So the flavour of the day is Bad Fandom Stats, and it turns out that not only is centreoftheselights using a wildly inaccurate method of counting ship popularity during a given year for the Year In Review fandom stats, but also that nearly every column on the chart is a lie. @5ummit exploded the whole methodology issue last year, so I'll just link their post and dive into other stuff.
One would think, looking at a list of popular ships with their fandoms listed next to them, that the named fandom is simply the one within which the ship exists.
The ship at the top of that list is "Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)" and the fandom is listed as "9-1-1 (TV)"; that's pretty straightforward, there's only the one TV show and those characters are from that show.
But then we get down to ships with characters that exist in multiple versions or subsections of a canon which have their own fandom tags on AO3, and things start getting janky
One of the first things I noticed was weird about this year's chart (aside from the numbers themselves being just straight up wrong) was that the fandom for Kirk/Spock was listed as "Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)", the AO3 tag for the reboot movies. That felt wrong, because while I know the reboot movies are big on AO3, most of the K/S stuff I've seen recently has either been expressly original cast or not specific to any one cast or iteration of canon.
I thought that the list might have been saying that Reboot Kirk/Spock alone was big enough to make the list while Generic and Original Kirk/Spock were separate fandoms that hadn't gotten onto the list. That would be absurd for new fic count, but there are stranger things on this list and the methodology favours newer ships, so I went digging.
A search for Kirk/Spock fic posted in 2024 and a glance at the sidebar gives us this, out of 2,255 total fics
Searching for Kirk/Spock fics updated, rather than newly posted, in 2024 also puts the All Media Types and Original Series tags above the Reboot Movies.
But searching the entire unfiltered ship tag gets us this, out of 22,426 fics
This means two things.
1.) Despite the listed fandom on the year end chart, Kirk/Spock (and by extension, all the other ships from fandoms with more than one iteration of canon [and some Batman ships are on there, so we've got far more complex things than simply reboot movies and TV/anime adaptions of novels/manga]) is a generic ship tag.
2.) the fandom listed was taken from the unfiltered tag, not from this year's data.
And centreoftheselights confirms that this is indeed her methodology.
The fandoms are, quite simply, wrong.
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Since we do not have access to her data and her methods are not replicable, we can't check how many of the ships might have been struck with a mismatch between which version of their canon is most popular overall vs this year.
I can't even be certain that there is a mismatch for Kirk/Spock. It's possible that the fics that actually make up her numbers have more reboot movie fic than otherwise. No one will ever know.
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It is interesting to dig into the differences. I find it utterly fascinating that Kirk/Spock had a period that pushed the reboot movies to the top of the list overall and has since settled into Original Cast being more popular, all while the ships remained consistently popular enough to regularily end up on Top Ship Lists.
Centreoftheselights' data does not allow us to dig into those differences, or even to meaningfully speculate about them.
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And yet more! As I explained in this reblog, the "type" column is not harvested from the data itself, but is a subjective interpretation of what centreoftheselights believes the characters' genders is or could or might be. So not only are all the columns wrong, they aren't even wrong in the same ways.
Over the whole sheet, the columns are: ⚠️Rank: Well, it accurately lists the order of the inaccurate counts, so I guess the column technically isn't inaccurate ⚠️Change: This is indeed the change in rank from last year's chart. It accurately lists the difference between two different inaccurate ranks ✔️ Relationship: accurate! This is the ship tag on AO3 ❌ Fandom: Inaccurate. Actually a top tag within the ship tag, not the fandom the ship is from ❌Works Gained: Inaccurate. see @5ummit's debunk ✔️Total Works: accurate! this is indeed the size of the tag on AO3 ❌Type: Inaccurate. OP's best guess, subjective interpretation, or headcanon ❌Race: Inaccurate. Same as above.
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Tagging @olderthannetfic and @5ummit since you two have kind of been doing the heavy lifting on this one :)
Also plugging the more accurate chart by Randomist1031, which, in addition to having accurate fic counts, also lists fandoms by generic names rather than top tag, which increaes both accuracy and readability. https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/158271001
