#fanfic stats
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Welcome to the blog of the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024!
We are an independent fandom research project who recently performed a large-scale survey of AO3 users, asking questions about demographics, preferences and behaviours.
We are now in the process of releasing and analysing our results, which you can find on AO3.
If you are interested in following along with the project, this is the place to do it! We will be making official announcements on our progress here, including any requests for public feedback.
If you have any other questions, please check our FAQ. If that doesn’t answer your question, the askbox is now open.
#fandom stats#fandom statistics#ao3 statistics#ao3 demographics survey 2023#archive of our own#fandom research#fandom survey#fanfic stats#ao3 census#ao3 users
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Do you wish you could tell how active an old fandom still is? Curious which are the largest fandoms in a given category like Video Games? Have you ever wondered how fast your fandoms are growing in comparison to each other?
Well do I have a dashboard for you:
Fandom Insights Dashboard
It's available to everyone and you can filter by Category, Fandom Name, and Fandom Size:
You can see what the largest fandoms are - either overall or within the filters you've chosen:
You can see what the fastest growing fandoms over the last week are:
And finally, you can see how fandom size has changed over time, dating back to October 2021 (when I started collecting this data):
As you can see, most fandoms grow at a pretty steady (and similar) rate, but every once in a while a fandom has a meteoric rise or a major jump after something occurs, and that can be fun to see!
If you have any questions or suggestions about how I can make this dashboard better, my ask box is open!
#fandom#fandom stats#fandom culture#fandom things#ao3#ao3 stats#fanfic stats#fanfic#fanfiction#ao3 fanfic#fanfics
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I just wanted to put out some stats for you all, just so you can understand my level of brain rot concerning Steddie.
I went looking and to my surprise my very first fanfic was my one and only foray into the HP fandom which was a story about Draco and Hermione getting stuck in an elevator and coming out of it with an understanding. They don't become friends or anything, but just getting some actual closure. You know, that thing Rowling fails to provide any of her characters? (Moffat and Gatiss have the same problem with Sherlock, but I digress)
I always assumed my very first fanfic was in the BBC Sherlock fandom. Back in February of 2012, but nope. The HP story predates it by about four months.
So all that just to say I've been writing fan fiction I really long time. With Sherlock being the longest fandom at ten years and almost 550K words.
That's important. 10 years (the pandemic cut out an entire year where I didn't write at all) and 550k words.
As of today before I did my writing for the day, I am at 410k words in less then YEAR! That's right, in the 11 months I've been writing Steddie I have almost as many words written in the Stranger Things fandom than I have for all of Sherlock.
That is some serious brain rot folks. And as long as you guys keep commenting and reblogging my stories, I will keep writing them for you. I have so many ideas for this fandom that I could easily write another 500k.
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Fic Stats Game
Rules: Give us the links to your fics with the most hits, second most kudos, third most bookmarks, fourth most comments, fifth most words, and your fic with the least amount of words. Originally tagged by @theresthesnitch <3
Most hits: (to no one's surprise) The Wedding Ring (my most popular fic by most metrics) - Fake dating Muggle AU (complete)
Summary: What is undeniably worse than attending your sister's wedding looking as desolate and forgotten as a wilted houseplant?
Drunkenly ringing your ex-boyfriend and asking him to be your date.
Second Most Kudos: The Reckless Now (990 kudos which is wild!!) - Love square Muggle AU (incomplete)
Summary: The old Lily Evans would never do such a thing. The old Lily Evans chose casual flirting, a bit of light dancing, an exchanging of numbers, and a hope for a future when she met a man.
The new Lily Evans, however, is tired of that same old song and dance. She wants to forget about the future and enjoy the reckless now.
Third most bookmarks: Chasing Life (216 bookmarks -- crazy!!) - Canon divergent (complete)
Summary: James Potter enjoys the simple life. That is, being a national Quidditch star, drinking profusely with his mates, and no-strings-attached companionship.
At least until he meets a beautiful, clever redhead who is immune to his charms and uninterested in his talents. She just might also help him see there is more to this thing called life than perpetual, meaningless bachelorhood.
Fourth most comments: in retrograde (my beloved) - Memory loss AU (complete)
Summary:
retrograde adj.
ret·ro·grade
a : moving in a backward direction
b : affecting memories of a period prior to a precipitating event (such as brain injury or disease)
It is a normal October day when James loses his wife. All he can do is hold onto the hope that she will come back to him.
Fifth most words: The Road Back to You - Muggle AU Second chances (complete)
Summary: This is a story about second chances. A story about coming home and finding friends who become family. And most of all, perhaps, it is a story about the inevitability of falling into—and out of—love, even when you fight against it.
Fic with the least words: to keep a promise (686 words) - only one lives AU (complete)
Summary: For the first time since she arrived at Godric’s Hollow, she paused, her body frozen as her boots crunched against the frostbitten grass. A sea of all-too-familiar headstones sprawl out in front of her. A wave of pain crashed along the length of her body, its force sweeping her feet forward again, sending her onward.
A minute later, an eternity later, she arrived at the place that was both her home and her Hell.
Tagging: @possessingtheproperspirit @thejilyship @wearingaberetinparis @annabtg
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Fan Studies Survey: Mental Illness and Fanfiction
ETA: This survey has now closed. Thank you for so many more responses than I expected! I will announce as soon as the data is available to others to use and as I make my own discoveries in working with it.
As part of my PhD where I am researching mental illness in interactive and immersive media types, I’m undertaking a project on how people read, write and interact with fanfiction about mental illness.
The survey will take you just 5-15 minutes, and will help to gather groundbreaking insights for fan studies. You’ll be asked about yourself, about how you read, write and find fanfiction about mental illness, and what interacting with this kind of fanfic has been like for you. This data will be shared openly so that other fan studies researchers can work with it and help us better understand this huge part of the fanfiction community.
Full data on the study, including consent, privacy and GDPR information, can be found on the survey page.
Submissions will remain open until the 25th June 2023.
Thank you so much!
#fan studies#fandom studies#fanfic#fandom research#fanfiction#fanfic stats#fandom stats#mental illness#phdresearch#mad studies#mental health#fandom meta#fandom culture#fandom
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Someone asked on Reddit how many fics you wrote in 2023. So....how many did you write?
I wrote 14. Several of them were long too. One was over 30K words, another over 70K words. Shortest was 2,900 words. I also have three WIPs though two are continuations of fics already posted.
And one fic I posted this year brought in the 2nd highest kudos I've gotten on any fic ever! (How To Train Your Gladiator - a gladiator AU featuring the Crows).
I'm happy with my fic writing in 2023. How about you?
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Fic Stats Game
Rules: Give us the links to your fics with the most hits, second most kudos, third most bookmarks, fourth most comments, fifth most words, and your fic with the least amount of words. =
Thank you @practicecourts for tagging me 🫶 You know you're awesome ❤️
I'm gonna use FF's stats first since that site's my jam ☺️
Most Hits: What Are You Doing To Me? 294,465
2nd Most Favs: Enemy Within 264
3rd Most Follows: Whatever You Say, Professor 140
4th Most Reviews: Wickedly Twisted 111
5th Most Words: Wickedly Twisted 63,938
Least Words: Chicks Dig Scars 2,327
(On AO3 it be WAYDTM 35,079; WAYDTM 456; WYSP 101; WYSP 35; WT; CDS) — Basically telling me I like FF’s way of counting each chapters’ viewership numbers SO MUCH MORE 😆 [as opposed to AO3 counting someone who just clicked to read the synopsis versus someone who binged all 57 chapters the same way…] And that Enemy Within was more popular on AO3. Go figure.)
Tagging anyone who enjoys a good statistical breakdown of their work! 💪
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Fic Stats Tag Game: One Shots!!
my big chonkus of BP yoinked titles away from EVERYONE, so i'm taking @gendervapor14's lead and switching over to oneshots~ absolutely genius, darling
Rules:
Give us the links to your one shot fics with the most hits, most kudos, most comments, most bookmarks, most words, and least words.
Most Hits: I think. I'm going to have a similar problem as last time :')
Sun God Nika takes this one at (whatthefuck) 6,152 hits goddamn
yeah this one was a people-pleaser right down to its core. im not surprised. Everyone loves a bit of time travel and saving ace <3
Most Kudos: Another victory for the dearly beloved mr. sun god at a nice 558 kudos. the original victor retains its throne :')
Most Comments: (Please not again everyone's gonna think im so damn lame) WOOO this one goes to Nightmare!! A different this one this time—folks just couldn't keep from expressing their lovely thoughts on crocomom and dadflamingo. I loved every comment dearly, thank you all for 'em!!
Most Bookmarks: Bananas it's Nika again. Ah well, not one I expected to get the most love, but I can't say I'm upset
Most Words: I know this one isn't Nika woooooo! It is my honour to bestow this title onto Pink is the Prettiest Color. 'Tis the curse of my smut, it takes me three years and twenty pages to wrap up. this one's all focused on a Katacora demon slayer au if that's your jam~
Least Words: I am yet again ignoring my art pieces, and this time staying within the fandom—Nightmare gets this one again!! Short and sweet~
Maybe I should do a version without Nika XD it's taking up all the space. elbows shoving all over the place. honestly, how rude.
anyways, this was a lot of fun! Thank you for letting me steal your posts yet again gen (check theirs out here!!)
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[LET'S TALK WRITING!] - FANFICTION STATS
My friends, I hope you’re all doing well. Let me tell you that when I say I’ve been meaning to write this article for months, I mean months. Maybe years, actually.
One thing about me that you might not know, is that I love stats. I love data. This is applicable to most areas of my life, but of course translates into my fanfiction habit. I want to know how many readers I have, where do they come from, etc. And, ever since I came back into fandom in 2020, I’ve noticed that other people do, too. Just have a quick look at the r/fanfiction subreddit. It’s cluttered with readers asking what fanfiction stats look like on the author's side, or writers asking: is [x] number of hits enough? is my fic doing well? what’s a good hits/kudos ratio? etc. I hope that this article will help you answer some (if not all) of these questions.
General disclaimer: Of course, I don’t pretend to be an expert in the field. I also don’t pretend to be anywhere close to the success the BNFs in my fandom are getting (nor do I, frankly, aspire to such an audience - it’s terrifying). But, as someone who has been writing fanfiction in different fandoms for over fifteen years, who likes data, and who also makes her own stats for my personal use, I thought it might be interesting for people to see what stats look like, what information we, writers, get from the various websites, and what we can learn from it/consider. I hope this article will help newer writers with understanding their stats better, but also make it clear that stats are not everything. Because, paradoxically maybe, while I do think stats are interesting, they are definitely not the reason I write. I seek to demystify some of this information, educate, and help both readers and writers understand audiences better. And, while I will be taking my own fics and readership as an example, I also hope this will allow other authors to use this method/information to look at their own data, and maybe look at their numbers in a different way. Lastly, please believe me when I say that my intent with taking my own data is not at all to either brag, nor whine about my own numbers. It is to 1) be transparent with my readers/other authors and 2) analyse the sample set that I happen to have access to. I’m also lucky enough that I feel rather neutral about my own stats and don’t really care that much, so I don’t really mind looking at my own AO3 account as a lab rat, here, haha.
Also, please note that I don’t use Wattpad. I don’t know what stats look like over there and have no data for that platform.
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GENERAL OVERVIEW:
As of the day of writing, 25 January 2023, here are my general stats as they are made available to me by AO3.
If you’re not sure what any of these numbers mean, AO3 has a very handy explanation available on their website, which should clarify. For the purposes of this post, I think a couple things are of note:
first, I have written (on AO3 - as I will explain later, I also have an FFN account with different stories) 444,008 words in sixteen years. That’s almost 9 novels, if NaNoWriMo is anything to go by. That is… terrifying, and mildly worrying, lol.
second, I find my subscriber count (note that “user subscriptions” is the number of people subscribed to you; “subscriptions” is the number of people who have subscribed to one or more of your individual works) rather low (compared to other stats I’ll talk about in a bit). I think this might be due to a number of factors, including the fact that I post on multiple fandoms (thus, people don’t subscribe to me as an author because they feel “spammed” when I post content outside of their preferred fandom - I posted The Good Wife content over the summer and lost two subscribers because of it, which was a bit funny), and the fact that many people seem to not know that when you click “subscribe” on a fic, you subscribe to that fic, and not the author themselves. I have a few one-shots that have loads of subscribers, which I can only explain that way. That’s something you might want to take into account if you feel like your subs number is also “low”. Personally, I have to say that this “low” number helps when I feel overwhelmed. There’s something comforting in the fact that “only” seventy-five people will get notified if I post something random.
As of the day of writing, 25 January 2022, here are my general stats as they are made available to me by FFN.
FFN has a different system where you can “like” an author (i.e. “favourite”) without subscribing to them. Don’t ask me why, it’s a hellsite. I find it interesting that more people subscribe to me than favourite me, I wonder what to make of it. I think relatively, I’ve submitted very few reviews on FFN, but I believe that is because I made the switch to AO3 relatively early (2013/2014-ish), and thus stopped using FFN to read/review fics.
I have more wordcount on FFN, which is down to 1) the fact that they count your A/Ns as words and 2) that I have some older stories on there I didn’t transfer to AO3 when I switched. I also stopped crossposting sometime last year (with the exception of Castles), so most of what I’ve published in late 2021-2023 isn’t on there. I could add up the wordcount of all my published works to know what the precise wordcount is, but I can’t be bothered.
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GETTING THE FFN STATS OUT OF THE WAY
I think we can all agree that AO3 has now surpassed FFN as a website (though I do have issues with AO3, I won’t lie), so I will focus most of this post on AO3 stats and beyond. However, I will say that as a platform, FFN provides authors with much better statistics than AO3 does. That is because they’ve fallen into a capitalist hellscape and probably sell all of our data to advertisers but … you know. As such, while I don’t want to spend too much time on these, I still think there are a few things we can learn.
I will go into my top fics on FFN v. top fics on AO3 and why I think they differ in a later section. But at this point, I’d like to focus on two things:
The Country Breakdown:
Facts: To me, this is the most interesting feature on FFN, that you don’t get on AO3. Unfortunately, it only gives you this information on a monthly basis (you can’t look up top countries of all time), but I’m taking the current month (January 2023) here, which is a pretty representative example of my typical country breakdown.
(views are blue, visitors are yellow. for an explanation on the difference between views and visitors, see here. this is cumulative of all fics i have published, but ffn gives you the ability to break it down per fic if you’d like)
Consistently, my top two countries are the US and the UK. The US being the top by a significant margin. Canada and Australia are frequent top five features, as well as India. Chile is a bit of an interesting outlier here.
Thoughts: I think that unless you are operating in a fandom that’s very country specific (say, you’re writing in Polish about a show set in Poland), you can generally assume your figures would be roughly similar. Only when I was posting fic for small British shows (Silk or Spooks) was my majority reading pool from the UK, rather than from the US. This makes strikingly evident the hegemony of the US in reading fanfiction, which is something you might want to keep in mind when writing content, especially if you’re from elsewhere. One way I take this into consideration as a European is that I try to sometimes explain, either in-text or in A/Ns, things that might not be obvious to American readers, either culturally, or linguistically. You are also totally allowed to ignore this (Google is everyone’s friend), but if you’re not American and want to make your fics more accessible, that’s something you might want to keep in mind.
Additionally, as an ESL speaker myself, one thing I find interesting is that for all of my frequent top five countries, English is probably my readers’ first language, or a very fluent second. This means that I can assume my readers’ English language reading comprehension to be pretty high, which is a good thing as a writer, as it requires less explaining/accommodations.
Lastly, historically, France (I am French, which is why I noticed this) always used to be pretty high on the leaderboard, but it no longer is since I started posting for Potter. I used to interact with a lot of French readers as well, in the past. I wonder if this “fall” might be because HP is a fandom where lots of French-language content is available, and thus, that is where the fandom is. I write in English, so perhaps I appeal to my fellow French people less. But, that’s only a guess.
The Chapter by Chapter Breakdown
see below a screenshot of the month of january 2023 for my current WIP, castles.
Now, this - again - is probably one of the best stats features on FFN. Sadly, it is also only available on a monthly basis, but it allows you to see the breakdown of views and visitors per chapter. This is great because it allows you to see the drop off between your first chapter hits (i.e. someone clicks on your fic because they’re intrigued) and the second chapter, which is readers sticking around for the ride.
Generally and historically, my retention rate is about a third (with two-thirds of readers dropping off before chapter 2). January was obviously a bit lower, but I attribute this to the fact that I published a new chapter, meaning that some of the people are opening the fic on chapter 1, then probably heading straight to chapter 13. What’s interesting to me is that while the figures are much lower (as the fandom itself is much smaller), my drop off rate is about the same for my other long work. So, again, pretty consistent retention rate.
Additionally, interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be any other significant drops that I can see. Without the figures, I would have assumed that people might drop off after chapter 3 (the main characters break up) or chapter 8 (very angsty), but actually, the numbers look rather stable, after the initial cliff. I think that’s a pretty good thing. It means that once people have genuinely started the fic, they tend to stick around.
Overall, I’m rather satisfied with my retention rate. I don’t mind people dropping off, my writing isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. I do assume (though I have no numerical basis for this) that it is lower on AO3, because AO3 allows more specific tagging than FFN. I guess that this system does a better job filtering out people who just wouldn’t be interested in the fic because of the themes, setting, etc. On FFN, they are forced to click in + read a bit before figuring out it’s not for them, whereas on AO3, they can for instance see the “unreliable narrator” tag or the “non-con” tage and if they don’t like that, they’ll not even come in. FFN has always been better at getting people through the door in that way, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily profitable to authors in general. I don’t necessarily care about hits, if they’re not actual readers (but, I’ll come back to this later).
CONCLUSION: In my opinion, that’s kind of all you can get from FFN, in terms of interesting stats. They also show you your subs, favourites (which are similar to bookmarks/kudos), etc. but I don’t really care about those figures anymore as FFN is a hellsite, and I only post there out of a bizarre sense of nostalgia. I’ll now move on to AO3.
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MOVING ON TO AO3
Now, I know this is something I’ve seen readers ask about before: what does it look like on the author's side? What do you have access to?
Let me put it into one word: nothing. We have very little data you don’t have. I will show you below but building on my previous content warning, there is one thing I want to acknowledge.
The figures on these, and specifically on my current WIP, are mental. In a way that frankly, as someone who grew up in fandoms where the most popular fics by the biggest BNFs have a few hundred kudos at most, moving to the HP fandom at age 27 was a shock, to say the least. I know that these figures are a fraction of what big-name authors/fics like All the Young Dudes get, and yet I cannot possibly fathom the numbers on some of my fics. This is of course a way to say thank you to all of my lovely readers, but also to say: please don’t compare yourself to this, especially if you’re into a smaller niche/fandom than I am in. This is ridiculous and shouldn’t be the way you evaluate the worth of your work (again, more on this below).
This being said, here is a screenshot for my Potter fics:
And, more reasonably, here is a screenshot for my The Good Wife fics.
note that i have also written in other fandoms, but i don’t want to go into detail about everything or else this post will be ten thousand words. this is just to compare what i consider normal, versus the hp insanity.
As you can see above, we don’t have much more information, as authors, than our readers have. Hits, and kudos are publicly available. Bookmarks are the publicly available number + private bookmarks, which is nice-to-know, though not life-changing. You also get graphs showing these numbers and ranking fics, but nothing you couldn’t make yourself if you wanted to. Subs are just ours to see (these are subscriptions to the fic itself, rather than to us as authors), so are comment threads. The latter are maybe the only interesting piece of information that AO3 gives us - they are the number of comments minus our responses (and the responses of other users to those comments, but in my experience, those are rare).
I’m not someone who really cares about comment numbers, I care about their content, but I hate that AO3 has those numbers, and still prefers to go by full comment count in public. I feel like the way AO3 also includes our responses and thank you-s dissuades a lot of writers from engaging with their readers/responding because they are seen to be artificially inflating the comment count. As AO3 has those figures, it is beyond me that those are not the one they make public. Let us interact and thank our readers without being penalised, thanks!
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A note on the kudos/hits ratio extension: this is not a figure that AO3 gives us, it’s the result of a handy Chrome extension that I’ve installed, which tells you the ratio between the number of hits, and the number of kudos left. It’s started malfunctioning on the author stats page on some fics for mysterious reasons, so I’ve played with the image to show you the actual count. I’ve seen newer writers on reddit seem to be very preoccupied by this as a way to tell if their fic is liked/successful, and while I do find this interesting, I want to warn against the danger of this overall.
First, as you can see, the numbers vary greatly depending on fandoms. I don’t think my fics on TGW were that much worse and at the time of posting, they were actually quite successful, for the fandom. It’s just that maybe people kudo less overall, on that fandom, or that because there are less fics, they go back and read old ones they’ve already kudo-ed more. The ratio for most kudo-ed fic for the pairing I used to write is 6.4%, so not much higher.
Second, the longer your fic is, the lowest your ratio will be. Castles and the fault in faulty manufacturing are two fics that were/are incredibly well-received and successful, they just have lower rates because they are long and people come back to them as they can’t read everything in one go. This is especially true for multi-chapters, where readers can famously only kudo once. I think the numbers are more relevant to shorter one-shots, and with those, you can see that my ratio is rather consistent. The two outliers are ce ne sont que des cailloux and the rare firing of wild canons. I attribute the former to the fact that it’s a very niche pairing/main character, thus it doesn’t get that many hits, but the people who are interested are more starved for content and thus more likely to enjoy what’s out there/leave kudos. I attribute the latter to the fact that it’s very angsty and a sort of controversial take. a louisville slugger to both headlights was only posted very recently, so that’s why the numbers are a bit off. I expect the ration to slowly come down.
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MY TOP FICS, AND WHAT THEY CAN TEACH US
Top 5 FFN (per favourites):
these are August 2022’s figures, which is when I took this screenshot. I’ve tried to take a new one but because it’s FFN, the bloody filter doesn’t work anymore lol. I don't think there would be much of a difference though because I rarely ever post on ff anymore.
Top 5 AO3 (per kudos):
note: the fault in faulty manufacturing and watch were only published on AO3. not sure how it would do if i published it on ffn.
Thoughts (excluding castles):
I find it interesting that my TGW fics are still occupying most of the top 5 on FFN, but are not even mentioned on my AO3. I assume this is because they were published first on FFN (at a time where it was still the “lead” platform, and later imported on AO3). But, interestingly, if you compare with the image above, they’ve still got more AO3 kudos than they had faves, which is worth noting.
I also wonder if maybe, on smaller fandoms, people are more likely to check both AO3 and FFN as they are starved for content, thus driving more hits to my TGW fics on FFN.
slipped does better on FFN than it does on AO3. I can’t explain this.
Looking at this (for anyone who’s read my fics), it is clear that: 1) bigger pairings attract more readership and 2) when it comes to canon pairings like Harry/Ginny, people prefer “positive” one-shots, really centred on a couple. I will dig deeper into this in the next section but the prevalence of the wolf’s just a puppy on this list, in my opinion, proves this.
A note on Castles (if you don’t read my fics, skim over this):
I consider castles a bit of an outlier, as it’s the only multi-chaptered fic on this list. Interestingly, while it has a similar number of hits (21.5k on AO3 and 20.4k on FFN), castles does a lot better on AO3 than on FFN, both in terms of faves/kudos (though we can have a debate about whether they are comparable), but also in terms subs. I also now get a lot more engagement on AO3 than I do on FFN. This may however be impacted by the fact that email notifications haven’t worked properly on FFN in over a year, and also to the fact that I’ve expressly stated I don’t respond to FFN comments anymore, so people might just not be bothered.
One thing I will say is that the number of hits, kudos, and subs on this fic is bonkers. In a flattering way. But, to be honest, I generally avoid the stats page on AO3 for castles before I post because if I sat down to write knowing that 200+ people will get a notification every time I post, I would never post again. Regarding hits, if I take the ⅓ retention rate on FFN and transpose it here (even though I suspect, again, that the rate on AO3 might be better), the number of single readers on this fic could be 7,000 which is mental. Even if I decide half of these might be repeats (which is probably a high estimate), that is still in the thousands. I try to remind myself that those numbers are ridiculously low compared to the All the Young Dudes of this world, which sometimes helps calm my nerves.
However, I did find out something recently, that is sort of worth noting. I’m not sure what you make of it but if you search for: Harry/Ginny, canon compliant, post-war fics excluding fluff (if you’ve read castles, this selection will make sense), castles is the 4th most kudo-ed fic in the list. If you search for all of these, minus the Hinny pairing, it is on the second page (so’s the wolf’s just a puppy). That is including finished, and unfinished works, which is wild. This being said, that’s also “only” 333 fics, which is surprisingly… low? I would have thought that post-war & canon-compliant was a bit more popular as genre than this. I suppose loads of authors don’t tag their fics as such - I don’t know.
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NOW, ONTO THE HOMEMADE GOOGLE SHEET
As mentioned in the introduction, given the scarcity of stats (especially when it comes to AO3), I’ve created my own Google sheet to track information I’m interested in. Since 2021, this sheet tracks:
my monthly number of kudos, per fic and in total
my monthly number of new readers, per fic and in total
The point of the first prong is to know, generally, how many kudos I get each month, and which fics are the most “successful”. It doesn’t really dictate what I write, but it’s nice to know and relatively easy to track. You might not know this (if you’re not a writer) but AO3 (by default - you can opt out), sends you daily emails with a summary, per fic, of the kudos you got in the last 24 hours. The email looks like this:
name of the user(s) blacked out here for obvious privacy reasons
As I don’t delete those emails, all I have to do at the end of the month is to go through my emails and count all the kudos I got, enter the data, per fic, in The Sheet. This is how I know, for instance, that between 1st December and 31st December 2022, Castles got 28 kudos. That’s easy enough.
This, at the end of the year, produces a graph like this:
First of all, I would like to highlight the fact that I am SO THANKFUL that I am in position where pretty much since May 2021, bar a few rare exceptions, I get one of those email every day. This is not standard nor something you should compare yourself to. But it is oh-so-lovely and I am thankful to everyone who leaves kudos on my work, in general.
(you might also be wondering wtf happened in May 2021, but I will get back to this in a bit)
All of this being said, this is not, to me, the most interesting aspect of this sheet. To tell you the truth, I started this count, sometime last year, to verify a gut feeling I had on something else. I wanted to know which of my fics people found first. I wanted to know which brought me the most new readers. I think this is interesting and helps me figure out where my readers come from, what their tastes are, and prove my theory that long works aren’t necessarily the best investment, in terms of expanding your readership. I will come back to the fic-by-fic analysis later on, but let me tell you that that last assumption was definitely correct.
Methodology: the way I count “new” readers is by having a separate count of the first kudo left on one of my fics by a certain account. Say, user “12345” leaves a kudo on 1 August 2022 on castles, then they leave another kudo on 15 August 2022 on the wolf’s just a puppy. Their 1 August kudo will count as a “new reader” kudo, and be added to castles’ number. Their 15 August kudo will still be counted (in the monthly kudos tally - first prong) but not as a “new” kudo. In concrete terms, the way I track this is that each time I get a kudo, I copy the user’s username into my email and see if they’ve left kudos before. If they have, they’re a “returning” reader. If they haven’t, they’re new.
Having said that, please know that I know this method is inherently flawed. Firstly, because user “12345” might leave multiple kudos on different fics on the same day, which means that I can’t know which one is the one they found/read first. My understanding is that there’s no specific order in which AO3 lists the fics and the kudos in the email we get. I cope with this by adding a new reader “point” to all the fics they kudo-ed that day. I don’t know which one came first, so I consider they all did.
Additionally, guest kudos are an obvious problem. “Guests” are users who don’t have an AO3 account/aren’t logged in. They appear as “guest” in the emails sent by AO3. Because of this, I can’t know who they are, and more importantly, if they’ve been here before, when, on what fic, etc. I also know that apparently, for fics they really like, people will log out of their accounts to give the author extra kudos on different chapters, which would explain why Castles gets so many guest kudos (more on that below). The way I cope with this is that I count all guest kudos as “returning” users. They never count as “new” readers, because I can never be sure that they are.
Lastly, the fact that a user leaves a kudo on a given fic doesn’t mean that’s the first one they read. I’ve recently had a user who I know for a fact has been following me for months (leaving comments, chatting on tumblr, and all) leave their first kudo on a random fic. I counted it as a “new reader” because I had to stick to the method but frankly, I don’t actually know how they found me.
Thus, this methodology is inherently faulty, and that’s not even accounting for human error, because obviously, I count all of this manually, sometimes months later (I don’t actually do this once a month, I do it whenever I have time) so I can’t promise all of my numbers are exact. But, it does give me some sense of the information I’m trying to gather. It may not be super accurate on a granular level but generally, I reckon the picture it paints is pretty accurate.
AVAILABLE GRAPHS AND THOUGHTS
1. ONE-SHOTS PUBLISHED AS PART OF FESTS/CHALLENGES ACCOUNT FOR OVER A THIRD OF HOW PEOPLE FIND ME
There seems to be, around the fanfic community (especially on HP), this assumption that long works attract more readers, but in my experience, what attracts new readers are actually fests. In 2021, the wolf’s just a puppy, the rare firing of wild canons and pick me, choose me, love me represent a very large chunk of how people found me. In 2022, add to that the fault in faulty manufacturing which is the fic that brought me the most new readers. You would think Seamus/Dean was pretty niche, but it’s not the pairing that brings you traffic, it’s the fest. This is the only reason (imo) that the fault in faulty manufacturing did so well compared to ce ne sont que des cailloux. A 27,000 words fic about Seamus Finnigan could never had done this well without the fest it was part of. People will participate in fests, look through collections, read everything in there. It’s easier for them to find fic that way than to actually go through endless tag searches.
Coincidentally, this is actually the explanation behind the huge increase in readership I experienced in May 2021. I published two fics (the wolf is just a puppy and the rare firing of wild canons) for the Hinny fic fest, which were rather successful, and caused me to be found by a lot of people who wouldn't have otherwise found my fics. I also do think this was helped by the fact that in June, I published chapter 8 of castles, and the controversy inherent to that boosted my visibility, but at the core, it was all that one fic fest.
So, the first thing we learn from this is: fests are cool! If you want to grow your readership, participate! They are also a great way to engage with fandom and the community in general, and to make new friends. I want to try to do one once a year from now on.
2. PEOPLE DO FIND YOU OFF THE FRONT PAGE
When I say this re:HP, people usually think I’m insane, but I swear, the front page matters. If you want to know when I posted last year, just look at this graph.
I posted:
the fault in faulty manufacturing in March
castles in: July, August, October, and December
Now, of course, this isn’t a perfect science. The January peak makes no sense to me. The April peak seems to be delayed from the March posting, which is a bit bizarre. October doesn’t have much of a peak, which I think is because I posted on the 29th, which means the new readers actually spread out between October and November. But, generally speaking, while I am at a level where readers will just find my fics on their own through a steady stream of recommendations, etc., most of my “peaks” actually still come from posting. If the front page (and, the multiple, front pages for big tags - you might not stay on the overall HP front page for long, but the ship-specific ones are a bit slower to kick you out, etc. The more niche your fic is, the longer you’ll stay on the front page of that tag) wasn’t bringing me any readers, there would be no correlation between me posting and the peaks at all. I think it debunks the idea that people only find their content on rec lists, these days. They do by looking at the first fics are on the front page of the tags they’re filtering.
3. BAD FICS DON’T DO WELL, REGARDLESS OF HOW SHIPPY OR FLUFFY THEY ARE
Now, this is entirely subjective but there is one fic I have written in the past two years, and think is bad, and that’s pick me, choose me, love me. And, it’s kind of reassuring to know that it’s one of the least kudo-ed fics I’ve published, on a pretty consistent basis (see the highlighted blue line in this graph).
That fic should have everything you could consider relevant to make it a hit: it’s super fluffy, it’s shippy, it’s short, etc. But it flops compared to the others. ‘Cause it’s bad (lol, I’m allowed to say it). So, I guess one of the things we can learn from this is that there is no use in me trying to please people’s brain algorithm. I am incapable of it and I do much better when I write what I want to write and what people actually follow me for (which is deep shit).
4. LONG FICS ATTRACT A LOT OF GUESTS
I think this becomes particularly clear when you compare these two charts.
Castles (my long WIP) is only my third most popular fic, when you look at how many new unique readers it brings me. The fault in faulty manufacturing does better than Castles lmao. However, it is my biggest share in terms of total kudos, which includes guests. I don’t have specific statistics on that, but I would say that approximately 2/3rds of my kudos on Castles are guests.
Again, I don’t know if these are people logging out to give me extra kudos on specific chapters, or if they’re genuine guests - it’s obviously not something I can speculate to. But it is a very interesting phenomenon that I’m not finding anywhere else.
5. PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS SURPRISE YOU
Whilst I maintain that bad fics do badly as a general rule (though there are lots of caveats), the fics that do well are sometimes baffling. Nothing could have prepared me for the fault becoming such a big chunk of my kudos this year. It’s done better than the wolf’s just a puppy, which is honestly a bit of an institution at this point. I’m also baffled at how large of a chunk watch has, a fic that is incredibly short, incredibly sad, and very gen. These are outliers that have done better than I could ever have predicted. And, I think, while you can always try to write what you think the people want, that is definitely not a guarantee of success.
.
LASTLY, A NOTE ON THINGS THAT I DON’T TRACK (AND WHY)
Comments: I could easily track those in a similar way, but 1) I’m more interested in the content than in the numbers and 2) I play with the notification feature on those a lot. Sometimes, I’m not in a mental headspace where I can cope with having comments come directly into my emails, especially with the kind of comment I sometimes get on Castles. So, yeah.
Subs: I guess you could track subs, but that’s a bit harder to do. You’d have to check your stats every day, which I definitely don’t do. I’m invested, but not that invested. But I would be interested if there’s any specific correlation there.
Bookmarks: Same as subs. Could track, but a much more difficult endeavour.
.
CONCLUSION
So, anyway, I hope this was interesting/helpful. I don’t know, it interests me. I took a mental health day off work today, and this is apparently what I’ve decided to do with it, lol. If you have any questions/thoughts, let me know!
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ao3 stats game
tagged by @pipergirl17 and @1lostsoul0fishbowl thanks guys 💛
Rules: Give us the links to your wonderful words with the most hits, most kudos, most comments, most bookmarks, most words, and least words.
Unsurprisingly, Long Is the Road Out of Hell swept every category 😂 so here are all of my second runner ups!
Most Hits: The Interview
Most Kudos: The Interview (huh)
Most Comments: The Interview (surprise, surprise)
Most Bookmarks: The Interview (oh boy)
Most Words: Waiting For This Moment (whew)
Least Words: Let Me Start Over Again
Well, you guys definitely know what you like 😂 thanks for giving my stories so much love!
Tagging: @jenniebellie @lokinightfury @foxylibrarian @sloelimbs and anyone else who wants to join!
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Very well, @twiilys, I'll bite! 😁 (I am a shameless stats bitch. You picked me well.)
Unsurprisingly, the first five are all Anne With an E fanfics. Having published 104 of those, even with 156 total on AO3, they definitely dominate these kinds of games. The least words fic is an FMA fic from ages ago.
Most hits: Words From the Heart (14752 hits) is an unsurprising winner, given that it has 20 chapters and was posted shortly after the cancellation news. Which is not to say it's undeserving, but I do think that it's a particular study in long fic + very active fandom.
Second most kudos: Is also Words From the Heart (630) so... I don't have much to say about that. 😅 Inflection Points unsurprisingly has the most kudos, is what I'll say.
Third most comments: In Which Feelings Start to Bloom: An Inflection Points Continuation (378 comments, 138 threads) has the third most comments but the 8th most comment threads. I was apparently having a lot of extended discussions on this fic! It contains one of my favorite scenes I've written to this day, where Gilbert chooses to spell "indomitable" as A-N-N-E. (The epilogues also led to one of my best-written smut pieces: "Moonlit, Starstruck".)
Fourth most bookmarks: As the Seasons Pass (102 bookmarks) has 2.5x as many bookmarks as comments. Not sure what that says about the story, but it's a fun fact!
Fifth most words: Covalent Bonds: Ineffable Chemistry Side Stories (8,243 words) was Ineffable Chemistry lore/missing scenes that I greatly enjoyed writing.
Least words: Only Together (266 words) was written for Royai Day 2011, and while it's not the old fic I'm most proud of (that prize goes to Altered States of Consciousness), I stand by it as a fic I had fun playing around with style-wise.
Not sure I really know who to tag, but if you see this and want to do it, consider yourself tagged.
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Fic meme!
Tagged post
fic stats meme! 💌 rules: give us the links to your fic with the most hits, second most kudos, third most comments, fourth most bookmarks, fifth most words, and fic with the least words.
First! Most hits
Second, most kudos
Third, most comments (ah, a repeat! SB fans are active)
Fourth, most bookmarks (again?!)
Fifth, most words
And finally, least words
Alright, gotta tag people... @claraowl @maui-omurice
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Fic Stats Tag Game
Thanks @otpcutie for tagging me!
Rules:
Give us the links to your fics with the most hits, most kudos, most comments, most bookmarks, most words, and least words.
(As one of my fics is the top in majority of these categories, I'll follow @otpcutie's lead and include the second ones as well.)
Most hits: Above and Beyond, my ZoSanUso (One Piece) fake dating long fic, with 5432 hits as I write this post. Second ones, very close to each other are The Wingman Competition (Dragon Quest XI long fic, 1782 hits) and My Paradise is You (Smutty follow up of Above and Beyond, 1641 hits).
Most kudos: Once again, Above and Beyond is first (342 kudos). The next ones are Mending Mistakes: Bakugou Style (MHA, KiriBaku, 172 kudos) and Discovering a new side of you (One Piece, SanUso, 163 kudos).
Most comment threads: Above and Beyond is very far ahead (62 comment threads). Next one is The Wingman Competition (11 comment threads).
Most bookmarks: First one: Above and Beyond, as usual (83 bookmarks), second one: Of idiots inside and outside of the courtroom (Ace Attorney, NaruMitsu, 37 bookmarks).
Most words: You guessed it, Above and Beyond is first (34368 words). Seconds are The Wingman Competition (16963 words) and I don't want you to be hurt (Bleach, Shinji/Hiyori, Momo/Rangiku, 14277 words). This last one is the first fic I ever posted on AO3, it still holds a very dear place in my heart.
Least words: Least number of words is Love Poems (Haikyuu!!, 755 words), it was just a little poems practice. I much prefer this second least: The Skeleton who terrorized an Island of Zombies with his Singing (One Piece, Brook character study, 834 words).
Hope you all who feel like clicking have a blast reading some of this!
Tagging @cosmicatta, @purplehairedwonder, @betsib, @goldenandhappy, @ensignsenna, @quackquackcey! (Hope I didn't forget anyone XD)
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❧ Basic information in short:
➻ Everything (status/words count/tags/warnings) will change over time.
➻ If the fanfic is less than 1.5K words I will publish two (does not apply to requests).
❥ Day of publishing fanfics/requests: Friday
← [Navigation] | [Why does it take so long?] →
❥ Number of requests to do: 21
Mr. Compress: 1
“Blossoms” (+6.1k)
You've known Sako for a long time - for so long, you can't even remember how it started. It's like you've known each other forever. Atsuhiro was attentive, kind and always ready to help for you. You didn't know if it was because of his gentlemanly manners, his self-confidence or his playful attitude and treating the world like a big stage, but at some point... You fell in love with a villain... AU: Hanahaki Disease
Rating: T | Genre: Romance | ⚠ Warnings: Near death of Reader, Mutual Pining, Age gap,
Shin Nemoto: 1
Relationship Alphabet
Gang Orca: 2
SFW Alphabet
“–––” (---)
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Rating: — | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: —
Request 01: Geten, Denki Kaminari, Momo Yaoyorozu, Katsuki Bakugo
Request 02: Neito Monoma, Tamaki Amajiki
Aki Hayakawa: 2
“Halloween Night” (---)
Halloween - a time when, hidden behind masks, we can indulge our deepest desires, and the cover of mystery and anonymity adds to our confidence.
Rating: E/M | Genre: Smut | ⚠ Warnings: —
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
“Comfort of being in your arms” (+4.8)
Summary: Life as a Devil Hunter was not easy, pleasant or long. Taking this job, you all knew the risks, but still.... You want him to live as long as possible.
Rating: T | Genre: Hurt/Comfort | ⚠ Warnings: Suggested character death and minor death (mentioned), Spoilers for Season 1: episode 5 (chapters 12-15), episode 11 (chapters 31-35).
Denji: 1
“Bittersweet feeling” (---)
Rating: T | Genre: Hurt/No Comfort | ⚠ Warnings: Minor death, Blood, Forbidden/Unrequited love,
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
All For One: 4
“Compensation” (+2.8k)
All For One was fighting with All Might when another group of pro heroes came to you. Somehow you managed to convince them that you're not an enemy, but a hostage and they decided to help you, but something went wrong at some point. And now you're here again, condemned to his mercy and disfavor. All and only his.
Rating: E | Genre: Smut (Lemon), Angst | ⚠ Warnings: Yandere!AFO (obsessive/possessive behaviour), Minor death (suggested), Kidnapping, Dub-con, Blowjob, Chocking,
“Our little dirty secret” (±2.1k)
Yoichi asks his brother to talk to their younger sister about her infatuation with him, but the latter seems to have other plans.
Rating: M | Genre: Smut (Lemon) | ⚠ Warnings: Incest
“Behind the mirror” (+3.7k)
Yoichi wanted to protect [Your Name] from their older brother, but he was too weak...
Rating: E | Genre: Smut (Lemon) | ⚠ Warnings: Incest, Dirty talk, Praising, Masturbation, Creampie, Voyeurism, Gags, Bondage, Blood,
“–––” (---)
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Rating: E | Genre: Smut (Lemon) | ⚠ Warnings: Incest,
Request 03: Angel Devil, Galgali, Beam
Himeno: 1
“Our shared moments and sunrises” (+3.5k)
There are many things that people would do for a better life, but those shared moments with you Himeno will never give up for anything.
Rating: G | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: —
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Kobeni Higashiyama: 1
“One very stressful day and a moment of relief” (---)
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Rating: E/M | Genre: Smut (Lemon) | ⚠ Warnings: —
Request 04: Galgali, Beam
Mummy: 1
“–––” (---)
Rating: G | Genre: Fluff | ⚠ Warnings: None
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Hikage Shinomori: 1
“Your silent guardian, your hero, your...” (+10.5k)
For a long time you feel watched - nothing new in a world where All For One is at the height of his power, but it takes too long to look like a simple robbery...
Rating: T | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: Stalking, Kidnapping, Stockholm syndrome,
Emnu: 1
“–––” (---)
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Rating: — | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: —
Request: Daki (+9k), Mukago (+7.6k), Nakime (+7.4k)
- “They’re cute”
What else can I say? They are cute.
Rating: T | Genre: Fluff // H/C // | ⚠ General Warnings: Minor death (suggested & mentioned), Eating people (mentioned)/dead bodies, Threats, Blood, Severe injuries on the body (not Reader), Misogyny, Muzan's goal (Spoiler for: Episode 34/Chapter 67), Presented the character's past (from "Kimetsu no Yaiba Official Fanbook: Kisatsutai Kenbunroku 2"), Forbidden Love/Mutual Pining || NOT EDITED
❥ Number of fanfics to write: 15
Dabi: 2
“Prisoner in a lonely tower” (---)
Rating: — | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: —
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
“What goes around, comes around” (chapter 2)
You were neither a great hero nor a known villain. All you ever wanted was a quiet life, but it’s seldom the plans go our way, right? One day after work, you pick on the wrong person and now you have to deal wit it.
Rating: T | Genre: Angst | ⚠ Warnings: Yandere!Dabi (obsessive/possessive behaviour behaviour in future), Blackmail,
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Tomura Shigaraki (LoV): 4
“Curse” (---)
You were just a servant at the castle. A slave from the lands conquered by All For One many years ago. You don’t remember what it was like before - when you were free or even your parents’ faces. You were no one special, yet you attracted the attention of the heir to the throne. AU: Royal
Rating: — | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: —
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
“It comes at night” (---)
It comes at night. It’s ugly and weird. You don’t know what he wants, but he comes back every night. AU: Fantasy
Rating: — | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: —
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
“Train” (---)
You've always come home from work by train, but because of some creep you had to find another means of transportation home.
Rating: E | Genre: Smut | ⚠ Warnings: —
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
“Copycat” (---)
Aoi worked as a prostitute, and thanks to her quirk she was more popular and sought after than her other female colleagues. Everything was going great until Dabi introduced her to his acquaintance - a thin man looking at her menacingly with red, bloodshot eyes from behind a curtain of greasy gray hair. At first it was supposed to be just sex, but the man began to demand more and more strange requests. And who was the [Hair Color] girl after all?
Rating: E | Genre: Smut | ⚠ Warnings: —
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Kurogiri: 1
“Who are you? Do I know you?” (---)
You work at U.A. High School and you were present during the League of Villains’ first assault on freshmen. Although you resisted them (and defeated some of the intruders), things weren’t going well… or at least until All Might shows up. The Symbol of Peace defeated the muscular Nomu, the bandit leader, Shigaraki Tomura, was shot and retreated, but his right hand didn’t seem willing to leave empty-handed.
Rating: T | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: Kidnapping,
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Himiko Toga: 1
“Blood like chocolate” (---)
She is dangerous - she is sick and obsessed. Obsessed with you and she is sick with love, however, there is one thing she loves even more… blood.
Rating: T/M | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: Yandere!Toga (obsessive/possessive), Injured Reader, Gore
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Mr. Compress: 1
“Thief of the Night” (---)
Rating: T | Genre: Romance | ⚠ Warnings: —
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Hawks: 1
“Nanny” (chapter 1)
In nature, when the female hawks dies, the male is unable to take care of the young and they die - that’s why you come here, but you didn’t expect to discover the dark side of the winged hero and his corpses in the closet.
Rating: — | Genre: Dark fic | ⚠ Warnings: Yandere!Hawks (obsessive/possessive behaviour in future), Kidnapping,
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
All For One: 1
“The worst thing about wishes is that sometimes they come true” (chapter 1)
The detective must solve the murders and disappearance of two teenagers - all the clues lead to one person, but [Last Name] [Frist Name] is missing. Will he be able to solve this seemingly simple case?
Rating: M | Genre: Dark fic, Heavy Angst, Case fic | ⚠ Warnings: Yandere!AFO (obsessive/possessive behaviour), Injuries Reader, Characters Death (mentioned),
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Power: 1
“Roommates From Hell” (chapter 1)
Aki is in the hospital and the two recalcitrant devils (majin and hybrid being accurate) cannot be left unattended. Therefore, Ms. Makima decides to choose you as their new caretaker. Good luck, you will need it…
Rating: T | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: None
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Control Devil: 1
“What happened in Hamelin…” (chapter 1)
Rating: — | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: —
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Akaza: 1
“You’re weak” (chapter 1)
You used to be a hunter, but a certain accident during a fight with a demon made you have to abandon your profession for the rest of your life. The worst part, however, is that for some reason one of the stronger demons in the world has attached itself to you.
Rating: — | Genre: — | ⚠ Warnings: —
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
Muzan Kibutsuji: 1
“His property” (---)
You couldn't stand living with him anymore, so you left. You didn't have a really bad relationship, but his eternal absence and insensitivity drove you crazy - you had your needs too, but you felt like it only worked one way, so you decided to break up with him. When he came back from one of his business trips, you were already waiting for him in the living room to talk to him about it. You didn't expect that the demon king is very possessive and jealous of his toys.
Rating: T | Genre: Dark fic | ⚠ Warnings: Yandere!Muzan (obsessive/possessive behaviour),
Working on it (any information will be added/changed when I finished)
← [Navigation] | [Why does it take so long?] →
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AO3 tags that are most correlated to specific Ace Attorney Characters
Found after analyzing every AA fic on AO3 as of July 29, 2022. Methodology and dataset link below!
These are calculated by finding what percent of all fics are tagged with each character, and what percent are tagged with each tag (for any tag with 50 or more fics), and then combining those percentages to make a table of predictions.
For example, out of the 21,931 Ace Attorney fics, 0.5% are tagged with "Families of Choice" (~130 fics) and 11% are tagged with "Athena Cykes". So we'd expect there to be (21,931)(0.005)(0.11) = 12 fics tagged with both "Athena" and "Families of Choice". But in real life there are 34 of those fics-- that's 183% higher than the estimate! Which means those two tags are correlated, AKA the two things tend to happen together.
Full dataset is here for anyone who'd like to mess with it!
#ace attorney#fandom stats#fandom statistics#fanfic stats#fanfic statistics#data analysis#AKA#nerd shit#gigi originals#if you like messing w data i highly recommend checking out the full set!#the top tags as you can see have a lot of 'no duh' entries#'POV phoenix wright' correlated w Nick... who'd've guessed...#but the ones further down are v interesting!
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Research Updates
Hello, friends - long time no see. As ever, the world persists in hurling difficulties in my direction which then cause work delays - on top of which I've also been observing a lot of strike action as a member of my union, the UCU (who have won some important progress with pensions and I'm really, really hoping we might get some progress on precarity - maybe - probably not but I can dream).
All of which is to say, I have only just put my survey in for ethical proposal this past couple of weeks. It's been signed off on by my supervisor, I'm partway through getting approval from my school representative, and after that it needs to go to the central committee for formal approval.
I thought I'd go over what this application entails for those who might be curious, as it's certainly something I'd never had to deal with before! For those unaware, I'm preparing to do a survey on fanfiction practices around mental illness. Read on for all the nitty gritty of ethical approval in the UK university system.
So first of all there is a form you go through to work out if you even need ethical approval or not. This is a checklist where if you answer yes to any of the questions, you need to get formal approval from the central research ethics committee. For me, this included things like: the research will gather data around sensitive topics; the research is with vulnerable groups; the research is personal or psychological in nature.
Once that's done you have another form to fill out (you'll spot a trend here), where you give the full detail of what the project is and what it will be studying. This also requires you to explain a lot about the security of data for data protection purposes, that you know how to do GDPR compliance, and if you're studying under 16s, justifying this & explaining how you'll protect underage persons during the study.
Side note: working to understand GDPR was the worst part of this process.
This form requires a lot of supporting documents. You have to give the full research proposal, a copy of the consent form, participant information, proposed research questions (if relevant - for me it's obviously the main part), and finally any advertising copy around it. My application literally contains an example TikTok script!
Once you have all this filled in (this will take a while), you then send that to your supervisor. They give you any changes, which wasn't many for me, and then it's off to the school representative. I'm in the Division of Arts, Humanities and Architecture, which is then made up of various Schools - I'm in the School of English. So my application goes off to that representative. I've had some feedback from them already which has been super helpful, and now I'm waiting on their confirmation that I'm good to send it to the central committee!
The way that process works is that they assign two random reviewers from their list of reviewers, and they go over my application and approve/approve with changes/reject. This can take anything from three days to three weeks; bit of a piece of string. But once that's done, I'm good to start!
I'm very excited because I'm so keen to have this data and to really get to see what fanfic authors & readers do and feel around Madness. We have nothing remotely like this data wise so it's going to be super exciting to see.
So that's your update! Hope you enjoyed this glimpse into academic bureaucracy, haha <3
#fan studies#fanfic stats#fanfic#fanfiction#fandom research#fandom studies#fandom stats#phdresearch#phd#mad studies#mental illness
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