was made to replicate, and he chooses to let her carry out her life under that pretence.

'I want to be a real boy!'

As I said, Data and Adrien are both like Pinocchio, trying to be ‘real boys’.

At the end of Data’s life, it didn’t matter whether he was made by a scientist or by organic means. He touched people’s lives, and that made him real in all the ways that matter.

Similarly, if Adrien got snapped away, people would remember him. They would mourn him. It doesn’t matter if there’s a body left behind or not. He too has touched so many lives, and that makes him just as real and important as any organic human.

In these ways, I believe they both succeed at being 'real' regardless of how they came into being.

I bet I could think of more parallels if I tried, but this has already got long enough :)

[dittobtch]

the wilds ao3 and tumblr stats - April 2024

last two graphs is the first graph separated

i ran out of things to do for these so here's the updated info for March and April 2024

notable observations regarding April 2024:

the wilds tag on tumblr had over 100 posts in April 2024 - something that hasn't occurred in literally a year

leatin had more fics posted than shoni in April 2024. this has only happened like twice before [x, Findings/ Observations - Ships].

The post count is only for new content. That is, new fics on ao3 and new posts on tumblr. The numbers do not account for reblogs, chapters updated, etc.

Data for March and April 2024 collected on May 16, 2024 - 10pm EDT.

See this post (tumblr) and this post (ao3) for relevant notes and other observations for previous months.

Other Fandom Stats

The Wilds AO3 March 2024

My Fandom Stats List

[melodioustear]

Data from my fanfiction and mental illness survey is now publicly available!

It is stored safely and eternally on the Harvard Dataverse. In accordance with the request of my ethics board (University of Kent CREAG), the demographic data has been disaggregated (separated) from the long-form responses on fanfiction practices in the public files. However, anyone can request the disaggregated version through the link above.

The data has been randomised on all three files for safety, and redacted of the thankfully small amount of identifying information that was given by participants, thus rendering it as anonymous as possible.

It is under a creative commons license that allows anyone to use it for their research, but please do cite the original dataset if you do.

Thank you to everyone who took part - I know already that there are some incredible insights here and really thoughtful reflections on how we approach mental illness in fanfiction.

[5ummit]

Centreoftheselights just shared the new 2024 AO3 stats.

In less than two days their post has already received 16 MILLION views and 80 THOUSAND retweets/quote tweets, with every comment I've seen taking the data at face value and using it to draw conclusions, much to my horror.

While OP did change the title of the "new works" column to "works gained" so that they're at least not blatantly lying now (the bare minimum), the wording is still very misleading. More importantly though they continue to use the same extremely flawed methodology and continue to bury and obfuscate those flaws and what the data actually represents. Nowhere on the chart or the details provided on the main page does it even say that only publicly available works are counted... and that's not even the biggest problem!

This data is, yet again, garbage and absolutely should not be used to determine the current size and popularity of a fandom (inarguably the main reason for it existing).

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.

[silvermoon424]

This is your daily reminder to archive your favorite fandom stuff!!!

I've been a voracious archivist/data hoarder ever since I first got access to a computer, and it's paid off more times than I can count. Just the other day I came across a PDF copy of an analysis post for one of my fandoms. The post was made on an old forum and is the most detailed and interesting analysis of a particular story element I've ever seen. Back in like 2012 I saved the post as a PDF, because even then I saved everything I liked.

Anyway, flash forward to 2025 and I decided to see if the URL included in the document was still live. I wasn't very surprised to see that the forum is long dead. However, even the Wayback Machine had no record of this thread. If I hadn't saved a copy of it way back when, I would have never, ever been able to read this analysis again!

The Internet Archive is sadly not infallible, especially when it comes to things like forum threads. You can do your part by manually saving things to the Wayback Machine, but I also recommend keeping your own archives. Aside from just saving pages as PDFs, I highly recommend a browser extension called SingleFile that lets you archive pages as HTML files.

[chariflare]

there’s a fandom thing i’m interested in broader attitudes to and it’d be cool to do a survey for it but. idk how to hold a good survey

[leonardalphachurch]

honestly not surprising to me, as someone who’s been here for over a decade. a LOT of the older fans just. left. there is of course a normal amount of people coming and going from a fandom, however… i tracked where rvb sat on tumblrs “year in review” thing once, and every year it got lower and lower on the list until it wasn’t there at all.

a lot of people really didn’t like 14-18 very much, and it really killed momentum in the fandom. i think, while there’s new content coming out, if you don’t like that new content, it can be really hard to maintain enjoyment of the show as a whole. but after all the content is already out, if you don’t like something it’s much easier to just ignore it. binging a season you don’t like in a couple of hours is a very different experience than getting it drip fed week by week for months. you have so much time to sit with it and think about it and hope for it to get better and be disappointed when it isn’t.

not to mention the number of scandals that rt had ruining people’s perception of their content. back in the day the red vs blue fandom was always much more heavily tied into the rooster teeth fandom than a lot of other rt shows, so i think the scandals hit us a lot harder than they did for, say, rwby. nowadays, though, the rvb fandom really isn’t tied up with the rt fandom at all. and even then, the last big scandal was in 2022. i know a LOT of people left when kdin put out her statement. if you joined in 2023 there wasn’t really a point to be disappointed by the company. especially now that it’s dead.

i also wouldn’t be surprised if rt’s shutdown and final season put rvb back into the cultural zeitgeist and got people interested/aware of it again.

tl;dr IMO it’s less “​a disproportionately high number of people have joined the fandom in the past two years” and more “​a disproportionately high number of people who joined the fandom before the past two years have left” with a sprinkling of “rt/rvb being in the news recently got more ppl interested in the show”

it's actually insane to me how many rvb fans have only gotten into the show in the past like 2 years. looking at the survey results so far is breaking my brain i think because 2022-2024 is in the top three for that question currently. like between zero/family shatters and restoration there was practically NOTHING happening with the series what do you mean this many people STARTED watching it then?? also i see so many people on my dash who are like "watching for the first time i'm on season 6 teehee" HELLO?? should-should i tag for spoilers on my rvb posts??

[bizarrelittlemew]

PROUDLY PRESENTING:

The Unofficial OFMD AO3 Wrapped 2024

sponsored by my love of fandom community, a passion for data presentation, more hours in photoshop than I am willing to admit, and inspired by the Good Omens AO3 wrapped

images used are either official stills or screencaps from episodes and the Vanity Fair lie detector video. everything edited by me :)

a few additional stats:

79 works had more than 100k words, with an accumulated 16 million words, meaning 1% of works accounted for 21% of words

At a reading speed of 300 words per minute, it would take 174 days and nights to read all of the OFMD fic from 2024 - or, if you read for 11.5 hours every day for a year, you'd be able to get through it all!

The most tagged sex acts for explicit fics were (in order): Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Oral Sex, Anal Fingering, and Hand Jobs

271 works were tagged "Art"

details about data collection and analysis ⤵️

All data was collected on January 1st, 2025. I limited search results within the fandom tag to works updated between 2024-01-01 and 2024-12-31. Works started earlier but updated in 2024 are therefore included. Works added and deleted again during the year are not accounted for.

I manually typed data from the AO3 search into Excel, so there may be errors and inaccuracies due to the limits of the AO3 search function, authors' tagging choices, and typos (sorry lmao). There is probably an easier way to do this but idk I was bored and didn't mind. Graphs were made in Excel.

For the total word count estimate, I collected the exact word counts of all works above 100k, then gathered data on the number of works within pre-selected word count intervals and multiplied the number of works with the average of the interval (for each interval). The total sum and cumulative graphs for both number of works and word counts are presented above.

I made posts on tumblr and bluesky asking people to nominate their favorite tags from 2024, and included as many as I could.

This is just how I chose to present the data - I hope it makes sense and I'm open to questions!

[lunawagner]

Study Results (1/??)

I'll post some of the results now! Firstly, I'll write about how I processed the data for those interested in details. (Please inform me if you see anything wrong or want to suggest a different method. I'm just an average person with an undergrad degree...)

If you just want to see the analysis, skip the data cleaning and test assumptions part! As a disclaimer, I don't know if this is all for now or if I can bring myself to work more on it soon 😭 

Special thanks to @xavieslittlestar and @m00nchildwrites for sharing this on bluesky and twitter

Data Cleaning

I realized that some of you guys didn't do the test and wrote the numbers by yourself 😊 And it took me hours to clean the data

As expected, there were some typos, and I corrected them before deciding which participants to exclude. For instance, some wrote 29/20, and since the sum of the subfactor scores is equal to your main factor score, I was able to confirm that it should be 19/20 by doing main_factor_score—other_subfactors = target_subfactor.

After dealing with typos, all participants who entered random values like 0000 and values that didn't align with the main factor scores were excluded.

In the end, the sample size was reduced from ~2600 to 1929.

Test Assumptions

The normality and homogeneity of variance were checked. Most of them fulfilled the homogeneity of variance(Levene's Test), but normality was problematic. I assessed normality based on Kolmogorov-Smirnov(KS), kurtosis, skewness, and Q-Q plot. There were some outliers, but most of them were a natural part of the data, so I didn't change anything about them. Although KS values were lower than .05 , I assumed normality if kurtosis and skewness seemed average (-2 to +2 for kurtosis, -1 to +1 for skewness). For others, I tried trimming, LOG, SQRT, Z, and LN transformations, but still couldn't normalize... Winsorizing would probably work, but there are too many participants(yes, I'm lazy). So, I'm gonna be relatively liberal about normality.

Results

Please note that all of them have small effect sizes (0.2 Cohen's d or 0.1 η2). So regardless of the p values, the actual association between your personality based on the big five and character choices in lads might be small in degree. Also, this is an observational study, which means you shouldn't try to infer a causation or a strict relation (so use it just for your enjoyment, not for fandom chaos~). But I'll put my personal comment under them because I need to enjoy myself too lol

Also, I realised that some of those are changing or disappearing when I compare poc(people of color) and non-poc within themselves. Therefore, the effects might be moderated/mediated by cultural differences as well.

===Trust====

Sylus mains had the lowest mean score in terms of trust(M=11.2, SD=3.42). Yet, they significantly differed only from Xavier mains who had the highest mean(M=12.1, SD=3.28).

Personal comment: I don't know what to make of it. But let me put those here as well.

==Conscientiousness and Agreeableness==

I'll write this together because I have a theory about these results.

Caleb mains' scores were the lowest in terms of conscientiousness (M=74.3, SD=13.7) and agreeableness(M=84.4, SD=13.8). For conscientiousness, they significantly differed from Zayne and Sylus mains. And for agreeableness, they significantly differed from Zayne and Xavier mains. [Agreeableness showed unequal variances, so I used Kruskall-Wallis test]

Personal comment: Honestly, I'm surprised. (Caleb and his girlies not beating red flag/villain allegations)

If anything, I would expect Sylus mains to have lower agreeableness and conscientiousness (first impressions don't disappear).

Then I thought, what if it's related to Caleb being MC's adopted brother? Listen before shooting me. To feel at ease with this setting, you should have higher (but healthy) dissociative tendencies to detach yourself from its real-life associations. And guess what— low agreeableness and low conscientiousness are related to high disassociation [refer to:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1130527417300373]. Secondly, having a lower need to conform(related to agreeableness and conscientiousness) with others might be making it easier for some people to choose Caleb as their main love interest.

(But as I said, these results are liable to change. For instance, for the non-poc sample the lowest mean value of conscientiousness belongs to Rafayel mains)

===Emotionality===

Caleb(M=14.7, SD=3.49) mains had the lowest emotionality score, and the difference between them and Zayne(M=15.6, SD=3.04), Rafayel(M=15.5, SD=3.11), and Sylus(M=15.5, SD=3.33) mains was significant

Personal comment:......Babes lolololol. Is Caleb's robot alter taking over his mains?? Did they get a Toring chip as well? It's so funny omg

===Self-Discipline===

Rafayel(M=10.1, SD=2.96) and Caleb(M=10.1, SD=2.97) mains had similarly low scores of self-discipline, and they differed from Zayne(M=10.8, SD=2.87) and Sylus(M=10.8, SD=2.79) significantly.

Personal comment: As a Rafayel main, I can confirm this.

=Second Love Interest=

Most of Zayne mains chose Sylus as their second love interest. The other most preferred second love interest was Caleb, but since this test was done just before Caleb's new myth, the results might be affected by our excitement for it. Also, Zayne mains showed low preference for Rafayel.

A note about less significant/non-significant observations:

As a whole, we have low extraversion and average conscientiousness, as well as high openness to experience, neuroticism, and agreeableness

For subcategories, we have the highest mean for imagination and the lowest mean for gregariousness. (perfect combination to date fictional men)

Sylus and Zayne mains had similar mean scores in many main factors and subfactors of the Big Five test. Likewise, Rafayel and Caleb mains' scores were close to each other, and they contrasted with Sylus and Zayne(not always significantly tho). Xavier mains generally had balanced scores.

None of the groups differed significantly in terms of openness to experience, neuroticism, extroversion, and these factors' subcategories.

To check if the data gives standard results, I checked socioeconomic status(SES) and its relation to neuroticism since previous studies indicate higher neuroticism for low SES groups, and it was the same for this dataset as well. Anxiety, depression, and neuroticism showed a slightly decreasing trend as the SES increased.

Some studies suggest that people of color have lower trust scores, but in this study, poc had higher trust than non-poc. However, it might be due to the differences in exposure to discrimination between poc who live in the US and those who are natives of other countries.

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