every now and then i go back to your posts and etcetera related to the gun and every single time i find myself staring in awe at such fine knowledge. its such a niche thing with so much to chew on that caters to an specific public who happen to know a bunch of things about a bunch of guns. i read these analyses and its like .. i dont know, listening to someone talk about sports or the best cars released before the y2k. fantastic discussion please never stop.
I'm so glad you've enjoyed my deranged ramblings and pet theories. I feel like I have to reiterate that I'm by no means a gun expert, but it turns out anyone can become decently knowledgeable about any niche topic if they're blorbo-obessessed enough lol.
I love reading and writing fandom meta and I'm sad I haven't had the inspiration or motivation to sink my teeth into anything in a good while. I've stepped away from fandom before though only for my interest to come back stronger than ever (The Gun Post came after year-long fandom hiatus after all) so hopefully there will be more where that came from in the future. 🤞
I recently read your additional response in that Bucky Barnes/Brock Rumlow P226 gun post.
I’m part of a Chinese winterbones ship community, and I was wondering if I could translate your analysis into Chinese and share it on a Chinese fan forum. I knew the original post had been translated, but your additional analysis is also very interesting!
Sure! I'm totally fine with translations as long as I'm credited and a link is provided back to the source (this applies to all of my posts, including the one you asked about in your 2nd message). The entire point of posting my meta on tumblr is that I feel like I have something interesting and worthwhile to share with the fandom and translations just mean more people get to hear and potentially build on my thoughts, which is all I could ever want.
I'm getting a little frustrated with people deliberately missing the point of my AO3 Stats post and making up things that I never said or implied so let's address the race and gender elephant in the room. This is especially directed at the influx of twitter users who were introduced to my post this year and now have Opinions about me. I've actually addressed this topic multiple times in the past, including in the comments of the original post, so I'm literally just going to repost one of those conversations with my response word-for-word. If you don't agree with me and still think I'm a horrible person for not inserting my own opinions about race and gender in fandom into a post designed to call attention to the ways data can lie and stop the spread of misinformation, that's your prerogative, but at least I don't have to keep repeating myself.
Comment: Why are the corrected versions omitting the data regarding pairing types and race. Wasn't that the original point of these lists, to highlight fandom biases?
My Reply: While that was supposedly OP's original goal, which I do believe is a worthy goal on the surface, the fact of the matter is it's not that simple and pretending that it's that simple leads to problems. Character races and ethnicities are often highly ambiguous/hotly debated and cannot be accurately judged (and then lumped into a handful of simplistic categories) across all fandoms by a single person, especially by someone who is not in that fandom (unsurprisingly OP gets in hot water every time they post their stats over mislabeled races and genders). Those who are actually concerned with accurate data collection and presentation generally agree it's best to leave that info off entirely rather than risk spreading inaccurate and misleading information. Also, regardless of OP's intentions, the main thing this list gets used for is ranking general fandom popularity, and it's their bad MEASURABLE data used to create those rankings that's being criticized so that's the focus of this post and the associated corrections.
Followup Comment: I concede that the race category is not that simple (in fact, I think the categories op uses for it are rather reductive), but surely pairing types/gender would be easy to categorise, being based on the way the Fandom tags a ship more than anything. Why would the fault lie with op if their list is based on the way the fandom tags the pairing in question?
Furthermore, why is op's intent irrelevant? The point of the data was to highlight the way poc and queer women are ignored in fandom spaces. The corrected data Does Not disprove this. Removing this framing turns the entire thing into a meaningless popularity contest, which is completely beside the original point. Why doesn't this bother you?
My Reply: Admittedly I'm much more wary of the race part of the list and I agree that the gender part should theoretically be more straightforward, but they've somehow still managed to screw it up. You would think that categorizing ships based on how they're tagged by the vast majority of actual fans writing the ship would be the way to go, but that's not even how they're doing it! Because apparently OP thinks they know best, which has consistently been an issue with their "methodology". For example, Aziraphale/Crowley is listed as "other" on their list despite more than 80% of the fics using the M/M tag (and it being obvious that's how most people actually view them because of the actor's genders and the character's gender presentations). All of the reader ships are also listed as "other" as well despite +90% of them being M/F. This is important information that really should be factored in or addressed somehow, as misrepresenting the popularity of true "other" ships should be antithetical to their supposed goal.
I never said that OP's stated goal was irrelevant, just that it wasn't the focus of my post or randomist1031's corrected dataset. I absolutely do not know enough about most of the fandoms on the list to feel qualified to weigh in on matters of race or gender and I suspect the individual who created the corrected dataset feels the same. That doesn't mean we're not able to focus our energy on the data we DO feel qualified to weigh in on and help stop the spread of misinformation where we can.
Also again, despite OP's stated intensions, their lists have always devolved into a meaningless popularity contest. Do I like that? No. But my opinion is, if that's what's going to happen anyway, people should at least be basing their judgements on good data so as not to draw wildly incorrect conclusions.
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.
Centreoftheselights is back at it again, posting their new 2025 "stats" and continuing to double down on their misleading methodology and presentation. You know what to do.
As an aside, I think it's pretty funny that they've decided to add a new note at the top of their latest post, tone-policing their critics (aka anyone who doesn't worship the ground they walk on) and trying to make the case that it's okay to spread misinformation to millions of people if you do it in your "unpaid free time." I'm one of the people they've blocked (shocking) – despite never once threatening, attacking, or harassing anyone – so I'm unfortunately unable to help the poor souls in their comments understand why the data in the pretty color-coded chart doesn't match up with their own fandom experience and the numbers they can see with their own eyes. Anyone wiling to venture into the comments and help spread the word would be much appreciated. Just be… tactful about it. COTL doesn't take kindly to critique, no matter what they say otherwise.
Shout out to characters who want to be used. Shout out to characters who are so desperate to be worth something that they'll endure anything. Shout out to characters who build their entire self worth around being useful, being a tool. Shout out to characters who don't care how they are treated, as long as someone pays them any attention at all
anyway in the hopes that i can save just one person from living the horror of my 20s: if you have a friend that seems a little too invested in callouts i hope you can get out of there safely
it's so easy to think to yourself "i don't have anything to hide, what do i have to worry about?" but having morals and generally doing your best not to hurt anyone will not save you. you can never be good or pure enough for these people. the target is constantly shifting and if they cannot find dirt on you they will change gears and tighten the circle of acceptable behaviors until you fit their new description of a threat. you are fully disposable to them and they are waiting to take the shot. don't confront them, don't give them the opportunity to darvo you. just hit the bricks 👍 the peace will be worth it
this post exploded overnight and my notes are full of people sharing their experiences in the tags. you all have my condolences. my favorite tag on this post said something along the lines of "if you're scared of your friends, those aren't your friends" so i hope y'all will wake up one day and realize you haven't been afraid of your friends for a very long time. it's possible i promise :)
