#kisses to you and grateful thanks bc this stuff is SO fascinating to see broken down into flat numbers

[inchidentally]

I am so glad you always give a breakdown bc my dumbass brain needs it and I want to give my takeaways to honor this exquisite work:

the higher than average number of landoscar fic being public - to me at least - has a LOT to do with landoscar fandom getting ahead of rpf truthing and being supportive of Lily for as long as the landoscar ship has been popular. which is esp interesting bc her accs have been private for a long time and Oscar didn't start consistently posting her on his own until after the first break of the season I think? their holiday in the Algarve(?) was the first time a lot of ppl will have even known he had a gf. so not only has fandom never created an agenda to ever try and 'remove' Lily at any point, her presence has never dampened landoscar's rise in popularity even among new F1blr fans.

there's also almost always an existing friendship or a foundation of friendship to landoscar fic and not very much of the usual rinse-repeat insert-names-here type of fic for other ships. it's often extremely specific to the Lando and Oscar's personalities and foundation of getting to know each other. as in, when no one is trying to tie themselves in knots to make an rpf ship "real" it leaves them more open to actually focusing on the real people behind the ship. all of the most intense rpf truther ships end up being pretty similar bc the mental gymnastics and suspension of disbelief needed to erase existing real life partners and viewing jokey gay bromance behavior as legitimately queer is the exact same process every time.

so landoscar fic authors always approach writing Lando and Oscar from a "what if?" perspective rather than a fandom agenda has felt so much more compelling to me as a reader bc the authors don't need to abandon Lando and Oscar's real personalities to write them in different narratives.

I’m extremely intrigued by that 'generational' aspect of ships, esp ones where the teammate partnerships began when DTS started - vs landoscar having arisen and grown totally outside of DTS influence (and not even seen as worthy of a rivalry storyline). to me that's also significant when you consider that McLaren’s social media and PR dropped off sharply right after Singapore and before the double podiums and never rly picking back up to this day. the focus has been on Lando and Oscar individually but rarely together since late summer 2023. super interesting since Lando and Oscar's relationship has only grown warmer and more relaxed from then until now.

all meaning that as landoscar was growing in popularity, tptb had mostly stopped pushing it compared to other teams who’s drivers are considered at all compatible and fan friendly. both carlando and dando grew in tandem with direct pushes from official McLaren, F1, broadcasting networks and sponsors' social media as well as a concerted effort at cultivating a bromance from Lando/Carlos and Lando/Daniel themselves.

which is why the fact that landoscar has given a 5+ year ship like carlando a run for its money in under a year is wild when you remember that the PR machine for carlando has always been a work horse/cash cow and their ship name is literally corporate engagement currency. the latest F1TV challenge and cross-promotion with Lando's .mov account and his dad's scooter company proved the power of engagement it still has despite an almost total lack of interaction between Singapore '23 and Aus '24.

the fact that Lando and Oscar do absolutely zero fake gay (and barely physically touch) and have not pushed a conscious bromance at all - and that they are both openly competitive with each other without being falsely apologetic or toxic - is what makes the steep rise in ao3 content the most staggering to me tbh ?? Oscar in particular has shown no interest in forcing an inauthentic image of himself on the public and Lando has actually followed suit with a change in approach to his own social media and engagement (less clowning around and hyperactivity, more focused and creative).

they've had the least marketing investment made of any of Lando's teammates and have had a non-stop contingent who are willing them to hate each other. so all that landoscar authors and readers have had to go on is the very unedited and un-camera ready way that Lando and Oscar interact.

like, it's genuinely fascinating bc I'm someone who has always gotten into fandoms via the most popular bromance/rpf ship and I'm 100% gullible for content even when I know it's being spoon fed to me. so I'm absolutely one of the ideal test subjects for the trends in this data !! bc not only has landoscar ended up outstripping all my other F1 ships by many miles, I've actually ventured into writing for them myself despite feeling huge anxiety over trying to write fic.

and yet somehow landoscar is also the least pandered to I've ever been with rpf.

also stupid side note re the rankings of additional tags gives me a lot of validation for my terrible and cobbled together astrology post for landoscar I made last year that in cases where Lando and Oscar accept/admit attraction to each other they fuck immediately and fuck furiously. apparently we all know it's written in the stars for them.

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 :')