#hockeyrpf wrapped 2024

[jamingbenn]

year in review - hockey rpf on ao3

hello!! the annual ao3 year in review had some friends and i thinking - wouldn't it be cool if we had a hockey rpf specific version of that. so i went ahead and collated the data below!!

i start with a broad overview, then dive deeper into the 3 most popular ships this year (with one bonus!)

if any images appear blurry, click on them to expand and they should become clear!

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before we jump in, some key things to highlight: - CREDIT TO: the webscraping part of my code heavily utilized the ao3 wrapped google colab code, as lovingly created by @kyucultures on twitter, as the main skeleton. i tweaked a couple of things but having it as a reference saved me a LOT of time and effort as a first time web scraper!!! thank you stranger <3 - please do NOT, under ANY circumstances, share any part of this collation on any other website. please do not screenshot or repost to twitter, tiktok, or any other public social platform. thank u!!! T_T - but do feel free to send requests to my inbox! if you want more info on a specific ship, tag, or you have a cool idea or wanna see a correlation between two variables, reach out and i should be able to take a look. if you want to take a deeper dive into a specific trope not mentioned here/chapter count/word counts/fic tags/ship tags/ratings/etc, shoot me an ask!

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with that all said and done... let's dive into hockey_rpf_2024_wrapped_insanity.ipynb

BIG PICTURE OVERVIEW

i scraped a total of 4266 fanfics that dated themselves as published or finished in the year 2024. of these 4000 odd fanfics, the most popular ships were:

Note: "Minor or Background Relationship(s)" clocked in at #9 with 91 fics, but I removed it as it was always a secondary tag and added no information to the chart. I did not discern between primary ship and secondary ship(s) either!

breaking down the 5 most popular ships over the course of the year, we see:

super interesting to see that HUGE jump for mattdrai in june/july for the stanley cup final. the general lull in the offseason is cool to see as well.

as for the most popular tags in all 2024 hockey rpf fic...

weee like our fluff. and our established relationships. and a little H/C never hurt no one.

i got curious here about which AUs were the most popular, so i filtered down for that. note that i only regex'd for tags that specifically start with "Alternate Universe - ", so A/B/O and some other stuff won't appear here!

idk it was cool to me.

also, here's a quick breakdown of the ratings % for works this year:

and as for the word counts, i pulled up a box plot of the top 20 most popular ships to see how the fic length distribution differed amongst ships:

mattdrai-ers you have some DEDICATION omg. respect

now for the ship by ship break down!!

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#1 MATTDRAI

most popular ship this year. peaked in june/july with the scf. so what do u people like to write about?

fun fun fun. i love that the scf is tagged there like yes actually she is also a main character

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#2 SIDGENO

(my babies) top tags for this ship are:

folks, we are a/b/o fiends and we cannot lie. thank you to all the selfless authors for feeding us good a/b/o fic this year. i hope to join your ranks soon.

(also: MPREG. omega sidney crosby. alpha geno. listen, the people have spoken, and like, i am listening.)

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#3 NICOJACK

top tags!!

it seems nice and cozy over there... room for one more?

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BONUS: JDTZ.

i wasnt gonna plot this but @marcandreyuri asked me if i could take a look and the results are so compelling i must include it. are yall ok. do u need a hug

top tags being h/c, angst, angst, TRADES, pining, open endings... T_T katie said its a "torture vortex" and i must concurr

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BONUS BONUS: ALPHA/BETA/OMEGA

as an a/b/o enthusiast myself i got curious as to what the most popular ships were within that tag. if you want me to take a look about this for any other tag lmk, but for a/b/o, as expected, SID GENO ON TOP BABY!:

thats all for now!!! if you have anything else you are interested in seeing the data for, send me an ask and i'll see if i can get it to ya!

[jamingbenn]

love love love the hrpf wrapped post! super interesting data, and i can tell you really thought about how to collect & display it. were there any surprises to you when you looked at the data? anything that you almost included in the post but didn't, or anything you want to talk about further? -puckszone :)

YES!! thank you so much for asking this. i actually originally wanted to include a list of average word count per ship, sorted by descending, kind of to show which ships has the longest fics etc. but i did not end up including that information because out of like 20 of the ships with the longest fics, about ~18 of them where OC fic or other extremely rare pairs. a quick look on ao3 showed me it would be pretty easy to backtrack which fic was which data point, so i decided against including it. it was just so interesting to me that they were ALL rarepairs - and kind of heart warming. like these must really be people's babies.

if ur curious what some of the non-rare-pair ships were, mostly minor-side-pairings, with one notable exception - alex ovechkin/evgeni malkin. ain't that something

[jamingbenn]

Hi, @jamingbenn, Your analysis is fascinating. Can I share it on a hockey-related Discord or you would rather keep it on Tumblr? Thank you for your work and your answer! FFH

hi!! omg thank you so much for liking it, and yes ofc!! private/hrpf discord servers are absolutely fine, really i'm just trying to avoid rpf becoming a source of discourse on more public, less fannish platforms where it can easily escape containment (tiktok, twitter etc). i'm so glad you liked it!!

(and hey if its a hrpf server accepting new members... feel free to drop me an invite link!! <3 <3)

[jamingbenn]

hello! i have a methodology question re: your ao3 stats, if that’s alright. does your scraper also see locked fics? i know some past hockey rpf stats things had only counted non-locked fics bc they couldn’t effectively process the data on locked fics, but i’m curious if you found a solution to that. i’m also curious if there’s any trend in terms of what gets locked (both in terms of trope and in terms of pairing)

hi! yes, i was able to access locked fics by logging in with my credentials in the webscraping process! for this reason, i anonymized all fics and did not collect information on fic titles or authors because they havent given me explicit consent to use any of their fic data. instead i simply took fandom information, tags, word count etc meta data for analysis instead!

for that reason as well i didn't track which fics would be locked vs not, as i had access to all fics after "logging in" to ao3 from the access point in the mechanized/programmatic web browsing step. it would certainly be an interesting trend i'd also want to look at but ethically didn't feel comfortable doing so!

[jamingbenn]

the wrapped you put together is amazing! thank you for doing that! <3

thank you so much for enjoying it!! it was so fun to make i'm glad people are also having fun reading it hehe