Hello! I am a normal tumblr user that goes by Peruvian or Menace, it doesn't really matters lol.
He/Him and masc terms only. I'm on my 20s. I tend to write really fast so sometimes my messages are incomprehensible. Also my mother tongue is spanish so I mess up on grammar sometimes. No NSFW.
I write fanfics from time to time đŁď¸đŁď¸. Mainly Clownzy :D. Go check them out1!1!!1
I am a big lifesteal fan (Clown main) but I love minecraft in general (Whitepine, Evboverse, Hermitcraft, Unstable Universe). MILF gang (Man, I love FerreMC)
I love how marlow wasn't even fucking real like everysingle one of her (?) friends was convinced that she was a cheater but a good person overall and she wasn't neither bro in fact she wasn't even real
It hasnât 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 â the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count â wasnât on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvelâs 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 letâs 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), itâs also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Letâs check out the authorâs FAQ to see if thereâs some important factor weâre missing.
The first thing youâll 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 isnât counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because weâre 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. Weâll 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?
Letâs look at another ship for comparison. This time one thatâs 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 whatâs 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, theyâre 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 itâs 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 letâs 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 itâs 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 itâs count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesnât 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 authorâs 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 fanworksâ are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewerâs part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column âNew Worksâ which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled âNet Gain in Worksâ 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. Thereâs 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 shouldnât take on a project like this if you canât do it right.
To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesnât 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) â despite never once threatening, attacking, or harassing anyone â 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.
do you guys even care about the original intent of the poster, as in, highlighting the racism and misogyny prevalent in fandom spaces? any method is going to be flawed, and the original is transparent about their methodology so what is the point of the hostility and accusations of misinformation? if only people were this pressed about fandomâs propensity towards racism and misogyny lmao
no you don't get it. compiling information is problematic. don't you know that transphobes love compiling information too? like, it's literally stalking. taking screenshots is literally stalking. if you enjoy facts you're worse than kiwifarms. yeah sure it looks like this is a bad person but if you don't look at any of the things they did you'll find out they're completely innocent. why do you hate trans women.
STILL fucking obsessed btw with the fact that techno saw all these dumbass duo/trio names and was like we are NOT doin that and just named him eret & tubbo the revengers himself he really said this fandom sucks shit at names im not gettin called boattrio
