#they're in a private collection on ao3 that no one can access but me

[daesungindistress]

Recently a Seungri stan messaged me privately to tell me she loves my old DaeRi fanfiction, pointed out one in particular that she reads "every once in a while," and even called me an author she loves. Four or more years ago this sort of feedback on my writing would have been encouraging, and I'd have thanked her for it. Nowadays, though, given the circumstances of that man and his fans, it was... let's just say unsettling.

Ever since the events of 2019 I've had conflicting feelings about my old writing and have many times considered pulling certain pieces down. I left the stories alone, untouched, partly for myself, as a repository of sorts, a public written record of a time past, because I can be stupidly sentimental like that, and partly for Dae stans, who I thought might still like them as long as they could look past the unpleasantness of the pairing's other half.

I expected people would react sensibly to BIGBANG's big change and hoped readers would enjoy my fanfics with the understanding that the past is the past and should be left as such. Accepting and embracing the group in its new form, as it has been since 2019 -- as four. The decision to let it be was certainly not made with fans of Seungri in mind, who by all rights shouldn't exist anymore.

Sad to say, they do. Not only can I not accept their gratitude, a compliment from one on my years-old stories featuring Seungri really upset me. It was an uneasy reminder that my old indulgences can still influence new fans and (mis)lead them into liking, sympathizing with, and supporting Seungri now, in the present, even after all that's happened. Disregarding his departure from the group and defending all the unsavory things about him that have come to light in the years since those stories were written.

Some time ago, on AO3, I turned off notifications for comments and kudos on everything with the mindset that if people were still reading and taking pleasure in my writing from so long ago, I didn't want to know. I thought that what I didn't know couldn't hurt me. But that isn't enough, I now realize. I didn't consider the potential side effects on others outside my target audience. I can't in good conscience look away any longer and allow those positive portrayals made by my hand to stand, even if it is only fiction, because Seungri is a real person who's done real harm, and quite a lot of it. By committing real crimes, and quite a lot of them. He has real power over people, power he's abused, with real-world consequences. And in a way, as a content creator... I have that power too.

So I've finally done what I should have done ages ago and have taken those stories down. It doesn't undo the damage, but at least I can breathe a little easier knowing my past work, which had been wildly overdue for removal, will no longer contribute to the problem still plaguing this band and its fandom today. If there's one lesson I've taken to heart in the years since Burning Sun, it's that I have a duty and a responsibility to do better. We all do.

[5ummit]

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.

[dangerouscommiesubversive]

Fic Stats Meme

Rules: Give us the links to your fics with the most hits, second most kudos, third most comments, fourth most bookmarks, fifth most words, and your fic with the least amount of words.

One more thing I was tagged in by @materassassino, even longer ago, because these past two days I've just. Really been in the mood to clear out some of my drafts and do fun stuff?

Most Hits: Make A Wish (Young Avengers) - 17,527 hits

Wealthy scientist Nate Richards has been shot, and the legendary sapphire he owned stolen. Noh Varr, a private investigator, is hired—not to track down his killer, but to exonerate one of the suspects. It all gets much messier than he'd expected.

This is a Young Avengers noir AU that I wrote for the Young Avengers Reverse Big Bang and one of my very few attempts at first-person narration, and frankly its hit count mystifies me. I guess people re-read it a lot or something? I'm glad that it has staying power, I'm just puzzled.

Second Most Kudos: Lay That Heavy Trick On Me (Guardians of the Galaxy) - 1,248 kudos

The Guardians take a job robbing an expensive resort, and their floorplans indicate that the best access point to get to where they need to be is in the honeymoon suite. Which means that two of them need to play like they're married. Peter's not quite sure why he has to be one of the lucky newlyweds. Drax doesn't understand subterfuge. Gamora just keeps laughing at them and it's terrible.

This was actually my most kudos'ed story until fairly recently, when it was overtaken by hard work. It's a fun story--not my best, but it's in a much bigger fandom than I normally write for and it has a couple of super-popular tropes in it, so I suppose it's not so weird that it's up there stats-wise.

Third Most Comments: Gaiden: Neo-Heisei Kamen Rider (Kamen Riders W through Zi-O) - 133 comment threads

Not bothering with the summary because this one's a collection of short pieces, mostly from Tumblr prompts, and it's got 108 chapters. Some people comment on every piece they read! It's very gratifying!

Fourth Most Bookmarked: Lay That Heavy Trick On Me (Guardians of the Galaxy) - 297 bookmarks

"Heavy Trick" again! I mean, for real, this one used to be my leader in everything, for a while it was by far my most popular fic.

Fifth Most Words: Into The Black (Young Avengers/Firefly) - 44,537 words

Mercenary space captain Kate Bishop's got a loyal crew (mostly), an unreliable space ship (hey don't you say that Dawn's Archer is perfect), some unresolved anger issues (some faces that need grinding that is), and a lot of moral gray areas that she likes to play around in as she roams the galaxy, taking whatever jobs she can find. When her ship takes on some unusual passengers, however, everything goes completely off the rails.

This one--my tragic forever-unfinished Young Avengers/Firefly mashup--is genuinely surprising to me. I had no idea I'd written so much for it. I ought to be honest with myself and everyone else and update the tags/summary/chapter count to indicate that it's unlikely to ever be completed, but I haven't got the heart. And who knows, maybe at some point I'll rewatch Firefly and re-read YA Vol 2 and get inspired for it again. As I recall, the next chapter I'd had planned before I got distracted was the "Objects in Space" one, which was going to have Deadpool as the bounty hunter.

Fewest Words: various fandom poems

Discounting my few podfics, which naturally have low word counts because they have no words, I have 12 poems up on AO3, 9 of which are between 100 and 200 words. It doesn't seem pointful to link any specific one, they're all short.

---

Instead of tagging anyone I hereby encourage literally anybody who read this far and who has fic up on AO3 to do it, it's an interesting exercise. For me it's also very funny--I've been posting fic to AO3 since 2012, so with the way these questions are scaled they tend to duck around almost all of my most recent work and hit the older stuff that's been up longer and had more time to accumulate numbers. My AO3 account is a bed of oysters, and these are their little embarrassing pearls.

[agent-yolk-writes]

Fanfiction Year in Review Meme

Figure I'd do something different for 2021. Hopefully I can remember what I did this year. Technically I'm supposed to be tagged and tag someone else, but alas I got no one to tag

What is your total word count for the year?

I made a lot of WIPs that I'm sure counted for a lot of words, but in terms of actual posting via AO3 I calculated that my post word count is just a little over 19k.

What fandoms did you write in this year?

A lot of Obey Me as well as Pokemon SwSh (for a zine piece), ITSV/Venom, Fate (obviously), a tiny thing for Godzilla S.P., and Jojo (both fic update and zine piece). I've been messing around with a few crossover ideas for Obey Me, one included a tokusatsu/superhero au (think Ultraman, maybe?) and another that included nightmare on elm street. I'm confident to post at least the first chapter(?) of the NoES.

I, uh, got into horror movies these year...mostly slashers set in the DbD universe despite never playing it. Maybe that's how I got that Nightmare idea? Idk. Maybe because Dead Meat remade their Friday the 13th kill counts this year I grew fond of Jason. Let's see if I can churn out something I like. Oh! I also began drafting an idea for a Jujutsu Kaisen/Chainsaw Man idea that's both reader insert and...smut. It might be a while before that comes out.

Did you write more, less, or roughly about what you expected?

I'm surprised I wrote a lot this year. I managed to bring out my first long fic out of temporary stasis and if it wasn't for my shitty ass job wasting most of my time and the fact I don't have access to my go to writing place (aka my college library, which is far away), I'd have more chapters of that.

But my ITSV/Venom fic requires less brain cells as it's honestly good dumb fun. People have been really enjoying it and vocalize how excited they are for the next chapter. Oooh, I have such big plans but not enough time for that fic.

What’s your own favorite story of this year?

Friends Like You and Us, definitely. As I mentioned, it's good dumb fun for everyone involved. It mashed my two favorite hyperfixations together as my love for MCU practically diminishes. But I always had a soft spot for Spider-Man and Venom so they can stay for as long as they like.

What is your most underappreciated story of the year?

I Think My Sister is Up to Something. Despite all the enabling and feedback from my friends when I was throwing around ideas, I don't really get that much engagement and I'm really sad about that. Having Rin did silly hijinks, revealing the reroll roster chapter by chapter, dropping clues as to who or what Sakura is with...I'm essentially talking to a wall as I am every day. I did, however, commission something to draw Suzuka in the FSN school uniform, so I'm taking that as a W

What’s your most appreciated story of 2021?

In terms of fan engagement outside of ITSV/Venom, definitely, You're My Dad! Boogie Woogie Woogie! Probably because of the Diavolo simps lol. I do have a Type(tm) and Diavolo definitely is that, and yet I made a 180 turn and projected my ideals onto him. Whoopsie. But hey, if the other OM stans enjoyed it than it worked out just fine.

Biggest fanfic related disappointment of 2021?

I Think My Sister is Up To Something. For obvious reasons. Maybe my SwSh zine piece for lack of engagement as well.

Biggest fanfic related surprise of 2021?

Definitely the Diavolo fic since I got a notification that someone put it in their private collection of Feel Good fics when they're down. That warmed my heart.

Something you are looking forward to working on in 2022?

Doing more writing, doing more posting, maybe start doing headcanons again. I hope in the future I can get accepted into more zines as a writer, maybe even a guest writer. I also want to do a fic collab with a friend, it's been a long time since I've done that kind of thing. Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll remember to participate in NaNoWriMo