hello!! the annual ao3 year in review had some friends and i thinking - wouldn't it be cool if we had a hockey rpf specific version of that. so i went ahead and collated the data below!!
i start with a broad overview, then dive deeper into the 3 most popular ships this year (with one bonus!)
if any images appear blurry, click on them to expand and they should become clear!
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before we jump in, some key things to highlight:
- CREDIT TO: the webscraping part of my code heavily utilized the ao3 wrapped google colab code, as lovingly created by @kyucultures on twitter, as the main skeleton. i tweaked a couple of things but having it as a reference saved me a LOT of time and effort as a first time web scraper!!! thank you stranger <3
- please do NOT, under ANY circumstances, share any part of this collation on any other website. please do not screenshot or repost to twitter, tiktok, or any other public social platform. thank u!!! T_T
- but do feel free to send requests to my inbox! if you want more info on a specific ship, tag, or you have a cool idea or wanna see a correlation between two variables, reach out and i should be able to take a look. if you want to take a deeper dive into a specific trope not mentioned here/chapter count/word counts/fic tags/ship tags/ratings/etc, shoot me an ask!
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with that all said and done... let's dive into hockey_rpf_2024_wrapped_insanity.ipynb
BIG PICTURE OVERVIEW
i scraped a total of 4266 fanfics that dated themselves as published or finished in the year 2024. of these 4000 odd fanfics, the most popular ships were:
Note: "Minor or Background Relationship(s)" clocked in at #9 with 91 fics, but I removed it as it was always a secondary tag and added no information to the chart. I did not discern between primary ship and secondary ship(s) either!
breaking down the 5 most popular ships over the course of the year, we see:
super interesting to see that HUGE jump for mattdrai in june/july for the stanley cup final. the general lull in the offseason is cool to see as well.
as for the most popular tags in all 2024 hockey rpf fic...
weee like our fluff. and our established relationships. and a little H/C never hurt no one.
i got curious here about which AUs were the most popular, so i filtered down for that. note that i only regex'd for tags that specifically start with "Alternate Universe - ", so A/B/O and some other stuff won't appear here!
idk it was cool to me.
also, here's a quick breakdown of the ratings % for works this year:
and as for the word counts, i pulled up a box plot of the top 20 most popular ships to see how the fic length distribution differed amongst ships:
mattdrai-ers you have some DEDICATION omg. respect
now for the ship by ship break down!!
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#1 MATTDRAI
most popular ship this year. peaked in june/july with the scf. so what do u people like to write about?
fun fun fun. i love that the scf is tagged there like yes actually she is also a main character
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#2 SIDGENO
(my babies) top tags for this ship are:
folks, we are a/b/o fiends and we cannot lie. thank you to all the selfless authors for feeding us good a/b/o fic this year. i hope to join your ranks soon.
(also: MPREG. omega sidney crosby. alpha geno. listen, the people have spoken, and like, i am listening.)
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#3 NICOJACK
top tags!!
it seems nice and cozy over there... room for one more?
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BONUS: JDTZ.
i wasnt gonna plot this but @marcandreyuri asked me if i could take a look and the results are so compelling i must include it. are yall ok. do u need a hug
top tags being h/c, angst, angst, TRADES, pining, open endings... T_T katie said its a "torture vortex" and i must concurr
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BONUS BONUS: ALPHA/BETA/OMEGA
as an a/b/o enthusiast myself i got curious as to what the most popular ships were within that tag. if you want me to take a look about this for any other tag lmk, but for a/b/o, as expected, SID GENO ON TOP BABY!:
thats all for now!!! if you have anything else you are interested in seeing the data for, send me an ask and i'll see if i can get it to ya!
i've been going through sports express, the russian website, looking up articles about ovi and geno, and it's really interesting reading about geno's departure from russia - in chronological order, from russian media. machine translated but the dates link to the original articles! some of the info is thin on the ground because i think it would have originally been given more detail in print.
posting mostly for me but maybe some other genoheads will find it interesting too ... the sense that metallurg were anxious to keep him in place goes back to more than year before he actually left, insisting they would keep him until 2008 ...
under the cut because it's quite long but it includes crazy things like zimin calling geno a pussy for leaving even though russian teams "enslave" their players and then on the same day bure claiming that geno didn't have to sign a contract. it's really interesting i think. comments from both his parents and everything, and it seems he was genuinely off-grid for a number of days, with people suspecting but unable to get in touch with him
something of course to keep in mind is that all of this was at-the-time reporting and people in various places had their own agendas for what they're saying, for example velichkin claimed that geno's resignation letter was a forgery. this contradicts reporting from pittsburgh at the time that geno's agents sent his resignation for him, but it's not the point of why i'm collating all these quotes and articles, it's because it's deeply interesting to read through the on-the-ground reporting complete with all biases and stuff from the time.
July 25, 2005: Gennady Velichkin, General Director of the Metallurg Magnitogorsk hockey club, believes that overseas media outlets are rushing to send [Evgeni Malkin] to the [NHL]. He stated this in a telephone interview with RIA Novosti. "Malkin is ours until 2008, and we have an agreement with his agents that he will definitely spend the next season in Russia," Velichkin noted. [...] the NHL and the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) had reached an agreement on a new transfer agreement governing the transfer of European players to clubs in the world's best hockey league. Specifically, it was reported that under the new agreement, NHL clubs will be able to pick up any player they drafted until August 15, even if he or she is under contract with a European club.
August 26, 2005: "I hope Pittsburgh will respect my decision." As SE previously reported, 19-year-old Russian Evgeni Malkin, the second overall pick in the 2003-04 NHL Entry Draft, chose the Russian club when choosing between Magnitka and Pittsburgh.
April 27, 2006: [...] the election of Vladislav Tretiak as FHR president has increased the Penguins' chances of acquiring Russian national team and Metallurg Magnitogorsk forward Evgeni Malkin as early as next season. The publication believes that, unlike his predecessor, Alexander Steblin, Tretiak could facilitate negotiations between the two sides. Russia is the only European hockey power that has not signed a player transfer agreement with the NHL.
June 21, 2006: Reports that Magnitogorsk Metallurg forward Evgeni Malkin has signed a contract with the Pittsburgh Penguins are premature, as the transfer agreement between the IIHF and the NHL, which Russia has agreed to join, has not yet been formally signed, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
August 7, 2006: Yesterday evening, Metallurg president Viktor Rashnikov, cutting short his latest vacation, urgently flew to Magnitogorsk for talks with Evgeni Malkin. As a result of the late-night negotiations, attended by club executives and the player and his agent, Malkin's previous contract, which had kept him with Magnitka until April 30, 2008, was annulled and a new one was signed. The Russian national team forward will spend the 2006-07 season with Metallurg, and on May 1, 2007, he will become a free agent and be able to choose a new club.
August 13, 2006: According to Reuters, citing ITAR-TASS, Magnitogorsk Metallurg forward Evgeni Malkin has left the team's camp after arriving in Finland on Saturday to participate in a preseason tournament. The forward, who celebrated his 20th birthday two weeks ago, departed for an unknown location, taking his documents and personal belongings with him. News agencies were unable to obtain official comment from the club's management.
August 13, 2006: The management of Magnitogorsk Metallurg has no new information regarding Evgeni Malkin's whereabouts. His phone is not answering, and the hockey player himself has not contacted anyone. [...] Zimin ... noted that it is not surprising that Malkin allegedly defected to the NHL. Zimin emphasized that he does not intend to condemn the hockey player, but is convinced that Malkin acted dishonestly [...] In the coach's view, "as a player, he acted very unmanly" and should have defended his position to the end.
August 13, 2006: Pavel Bure said he understands Evgeni Malkin's desire to play in the world's strongest hockey league, but is very surprised by the player's actions. "There's no point in doing that now, because we live in a democratic country, and he didn't have to sign a contract with us. Now you can easily go wherever you want," the general manager of the Russian Olympic team noted.
August 14, 2006: "My son simply lost his temper; his nerves couldn't take it anymore," [Vladimir Malkin] said. "At the last minute, he was persuaded to stay with Magnitka, even though his mind was already set on the NHL. I understand, but I don't support him. It was a childish act! Before I can assess what happened, I need to speak with him personally."
August 14, 2006: The Russian Ice Hockey Federation (RIH) announced in its official press release that it is closely monitoring the situation surrounding national team player Evgeni Malkin. [...] "The RHF is confident that Evgeni Malkin can have a vibrant, action-packed, and highly beneficial season in Russia—for himself, Metallurg, and the Russian national team. However, on Saturday, it became clear that the player had left his club. To understand all the details of this event, it is necessary to hear from all parties involved. Evgeni Malkin has not yet been contacted, and his whereabouts are unknown."
August 14, 2006: "Zhenya really wanted to go to the NHL and was tormented by the thought that refusing to play for the Penguins would damage his reputation in America. If not for Viktor Rashnikov's personal request, he wouldn't have signed that contract," Natalia Malkina said, referring to the contract with Magnitogorsk's Metallurg.
August 15, 2006: Where to look for Malkin? [...] the hockey player's subsequent actions shouldn't be surprising. Having waited until his first trip abroad with the club and received his passport with a Canadian visa for the occasion (until then, it had been kept in Velichkin's desk—another "argument"), Malkin immediately gained freedom in the most accessible way at the time.
(NB: this whole article is very long, it's an opinion piece and it's a bit crazy, but it's really interesting culturally, discussing that metallurg dealt with geno in a 'soviet' way and he responded in kind.)
August 17, 2006: The fax containing Evgeni Malkin's resignation letter sent to the Magnitogorsk Metallurg office is a crude forgery [...] "You don't have to be a handwriting expert to immediately recognize that the document wasn't written by Malkin, but in a feminine, overly calligraphic handwriting. Moreover, judging by the Old Church Slavonic, it was clearly written by an émigré. But most importantly, the signature is illegible." [...] "The lawyer told me he had no right to attach this 'worthless piece of paper' to his personal file, and after our conversation, he simply tossed this crude forgery in the trash."
August 19, 2006: Werner, according to the newspaper, acknowledged his involvement in the matter but denied doing anything illegal. Malkin, he claimed, needed to hide in Helsinki for a while, and Barry relied on Werner for this. "It all went very quickly," Peter Werner said in an interview. "Luckily, I have the right contacts, so we were able to quickly rent an apartment for a few days. We also agreed to work with a security company." Malkin lived in this apartment with Barry while the latter was applying for an American visa at the US Embassy in Helsinki, reports SE correspondent Marat ZUBKO.
September 4, 2006: Malkin's agents, Barry and Brisson, are expected to begin negotiations immediately after the weekend. The discussions are expected to be short, and a standard entry-level contract will serve as the basis. "Malkin has been ready to play at the NHL level for quite some time. Now Barry and I must enter into negotiations with Pittsburgh so Evgeni can play," Brisson said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
September 5, 2006: Russian national team forward Evgeni Malkin, selected second overall in the 2004 National Hockey League (NHL) Entry Draft by the Pittsburgh Penguins, signed a contract with the club on Tuesday, RIA Novosti reports, citing the Penguins' official website.
September 5, 2006: According to Velichkin, two "alternative options" are possible: "Either the NHL understands that Evgeni cannot play for any club other than Metallurg this season and returns him to Magnitogorsk, or it begins negotiations with us to assign his contract," he noted.
September 6, 2006: "There are regulations according to which a hockey player can be disqualified and banned from playing in the Russian championship for such violations. However, this disqualification does not apply to the national team," Tretiak stated. "The Russian Ice Hockey Federation wants changes to labor laws. This will prevent a situation where, in the middle of the season, a player who is being counted on resigns and leaves."
September 15, 2006: The Russian Ice Hockey Federation (RIH) Arbitration Court has banned Evgeni Malkin from playing for any club other than Magnitogorsk Metallurg, RIA Novosti reports. [...] Malkin's representatives did not appear at the arbitration hearing, despite having been notified in advance of the date.
this isn't all the reporting, i'm sure i missed some, but this was the stuff that swirled around on this website at that time. timeline footnote is that geno was then injured in a pre-season game on september 20th, 2006. there was lots of reporting on this, too, and discussing that his parents were trying to get american visas to come be with him. he dislocated his shoulder and eventually debuted on october 18th, 2006. metallurg tried to sue the penguins after his debut, but it was dismissed in feb 2007.
idk how to word this properly but wrt the fanfic thing you reblogged earlier. Why do fanfic writers have such different expectations than any other content hosting platform?
Like lets take youtube as a point of comparison, Engagement like comments and likes largely exists to boost the works place in algorithm, thats why youtubers put in calls to action and other engament bait. Few with decent reach even read the comments and the audience shouldnt try to develop any weird parasocial relationship with the youtuber. Fanfic authors ask for likes (kudos, because the websites gotta use nonstandard language for some reason) and comments despite them not having any impact on an algorithm, and seem to want the audience to try and develop a relationship with the author based on tumblr posts like that one.
Why the radical difference in behaviour away from the norm? And honestly with all the (usually) metaphorical blood spilled online about parasociality why are authors really surprised that the audience tries to keep their distance as is best practice with any other content producer?
okay I am going to answer this as kindly and as calmly as I can and try to assume that you are asking this in good faith. because my friend, the fact that you feel the need to ask is, to me, The Problem.
[this is, for the record, in response to this post]
fanfiction writers are not *posting content.* (I also have reservations about engaging with the term "content producer" or "content creator" but let's put that aside for now, I'll circle back to it.) you say "they seem to want the audience to try and develop a relationship with the author" as though it is strange, off-putting, and incomprehensible to you, when in fact that is the point of writing fanfiction. it is a way of participating in fandom. it is a way of building community and exchanging ideas and becoming closer with people.
if authors wanted to solely ~generate content~ that would get them attention (?? to what end, the dynamic you have described seems to equate algorithmic supremacy as winning for winning's sake, as though all anyone wants to do is BUILD an audience without ENGAGING with them, which I cannot fathom but let's pretend for a moment that is, in fact, true) then like. if that were the case why on earth would they choose a medium in which they categorically cannot succeed and profit, because it isn't their IP?
you are equating two things that are not at all the same thing. to the degree that parasocial relationships are to be avoided, and "that person is not trying to be your friend they are trying to entertain you, please respect their boundaries" is a real dynamic -- which it is!! -- like. you have to understand that the reason that is true for the people of whom it is true is because it is their JOB. they are storytellers by profession, and they are either through direct payment, or sponsorship, or advertising, or through some other means, profiting off of your attention. i don't say this to be dismissive, many wonderful artists and actors and comedians and any number of a thousand things that i enjoy very much go this route but they do so as a *career choice.* and so when you violate the public/private boundary with them, you are presuming to know a Person rather than their Worksona. the people who work at Dropout or who stream their actual play tabletop games or who broadcast on TikTok or YouTube are inviting me to feel like i know them to the degree to which that helps them succeed in their medium and at their craft, but there MUST be a mutual understanding that that's a feeling, not a fact.
however.
a fanfiction writer is not an influencer, not a professional, and is not looking to garner "success." there is no share of audience we are trying to gain for gain's sake, because we are not competition with one another, because there is nothing to win other than the pleasure of each other's company. we are doing this for no other reason than the love of the game; because we have things we want desperately to say about these worlds, these characters, these dynamics, and because we *want more than anything to know we are not alone in our thoughts and feelings.* fanfiction is a bid for interaction, engagement, attention, and consideration. it is not meant to be consumed and then moved on from because we are NOT paid for our work, nor do we want to be. the reward we seek is "attention," but attention as in CONVERSATION, not attention as in clicks. we are not IN this for profit, or for number-go-up. there is no such thing: legally there cannot be. we are in this because we want to be seen and known.
like. please understand. i am now married to someone i met because of mutual comments on fanfiction. our close friend and roommate, with whom i have cohabitated for over a decade now, is someone I met because of mutual comments on fanfiction and livejournal posts. that is my household. beyond my household, the vast majority of my closest personal friends are people with whom I built relationships in this way.
you ask why fanfiction writers want THIS and not "the norm," but the idea of everything being built to cater to an algorithm to continue to build clout, as though the only method of reaching people is Distant Overlord Creator and Passive Receptive Audience being "the norm" is EXTREMELY NEW. this is not how it has always been!! please think of the writers of zines in a pre-internet fandom, using paper and glue and xerox to try and meet like-minded people in a world that was designed for you to only ever meet people in person, by happenstance, in your own hometown. imagine the writers of the early internet, building webrings from scratch to CREATE a community to find each other, despite distance. imagine livejournal groups, forums, and -- yes, indeed, of course -- comment threads IN STORIES -- as places where people go to *converse.* in the past, we had an entire Type Of Guy that everyone knew about, the BNF ("Big Name Fan") whose existence had to be described via meme because it was SO DIFFERENT THAN THE NORM. treating fellow fans like celebrities or people too cool for the regular kids to know was an OUTLIER, and one commonly understood to lead to toxicity.
in the past, I have likened writing fanfiction to echolocation. i am not screaming because I like hearing the sound of my own voice, though i can and do find my voice beautiful. i am screaming so that the vibrations can bounce back to me and show me the world. the purpose is in the feedback. otherwise it is just noise.
does this make any sense? can you see, when i describe it that way, why an ask like yours makes me feel despair, because it makes us all sound so horribly separate from one another?
perhaps I will try another metaphor:
a professional chef who runs a restaurant will not have her feelings hurt if you never fight your way into the kitchen to personally tell her how much you enjoyed the meal. that would, indeed, violate a boundary. professional kitchens are a place of work, and you have already showed her you enjoyed the meal by paying for it, or by perhaps spreading your enjoyment by word of mouth to your friends so they, too, can have good meals. you show your appreciation by continuing to come back. if a bunch of people sitting around randomly happen to have a conversation about how much they love the food, it wouldn't hurt that chef's feelings to not be included in the conversation. however: EVEN IN THIS INSTANCE, it is ADVISABLE AND APPROPRIATE to leave a good review! you might post about how much you like this restaurant on Yelp, and it would probably make the chef feel great to see those positive comments. but the chef doesn't NEED them, because the chef is, again, *also being paid to cook.* that's why she started the restaurant, to be paid to cook!
i am not being paid to cook.
i am at home in my own kitchen, making things for a community potluck where i hope everyone will bring something we can all enjoy together. some people at the potluck are better bakers, some better cooks; some can't cook at all but are great at logistics and make sure there's enough napkins for everyone; some people come just to enjoy the food, because that's what the party is for. and if I, as this enthusiast chef who made something from my heart for this reason alone, learned after the fact that a bunch of people got together in the parking lot to rave about my dish but no one of them had ever bothered to tell me while I sat alone at my table all night, occasionally seeing people come by to pick up a plate but never saying anything to me -- of course that would bother me, because I am not otherwise profiting off the labor I put in. this is not a bid to be paid, because if someone WERE to say "hey, great cake!! here's five bucks for a slice" i would say no, friend, that is not the point and give them the money back. i'm not trying to Get Mine. I am in it to see the look on your face. I'm in it so you can tell me what about it moved you, so that I can say back what moved me to make it in the first place. so we can TALK about it.
because what happened in the first place is this: one time I had a cake whose sweetness, richness, flavor, intensity, and composition moved me so much that I *taught myself to bake.* so I could see how much vanilla and sugar was too much, so I could learn how to make things rise instead of fall flat, so I could even better appreciate the original cake by seeing for myself the effort and talent and inspiration that goes into making one even half as good.
learning to do so is a satisfying accomplishment in and of itself, yes.
but I also did it because at the end of the day we should EAT the cake. and it's a lonely thing, to eat alone when a meal was always designed and intended to be shared.
so, to answer your last question: i'm not surprised, i'm just sad. because somehow two things that were never meant to be seen as the same have been labeled "content," and thus identical. and it diminishes both the things that ARE intended to be paid for AND the things that are not, because it removes any sense of intimacy or meaning from the work.
i hope you know i'm not mad at you for asking. but i'm frustrated we've come to live in a world where the question needs to be asked, because the answers are no longer intuitively obvious because we're so siloed.
ALL OF THIS - especially "we are doing this for no other reason than the love of the game; because we have things we want desperately to say about these worlds, these characters, these dynamics, and because we *want more than anything to know we are not alone in our thoughts and feelings.*"
what if you were an ANNOYING AMERICAN BOY who beat a SWEET CANADIAN BOY at THE junior tournament and he HATED you but then you SAT ON THE PLANE TOGETHER and you made him LAUGH and you became BEST FRIENDS and had a SECRET HANDSHAKE and a SHARED ROOFTOP PLAYLIST and DEBUT GOALS MINUTES APART and you both became the SUPERSTAR SAVIORS of your FAILING FRANCHISE but then he got TRADED away and you kept getting INJURED and said the injuries HURT LESS THAN THE TRADE and EVERYBODY called you WASHED UP while he THRIVED but THEN YOU GOT TRADED BACK TO HIM??
NRK is celebration a decade of Skam (😭) with a nine episode podcast. You can listen here
I'm collaborating with @kosegruppie who will be posting my translations and make subtitled videos with them. Make sure to follow them here on insta for all the latest!
Below the cut you'll find the transcript of the first episode (I've skipped a few summaries, the radio hosts watching the show etc, but all cast and crew interviews are there!). Enjoy!
From 03:50
Torkil Risan: It’s hard to measure that kind of thing, but Skam has to be Norway’s biggest tv show success. It was a small productio with low budget, had unknown actors and no traditional marketing. But the show would go on to break streaming records, set the agenda for public debate and take part in changing the language both in Norway and abroad. It would change the lives of many young people and entertain hordes of adults, and not only in Norway, no. There were people using their free time to translate the Norwegian episodes to a steadily growing international audience. Episodes were downloaded both illegally and, well only illegally really. But whatever. People all over the world were watching Skam. Skam has, up until this point, nine international adaptations, with Sram in Croatia as the latest one - it came out in October 2024. And all of this, that is the Norwegian original version, is created, written and directed by one person - Julie Andem.
JA: It became very difficult after a while to film and keep the storylines secret, because we were recorded wherever we went. Especially the outdoor scenes. Like at Nissen there were suddenly hordes of fans from all over the world when we were supposed to film, so that made it a bit difficult.
TR: And you can’t picture what it would become like when unknown 16 and 17 year olds get cast in a new show at NRK.
JA: Before these actors got their roles, at the last round of auditions, I had a talk with each one of them where I said: “I don’t know how big this show will become, it can become nothing, but it might become big. And if it becomes big and you become famous, you give away part of your freedom - the freedom to be anonymous to people. Today, when you’re on the bus, having a bad day, no one bothers you. But after you’ve become famous, people will walk up to you and want to talk to you and you can’t get away from that. When I call you next week and give you the role, if I do, I’ll ask if you’ve thought that over, and what you think of it - because you have to think that over now.” And I said that to each one of them before they got their parts. And then I think it was Josefine who said, we talked later about what I had said, that she thought “that lady is delusional. She’s making a small P3 show”. My talk went in one ear and out the other.
JA: It’s hard to imagine things like this for people that haven’t experienced success like that, and what it demands of you afterwards. And the freedom you lose to be anonymous. It is a really difficult pressure and it can be challenging. We thought a lot about it throughout and one of the main reasons that we ended Skam when we did, was because of that pressure on the young actors.
TR: Is this an ongoing conversation with the cast?
JA: I always think - there’s no one outside of it who understands what we experienced with Skam. So the best ones to talk to, always, about these things are the cast and the production team, who understand it and have the same feelings.
TR: That Skam also changed the lives of those who created it, we’ve established. I am curious about how Julie Andem, who has no clue how big the show is going to become, created these characters?
JA: As I remember it, I did loads of research with the target group to understand what that group, girls in Norway aged 16, needed, what stories it needed. And I think my goal was to develop 10 characters who could fit into a universe about them. That’s where I started. And the plan was that all the characters would develop in a way that they could carry their own season. So all of them were developed as main characters. I created them before the seasons, before the storylines.
TR: In September it’ll be ten years since Skam was released. It was released more like an event than a traditional tv show. Short clips could be dropped at any point during the week and people in the show posted on social media. It was Mari Magnus who was responsible for these digital updates.
MM: All the characters, even if they don’t have open accounts on social media, have a bunch of email addresses. I have a box full of sim cards and burner phones. Everyone had a facebook account. They were private, but it was so that it would feel a little real if you searched “Isak Valtersen”.
TR: Someone else that became well known to the audience, was media professor Vilde Schanke Sundet. She saw the format as unique enough that she had to start doing research on Skam while it was still possible.
VSS: I binged the entire first season one night. I remember laying in the cosy corner at home, watching on the ipad. I went to bed at 2:30 am and thought “now I understand what they are talking about”. I was interested in analysing it the same way researchers have been interested in analysing multimedia storytelling - how the story is built, how you make the different components, what it is NRK wants with this show, what it is trying to tell. And you become so drawn into the story that the ability to analyse goes a bit up and down through the different seasons.
TR: What makes Skam different from other tv shows?
VSS: There’s both things that make it very different and things that are very similar. Because the dramatic curves are similar to other dramas we know of. It’s love triangles, good vs evil, the struggle to find yourself, all things similar to the high school/coming of age genre. And it’s well made, but that’s not what’s groundbreaking. The groundbreaking part is how the story is told. You're doing it real time, so if you’re following the blog it will appear very close. You never know when something is coming. It’s unpredictable, it drags people in. It’s based on the needs of the audience. They did loads of research when developing the show and it appears closer when the setting is a Norwegian high school than an American one. That makes it different and innovative. I think all the fans know they are fictional characters, but they feel much more real because we are not sitting down in front of the tv to watch, they are just there in your everyday life. It’s much more at the top of your mind than other things you watch and put behind you until the next episode is released.
TR: The way Skam was created made it special. But that was not the most important part for Morten Hegseth.
MH: The format has been given too much credit. It was a good format to post clips in that way, but the reason it was so good was that the content was amazing. It wasn’t the publishing strategy that made Skam an international phenomenon.
(Skip to 13:26)
TR: Before they created Skam, the show creator Julie Andem and a few others made in depth interviews with young people in the target group. And the challenges Eva has in season 1, was pretty common with the group.
JA: What is that life like? When you’re coming from secondary school, where you have a friend group and a familiar and safe environment and you’re thrown into a new universe. Everything is starting over and you have to find your place again. But she starts out as a girl who has become totally dependent on her boyfriend. She’s been thrown out of the friend group because of the choice she’s made to be together with her boyfriend, with Jonas, and that makes her dependent on him.
TR: A successful way to independence is to become friends with a confident, stylish and cool new girl, like Noora. That, despite being good in Spanish, isn’t as crazy about russ as the other girls Eva start’s to hang out with - Jente-Chris, Vilde and Sana, who has concrete plans to fix a spot on a russebuss. And there you have our girl gang. Do you, the listener, think they are cool? Are they supposed to be cool?
JA: Socially, in school, they are not a cool group. That’s what the first storyline is about. The Pepsi Max gang are the cool, pretty girls and the other girls are not so cool. But I think they are very cool.
TR: What about the boys, aren’t they cooler?
JA: Yeah, they do at least have cooler references and masks. I’s more important to them to be cool. So they might be “cooler”.
TR: To actress Lisa Teige, it was a bit like starting a new school - moving from Bergen and start working as an actor in Skam. How much of Eva is really in Lisa?
LT: In the beginning I felt very different from Eva, because she went through very different things, I thought at that time. But things like finding friends in high school, I do identify with. I didn’t have that boyfriend drama, at least so early on. But looking back at it now, I would say I see myself in a lot of the things Skam talks about. I’ve also been in girl drama, had partner problems and the vulnerability in finding new friends. But back then, I felt the need to be like “No! I’m not going through the same things as Eva right now”. But really I did eventually go through those things.
TR: And like Eva, Lisa did find some good friends on Nissens’s school yard.
LT: I remember I noticed they were a few years older than me. I thought they were incredibly cool. That was my first thought “shit, these are cool people with experience”. It felt very cool to be part of that group. And I have so many good memories from the set with all the girls together. Especially because there’s a lot of humor surrounding the Vilde and Chris characters. They improvised many funny parts and we were laughing so hard on set. The dynamics of the group was really good.
TR: But Bergen, where Lisa is from, and Oslo are two different cities and they have different accents.
LT: Some things were difficult for me, as someone from Bergen. Like when I was supposed to say vors (pre-game) for the first time, which I had never said before and I don’t think I had ever been to one. And they said vors in the Oslo dialect and it was so difficult for me. I had to call mum and dad back home to ask how I was supposed to say the word.
TR: Eva is also one of the characters who is making out the most in the show. And here both Lisa and actor Marlon Langeland, who plays Jonas, got thrown into the deep end from the start.
LT: We had a workshop before filming, where we got to know each other and we played some games, as warm up. But to start kissing that person is something totally different. I remember dreading that quite a lot, because we were making out the first day of filming.
LT: And that’s the kind of thing you dread a lot, but when you first get going it’s very mechanical in a way. You don’t think about what you’re really doing and it’s like “can you place your hand there”, “turn a bit that way” and “make the kiss a bit more intense, because it looks good on camera”.
(skip to 27:19)
TR: Mari Magnus mentioned The penetrators, the coolest russebuss at Nissen.
MM: Penetrators has a song, that’s on Spotify and I don’t know if it has been said before, it probably has, but *whispers* it’s Tarjei.
TR: That’s rapping?
MM: Yes.
TR: So they guy singing lines like “Penetrators cums on your face, the weather report says flooding, it’ll rain cum”, that Tarjei Sandvik Moe, who plays Isak. Tarjei went to Nissen himself during this time and managed to sneak in several references to actual things going on in the school. And to blur the lines between the fictional and reality was one of the show’s goals. To make the show as real as possible they had instagram accounts and could start chatting with each other on friday evenings.
MM: It was a Friday evening and Julie was probably at work and we posted a photo on Jonas’ account, a Big Smalls reference, that he tagged Isak in. And we are logged into one account each, one on Isak’s, one on Jonas’. And we decided to have some fun in the comment section, hoping that maybe three people would see it, but that these three would have such a weird experience that they in school on Monday would say “You won’t believe what I say on instagram on Friday”. So Isak and Jonas drag Eva into it, but Eva is on a russebuss. And the audience is so cool, there are fans playing along and commenting things like “I saw you in the cafeteria today” “what did you get on your maths test?”. This is week two maybe, and those things we could do a bit more strategically at the start to get the engagement going.
TR: It’s a bit slow in the beginning, but interest in Skam grows quite fast. So to chat as the characters on instagram becomes too difficult, there’s too many others taking part in the conversation. And some audience members were more engaged than others. One of them was Julian Dahl, who was very active in the comment section. Active enough to get mentioned in the show.
TR: You’re living alongside these characters and sometimes that creates problems. Because Eva wants Jonas and Isak to go with her to the revy-party but they can’t. Why not?
Isak: We can’t
Jonas: Why not?
Isak: The tickets to Kindred Fever.
Jonas: I had totally forgotten that.
TR: You’re excused if the name Kindred Fever doesn’t ring any bells. They had a mini hype right around the time when this was released and they happened to have a concert the same day as the revy-party.
JA: The only reason we picked that concert was because it was Oslo that day. We just thought what band could they possibly be interested in that’s playing in Oslo that day?
TR: To make the right references is hard when you’re making a show. How do you know what 16 year old boys are saying, doing and would post? Sometimes Mari Magnus asked the actors to do it themselves.
MM: In season one we sent Isak, Eva and Jonas out on the town with some phones and told them to make some content as if they were a friend group eating burgers in town. And they came home with loads of nice stuff we could post.
(Skip to 33:40)
TR: I’m at your disposal - you can ask questions about the show and leave your thoughts and tips. There’s many easter eggs and symbolism in Skam that might be fun to dig deeper into if we come across it. There’s a messaging function on NRK radio. You could for example ask, like I asked Julie Andem, why is the show called Skam?
JA: We had loads of suggestions and we hung big sheets of paper at the auditions where they could write suggestions for the name of the show. And we got a lot of strange ones and Ingvild Marie Nyborg, who was on the team, came up with Skam and no one of us hated it, so that was the one.
TR: Do you remember any of the ones you hated?
JA: I remember “the 99:er gang”.
TR: I’ve found some questions the fans are wondering by sneaking around in some of the many Skam online fan forums: Like, who in the Skam universe is Lisa Teige?
LT: During the auditions I very much wanted to be Noora. Especially when I was 16 I thought Noora was super cool. But I do feel closest to Eva. I recognize myself in the insecurity and the fun parts and being someone with principles. It’s a boring answer, but it is Eva. That’s why I got to play her.
incredible. importantly, sid has no idea this is happening. he’s just being a good sport, meeting with candidates like the front office has asked him to, taking them to dinner with no idea it’s a date and being filmed. in the confessional the candidate is like, “you know you hear about the fabled sidney crosby your whole career, but when he’s sitting across the table from you, his eyes sparkling in the candlelight as he talks about his deep passion for the game, you have a moment outside yourself where you realize that your whole life has been leading up to this point. I’ve been doing this a long a long time, but [looks wistfully at something off camera] he makes me feel like I still have a lot to learn about myself. [turns back to the camera with a small smile] And that’s exciting.”
Kyle calls Sid into his office the next morning to get his take, and Sid gives some vague non-committal answer in his media voice. Kyle’s eyes dart to the camera even though he’s not supposed to look directly at it, and subtly shakes his head. This one’s not moving on to the coveted overnight date.
I read this book in two sittings on Saturday (Penguins had a blow out loss and Geno wasn’t playing - it was a good distraction). Written by a Canadian former NHL coach, it offers his perspective on the differences between hockey in Russia v North America and background on both Metallurg and Magnitogorsk. Also good for Malkin fans :)
here is the kinkuary 2025 master list. here is a link to the collection on ao3. it will open sometime in the evening of january 31.
a few notes:
the collection is unmoderated and i am not reading each individual entry. please be mindful of your fellow participants and tag and warn as is appropriate!
this is a pan-fandom event. all pairings from all fandoms are welcome, no exceptions. no anti nonsense will be tolerated, and if you see any please send me a note so i can ban that person from participating.
there are no minimum participation requirements for this event. you can do some, all, or none, and the prompt fills don't have to be posted the day of—this is just a guideline to hopefully help spark your creativity in a tough month of the year! in the past, people have even combined multiple prompts for one larger work. whatever you want! just try to keep the theme in mind.
leave comments! we all do our best to write for ourselves, but communities are only as strong as the participants. i hope we all work hard to lift each other up, especially this year!
and finally—this is an 18+ only event. no exceptions.
allow me to explain. Yule boasting is an old Norse tradition of getting shitfaced at the winter solstice feast and standing up to proclaim all the great, infamous, and wildly improbable deeds you will perform in the coming year. can range from an unlikely but technically possible claim, like "I'm going to rob 300 banks", to something you'd have to bend the laws of the universe to actually accomplish, like "I'm going to punch a god in the dick and steal his horse". these are not plans. they're not even goals. they're the things you'd do in a self-insert superhero fanfic. and honestly all I want this holiday season is for a bunch of friends to go all in on this nonsense with me and hype ourselves up in ways previously unimaginable
data collection: jan 4 2025
date range: 2024-01-01 to 2024-12-31
*note: i specify english because some sports rpf fandoms are heavily chinese-leaning, but the cultural considerations of using ao3 in china and/or writing chinese fic about english-speaking athletes aren't quite the same. and almost all chinese rpf is public so it'd skew the results!
i thought it'd be fun to make a table of the Sports RPF 2024 4th Wall Olympics, i.e. what share of works per sports rpf fandom in 2024 was user-restricted, because i'm a 4th wall believer and am constantly #striving to keep our archives safe from prying eyes!!! anyway without further ado:
# works counted: 24,259
the prettified tables with all the data, sorted by total works:
% restricted:
as always, hrpf is the darling baby of the 4th wall, while f1 rpf is around the middle of the top 10. despite f1 producing 3x the works hrpf did in 2024, their amount of RESTRICTED works are actually comparable (3,111 to 2,847). after hockey, the next best-performing fandoms are cycling, baseball, and motorcycling.
the least private fandoms are formula 2, men's football, and women's football/soccer, the last one probably being because everyone there is actually already gay so who cares.
drove past phil's live crabs, the live crab seller parked on a median in south philly today. bro was selling live crabs from his truck on the median. huge wooden sign on the side of the street saying phil's live crabs is OPEN but bro was parked on the median with a truck unloading baskets of live crabs. and i was just sitting at the stoplight watching people cross the streets with bags of crabs. and i thought man south philly is lawless in a way that is poetic, artful. beautiful, even. and the truck and logo were all in the phillies colorway
and i relayed this becky, who knows of phil's live crabs, and she said "i would read flyers fic if phil was in it" and i said "where's the fic where travis konecny sells live crabs from the median and travis sanheim is his crab buyer." the world is so beautiful, if only you open your heart to it
