#rpf statistics

[dangerliesbeforeyou]

ok so i spent yesterday looking through and collecting data from ao3's rpf (real person fanfiction) collection (for no reason other than 'i was intrigued' lol...)

and i thought i'd go through some of the interesting finds!

(this is probably interesting to nobody but me but hey when has that ever stopped me lol!)

starting with a disclaimer that this is a judgement free zone! i may make a few jokes about things from time to time on here, but i am firmly of the 'ship and let ship' mindset so no hate meant in any of this at all lol <3

first interesting fact is that kpop is the highest rpf tag (with over 650k works!!), bts are obviously the boy group with the most fics, with twice being the highest girl group!

speaking of girls... so for every category i tried to find what the top f/f ship was and for a couple of the tags (most notably actors and music), the top f/f ships were actually male characters (which confused me until i saw the additional tags were genderbend and genderswap lol)... there are also a lot of fandoms where the top characters when you take out m/m ships is actually original female characters (or reader)!

unsurprisingly, taylor swift is the solo artist with the most fics written about her (many shipping her with various celebs, both men and women), but what i found interesting is that there are 140 of her songs and albums that are featured in fics, which is more than any other musician's work (even hozier lol!)

other music tag info is one direction as the non-kpop band with the most fics, with larry stylinson being the top ship (no one is shocked at this) and the highest rating being explicit! which is a bit surprising since most of these fandoms have either general or teen and up ratings as the top one... the only other umbrella rpf fandom that has explicit as the top rating is actors... oh and porn (duh)

my chemical romance deserve a mention as the band with the most fics under the rock music tag (and in the bandom tag), with gerard as the top character (good for them!)! queen also rank pretty highly, with a lot of the fics being specifically linked to the 2018 film bohemian rhapsody rather than specifically the band themselves (so it's like... rpf of rpf lol?)

i think the beatles are the oldest band/musician to have a lot of rpf about them but it's honestly a little hard to tell so don't quote me on this... they are also at the top of the 60's music scene, where the rolling stones take 2nd lol...

the rpf section that i went into the most blind was the sports tag, since my knowledge of sports is .......... yeh that's about all i know lol

men's football and hockey have a similar number of fics each (a little over 30k), though the top character in the sports tag is max verstappen who is actually a racing driver so ??? confused noises lol

anyway idrc about the men (this is a joke ofc @ men i love you), what i DO care about is that women's football (and this is specifically the soccer kind not the american lol) has the highest femslash fics, and i looked up tobin heath (who was the top character in this section) and lemme just say that i Get it lol...

wwe and formula 1 are some other sports that have a significant number of fics in the, filled with people i've never heard of before pfft... i will say that most of the sports have general as their top rating, except for hockey which has explicit (i feel like theirs some kinda joke i could make here about playing with sticks but i'm not gonna lol... especially since most sports already play with balls so?)

anyway enough about sports lol, let's return to something i'm much more comfortable with: youtubers!

youtube is actually the 2nd most written about category (next to kpop, with nearly 280k fics) with minecraft youtubers (the top character being tommyinnit) being the most written about!

what i found most fascinating about this is that 8 out of the 10 top ships in this tag are platonic (and 1 is actually just the 'no romantic relationships' tag lol... the top ship overall is still a slash pairing, but it's still interesting that such a big fandom has mainly platonic pairings!)

also even though the phandom have nowhere near the amount of fics as minecraft youtube, i found it kinda funny that there are (as of writing this) only 95 more fics featuring dan than phil (essentially saying that literally nearly 99% of the fics feature the both of them lol... phandom really said 'co-dependency' and i respect that lol)

moving on to actors, which i expected to have a lot more fics than it does given a lot of rpf involves the actors of characters in popular fictional ships (i mean there are still a lot, over 130k lol...) and supernatural takes the crown of having the most fics of this category! j2 is the top ship, though the 3rd top ship in the actors tag is actually tom hiddleston x original female character! i think because of this british actors are the highest subsection of actors, followed by chinese actors!

i think i did expect the chinese actors to have more fics, but i'm guessing the smaller number is because of the whole xiao zhan ao3 drama from a few years ago... wang yibo x xiao zhan still make up the most popular ship, plus there are plenty of other c-dramas and other chinese shows that have a big number of fics that don't fall under the chinese actor umbrella tag (so the number probably would be a lot larger if i went through and counted them... but i'm not gonna)... similar thing with thai actors, which only has a couple thousand fics in the tag, but there are a whole lot more fics dedicated to rpf of specific actors on specific shows (from a quick glance i think tharntype and kinnporsche are a couple of the highest fandoms? but i didn't go through everything cos i'd already been doing this for a few hours and i was getting sleeeeeby lol...)

one thing that intrigued me was the british comedy category (which is the top comedy category lol! we did it lads we finally came top with something!), where would i lie to you and taskmaster were the top fandoms! david mitchell was the top character and, kinda bizarrely imo, david x charlie brooker was the top ship (i feel like i'm missing some kinda big thing in the british comedy fandom ngl lol... but like really? you ship david with charlie brooker when robert webb, his actual comedy partney, is RIGHT there? or even lee mack i'm ??? ok ok i'm getting off topic pfft...)

oh greg davies and alex horne are also a popular ship in this category ofc (though they have less than 1000 fics lol!)

the final umbrella category of rpf that i could find was historical, which is the tag with the least amount of fics (under 20k), with alexander hamilton and various other american specific historical figures making up the bulk of the popular historical fics (these are mainly tired to the musical hamilton btw)!

the top characters and ship when narrowed down to just the f/f of the historical tag is mostly original female characters btw!

there are also fics of other public figures, like politics, porn, journalists and chefs, and probably the most intriguing facts i found from this section are that hillary clinton is the most popular character in the 21st century us politics section, joe biden and donald trump are the 4th most popular ship (with the reoccurring additional tag of 'crack fic' lol), and though it isn't in the top stats, when i went into the pundit and journalist tag the first few fics to pop up were ben shapiro x matt walsh explicit stuff which was... uh... interesting lol

final thing i'll note is that i stuck mainly to ao3 for this because though i know places like wattpad have a large rpf collection too, but it's so bloody HARD to find data about fics on that site pfft... though i think one thing that would be shown by looking into wattpad's rpf community is that whereas ao3 has a lot of shipping content (obviously), wattpad has a lot more reader x celebrity (but like take this with a pinch of salt since i've not actually done the research for this part pfft...)

anyway i hope you (all 0 of you) enjoyed this rambling take on the data i found on ao3's rpf collection lol!

i know people get really weird around rpf, but i just genuinely find it SO interesting how diverse the range of stuff people write about!

[aethel]

Another discord discussion on the rise and fall of certain RPF fandoms and podfic popularity vs. overall popularity of a fandom prompted me to make another comparison graph on AO3 fanworks for these fandoms. Check it out; the prevalence of podfic for a fandom isn’t closely correlated with the overall size of the fandom.

I got these numbers using the work search function while logged in. For the podfic numbers, I relied on the “Podfic” tag, which not all podfics on the archive use....

[aethel]

After my last foray into fandom statistics, I was thinking about other ways to spot how real-world events impact fanworks: the percentage of AUs might increase in an RPF fandom if real life developments would make canon-compliant fic too unhappy or otherwise interfere with fanon. I tried this theory on two Chinese RPF ships: Wang Yibo/Xiao Zhan* and Gong Jun/Zhang Zhehan** (LLD). While logged in I used the ship tag, filtered by English fanworks only, and compared fanworks with any AU tag to the total output per month.

* After AO3 was blocked in China February 29, 2020, people retaliated by sabotaging XZ’s career.

**August 13/15, 2021 - ZZH was blacklisted from the entertainment industry and his shows removed from the Internet

Unfortunately the results are inconclusive. WYB/XZ AUs did increase, but the overall number of fanworks also increased significantly due to another real-world event: the pandemic. Also there were several fic challenges starting in April 2020. Meanwhile, ZZH/GJ fanwork AU percentages did not go up, but there’s only one full month of data post-apocalypse, so who knows. Other complicating factors: AO3 users might not include an AU tag consistently, and I think the percentage of AUs tends to go up the longer a fandom is active anyway. (??)

I thought about finding a control group, but the next largest Chinese RPF ship I knew of was tiny: it’s been going since 2018, but Bai Yu/Zhu Yilong still has only 253 fanworks in English. 38 are tagged as AUs.

I limited my inquiry to English works because of the aforementioned banning and also Chinese fanworks seem to be less likely to use an AU tag--probably because of tagging practices and/or the language barrier rather than because they don’t write AUs. (For example, the fic with the most hit counts in the WYB/XZ tag is a sex worker AU, and it is not tagged as such.)

This test might still work on a more popular anglophone RPF ship, should anything remotely as catastrophic happen to the main ship in one of those fandoms. I hope not.