Have you ever wondered which FR dragons are the most popular to draw? No? Well clearly you're not a university student with looming deadlines, a severe procrastination problem and unlimited access to research grade statistics software let's dive in
Originally I was doing this to see which dragons I'd drawn the most for commissions over the years, but then I got curious generally about if the popularity of dragon breeds correlated with the amount of fanart produced. We artists are always fighting algorithms and trends, so this info may be useful to those of us looking to utilise them!
A brief intro/some disclaimers to the data:
I've only included modern breeds as they are more numerous than ancients on-site, have been around for less time (excl. Obelisks) and Excel was already protesting with what I had so I saved myself the headache. Look forward to the ancient breed sequel ahahahah :P that's a joke i'm not doing this again
For my 'tumblr popularity' data, I counted the breed of dragon of the first 100 featured in the '#flight rising art' tag. I excluded ancients and any unidentifiable breeds. Each individual dragon was counted in multi-image posts, unless if the dragon(s) in question were in a comic, series etc. in which case each unique dragon was counted once.
Assuming my personal commission stats are the least interesting to most people, but I'll give some background. I started doing comms in mid-2018, producing art at a relatively impressive volume (rip my time and motivation.) I do a lot less FR art now, but if we assume breed popularity has stayed consistent since then the only breed this should really effect are Obelisks as the newbies.
And then finally, on-site breed popularity. I used the dragon search feature on FR to identify the number of named, active dragons for each breed. Total dragons as of 27/01/24, if you were curious: 12,924,070! That's a lot of guys!!
I threw everything into percentages, then made a graph. it's got issues probably but my degree isn't in niche pixel dragon info and i was getting bored at this point
I ran some stuff through statistical tests but they don't show anything remarkable that you can't see in the graph. Rstudio claimed a few more years from my lifespan for naught
Skydancers and Imperials are crazy popular in all categories, but SDs are Tumblr's favourite
Obelisks and Ridgebacks do disproportionately well on Tumblr compared to their site popularity
Snappers and Bogsneaks are pretty unpopular across the board. I've never drawn either! But at least snaps are getting a bit of love on here
The popularity of Faes and Guardians on-site is not significantly reflected in fanart (excl. Guardian comms for me which is? an odd outlier??)
Mirrors and Nocturnes are not popular on Tumblr - found the latter interesting as I thought there may be lingering bias from NotN, but apparently not
Coatls, Pearlcatchers, Spirals and Tundras are pretty consistent between categories. Nothing really of note for these guys except for less people wanting me to draw spirals (good they're complicated)
I could draw a Wildclaw with my eyes closed and although that will not make me popular, it can make me money
Well that was a good use of 4 hours I'm going to write my essay now
and if you'd like to show your support for this cool art stats guy check out my main @lynxnothinks commissions are open thank you byeee
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