ETA: This survey has now closed. Thank you for so many more responses than I expected! I will announce as soon as the data is available to others to use and as I make my own discoveries in working with it.
Thank you so much everyone for your responses to my fanfiction and mental illness survey. As of posting we have 108 responses which is fantastic and very much enough for my own thesis, but I don't just want this data to be for me - I want it to be available to other fan studies researchers to work with and build upon.
This is the work I spoke about when I was on the @fansplaining podcast just a few months ago, and something that we just don't have in the fan stats community - our only related information is on whump, which whilst useful isn't by any means the same thing.
So if you'd like to help us learn more about how we read, write and interact with fanfiction about mental illness, please take the survey & share this post!
The survey will take you just 5-15 minutes, and will help to gather groundbreaking insights for fan studies. You’ll be asked about yourself, about how you read, write and find fanfiction about mental illness, and what interacting with this kind of fanfic has been like for you.
Full data on the study, including consent, privacy and GDPR information, can be found on the survey page.
Submissions will remain open until the 25th June 2023. Thank you so much!
A few years ago, I was curious about some of the characteristics of works posted on the Archive of Our Own, so I scraped some (lots) of data and went about analyzing it. This series of posts describes that analysis. It’s broken down into 7 posts; this is the first one, describing the data set and how it was collected.
The Data | Basic Questions | Fandoms | Tags | Correlations | Kudos | Fun Stuff
Thanks to @eloiserummaging for beta reading these posts; any remaining errors are my own. A Python notebook showing the code I used to make these plots can be found here.
In case you’ve wandered in here without knowing about the Archive of Our Own (aka AO3), here’s a brief primer. It’s a fan-run, nonprofit archive for all kinds of “fan works”--that means fanfiction, but also other media such as fanart, podfic (fanfiction audiobooks), fanvids (audiovisual media), meta (fanwork criticism), etc. The AO3 has a ratings system and a warnings system, but they’re both optional in the sense that you can choose an “abstain” option (“No Rating” or “Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings”, respectively). When you do a search or look at an index page, you can generally see the title, fandom, creator, summary, warnings, rating, category (since many fanworks are romantic/sexual in nature, this is basically either “gen” for no romance, or the gender configuration of the main relationship(s)), language, word count, comment count, kudos count (you leave “kudos” for the author instead of hitting a “like” button), and whether the work is part of a series. On many works, but not all, you can also see the hit count--this is turned on by default, but authors can turn it off. And finally, there are also generally a number of freeform tags. The AO3 has one of the best tagging systems out there, and I’ll make use of that in some later posts.
Before we get into this, I wanted to shout out @destinationtoast, who has been on the fan stats beat for years. Some of what I’m going to show in the next few posts will duplicate work she or others have done. I’m still showing it because our data collection methods are different, and so the answer they get and the answer I get may be different. Redoing some of the analysis means that all the graphs I am showing are self-consistent. But you should really go check out @toastystats and her great masterpost of stuff if you’re interested in this topic.
For my analysis, I collected data by scraping AO3 works pages in most fandoms over a period of several years, skipping large subfandoms so I didn’t duplicate information--e.g., I did not download “Stargate: SG-1” data because all of those works are also included in “Stargate - All Media Types”. I attempted to be kind to the server load by leaving lag times between successive pages and taking frequent breaks, and I also have regularly donated to the OTW, more than enough to offset the cost of my downloads for this project. The total amount of data is well under a single day’s load on the servers, and collected over several years, although I would guess that on my peak downloading days I was probably the #1 user by data volume.
Here’s what the actual collection dates look like:
I grabbed a bunch of stuff in 2015, updated again in 2016, let things lie for 18 months, and then picked back up. So the data set I have contains everything posted in 2017 or earlier that was still available when I collected the data, and most (but not all) of the data posted in 2018 or later.
To avoid re-downloading, if I went back to update a previously-downloaded fandom, I only went back far enough to get to the newest works I’d seen the previous time I downloaded. That means that anything posted before 2016 or so is “frozen” in this data set--it hasn’t had its hits, kudos, or comments updated, and if other changes were made (orphaning, deletion) that is also not captured. If a work moved up in the sort date (for example, if it had a new chapter added), the new data was used instead of the earlier collected data.
I was not logged in, so no private works appear anywhere in this data set. (So you should probably think of this as “stats of public AO3 works” not “stats of AO3 works”--they will probably be different because some fandoms are more likely to privatize their fic than others.) Because I’m not able to get individual permission from authors to show their data, I’ll only be showing aggregate data--the rough cutoff in my head is that I only show data points that represent >1000 works.
I also wanted to download tag information, because the Archive tagging system allows users to choose any tags they like, and then bundles those tags into synonyms in the backend--allowing somebody to misspell a tag “John Waston” instead of “John Watson”, for example, but preserving that they meant “John Watson” for purposes of searching. I downloaded the tag description page for any tag which appears in the data >=500 times and used that data to unify all synonyms of the most-used tags. Tag pages are not redownloaded once downloaded, so tag updates since May 2015 are mostly not represented here, except for a few tags which crossed my lower-cutoff threshold sometime between May 2015 and 2018.
Overall, I downloaded meta-information for 4,337,545 works. I won’t be sharing this dataset because it includes now-deleted works, but if you have a question that a dataset like this could answer, I can try to answer that question, time allowing.
An analysis of the ‘Romy’ tag on Tumblr, AO3 and Etsy
These are co-occurrence graphs for the tag ‘Romy’ on Tumblr, AO3 and Etsy respectively. Data was collected on all available instances of the ‘Romy’ tag in 2016. Graphics are taken from my PhD thesis, Serious Leisure in the digital world: exploring the information behaviour of fan communities. Thanks to @destinationtoast for the awesome Python code that actually made this possible. <3
You can view larger versions of the graphs on this post.
TUMBLR
Entire dataset (ZOOM IN):
The most interconnected tags (betweeness centrality +1):
ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN
Entire dataset (it was huge - tagging on AO3 is so complex and granular in general) (ZOOM IN):
The most interconnected tags (betweeness centrality +1) (ZOOM IN):
ETSY
Entire dataset (Etsy was the least complex) (ZOOM IN):
The most interconnected tags (betweeness centrality +1) (ZOOM IN):
Note: I've used the term mental illness in this post due to my desire to reach a wider audience. Normally I use the term Mad(ness), as I work from a Mad Studies perspective. Please use whatever terms you prefer.
Hello!
I'm a PhD researcher working on representations of embodied mental illness in fanfiction. I am trying to find demographic data regarding mental illness/psychosocial disability in fandom. Just disability isn't enough - I need it to be specific as to the manner of disability/illness.
Do you know a study that has looked at this, either directly or indirectly? I'm especially interested in finding rates of people in fandom who have experienced mental distress, and if possible, data around fanfiction practices in expressing that experience.
Please either reply here, DM me, or you can email [email protected] to contact me. Signal boosts very appreciated.
I’m currently conducting research into the representation of mental illness within fanfiction, and I am seeking recommendations for fics. I would love to hear of any stories you know of that meet the following criteria:
- Contains at least one PoV character who is mentally ill.
- Author has stated (usually in fic notes, social media or similar) that they experience mental illness.
- Works must be in English.
These fics can be of any length or fandom. They can be standard fics, podfics, or other formats as long as they are transformative works. They can focus on ANY kind of mental illness, and that mental illness does not need to be defined explicitly as long as it is clearly a significant focus of the story.
I do not need them to be archived in any particular place, though if they’re on the AO3 that would be ideal for me, as a lot of my other data (tag frequency etc) is drawn from there for ease of access’s sake.
I’d also love references to any rec lists or similar that focus on mental illness.
I’m doing my own research of course, but there’s no resource as good as asking. You can either reply here, use my asks/messages, or contact me at [email protected] if you have longer recommendation lists to pass along.
Thank you all so much!
ETA: Just wanted to note that I’ve consulted my research ethics representative and as far as we’re aware, this request doesn’t require any formal review - the content of your recommendations won’t be used in my thesis, it’s just information gathering for me!
Next up: a more detailed analysis of fandoms, the engine of fan works everywhere.
The Data | Basic Questions | Fandoms | Tags | Correlations | Kudos | Fun Stuff
Thanks to @eloiserummaging for beta reading these posts; any remaining errors are my own. A Python notebook showing the code I used to make these plots can be found here.
What are the top fandoms on the AO3?
I pulled this data directly from the Archive fandoms pages in mid-March, just to make sure I was comparing work counts on the same day. And, as it happens, I checked about 3 days after BTS pipped Star Wars to become the 10th-biggest fandom on AO3! You may note that there’s significant overlap between some of these fandoms–K-pop and BTS, Marvel and Avengers–but they are classified as different fandoms so I’m preserving that here. (In a technical sense, while there’s significant overlap between Marvel and the Avengers, Marvel has some works Avengers doesn’t and vice versa.) Edit 4/25: in fact, I had a data processing failure and BTS should have been a subfandom of K-pop all along! I'm leaving the plots for now, but worth keeping in mind.
These fandoms aren’t of equal popularity over time:
(The height of the curves are relative within each fandom but not correct between fandoms, by the way. The BTS work count is like ⅓ of the Marvel work count, fore example, but it looks taller because a higher fraction of those works were posted in recent years. Basically, all the colored blocks have the same area, so the ones popular over a short time are also taller.)
RPF and Supernatural are nearly-constant juggernauts, while Marvel rises and falls with movie releases, and K-pop has exploded in the last few years. You can also see release dates of Sherlock series reflected in the Sherlock Holmes tag, and Fantastic Beasts in the Harry Potter tag. (And in the old version of this where Star Wars was the 10th biggest fandom, you could REALLY see The Force Awakens.) Marvel has the biggest single day for any fandom–on Dec 24, 2015, there were (at least) 452 Marvel works posted! In fact, we can look at Marvel in more detail. Here’s Marvel posting rates over time, with the MCU movie release dates overplotted:
Wow–guess we all hated Civil War, lol. In fact, that dip is so big that you can see it on the Archive-wide stats from the previous post–other fandoms had a small dip there, but nothing like Marvel, so it drives most of the decrease you see in mid-2016.
Here’s a fun comparison: the top 10 fandoms by number of works; by total number of hits on all works; and by median hit count per work, for fandoms with at least 1,000 works. Another way to think of this table is: most popular with creators; most popular with readers; and highest reader-to-creator ratio. For an apples-to-apples comparison, I’m using the number of works in my dataset and not the Archive counts, so this top-fandoms-by-works list is a little different from the plot above.
The total works/total hits lists are not that different, though there’s some obvious order reshuffling. The top fandoms by median hit count list is really different, though, with only Teen Wolf on there from among the top fandoms by hits or number of works. I can think of two explanations for why those fandoms in particular: either they’ve got massively better fic than other fandoms (hard to know why that would be), or there’s a big unmet desire for fic in those fandoms. Maybe a place to write, if you’re looking for lots of approbation. :)
Do fandoms produce works of the same length?
Kind of surprisingly: no. Those are big differences: the median BTS fic is 70% longer than the median Sherlock or Supernatural fic! Also note how very small these values are. 50% of all the works in Sherlock fandom are under 1705 words. You can also see that in the wordcount histograms in the last post, of course.
A couple of other questions: how many works are there in a typical fandom?
The most common number is 1! That’s very surprising to me.
I was also curious about how per-work hit counts relate to the number of works in a fandom. Naively, I would think that having more works in a fandom would increase hit counts: a person who reads a fic about fandom X is likely to want to read more fics about fandom X, so you build a self-sustaining readership if there are lots of fics to choose from. Also, since work creators are a subset of work readers, in general, what writers choose to write in is probably a good proxy for what readers are interested in reading; more fics means more people interested means more readers.
Here’s the actual relationship between number of works and median hit count:
It’s kind of noisy (meaning the points move around a lot), but for fandoms with more than ~5 works, we do see that more works means more hits. The increase actually stops around 1000 works, which I should have predicted above. (I’ve cut off the graph because it’s very noisy above 10,000 works, but the flattening continues.) Apparently, that’s about the point where you have more works in a fandom than even a devoted reader could read. If you have 10 works, or 20 works, then every possible reader can read everything, so more interest means more hits. But once you have more works than people can read, then, basically, adding readers and adding creators cancel each other out in the average hits per work.
Also kind of interesting is that things with <5 works seem to have more hits on average. I suspect this is because of Yuletide, which steers people to rare fandoms they might not read on their own.
RANDOM FUN QUESTIONS I can ask of the AO3 data, coming right up!
The Data | Basic Questions | Fandoms | Tags | Correlations | Kudos | Fun Stuff
Thanks to @eloiserummaging for beta reading these posts; any remaining errors are my own. A Python notebook showing the code I used to make these plots can be found here.
All right. You should probably read the earlier posts in this series if you want to really understand what's happening. This is basically my "fun stuff" post: all the questions that aren't grand, sweeping statements about what's on the Archive, but rather my own personal quirky interests. :)
First up: Drabbles! My most pointless hill to die on is that a drabble is exactly 100 words. Do creators on the Archive agree?
KIND OF! There's definitely a spike of things at 100 words. It’s actually big enough that you can see it on the general word count histogram from the basic demographics post. There's also a sense of "drabble is a short fic" (what I would call a "ficlet") of approximately 520 words, give or take...a lot. Okay, fine. (I'm still right.)
I looooove AUs. What are the most popular AUs, and how have they changed over time?
As with the previous plots I’ve shown like this, the height of the curves are relative within each tag but not correct between tags. Soulmate AUs are way less popular than modern setting AUs, but their curve looks taller because a higher fraction of works with that tag were posted in a short span of time.
Things to note: The biggest AUs (modern setting, canon divergence, college/university, and high school) all approximately trace the growth of fics on AO3 over time. I thought A/B/O would be the most recently popular AU type, but actually it looks like soulmates is even more skewed to recent times than A/B/O, which I didn’t expect! Human AUs have gotten less popular lately (I think this was really popular in Teen Wolf, so as the rate of Teen Wolf works has slowed, the number of human AUs has also slowed). I’m not sure what fandom liked canon AUs, or even what that is, but it was really popular in 2012-2013 nevertheless.
I was also curious about crossovers. Like I mentioned briefly in the fandoms post, there are things that are in two different fandom categories that we probably wouldn’t think of as an actual crossover: an Avengers fic can be in both Avengers and Marvel, but most readers would recognize that as the same universe. I made a list fandoms that appear together on works, weeded out the ones that look like same-universe crossovers, and came up with this list:
DCU and Marvel should have been predictable, I think. A little more surprising is that SuperWhoLock actually did have an effect on the number of crossovers, by a lot--you can see all pairs of those three fandoms on this list. (If a work had three fandoms A, B, and C, that counted once as a crossover for A and B, once for A and C, and once for B and C.) Harry Potter is a common crossover too, which I expected, as I’ve read a Harry Potter AU in every fandom I’ve been in that wasn’t Harry Potter.
But this graph has my single favorite piece of information in this entire analysis: there are a ton of Guardians of Childhood & Hiccup Series crossovers. If you’re not familiar, those are two canon sources made into Dreamworks animated movies: Rise of the Guardians and How To Train Your Dragon. I had no idea there was a large fanfic fandom for those, let alone that there would be thousands of works that cross them over!! Isn’t that awesome?
I used to be in Harry Potter fandom, so here's some fun with different Harry Potter ships. The top ten ships are:
Okay. I could have predicted...some of those. Note that this doesn’t mean those are the top main pairings: I expect that James/Lily is a common side pairing for Sirius/Remus, and that Hermione/Ron appears a lot in Draco/Harry fics. Draco/Harry is much more popular than my old stomping grounds of Harry/Snape, which I think was also true at the time, although the works represented on the Archive probably don’t include most of what I was reading in 2003.
Actually, we can check my point about secondary pairings. Here’s a correlation matrix for those top ten ships (remember, green means they’re correlated--appear as tags on the same work more often than you’d expect based on chance--and pink means they’re anti-correlated, or appear together less often than you’d expect):
Yeah, absolutely, some of these are likely secondary pairings for popular ships. Actually, there’s one obvious set of pairings I missed--the canon pairings, Harry/Ginny and Hermione/Ron, which are EXTREMELY correlated. You do also see some Hermione/Ron with Draco/Harry (it’s actually a big correlation despite the light color, because the scale has to account for the five HUNDRED percent relative likelihood of Harry/Ginny and Hermione/Ron). And, yep, James/Lily and Sirius/Remus are together. But apparently there’s also some Harry/Ginny with Hermione/Draco (not sure I would have picked that--or, actually, that Hermione/Draco would be this high on the list) and, more obviously, Harry/Ginny with Scorpius/Albus Severus.
There's a genre of fics that I see sometimes when browsing: the "Reader/somebody" genre, where you're explicitly supposed to insert yourself into the fic. (Some of these have Y/N scattered throughout the fic, for "your name", for example.) Who are the top characters that get paired with "Reader"?
Those aren't the same as the top character tags. So this kind of thing is serving a sub-audience of AO3 readers, different in certain ways from the typical reader, I guess. I don’t think I would have been able to predict this list in any way at all, either. I really like that fandom can encompass so many things that are different from what I read!
Finally: older fandoms on AO3. I asked my fandom friends to come up with what they thought of as "classic" fanfiction fandoms. Then I excluded anything with new (major) canon later than Nov. 15, 2009, when the Archive opened for beta, and anything with less than 1,000 works. Here's how those fandoms are faring on AO3.
I LOVE THAT THEY ARE STILL AROUND. I love fandom. That's all. Thanks for reading.
In this post, we'll discuss tags on the Archive of Our Own! Please note: because the works on the Archive include explicit material, some of the tags discussed in this post may not be appropriate for your workplace.
The Data | Basic Questions | Fandoms | Tags | Correlations | Kudos | Fun Stuff Thanks to @eloiserummaging for beta reading these posts; any remaining errors are my own. A Python notebook showing the code I used to make these plots can be found here.
The Archive of Our Own has one of the best tagging systems around. You can read more about it here, here, here, or here. For our purposes, the important part is that users can tag their works however they want, and then a group of people called "tag wranglers" sort those tags, either adding them as synonyms of existing tags or creating new canonical versions for them. What I'll be showing here is the "canonical" version of the tags. For example, a work tagged "flufffffff" or "so fluffy!" would have those two tags assigned to the canonical tag "Fluff", so I will consider both of those tags as being "Fluff" to get the most accurate count.
The other important thing about AO3 tags is that they come in four flavors. The first one is "warnings", the content warnings required by the Archive (plus the default tag indicating you're abstaining from the warnings system). The second flavor is "Characters", tags describing the characters in the work. The third is "Relationships", tags describing the platonic or romantic relationships depicted in the work--typically, "X/Y" indicates a romantic and/or sexual relationship between characters X and Y, while "X&Y" means a platonic relationship, although this usage isn't universal and isn't enforced. The final category is "freeform", aka everything else.
Again, the tagging system is freeform and optional. In particular, I'll note that "character" tags and "relationship" tags don't necessarily imply each other: you can have a work tagged "Sherlock Holmes/John Watson" that only features Mycroft Holmes, or that features John and Sherlock but doesn't tag them as characters, only as the relationship. So remember that--while it's pretty good on average, because people tag their works so readers/viewers can find them--the number of uses of a character tag isn't the same as the number of works that feature that character, for example.
Okay! So what are the most popular freeform tags on the Archive? If you read a lot of fanfiction, I doubt you will be surprised by anything on this list. Left column is the top 15 tags by number of uses, while right column is the top 15 tags by the cumulative hit count on every work tagged with that tag.
Are these tags consistently popular over time? For reasons of space, I’ll just plot the top 10 by number of works:
If you look back at the works vs time plot in the second post, you'll see that yes, the shape of these trends is similar to the total number of works, so trends in fannish tastes haven’t changed much over the time the AO3 has been in existence. (These show a little more bumpiness because there are fewer works in each plot.) Some of these have gained a little more recent popularity vs earlier works--smut, fluff, and the two specific alternate universes are a little more weighted towards later times, while humor and general AUs are falling a little behind--but the differences aren’t as large as we saw for fandom trends in the previous post.
I'm sure you're curious about characters and relationships. Here are the top character tags, omitting the catchall character tags of “Original Character(s)”, “Original Male Character(s)”, “Original Female Character(s)”, and “Reader” (all of which would otherwise appear in the top 15). Also, remember this is missing some of the data from 2018 and 2019, as described in the first post, so BTS characters should probably be higher:
And here are the top relationship tags (again, excluding the catchall “Minor or Background Relationship(s)”):
And in particular, here are the top characters of color (excluding works with fictionalized race/ethnicity power systems--um, more than modern-day Western society’s power systems are made up--and characters from Voltron Legendary Defender, since I wasn’t able to find enough information on them):
Park Jimin (BTS)
Min Yoongi | Suga
Jeon Jungkook
Kim Taehyung | V
Kim Namjoon | Rm
Jung Hoseok | J-Hope
Kim Seokjin | Jin
Zayn Malik
Katsuki Yuuri
Sam Wilson (Marvel)
Magnus Bane
Nick Fury
Midoriya Izuku
Bakugou Katsuki
Erica Reyes
And here are the top relationships that are not M/M:
Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Emma Swan
Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak
Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Clarke Griffin/Lexa
Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Captain Hook | Killian Jones/Emma Swan
Kylo Ren/Rey
Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley
Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper
Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold
Allison Argent/Scott McCall
James Potter/Lily Evans Potter
Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Here are the top ten freeform tags for the top ten fandoms. Different fandoms seem to produce different kinds of fanworks--which you'd expect, based on the variety in the source material.
AU = alternate universe, AU - CD = Alternate universe - canon divergence, AU - C/U = alternate universe - college/university, AU - HS = alternate universe - high school, BJs = blow jobs, ER = established relationship, H/C = hurt/comfort, PWP = plot what plot/porn without plot, RPF = real person fiction, SPN = supernatural.
Finally, for fun, here's the top 200 tags of all kinds, sorted against each other. You can find a lot of fun things on this list. Some of my favorites:
Supernatural is so big, and so focused on so few characters, that Dean Winchester is the sixth most popular tag on the entire AO3.
Clint Barton is way higher than I would have expected.
Sherlock Holmes is slightly less popular than anal sex.
Original female characters are more popular than anal sex.
Similarly, cuddling is more popular than A/B/O.
Harry Styles is less popular than 3/7ths of BTS (at least as of sometime in 2018); Louis Tomlinson barely tops Draco Malfoy.
Alcohol comes between Katsuki Yuuri and Viktor Nikiforov.
Leonard McCoy is below songfic. Please join me in picturing how pissed off he’d be.
The one-two punch of “Spanking” and “I’m Sorry” is pretty amusing.
If I had put up the top 201 tags, 200 and 201 would have been “Flirting” and “Murder”, so Hannibal is almost on this list.
