#tasty stats

[coffee-at-annies]

This was the 800th core game

[lovesickeros]

now that natlan is out it's tsaritsa yearning hours again because i am one nation closer to either being horribly disappointed or foaming at the mouth!

creator!reader w a little side of conflicted tsaritsa is such good food I can't not yap about it. a woman who has dedicated so much of her life to severing herself from "love" of all kinds and succeeding and. just being so confident that when she meets you she's bitter and angry and mean. because she can't stand you. she isn't supposed to love yet you worm your way into her heart anyway and you don't even know it.

especially in smth like an imposter au. she tells herself your just a tool for her to use but your treated like the Divine you really are, pampered and spoiled every step. tells herself it means nothing when she indulges you – let's you hold her hand in private, eventually let's you move aside the veil, just a little.

and she hates it. hates how easy it is to let you break down the ice she's built up for years.

all you do is smile and she feels like she can't breathe. because despite how violently she rejects love in all aspects, it always bleeds through eventually. she despises it but the way you brush your thumbs over her cheeks makes her bitter and warm and it infuriates her to no end.

she hates you and she loves you and she can't stand you and if you were ever taken from her she'd destroy every inch of teyvat if she had to go get you back.

and ironically enough I think she'd also be the one to initiate any first kiss. maybe she's still trying to convince herself it's just a fluke and itll make her realize it meant nothing, it means nothing. desperate to fix whatever you've done to her and instead it just makes it worse.

a horrible mess of a woman who gave up on love just to be confronted with it when she finally accepted it's absence.

[dkettchen]

I have added geographic & language data to my ship data set!

(some of the combo ones may still be recategorised but alas that's very few)

Total ships (by country, continent, language):

TLDR:

The US has too much soft power with over 50% of top AO3 ships in the last decade being from US-originated media

UK & Japan are runners up but each only make up about an 8th of the ships

"European media" is almost exclusively UK media, with only about 3 fandoms from other countries (France, Norway, Sweden) without UK/US collaboration and/or original/most popular release(s) in english, we do not have much translated non-english european media represented the way translated east asian media is

Africa and South America are straight up not represented

Other than Thailand, only east asian media is represented for Asia. India as one of the two most populous countries in the world alongside China is not represented at all

Oceania (Australia and New Zealand only) only has I believe 3 fandoms represented

Countries by ranking:

(overall, annual, and femslash:)

The overall and annual rankings improved their country distribution over the years.

Annual had the biggest influx of east asian media, aligning with the previous racial diversity findings.

Femslash is actually doing the worst on country diversity, with 3/4 consistently being made up by the US alone, which was surprising cause it was doing the best on racial diversity out of the three. (me@femslash: YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE ToT)

Overview stats by country (biggest 6 represented):

US & Japan:

UK & Canada:

China & South Korea

East asian countries feature about as many east asian characters as english speaking countries feature white ones. The latter also do not feature much more east asian rep than other groups, meaning that the vast majority of our east asian characters in the rankings are *from* east asian media becoming more globally popular, not from more east asians being represented in other media.

Korea is doing the worst on diversity represented cause its fandoms are almost exclusively kpop RPF, hence only feature east asians (and even among them largely only the ethnically & nationality-wise korean ones, not many of the international ones), and with the exception of Red Velvet only boy bands/mlm. BTS makes up over half of its ships despite only featuring 7 individual men.

The US as the biggest category has the most racial diversity and highest percentage of interracial ships, but Japan and China have surprisingly high levels of diversity represented, despite their irl population's much lower ethnic diversity than say the US to my understanding. In China's case this seems to largely be due to Genshin Impact making up over half of its ships and featuring many different culturally inspired worlds, leading to more diversity represented on paper, with the caveat that a lot of its non-white and non-east asian characters have been criticised for white-/light-washing/colourism. Both Japan and China have white characters as their second biggest group, unlike english speaking media which does not mirror that ratio for east asians.

The UK and Canada are doing way worse on racial diversity than the US, despite featuring way more different fandoms than Korea. (= They don't have an excuse lmao)

As expected based on the rankings' country distributions, the US features an almost equal amount of male & female characters, due to wlw and mlm ships being nearly tied and a decent amount of straight ships being represented. Canada has an even crazier femslash ratio with over half of its (much lower number of ships) being femslash. Japan and the UK both feature about 1/3 female characters. Japan is also the only asian country of the three that features any straight ships at all.

[coffee-at-annies]

Man I didn’t think SidGeno could still have firsts but they’re surprising us

Huh that's new

[carlsdraws]

PoE after veilguard really makes the insistence that veilguard IS dark fantasy have you seen d’metas crossing so genuinely laughable. i wouldn’t even classify PoE as a dark fantasy but there’s a grim realism to the villages and people in that game that is so interesting…. and veilguard is a glossy marvel movie in comparison

[bumblerhizal-art]

my client is innocent your honor

based on some modern au shenanigans from discord

[rattataganda]

So you love Rattata. What do you think of Raticate. Upgrade or Downgrade?

I'll be honest, Raticate feels like a downgrade to me. Where went the beautiful purple, how did you get so scruffy so fast, buddy? On its own, Raticate is alright, but it just doesn't feel Rattata-like enough for me. I just like my sleek purple rat as it is.

[space-ninja-fashion-show]

This game is fuckin spoiling me

[galemilker]

Aogami, Amanozako and any friendly NPC: it is dangerous here , go to the Tokyo Diet building to be safe with the angels of bethel Me and my demon bois and girlies, when we come across any fightable demon:

[coffee-at-annies]

The best part of baseball is they’ll say a stat hasn’t happened since X and sometimes X is like 2019 or 2004 and you’re like that’s a reasonable date and then sometimes it’s 1970 or 1948 which is a little unreasonable but the mlb is old, and then sometimes it’s 1910 or 1893 and you’re like okay you’re making dates up

[narwhalandchill]

omg Somehow actually managed get a 4p glad going for her with jade cutter Without overcapping crit 😭 waow....

(naturally not a single childe piece stolen in sight uwu + a very normal amount of atk rolls in there yes ik ik)

[coffee-at-annies]

On pace is the funniest stat crime. It’s my favorite nonsense

Also mood and i didnt talk about this at all but like not Keller, Cooley and Schmaltzy all having a projected 164 point season rn cause of their 2 point games yesterday 😏😏😏

[dravidious]

You're more amazing than hugging

Reject the imperfection of your flesh, embrace the perfection of artifice- What? Phyrexia? No, of course not! I meant

[mihotose]

kim must have so much volition to deal with harry if i were him id have lost morale as soon as he walked down the stairs into the whirling

[chipper-smol]

hey if anyone is craving some good pokemon nostalgia or wants to play a new pokemon game but doesnt have 60+ dollars to drop, or doesnt vibe with how nintendo keeps shutting down fans who build emulators, or kind of wish for a higher quality game with tasty QoL measures, or doesnt want to support the unhealthy crunch culture they have-

ya’ll should check out Coromon

1: its currently on sale for $5 on steam

2: beautiful pixel art style and animation

3: built in difficulty modes including nuzlocke if you like doing nuzlockes

4: shinies actually have stat values instead of just being pretty. theyre also rare enough that they still feel special while at the same time arent near impossible to encounter

5: cute little world details where the dev team didnt have to do but did anyway to immerse you into the game (like a guy pulling out an umbrella when it rains, or your sibling complaining when you step in front of the tv, or having to put on a labcoat before going into a lab)

6: the dev team are obviously hardcore pokemon fans who went “ok we’ll just make our own cause nintendo keeps missing the ball” without the palworld plagiarism bs

7:

idk ive been really craving that first pokemon experience i had and this is NAILING it

[ryttu3k]

So uh, my Very Scientific Poll was somewhat derailed by the fact that no one on this site is neurotypical. Haha. Oops.

Broad categories

93.1% of respondents were neurodivergent in some way (57.5% autistic, 35.6% other neurodivergent). 6.9% were neurotypical.

11.7% of respondents had a positive emotional response. 30.5% had a neutral emotional response. 57.8% had a negative emotional response.

Identity by emotion

Of those who had a positive emotional response, 100% were neurodivergent in some way (61.3% autistic, 38.7% other ND).

Of those who had a neutral emotional response, 92.8% were neurodivergent in some way (58.7% autistic, 34.4 other ND), 7.2% were neurotypical.

Of those who had a negative emotional response, 91.9% were neurodivergent in some way (56.1% autistic, 35.8% other ND), 8.1% were neurotypical.

Emotion by identity

Amongst autistic respondents, 12.7% responded positively, 31% neutrally, and 56.4% negatively.

Amongst other neurodivergent respondents, 12.4% responded positively, 29.5% neutrally, and 58.2% negatively.

In total, amongst all neurodivergent respondents, 12.6% responded positively, 28.3% neutrally, and 57% negatively.

Amongst neurodivergent respondents, 0% responded positively, 31.9% neutrally, and 68.1% negatively.

Values may not add to 100% due to rounding errors.

Conclusions

I uh. I'm not sure I can actually use these statistics, given that less than seven percent of all respondents were neurotypical and I was kind of banking on there being at least some larger numbers to show that those responding positively to EC were more likely to be autistic, with a softer response for other neurodivergent people. Possibly I shouldn't have done this poll on the most autistic social media site on the internet.

In general, it does show what I expected - while negative responses were still the majority, autistic respondents have a slightly more positive response. There wasn't a significant difference in autistic respondents versus other neurodivergent respondents. The small handful of neurotypical respondents were far more likely to have a negative response, but again, hard to draw a conclusion when only 6.9% were neurotypical…

It would be quite interesting to do this again with more neurotypical respondents, and also to examine feelings towards the Uncanny Valley! A lot of respondents mentioned it specifically, usually with a strong negative response to the Uncanny Valley correlating to a negative response to EC; I find I'm not very susceptible to it and am very fond of EC. (I had an earlier post about it here, relating to Pikachu in Detective Pikachu.)

So in conclusions, whoops, sample error.

A question, spawned by a thread on Reddit! Explanation will be beneath the cut, please have a read after replying to the poll.

This is the doll character EC, from the Australian 90s children's show, Lift Off. EC was able to move independently and served as a friend to the child cast.

For responses: 'positive emotions' includes feeling warm, affectionate, etc towards EC. 'Neutral emotions' includes feeling ambivalent, not having any particular feelings regarding EC in particular. 'Negative emotions' includes feeling fear, disgust, disconcerted, etc towards EC.

Beneath the cut, a longer explanation on EC, and why I'm asking this question.

Lift Off was an Australian kids TV show that aired from 1992 to 1995, aimed at 3-8-year-olds (I was five when it started), partially fantasy but largely educational, aimed at helping kids learn how to deal with problems and difficult emotions, learn about the world, and foster empathy for others. In the first episode, two of the main cast of kid characters find a discarded doll, who, much to their surprise, starts to move independently. The kids befriend the doll, named EC, who becomes a main cast member.

In this clip, Poss and Kim find EC.

EC, short for 'Every Child', was designed to be an audience stand-in, allowing the entire young audience to project upon them, to be a vehicle for imagination. This... may have backfired for a lot of people, because thirty years later, what most people remember of Lift Off is of being completely terrified of EC, the faceless, non-speaking doll.

This article on the ABC, with Luke Carroll, one of the child cast members, opens by mentioning kids being terrified of EC. This article on Buzzfeed is entirely on how scary EC is. This post on r/AustralianNostalgia also goes into it, and this recent post on the same (which prompted me to make this post!) shows a positive response from OP, but with a lot of comments to the contrary!

(There were EC dolls available for sale - albeit with a plastic head, not a cloth one. I desperately wanted one.)

So, I'm extremely curious about how people initially respond to EC, particularly those who didn't watch Lift Off as a kid. There's a thread on the first subreddit post that has me thinking:

"We had an EC toy and I never once found it creepy. I loved playing with EC and played in a similar vein to the kids on the show. I've since found out that I'm quite neurodivergent so maybe that says something? I loved this show so much and have since shown it to my kids."

"I loved EC too… and I’m ASD, maybe that’s the secret"

"Exactly me! Was my fave toy ever. I remember all the scenes where he made cool magic happen"

Another comment:

"I adored Lift Off. Had my own EC doll because he just had the loveliest vibes (still have him somewhere), had the Purple Backpack as my very first school bag, got the magazines every month... it had me transfixed. Diagnosed with ASD in my 30s, which might explain it. But that show was just pure, undiluted joy for me."

I adored EC, wanted an EC of my own, and I'm autistic. I'm wondering if a positive response to EC is linked to that - with clearly projected body language and a lack of facial expression (or facial features!) and spoken word, EC definitely communicates in a non-'normative' way, which I found extremely comforting. I vastly preferred EC and Lotis (the sapient artificial intelligence controlling the building's elevator) to the human kids, honestly!

So, how do you feel about EC?