I wanted to look at fanfics on Ao3 that have a Chloe Redemption arc, and whether there has been an increase or decline over time.
Findings:
Since Season 5 finished airing almost 6 months ago, if there was a drop in fanfics then this trend would be apparent. I thought that with the introduction of Zoe in Season 4 and further development of Season 5, fans start to give up on the idea of redeeming the spoiled rich kid.
Contrary to my original hypothesis, It looks as though 2020 onwards there has been a significant increase in Chloe Redemption fics (P-value < 0.001).
Perhaps a revisit in a few years time may provide more insight.
Love her or hate her, she’s here to stay!
Fig 1. Percentage of fanfics tagged with Chloe Bourgeois Redemption relative to total fics tagged with Chloe Bourgeois.
Fig 2. This data could also be represented in a Line Graph to plot changes in absolute numbers over time, with the total fanfics (grey) and Chloe Redemption fanfics (yellow) on the same graph.
Method: The data presented here included all languages as well as crossovers. The number of fics each year is approximate and based off filtering for each calendar year using the Date Updated option on Ao3.
📈 Data obtained is a snapshot of the fanfics available from Ao3 as of 29 Dec, 2023.
I don’t know if anyone has done this, I hope I don’t step on anyone’s toes. Here a wrap up for 2023 for Miraculous Ladybug!
This study only assesses the fanfics posted by the last update, so if there was an older fic that was from 2021 that was updated in 2023, this would be captured by this study.
📈 The data presented here is a snapshot of the Fandom on: 05 Jan 2024
🖤 Works posted to Ao3 in 2023
In 2023 there were 10,515 fanfics posted (including crossovers and all languages). The median word count per fanfic was 2,268 words. In general, each fic received 5 comments, 561 hits and 36 kudos (median).
A majority of fanfics were not crossovers (Fig 1). The peak of Ao3 posts for Miraculous Ladybug was in 2021 with a total of 11,350 fanfics. Fanfics with crossovers have had a steady rise in popularity from 2018 with a peak of 2,609 in 2021.
Fig 1. A total number of fanfics posted to Ao3 in 2023 for the Miraculous Ladybug fandom without crossovers (blue line) and with crossovers (dotted line).
Note that this analysis will excludes crossovers (a separate analysis to come!).
Fig 2. Total number of completed fanfics (red) and incomplete fanfics (pink) posted to Ao3 in the Miraculous Ladybug fandom for 2023 (excluding crossovers).
Fig 3. Total number of words per fic published or updated in 2023. The median word count per fanfic in 2023 was 2,268 words.
The most frequently used tags for 2023 were (in descending order):
Fluff (1495)
Angst (1040)
Identity Reveal (982)
Aged-Up Characters (968)
Alternate Universe (732)
Hurt/Comfort (700)
Adrien Needs a Hug (510)
🏆 Highlights in 2023 include
Miraculous Ladybug Season 5 Finale, s05e26, Re-Creation (Part 2) (First Airdate: July 01, 2023) [2]
Ladybug & Cat Noir: The Movie (Released: July 05, 2023) [3]
Miraculous Paris Special (Preview Screening: October 15, 2023) [4]
🖤 Most Tagged Side of the Lovesquare in 2023
Fig 4. Percentage of fanfics tagged with different sides of the Lovesquare.
Note that these are only taking into account fics that use this tag. There may be fanfics that have sides of the Lovesquare that are not indicated. This analysis also includes tags for Marichat May, Ladrien July etc.
Adrinette (34.5%; 737 fics)
LadyNoir (32%; 677 fics)
MariChat (23.5%; 501 fics)
Ladrien (10%; 213 fics)
🖤 Top 10 Characters Pairings on Ao3 (excluding Lovesquare)
Alya/Nino (927 fics)
Luka/Marinette (734 fics)
Juleka/Rose (405 fics)
Nathaniel / Marc (337 fics)
Felix / Marinette (317 fics)
Gabriel / Nathalie (286 fics)
Adrien / Luka (269 fics)
Felix / Kagami (183 fics)
Adrien / Kagami (159 fics)
Kagami / Marinette (158 fics)
There was a large shift in a number of pairings, in particular there was a dramatic increase in the number of fics tagged with Felix Fathom / Kagami Tsurugi (see below the cut for Season 5 spoilers). Other notable mentions are also Marinette Dupain-Cheng / Zoe Lee with a 2.5 fold increase in fanfics posted in 2023 (63 in total) compared to 2022 (26 in total).
🖤 Conclusions
It’s been a big year, and one that is controversial in many ways. I was just curious to see if there’s a decrease in activity since the season 5 finale, but it looks like the fanfiction writing is going strong. But are fans tuning out? Or are we trying to create more fix-it fics? (I will delve into that in a different post, since this was quite labour intensive).
There have been some interesting changes in relationship tags as well as tags for Sentimonsters (below the cut).
Methodology, References and Season 5 Spoilers below the cut:
Warning: Season 5 spoilers below:
🖤 2023 was also the year Feligami became official
This has lead to a dramatic increase in fanfics for the power couple.
Fig 5. The total number of fanfics posted on Ao3 for Felix / Kagami, represented per month saw a dramatic increase since the release of Season 5 in 2023 (blue). In contrast, I have plotted the total number of fanfics per month 2022 (red).
💔 2023 was also when the sentimonster theory was confirmed
Fig 6. Fanfiction that have used tags for Sentimonsters since 2018. Note that this is not a cumulative plot and that the numbers are individual works from each year tagged for Sentimonster.
In 2023, there were 192 works that tagged for Sentimonster Adrien, and 95 for Sentimonster Felix and 34 for Sentimonster Kagami. Recent usage for the tag 'Adrien is not a Sentimonster' was also observed (21 cases).
Please don’t be mad at me. I’m just a stats hamster.
Methodology
Filtering
The analyses start from Sep 05, 2012 when the first promotional video (PV) for Miraculous Ladybug was publicly leaked [1].
Since the website is very active, the information may change as this data is best considered to be a snapshot of the fanfics posted at this point in time. Also note that the filter is also for last update, and not first posted, so that older fics may be captured in later datasets. But for the purposes of this study, I am assuming that if the author is updating, then they are still active in the fandom.
To get an idea on what was posted to Ao3 this year, I have filtered for last published date 01 Jan 2023 - 31 Dec 2023. Note that while there was only an option for selecting by Last Post Date, which meant that works originally posted earlier (pre-2023) would still be captured if it was updated within the bounds of these dates.
Furthermore, it is also possible to backdate works on Ao3 which may also give false results. However, it may be likely that if this did happen it would only be a small percentage of fanworks. As such the data is an approximation of fandom activity during 2023.
Relationship Tags
I have followed the Ao3 rules so that / are taken to mean romantic relations and & for platonic relationships. In this analysis, I have combined the numbers for Felix (PV), Felix Graham de Vanily and Felix Fathom.
When @sweetmeatdale asked me this question, I originally got Google asking me if I wanted the painting Le Chat Noir by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
So I just ignored Google because I was feeding my toddler at the same time (multitasking!).
But I put both names side by side and found that actually this is quite interesting because Chat Noir is mostly used within Europe and outside of Europe, the top countries to use the H was in French speaking countries and département d’outre-mer (DOM). Which makes sense.
As promised here are my stats for Miraculous Ladybug fics on Ao3 with crossovers only. To see a snapshot for Miraculous Ladybug without crossovers click here.
📈 The data presented here is a snapshot of the Fandom on 06 Jan 2024
Don't be mad! I'm just a stats hamster.
🖤 Proportion of Crossover fics
At the time of posting, Crossover Fics accounted for 13% of the total fanfics on Ao3 (9177 works) (Fig 1A). They were predominantly featured in Batman All Media Types (5097 works) or DCU (1034 works), accounting for 68% of all crossover fics (Fig 1D). The majority of the works were rated for General (39%) or Teen Audiences (39%) (Fig 1B).
Fig 1. Proportion of Miraculous Ladybug works posted on Ao3 in 2023 [A] featuring crossovers (grey) and without crossovers (black); [B] and the proportion of all works posted on Ao3 as of January 06, 2024 (9177 works). [C] The proportion of cross-overs outside of the MariBat fandom as well as [D] the growth of the top ten fandoms in crossovers in 2023 (red) are also presented.
Excluding works from the MariBat fandom, the second highest number of works to be crossovered with ML was Boko No Hero Academia with 348 works (3%) and is also the fastest growing crossover fandom, almost doubling in works in 2023 (141 new works) (Fig 1C-D).
🖤 Top 10 Fandom Crossovers
Here are the crossovers in a Table format.
Table 1. Top 10 Fandoms in 2023 and percentage change compared to 2022.
Popular Tags used in 2023 (number of works) and percent change compared to 2022:
Fig 2. Top 5 relationships in ML crossover fics in 2023 and percentage change when compared to the year prior.
While works tagged with Adrien/Marinette has increased by 3% in 2023 when compared to the year before (Fig 2) the top 5 relationship pairings have not changed with Daminette taking first place.
Relationship Tags with Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug across all time (from Highest to Lowest):
Damien Wayne (1870 fics)
Adrien Agreste (1237 fics)
Jason Todd (806 fics)
Tim Drake (580 fics)
Dick Grayson (321 fics)
Hope this entertained you! Until 2024, same stats time, same stats channel.
Sodium Content and Methodology below the cut:
🖤 Top 5 Salt Categories
Look, Marinette is in Gotham for a reason. Usually it’s because of some sort of common table condiment/seasoning. Here is a breakdown:
Fig 3. Frequently tagged salt and character bashing tags across all crossover works prior to 2023 (green) and new works posted/updated subsequent to Jan 01, 2023 (dark blue). The change in numbers to the previous year (where present) are indicated.
Methods
Partitioning
To see changes in crossover fics in the ML fandom over time, I have tracked the number of crossovers posted to Ao3 per year.
Data was filtered by the date the fic was last posted, between 01 Jan - 31 Dec for each year.
Note that older fics may get updated, this data is only a reflection of the fandom at one moment in time. This analysis was performed 06 Jan 2024.
Filtering
Note that I have followed the Ao3 definition of a slash representing romantic relationships and & indicates platonic relationships.
As mentioned in my previous post, the ML fanfics on Ao3 can reflect changing opinions and theories. I wanted to look at this in a more qualitative manner using Ao3 tags, starting with The Miraculous Big Bang (methodology below the cut).
The Miraculous Big Bang is a fandom event that has been running for several years where people collaborate to write fanfics and draw fanart. These collections provide a good snapshot of fanfics written at a particular point in time.
🖤 Word Clouds
The Miraculous Big Bang was run in 2017, 2021, 2022, 2023, which covers a period of six years from Season 1 to Season 5 (see below the cut for more details on the methods).*
2017: There were a lot of tags that mentioned Season 2 spoilers, which suggests that these fics are based off mostly Season 1 content. This collection of fics had a lot of Historical AUs (Sample size: 32) [1].
2021: By now, Luka Couffaine and Kagami Tsurugi feature prominently in the tags for Miraculous Big Bang 2021 (Sample Size: 43 fics) [2].
2022: There are a lot of darker undertones in this word cloud (Sample size: 34 fics).
2023: Noticeable jump in fics labelled for Sentimonsters as well as LGQBTI+ tags (Sample size: 37 fics) [4]
🖤 In summary
Judging from the 2023 big bang, fics were written in the six months prior to posting, so this would cover a pretty sizeable timeframe. For example, Season 2 was aired between December 2017 and November 2018; and introduced rival love interests Luka Couffaine and Kagami Tsurugi.
Luka Couffaine was tagged an average of 10 and Kagami Tsurugi 7.7 times across 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Interestingly, Lila Rossi was introduced in s01e26 (Volpina) and was tagged 8 times in 2023, excluding other tags such as Lila lies, Lila manipulation, Evil Lila Rossi; while tags for Chloe Redemption remained constant (3 fics each in 2017, 2021, 2022, 2023).
* credit to @miraculousbigbang and clairelutra who ran the initial ML Big Bang in 2017, and @mlbigbang who ran the subsequent 2021, 2022 and 2023 Big Bang events.
📈 This Data is a snapshot of the posted fics on Ao3 on
🖤 Acknowledgements
A huge thank you to @miabrown007 and @ryanidious for their help in providing me with information for the mlbigbang 2017!
🖤 Methodology
Sample Collection
Looking at all this quantitative data is fine, but I want to go a bit deeper (but not too deep, I don’t have time to read every single fic). A good way to get an idea on the content of a fic is through the Ao3 tagging system.
I need a way to look through the tags used over time, but this seems like too a mammoth task in Ao3 (more detail on that below the cut).
The good news is that Ao3 has a feature within collections that does that for me!
My instant thought went to the Miraculous Big Bang. It’s perfect because it is an unbiased collection (e.g. if it was a birthday gift or personal collection of recs, the fics would be tailored to the person’s tastes and preferences).
Word Clouds
Word clouds are an interesting tool to quickly look at recurring words. However, major criticisms of this method is that you can lose the context the words are used in. This is a good article to describe considerations when using a word cloud [5]. However, the nature of Ao3 tags is that the context is either inherent or are merely keywords.
Data Cleaning
Now unfortunately this word cloud needed some cleaning to remove commonly used tags. When I first did this all I got was a big image with the words Miraculous, Adrien Agreste, Ladybug, Chat Noir and Marinette Dupain-Cheng, and Miraculous Big Bang which I think you can see is not very informative.
Removed Keywords: Adrien Agreste, Adrienette, Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Ladybug, Chat Noir, Miraculous, Miraculous Big Bang
When these were removed, I put the tags into a free word cloud generator such as https://www.freewordcloudgenerator.com/generatewordcloud.
There is no natural language processing so I have hyphenated common phrases. Ao3's word cloud has already combined the common keywords and enlarged them, so I had to manually check how many times they appear to add them back. It's not exact but it works.
References
[1] Miraculous Big Bang 2017: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/miraculousbang2k17
[2] Miraculous Big Bang 2021: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/MLBB_2021
[3] Miraculous Big Bang 2022: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/MLBB_2022
[4] Miraculous Big Bang 2023: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/MLBB_2023
Looking at Google and users who searched for the keyword “Miraculous”:
Searches by Region:
In detail:
USA vs UK
It’s fun to see the searches peaked around the end of Season 5 as well as the release of the Movie.
For Your A-meows-ement
I just wanted to do something fun with my Cat Boy. Let’s see where he was searched most.
First let’s see searches over 2023 for Chat Noir (Blue), Chat Blanc (Red) and Claw Noir (Yellow).
Chat Noir
More to come but I have run to the Tumblr 10 image post limit.
It seems as though the different cat boys are popular in different states. I have decided to use the term Chat Noir, but @sweetmeatdale has suggested Cat Noir and I found an interesting distribution to the term based on geographical location. So I stand corrected.
To the Americans: How did your state do? Do you think you personally attributed to all the searches here?
I was wondering if the Miraculous Paris Special has generated more excitement than the other specials or is it just me connecting with my past punky girl?
I also wondered if this was measurable - and possibly translate to more fanfics on Ao3.
I’ve definitely seen a lot of art and have also gone on an art binge myself @hamsterdraws (but I don’t know how to quantitate posts on Tumblr). So here is my attempt to quantitate my obsession with these emo kids!
Reblog don’t repost!
📈 The data presented here is a snapshot of the Ao3 database as of December 17, 2023.
🖤 Fics Posted to Ao3
It’s only been since October 15, 2023 [1], but the preview was shown straight after the Season 5 finale in July. So overall there has been almost 6 months of speculation and hype surrounding the TV Special.
Fig 1. Total number of fics posted that has been tagged with the Miraculous Paris Special (sample size of 80) [2].
🖤 How does it compare against the other specials?
From my own opinion, I was way more excited about seeing the evil counterparts of my blorbos than seeing them do the same Lovesquare dance again. So is is just me?
Fig 2. Total number of fanfics for each Miraculous special or movie.
I think the numbers reflect the positive uptake of the Paris Special. In the first two months alone there are twice as many fics as Miraculous Shanghai.
Fig 3. Time-adjusted number of fics posted to Ao3 per month since aired. The lighter shaded bar takes into account the public release date and not the trailer date.
For a better comparison, I included the movie because it was released at roughly the same time the teaser trailer. Even though the characters were roughly the same in the movie as the TV show, they had slightly different personality traits.
Fig 4. Number of fics written about them per month in the first six months following their release dates.
The arrow indicates when the Paris Special was televised and the preceding months were based on the teaser trailer. At the time of posting, we are only halfway through December and more fics may be posted by the end of the year.
🖤 What did I learn?
On all appearances, Miraculous World: New York - United HeroeZ had more fanfics, but keep in mind that this was released in September 26, 2020 [3].
There appears to be an initial flurry of fanfics posted on Ao3 using tags for the Miraculous Special: New York, however this excitement has petered out gradually. While the Miraculous Paris Special has yet to reach that initial number, only two months has elapsed since it was publicly aired.
The Miraculous Movie on the other hand was released a few months before the Miraculous Special aired and it had generated much less fanfiction - or at least were not tagged [4-5].
In conclusion, it appears that the Miraculous Paris Special has been received well by the fans. I would be interested to see if this trend continues or if like the New York special, the fics will fizzle out.
🖤 Total Number of Fics Tagged
Miraculous Paris Special (80 Fics)
Miraculous Shanghai (33 fics)
Miraculous New York (177 fics)
Miraculous Movie (40 fics)
Miraculous Christmas Special (9 fics)
Miraculous Origins (31 fics)
Miraculous s05e28 Action (0 fics)
More numbers for the other Miraculous World specials and references below the cut.
🖤 Number of fics tagged with New Characters
Miraculous World: Paris
Shadybug | Toxinelle (32 fics)
Claw Noir | Griffe Noire (42 fics)
Betterfly | Hesperia (20 fics)
Miraculous World: New York
Number of fics tagged for:
Jessica Keynes | Sparrow | Eagle (103)
Aeon | Uncanny Valley (108)
Olympia Hill | Majestia (11)
Barbara Keynes | Knightowl (32)
Dean Gate | Doorman (4)
Mike Rochip | Technopirate (4)
Hot Dog Dan (8)
Miraculous World: Shanghai
Number of fics tagged for:
Fei Wu | Ladydragon (132)
Cash | King Cash (5)
References
[1] Miraculous Paris Special (Club-Canal+ Preview Screening pre-release date: Oct 15, 2023) ( https://miraculousladybug.fandom.com/wiki/Miraculous_Paris)
[2] Looked up terms such as Miraculous Paris Special on the Tag Search tool in Ao3 and found disambiguation and collated the freeform tags that were not found under the main Ao3 tag.
[3] Miraculous World: New York - United HeroeZ (https://miraculousladybug.fandom.com/wiki/Miraculous_New_York)
[4] Miraculous World: Shanghai, The Legend of Ladydragon (French release: April 4, 2021) (https://miraculousladybug.fandom.com/wiki/Miraculous_Shanghai)
[5] Ladybug & Chat Noir: The Movie (French Release Date: July 05, 2023) (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10364034/)
