#data source: ao3

[juanabaloo]

25 Days of Bring It On! (Day 14)

This is me analyzing the Bring It On canonical tag on AO3. So first off, standard caveat that AO3 was started after the first Bring It On movie was released. So similar to other fandoms that started pre AO3, we have lost a lot of fic and analysis and meta and artwork because so many of those websites are defunct now. BUT we can still use what is on AO3 as a data source.

OVERVIEW

Of the 76 Bring It On works, 3 are video edits, 3 are podfics, and 1 is a fake post. (The fake post is saying they take requests, and is against the AO3 TOS. Their account is now orphaned.) So really there are 75 works, and 69 of those are fics.

For ratings there are 15 G, 35 T, 10 M, and 12 E. There are 4 that are Not Rated. Only 5 of the works are WIPs. There are 31 works tagged as crossovers, with 45 not.

Most of the works (49) are tagged with the category F/F. There are 7 works tagged with the category M/M.

RELATIONSHIPS

Looking at only the first Bring It On movie characters, these are the tagged pairings:

Missy / Torrance (26 works)

Isis / Torrance (6)

Isis / Missy (3)

Cliff / Missy (2)

Cliff / Torrance (1)

Courtney / Whitney (1)

Jan / Les (1)

Jan / Whitney (1)

Darcy / Kasey (1)

The only ship that kiss in canon is Cliff / Torrance. It's funny to me that there's only 1 work for them. (Also Jan and Whitney did have something going on in canon, and there's only 1 work for them too!)

These other pairings were also interesting to me, and involve one Bring It On (2000) character, or another Eliza Dushku character.

Faith Lehane / Buffy Summers (3) - Faith and Missy are both played by Eliza Dushku. Faith and Buffy are from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

Missy / Kat Stratford (2) - Kat is from "10 Things I Hate About You"

Cliff / Ephram Brown (1) - Ephram is from "Everwood"

(I'm ignoring other pairings of Missy with non Bring It On characters that only have 1 work.)

Les / Larry Blaisdell (1) - Larry is a character in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

Isis / Michaela Pratt (1) - Michaela is a character from "How To Get Away With Murder"

Note that works can have more than one relationship tagged. There is one poly work, a drabble that is tagged Missy / Torrance / Isis. It is also tagged with the two Missy pairings. Which means technically that work already appears twice in the list.

You can also see the relationships by character, which includes characters from the other Bring It On movies too.

FANDOMS

My cutoff for a "top" fandom was 5 works. Buffy has 10 works and then all the rest have 5.

1997 - 2003 - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (10)

1998 - 2003 - Dawson (5)

2002 - Blue Crush (5)

2006 - Stick It (5) - written and directed by the writer of Bring It On

2000 - Girlfight (5)

? 1990 - Baby Sitter's Club (5) - unsure of the date. books start in 1986, TV is 1990-1993, movie is in 1995.

1987-1995 - Full House (5)

Alright, that's enough data for now. If you decide to post some art or fic for the first Bring It On, you can use the Bring It On (2000) tag in AO3. That will get included in the Bring It On (Movies) tag automatically. In other words, if you already posted a work under Bring It On (2000), it is counted in the stats above.

Bring-O card if you want some ideas for posting!

(Charlie conspiracy gif thanks to starions)

25 days for 25 years

[buffydataviz]

Goncharov Index for BTVS ships

It's been a while! This is a quick post on the Goncharov Index for BTVS. (Inspired by non-BTVS things like this complaint and this poll.)

Basically Goncharov Index = GI = your works / Goncharov works. As of today Goncharov has 777 works on AO3.

BTVS fandom: 38,932 works (nothing filtered out, so includes crossovers, so also includes ATS crossovers) ===> GI = 50

ATS fandom: 6,535 works (filtered out BTVS crossovers) ===> GI = 8

Buffyverse fandom (BTVS + ATS): 45,467 works ===> GI = 59

And what about the ships? This is a little weird because we are comparing one ship to a whole fandom, but then again Goncharov is a fake Tumblr-fever-dream so what the hell.

We already know the top 5 ships in BTVS. Oh WAIT! Actually this is a little different now. There is another top ship now and the order has changed too. I'll have to do a separate post about that. (An old archive that focused on Giles/Buffy got imported into AO3, so there's a new top ship.)

Spike x Buffy (Spuffy): 6,215 works ===> GI = 8.0

Buffy x Angel (Bangel): 2,377 works ===> GI = 3.1

Giles x Buffy (BG): 2,232 works ===> GI = 2.9

Spike x Xander (Spander): 1,989 works ===> GI = 2.6

Tara x Willow (Tillow): 1,692 works ===> GI = 2.2

Faith x Buffy (Fuffy): 1,487 works ===> GI = 1.9

Bangel moved past Spander for number of works! The numbers above are technically for any fandom. (From a quick glance at comparing the numbers overall vs just in the BTVS fandom the difference is small.)

If you are curious about the next largest ships on AO3, after these 6, it's Xander/Anya, Angel/Spike, Dru/Spike, and then Jenny/Giles.

[buffydataviz]

Tutorial for basic data on AO3 Top Ships

Earlier (while researching the BTVS Goncharov Index) I stumbled across the fact that Giles x Buffy is now #3 on the ship list for number of AO3 works! This is a change from before, the old top 5 in order were Spuffy, Spander, Bangel, Tillow, and Fuffy. I wanted to check the ranking of BTVS ships.

Ignoring the crossover effect (which is not too bad for BTVS ships), there is a very easy way to check what are the top ships on AO3. If you don't know how to do this, keep reading for simple directions and screenshots. I'll do another post with the Top 20+ ship results!

Pick your fandom on AO3, in this case "Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)." You want the screen that lists all the works. Today there are 38K works for BTVS (TV). It looks like this:

(The default is sorted by Date Updated. Don't get distracted from your research by the new-to-you fic! Research!)

2. On the right hand side, under the Include section, click on the triangle by Relationships to expand it. It will show the top 10 ships. Next to each ship in parenthesis is the number of works.

3. Let's say you are bored by the top 5 (or 10) and want to dig into the even more rare ships. This is when the Exclude section is helpful. The Exclude section is under the Include section. Scroll down to it, expand the Relationships. Now click on the X, it will turn red once you exclude that ship. In the image I've excluded the top 4. Once you are done, click on Sort and Filter back up at the top.

4. The number of works will drop dramatically. Excluding the top 10 ships I end up with 22K works. Repeat the second step to expand the Relationships. You will find a new batch of 10 ships!

If you want to dig in on AO3 data, Destination Toast has a detailed tutorial that gets into more advanced stuff. I highly recommend it!

If you have a burning interest in non-Buffy fandom stats, but don't want to do the work yourself, you could nicely ask phantom statistician for some results. (You may have to wait a while, there's a long list of requests.) There is already a lot posted, so perhaps your question is already answered there. (She can use both AO3 and FFN as data sources.)

Shout out to Phantom Statistician who created the original pie chart of top ships in BTVS back in 2020, which is how I knew what the previous top 5 ships were.

And I know I've said it before, but while using AO3 data is easy, it does not include all fanworks, or even all fanfic for BTVS. Since Buffy went off the air before AO3 started, lots of works are on other websites and/or lost.

Also Elysian Fields is a huge long-standing Spuffy-only fanfic site, so focusing only on AO3 undercounts the amount of Spuffy fanworks. Even with that undercounting, Spuffy is still the number one BTVS ship on AO3.