Episode 138: 2020 By the Numbers
Nearing the end of a very strange year, Flourish and Elizabeth sit down with fandom stats whiz Destination Toast to dig into recent fanfiction trends on the Archive of Our Own. Topics covered include the massive uptick in fic production (that predated the pandemic!), the impact of China’s AO3 ban and the rise of Chinese media in English-language fandom, which fandoms and tags are growing in popularity, and—inescapably—what’s happened with Supernatural fandom since the events of November 5th.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:02:07] Toast was previously on the podcast in Episode 13, “Destination: Stats!,” Episode 16, “Larry is Real,” Episode 21, “Trash Ships and Fandom IRL,” and Episode 44, “Mary Sue.”
[00:03:45] The interstitial music here and throughout the episode is “The Long Journey” from Music for Podcasts 2 by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:07:56] As you’re listening to this episode, check out Toast’s post about their 2020 stats!
[00:15:27] You can contact Toast as destinationtoast on Tumblr and @dstntoast at Twitter.
[00:30:16] Behold! Wesley Crusher’s sweater! (The image is from and of Becky Lee, who wrote the knitting pattern.)
[00:58:10]
And yes, if you have any comments on this part of the episode…send them directly to @flourish on Twitter.
[01:02:30] Toast has written up the Supernatural stats we’re talking about here.
[01:16:24] Although Toast wasn’t a part of it, we did record an episode live from GeekGirlCon!
Transcript
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #138, “2020 By the Numbers.” So you know, 2020. Numbers. I think we’re talking about the returns from Gwinnett County, Georgia.
FK: Oh my God. [ELM laughs] I am going to stab you. That is not what we’re talking about. We are talking about the return—
ELM: Clark County, Nevada!
FK: —of Destination Toast, our favorite fandom statistician!
ELM: [laughing] There are so many numbers this year! I didn’t want to make a COVID joke, because there’s nothing funny about that, and honestly there’s nothing funny about the continuing—what’s the word?—the, like, amber we’re all trapped in waiting for some resolution on the selection.
FK: Yeah. I mean…
ELM: Words. The words are trapped.
FK: But we’re not talking about any of that! We’re not talking about any of that! What we’re talking about—
ELM: I mean, look look look—
FK: —is fanfiction stats.
ELM: Fanfiction stats—I just gotta say, because we devoted a portion of our episodes pre-election urging people, imploring people to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris…
FK: Thank you for voting for Joe Biden.
ELM: Thank you very much, particularly if you live in one of the states that flipped. But actually, no. Everyone, because the electoral college is a piece of shit and everyone’s votes should count.
FK: Yes. Thank you.
ELM: But it’s been an interesting few weeks looking at numbers. Frankly, it’ll be a thrill to look at some numbers that are about fanfiction.
FK: Yes! So we’re, I think we’re gonna talk about numbers over the course of 2020 about, like, AO3 numbers? And I have lots of questions about what happened in this hell year, and like, how this went.
ELM: Hold on, should we just say who Destination Toast is, if anyone hasn’t listened to their previous episodes?
FK: Ah, good idea, good idea.
ELM: They’ve been on the podcast three times and they are pretty well-known in like, AO3 transformative spaces for their stats work.
FK: Yeah. They are a reliable source of information about what is going on on the Archive Of Our Own, as far as the numbers go. And they’ve come on—they’ve talked about all sorts of stuff with us in the past. They’ve talked about, they’ve done some stuff like this episode where we went over, like, a year and what that year was like in fanfic. I think the last time they came on they talked about, like, the percentage of fics that were about asexual characters. All sorts of stuff like that.
ELM: Yeah! So Toast looks into a lot of interesting questions, but I know that this year, right around this time, they were looking at kind of the trends over the last year. And 2019, somewhat, as well. And so it’s interesting.
I think we should caveat this by saying that like—and I think Toast heavily caveats their work, whenever they post it—saying, like: this is an analysis of the data that’s on Archive Of Our Own, or sometimes whatever site they’re analyzing. And like, it is not a qualitative judgment of anything. These are just numbers reflecting things that are happening in the world. I don’t know, it’s kind of up to us, as people who may be spending time on the ground in various fandoms and seeing reflections of these trends play out in their fandom spaces, to kind of give that context. And so these numbers should never be decontextualized, I guess, is what I think Toast would agree is a big thing to keep in mind whenever you’re looking at these trends.
FK: Definitely. All right, well, should we call Toast up?
ELM: Yes. I would love to do that.
FK: Let’s do it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, I think it’s time to welcome Toast to the podcast! Welcome back, Toast!
Destination Toast: Hello! Great to talk to you again. It’s been too long.
ELM: Hi, Toast! It’s funny cause we have talked to you, not on the podcast, so it doesn’t feel that long to me.
DT: Yeah, OK.
ELM: But it’ll be long for everyone else.
DT: All right, I was just being polite, Elizabeth! [laughs]
ELM: I don’t know, this is very familiar! This is just like, we’re in lockdown like normal times, except we’re recording it.
DT: Yeah! [all laugh]
FK: We’re a little bit more directed than we are when we’re just, you know, shootin’ the shit.
ELM: I don’tk now, I usually bring an agenda to a casual Skype conversation. That’s not true. I don’t bring agendas to real meetings, so…
FK: You don’t bring agendas to anything, Elizabeth, my God.
ELM: No, no, I don’t do that. All right. We do have a bit of an agenda here, but first, before we talk about these stats, I would like to know—Toast, you have not been on the podcast in several years.
DT: Yeah.
ELM: What have you been up to?
DT: Ah! I have been pretty busy outside of fandom with work-y and other life things. Especially so during quarantine times. Things have been going mostly pretty well for me, but I have been busy enough that I haven’t been doing fandom stats or other things as much as usual. I guess I also have had some of the experience of just finding this whole year has messed with me some, and I haven’t really felt inspired to do stats or anything until recently either. But yeah! I’ve been continuing to listen to you guys, but it’s great to be back on the podcast with you.
FK: And now you’re back doing stats, too!
DT: I am! I have been super curious about what’s been going on during this year with all of the tumult and unusual things going on, and so I recently took a look at that.
ELM: OK. So I’m trying to think if you, if you don’t take a quantitative approach to this, what people have been saying qualitatively about what’s going on in fandom. And I feel like you get a lot of kind of confirmation bias.
DT: Yeah.
FK: Yeah, like what are the theories that people have been putting, putting forth, right?
ELM: Yeah. So like, I’ve seen some people be like, “I can’t read! I can’t write right now! So like, I bet no one can.” You know? Obviously some people are like, “I assume other people have different experiences than me.” [laughs] Not everyone is assuming the same thing! I’ve also seen people talk about how they’ve just been constantly rereading and not reading anything new.
DT: Yeah.
ELM: Which, you know, definitely is something that I would be curious to know if it shows up in numbers. I’ve seen people talking about revisiting old fandoms, sometimes very old fandoms—or maybe I’m just old, and they—cause they’ll be like “My teenage fandoms…” and maybe for them that was like five years ago, but to me that would be, you know, half a lifetime ago. What else? Can you guys think of other theories that you’ve seen?
FK: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of people also saying “I only wanna read fluff, I only care about that right now, because, like, everything’s too stressful,” like, that’s been—that’s been another thing I’ve seen people say. You know, “I think that it’s only gonna be like, happy hugging things that are coming out of this period.”
DT: Yeah, I have certainly seen all of those theories go by. I myself have been definitely—the fandoms that I have been reading, you know, I’ve haven’t been reading a whole ton of fanfic, but the stuff that I’ve been reading has mostly been old favorites and things with happy endings and so I can definitely understand where a lot of people are coming from with those theories, and I guess that was part of what I was curious about, too. Is it mostly fluff? Has there been a lot of people just not able to write anything new? On the other hand, you know, so many people are stuck at home more—maybe we would see a big boom in production. So I was sort of curious about all of those things when I started looking at this.
ELM: OK, well, should we go to the numbers?
DT: Sure!
FK: So what happened, just like, if you look over all this year—what’s the like, big number?
DT: [laughs] The big number is that there has been a huge boom in the production of new fanfic over the course of this year on AO3. I will say that all of the stats that I’ve done so far about this year are purely looking at Archive Of Our Own, so I can’t say anything at the moment about the other archives.
But yes. So I actually looked year-by-year and found that there was quite a big surge even in 2019, which we can talk about a little bit, perhaps, but in 2020 there has been an even bigger, huge increase in new works in the year so far. Over 40% more than in 2019 during the same period. And usually it’s more like a 10% increase from year to year. So this has been a really big jump so far.
FK: Whoa. Does that have anything to do with—so I know one of the big stories over this time has been not just the growth of Chinese-language fandoms in English-speaking world, but also like—there’s been a lot of questions about like, how much more Chinese-language works are there on the AO3, like, how is—I mean—
ELM: Hang on Flourish, that’s a 2019 question, because you know, the AO3 was banned in China pretty early this year. That was this year! Which… [laughs]
FK: That was this year, yeah!
DT: That was March.
ELM: It was right around the time of Appgate, as you may remember. Feels…
FK: Wow. Appgate happened in March. Oh my goodness.
ELM: It was right around, like, March 1.
FK: This year has been a million years long.
ELM: I remember it was around the same weekend that that was going down, the two different AO3 stories, and people were frustratingly trying to tie them together in ways that were not great.
FK: Right.
DT: You’re right, and I had actually forgotten that all of these things happened this year also. When I was initially doing these stats, I was thinking that the big Chinese influx and the end of a bunch of that had all happened in 2019, cause again: this year just feels so very long. But you’re right, those things happened in March.
FK: But I mean, I actually also wonder, like—there was the big Chinese influx, but then how much did the government banning it actually…that’s not always super effective, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: People use VPNs, people use stuff, and sometimes the government banning something actually makes it more appealing. So how much—what was the influence of that on these numbers?
DT: Yeah. That’s a great question, and I did actually do some amount of breaking things down by language. So obviously, the things that are in Mandarin, which was the main Chinese language that I saw on Archive Of Our Own, all Chinese fanworks are not the same thing. There may be people in China posting things in other languages. But I looked at the things in Mandarin as a rough approximation, cause that’s actually the second-most-popular language on Archive Of Our Own at the moment.
And so we do actually see a big dip in production of Mandarin fanworks in March, when the Chinese government banned Archive Of Our Own. However, Mandarin remains the second-biggest language on Archive Of Our Own, even after that. It got a lot closer to Russian, the third-most-common language, but yeah. Definitely a large effect, but it continues to be one of the biggest contributors to Archive Of Our Own.
ELM: Did you see in the numbers—I know there was a large migration of fans themselves, it was around June of last year, 2019, and there was an influx of migrated fanworks as opposed to just people showing up and writing more. Is there a way to track that?
DT: So, I think those are really interesting questions. I didn’t actually do either a month-by-month breakdown in 2019, nor did I look at individual authors who were coming, and how many of those stuck around. So I think there’s a lot of fertile opportunity to go do more statistics and investigate that further, but I don’t actually have an answer to that right now.
ELM: OK. That’s interesting. All right, next time.
FK: OK but—yeah, next time. Does that mean that you did a month-by-month breakdown in 2020?
DT: I did!
FK: If you didn’t do one in 2019? [all laugh]
DT: Yes, actually! So I was curious about how much of a pattern we could see month-by-month, given that as we’ve all noted, this year has been a zillion years long, and it feels like there’s been a whole bunch of really major events. So I did break it down month-by-month, and I saw that sort of roughly in April there started to be a substantial increase in the number of works per month compared to what I would’ve predicted from how the year started out, and it’s continued to increase. July saw a particularly large, you know, surge in fanwork production. But generally it’s higher than I would have expected for the year, starting around April.
But, I think that actually hides part of the story, when you just look at the overall numbers, because when I broke it down by languages, I saw that different languages had different patterns of what they were doing over time, which makes I think a lot of sense, because globally different countries have been experiencing different aspects of the pandemic and lockdown and so on at different times.
ELM: Talk to me about July. So did you see a big—like, I’m just trying to figure out like, I mean, obviously there’s a million factors here about why people would have more interest and time. You know, I, obviously I’m going to be thinking about the shape of this pandemic and other events that happened this year. [laughs] As having an effect on this. So I, I do know that there was a very large surge in certain parts of the U.S. in the middle of the summer that might’ve led people to have to do more sheltering in place, but then in other parts that was when people were like, sneakin’ off to cabins or whatever. That’s, you can do it responsibly, go to a cabin, you know.
FK: Yeah, I was gonna say it feels like in New York, where we are, July was the moment where it was like “Oh! Things are maybe not as terrible as they used to be!” But that was not the shared experience of everyone in the United States.
DT: Right. And actually when we look at just English, there isn’t actually any kind of sharp peak in July. English is far and away the most common language on Archive Of Our Own. But in English we just sort of see starting in April there’s like, maybe a little bit of a surge over the summer overall, but mostly it’s just been, yeah, it’s been quite high in English in general.
And so I was interested in, yeah: what languages are seeing more of that peak specifically in July? And I don’t really have a good story for what’s going on in July, but we do see it in Chinese and Russian and Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, all seem to be some of the examples of things that are contributing. Indonesian a little bit? Yeah. So not all of those have a sharp spike just in July, but those are kind of the languages that were seeing a lot of the most activity then, and Brazilian Portuguese in particular maybe has the sharpest spike for July. But yeah, I honestly don’t really know what the story is and how much of it is just sort of coincidence of a bunch of different things for different groups of people, all lining up around that time. But it’s certainly an interesting pattern.
FK: Well maybe, maybe someone in Brazil will write, will you know, call in or write in and tell us “Oh yes, in July X happened!” And we’ll be like, “Oh!”
DT: That would be so great! And Chinese and Russian being—sorry, Mandarin and Russian being the, you know, two most common languages aside from English, they did—their seeing even a small peak means that they also were contributing a lot to that. So anyone from any of, who contributes or reads in any of those languages, I would really love to hear what you think was goin’ on in July.
ELM: That’s super interesting. All right, write to us and write to Toast.
DT: Yay!
ELM: Toastystats? Or destinationtoast? Which one do you send people to?
DT: Uh, I send people mostly to destinationtoast at Tumblr. My ask box there, or my Twitter, @destntoast, will get the fastest replies.
ELM: OK. We will make sure those are in the show notes, but just so people can have them in their minds. And they should follow you to see stats and like, cat gifs.
DT: [laughs] Always cats, yes.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: That’s the brand. Stats and cat gifs.
ELM: OK. So we’ve done production, what do we wanna talk about next?
DT: Well, should we talk about what some of the really active fandoms are?
ELM: Yeah, because people love this horse race.
DT: They love the horse race!
ELM: I say this as someone who’s worked at a lot of horse races, I don’t know why I invoked that term because actually I don’t like using that term for things that are not like horse races at all. I’m just saying!
FK: This is not. I feel like it’s also worth noting right now, I think I speak for all of us in saying that none of us think that it is the mark of a good fandom that you are highly active in creating fanworks. That like, that doesn’t make you special beyond like, maybe having a nice experience cause there’s lots of new fanworks for you to read. It’s not a contest.
ELM: Let me tell you, every Thursday morning at my racetrack they do one—the first race is one steeplechase. And no other steeplechases. And let me tell you, that is when they have to jump over things. And it’s a shitshow every time and if someone falls down it’s just like a disaster, right? And the jockeys are taller, which is very confusing to me. Different jockeys. But people who love steeplechases really appreciate that one race a week, and that’s what some fandoms are like. With fun jumps and sometimes some disasters and weirdly tall jockeys. [all laughing] I mean that they’re like, 5’8”. They’re not…
FK: This is—I’m not sure that this metaphor holds together, Elizabeth. I appreciate the attempt, but I don’t know that it actually holds.
ELM: [laughing] No, go ahead.
DT: As someone who was definitely, like, a horse girl when I was little, and read many books about steeplechases as well as other races, I appreciate the valiant attempt at a metaphor there. [all laughing]
ELM: Yeah! I mean, and the guys who just wanna see horses run on the dirt don’t like the steeplechase, so that’s like, you know, you got your Marvel fans who are like those guys, whereas like, the steeplechasers are like the…
FK: Is this really how that works? I don’t think this is a good metaphor! I’m gonna be the person who’s just like, “Are you listening to what you’re saying? Because I don’t think this—I don’t think it works.”
ELM: I’m listening! I think that the media uses “horse race” poorly and I’m gonna take it back and use it in better ways, in more creative and interesting metaphorical ways.
FK: [laughs] OK, “creative” might be the…you’re gonna use it poorly in different ways.
DT: I admire and am entertained by the effort. [all laugh]
ELM: Good, good. All right.
FK: OK but, but, if we’re going to talk about some kind of a race…
ELM: Plain ol’ turf races, plain— [laughs]
FK: Who’s winning, who’s “winning” this race? What fandoms are really highly active?
DT: Yeah. So I’m gonna talk about which fandoms are highly active from a couple of different directions. First, just which are the ones that are producing a ton of new or recently-updated works, and the ones that have grown a lot this year. I do want to caveat that yes, indeed, lots of fans care a lot about this and get very sad when they don’t hear their fandom mentioned in this group. I get so many notes from sad fans. And often, you know, their fandom has produced like thousands of works this year! But it just didn’t quite hit the arbitrary threshold that I set in order to not overwhelm people with every single fandom. And so I just want people to know that like, often their fandom also was highly active and even if it wasn’t, as Elizabeth has noted, like: that’s great too! There’s room for fandoms that are popular and fandoms that are not. But anyway.
ELM: Yes. I did note that, yes.
DT: Don’t be sad if you don’t hear your fandom in here! But I will highlight some of the ones that have been particularly active this year. So, I saw that one of the very biggest tags that—fandom tags that has been popular on AO3 and really active this year, is K-pop, which of course is a meta tag that holds a whole bunch of other tags. And so BTS has been super huge, NCT, and some other K-pop bands also, lots and lots of fanworks for K-pop. And interestingly, Real Person Fiction—RPF—has also been really active, and I didn’t realize until I did these stats that K-pop and RPF actually like, one is not a sub-tag of the other. Looks like Archive Of Our—
FK: Whoa.
ELM: That’s interesting.
DT: Totally!
FK: Wait wait, does this suggest that K-pop members are not real persons about which we can write fanfic? Cause that’s fucked up!
ELM: There’s also like a bandom meta-tag too, isn’t there?
DT: So I believe, I looked at One Direction and a few other things and I think they are also not Real Person Fiction. I think that like…
ELM: They are constructions, that’s fair.
DT: Actor RPF and Sports RPF and a few other things seem to roll up to Real Person Fiction, but some quirk of tag wrangling has put a lot of bands in a separate category. So.
ELM: That’s interesting.
DT: Yeah. So that’s not like, a deep meaningful thing, it’s just how things have evolved over time on AO3, but when I saw these two things being big…
FK: You know, look, if you’re a sociologist looking at like, community tagging practices, this is actually kind of deep and meaningful!
ELM: But these, K-pop as like a meta-tag, if I was writing a BTS fic I would not tag it “K-pop.” I would tag it “BTS.” Right?
DT: Right. You also wouldn’t tag it “Real Person Fiction,” usually.
FK: And it’s a meta-tag that rolls up BTS into K-pop by default.
ELM: Right. And if I was writing a hockey fic I would tag it “Hockey RPF,” I wouldn’t tag it “RPF” probably.
FK: Right. And then “RPF” is a—so this is not like a community tagging decision necessarily as much as it’s a tag wrangling decision.
ELM: Right, and probably one that was made a long time ago and this is a legacy of it, I’m assuming. A tag wrangler, I know some tag wranglers listen to this podcast! You can also let us know about how these decisions are made.
FK: Yeah, tell us about how this came to be, guys! It’s not, you know, it’s just interesting.
DT: Right, yeah. So I guess my assumption was just, indeed, that this is mostly a thing that has come out of the history of tag wrangling, and it doesn’t mean something particular about how people are mostly choosing to tag things, necessarily, as you both observe: mostly people are choosing something more specific than either of these, they’ll tag it “BTS” or they’ll tag it “Hockey RPF” or so on. So just highlighting that those two categories have been seeing an awful lot of activity this year.
I also saw that anime has made a huge surge, a number of anime properties were very active this year, and in past years when I had looked at anime, I had seen that a lot of it lived over on fanfiction.net and other platforms and less of it was on Archive Of Our Own. But this year, not only did I find that Naruto and Haikyuu!! have climbed into some of the top most-active fandoms, but also one of the most popular fandoms overall right now is BNHA, My Hero Academia, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is also very popular. So lots of anime that is thriving on Archive Of Our Own, and since some of these are I believe newer properties, it’s not just people migrating older works from other fandom platforms, but I believe that it’s also just getting popular on AO3 from the beginning.
FK: Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. Like, Naruto is so old, I wonder—has, do we know if AO3 has rolled up any old archives in that category?
DT: That’s a great question. I don’t actually know that.
ELM: You’re gonna walk away from this with like, dozens of additional questions. It’s gonna be great. I can’t wait for you to do the follow-up stats.
FK: I mean it’ll be interesting to look into that. Cause it’s true, right? JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure I think is newer and so I guess it—you know, that’s interesting because it could be people coming on, but I wonder how much—obviously there have been times when Archive Of Our Own has grabbed old…
ELM: Sure.
FK: Old archives and has ballooned…
ELM: I also know that there’s been a huge influx of anime on Netflix, obviously lots and lots of people already—lots of Western fans already were watching on CrunchyRoll and things like that and many other ways over the decades, right. But I have seen a bunch of discussion about what Netflix is doing for anime right now, and so I’m curious—maybe it’s actually bringing, I wonder if it’s bringing new people into anime in general in the West.
DT: Oh yeah, that’s really interesting. I did see like, Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was recently made available on Netflix, which had been more accessible to Western audiences, but still it suddenly got way more available, and we saw a big surge in activity in that fandom. Of course that’s conflated with like—there’s new material coming soon for Avatar, and so on. But still, I think that you’re right that if a bunch of things got suddenly more available to a broader audience, that could also help explain why the fandoms are suddenly surging.
ELM: Yeah.
DT: I also want to take a moment to caveat right now, like: I’m talking about a bunch of these fandoms, anime fandoms, K-pop fandoms, I will be talking about some Chinese fandoms: I’m not actually active in any of these fandoms and so people may well spot, you know, mistakes that I make about which fandoms have been active when and so on. So just take everything I say with a grain of salt, if I say that something is new and it’s not, or so on.
ELM: Sure. OK, so that’s interesting. All right, so what else?
DT: Yeah!
ELM: Is in the top fandoms?
DT: All right! Well, I had seen a whole bunch of fanworks going by on my Tumblr dash, fan art and links to stories and stuff, for The Untamed and The Witcher. And sure enough—
ELM: Are you saying that there’s Untamed fan activity on your dash? [DT laughs] That’s weird! It’s very hard for me to find that on the internet.
DT: Indeed. Indeed I have seen some. Yes. So definitely those fandoms showed up among some of the more active ones this year, the ones that produced over 10,000 fanworks just within 2020.
ELM: Side note: Did you know that The Untamed was a Yuletide fandom in 2019?
DT: Oh my goodness! No.
ELM: It’s incredible to me.
FK: Wow. Amazing.
DT: It is amazing.
FK: I love, I love, I love Yuletide fandoms like that where it’s like, “Oh!”
ELM: Boom!
DT: Yeah, I remember looking at Yuletide stats one year and that year Hamilton was, I believe, still a Yuletide fandom, so it’s always fun to see things go on to get really huge after Yuletide.
ELM: That’s funny. OK, wait. Untamed, Witcher…
DT: Yes. Still Good Omens, which was sort of a breakout TV show last year—still quite active.
FK: Huh, that’s interesting! I wouldn’t have guessed that. I think that, maybe it’s just because of my own little bubble, I don’t see as much of it. But evidently people are still goin’ there.
ELM: Flourish is tunin’ in from het fandom right now. I can assure you, the Good Omens fan… [laughs]
FK: I have plenty of slashers, it’s just for me—maybe it’s just that the Untamed wave came for my timeline like, so, you know. It just washed everything before it.
DT: Yeah, I do see more Untamed than I see Good Omens, but I still have a fair amount of Good Omens on my dash, so.
ELM: Yeah. I mean, I think that you and I both having been in Sherlock fandom, there is a direct line from one to the other. So.
DT: True, true. Absolutely. [all laugh] Yeah, so I also saw a bunch of video games. Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy showing up in some of the most popular fandoms, and I’ve certainly seen Final Fantasy for quite a long time, I also saw plenty of older favorites of fandom are still quite active. So you’ve still got a lot from MCU, a lot of Harry Potter, a lot of Star Wars, and Supernatural, which I think we might talk about more in a bit. Some DCU, Disney, all those kind of—all those kind of ones. So those…
FK: The usual suspects.
DT: Yeah! Yeah. So—
ELM: I would be, I don’t—I doubt you went into this kind of detail because we didn’t ask you in advance, but I would be curious to know the shape of the Harry Potter fandom this past year.
DT: Oh, I was very curious about that. Yeah, cause I was wondering—I actually at some point was wondering how many people were going to orphan their fanworks and whether there would be a huge fall-off in Harry Potter production, and those things might have happened some, but when I looked just at things in the past couple weeks, Harry Potter was one of a couple of the most popular fandoms overall. So still—
ELM: That’s interesting!
DT: —very high production.
ELM: Sit with that one.
FK: Wow. That’s…
ELM: I mean, I have a lot of friends who are still in the fandom and don’t know, they still don’t know what to do. And I guess, you know, like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s been, it’s been six months since that all, I mean, it didn’t all go down at once. But six months since the big explosion of opinions. Still deciding.
DT: I still get a lot out of rereading Draco/Harry fics and stuff! But I’m still a person who got a lot out of, still gets a lot out of the Sherlock fandom, and sort of—I have my differences [laughs] big and small with creators of these different fandoms’ canons! And I still get a lot out of the fanworks. So I have a fair amount of personal sympathy for the people who are still clinging to the fandom portion of those properties.
ELM: I just like—I had an image of you, like, cradling these fandoms and me being like “THEY’RE DEAD TO ME” and spitting on them. Just being like “NO. NO.” [all laugh]
DT: Yes, that’s sort of how I see our role.
FK: Speaking of that, by the way, Elizabeth, if you want me to unravel your Weasley sweater and knit you a new sweater that is not a Weasley sweater, I will do that. Cause I think I’m gonna do that with mine.
ELM: Oh, I might want that actually! That’s very sweet.
FK: Yeah. I will do that. Yeah, no, I mean, it may be like a weird-ass sweater cause it’s gonna be like, all the stuff I unraveled from it and like, whatever else I have of the same weight.
ELM: Crop top!
FK: But you know, it’ll be the like—you know, spit on it sweater, I guess. [all laughing]
DT: Do you guys still have a Patreon tier that is a Weasley sweater?
FK: We removed it.
ELM: That wasn’t just cause of Harry Potter. No one was—it was extremely high for a reason, and…
FK: It was a joke, mostly.
ELM: Yeah, it was a joke tier. So anyone who does want that, Flourish will knit you any sweater of your choosing for that tier.
FK: [laughing] Whoa. Whoa.
ELM: I’m happy to tell you that, that’s what Flourish will do for you.
FK: Elizabeth, whoa. I have not consented to this.
ELM: Look, you know, you’re saying that you withdrew your consent to make a sweater?
FK: There’s a big difference between “I will make you this particular sweater” and “I will make you any sweater of your choosing,” Elizabeth.
ELM: Oh oh! No no no. Flourish will make you a sweater.
FK: Yeah! It can be a sweater of my choosing. I will make it for you to fit you correctly.
ELM: A sweater themed around the fandom of your choosing. You could do that.
FK: Yeah, I feel like I can do that. As long as I have ultimate design decisions.
ELM: You could knit a Star Trek sweater. You could make a sweater with like the little, what’s it called? An ensign, is that what it is?
FK: Dude, I would do you one better and I’d make you Wesley’s embarrassing sweater from Next Generation.
ELM: Wow.
FK: Wesley’s the one with the knitwear.
ELM: Yes.
DT: Wow.
ELM: All right, everyone, get in on that. If you’re savin’ up your money in lockdown, just, what, it’s something ridiculous like $400 a month or something. It wasn’t that bad, but still. It was high. OK, great, moving on. Let’s not talk about Harry Potter any more.
FK: All right, so we were talking about total volume before. This is what you were talking about, you were talking about total volume of fanworks. What about what’s fast-growing? Cause that’s different, right?
DT: Yeah, and partly because the top most popular fandoms were so full of old favorites that have been around a very long time, I was curious to see what’s been super-hot this year in particular, so I was looking at things that have produced thousands of fanworks overall, but like over half of them were produced in 2020. So this highlights a different group of things—and there were a few things like Old Guard that I’ve seen on my dash a whole bunch and was not surprised to see showing up there.
But actually, what I thought was really interesting was that there were a whole lot of properties in there that were Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai, and also that there were a whole lot of things that were not live-action. So there were lots of video games, but also other mobile games. There was lots of animated content. There were podcasts and webseries. And so it was an interestingly diverse set of fandoms that are fast-growing in a bunch of ways, and I’m kind of curious how much of that is because of like, this year is weird and we don’t have as much live-action content coming out, and how much some of this would be happening anyway, either because of fans coming in from more parts of the globe—the Chinese influx, as we were talking about, and other global trends—and how much of it is, you know, people broadening their sets of interests. And we don’t really know that yet; it’ll be really interesting to look to see whether the diversity changes on any of those dimensions going into future years.
FK: Can I just say I’m really delighted to see Shall We Date? on this list? Because when I saw Obey Me! Shall We Date? I was like “that is gonna be fucking catnip for people,” and I’m glad to see myself proved right.
ELM: Is that a dating simulator? Yeah.
FK: It’s a dating sim where you are dating all of these demon characters?
ELM: Oh! I have seen that!
FK: Who represent all of the different deadly sins?
DT: That’s fantastic. I kept seeing that title and being like, “Shall We Date? Obey Me!, this is fascinating, I have to look it up,” but I hadn’t looked it up yet.
FK: Yeah, they’re demons. I have not actually played it, I’ve only looked at it, but I didn’t have to look at it for very long to say, “Oh yes. This one.” [laughs] You know?
ELM: That’s funny.
FK: You know when you sometimes just see something and you’re like, that’s, that—it has it. It’s got it. The thing.
DT: See, that’s interesting. Because definitely—so I assume that one has more characters that you can attach personalities to, and definitely some of the games are of that sort, but I see Minecraft in here, and I see some like, tower defense games and things—I don’t know much about a large number of these games, but it struck me that there was a interestingly large set of types of games, and I’d love to hear from folks who are maybe in some game fandoms, who can talk more about what kinds of things people are picking up on and focusing on in each of those properties.
ELM: Minecraft, I’m extremely curious to know what Minecraft fanfiction is like.
FK: Yeah! Well, the thing is that I’ve seen some Minecraft fanfiction. It used to be, I used to encounter it like, on DeviantArt or on forums and on Reddit, and I wonder whether there’s more—I mean, this may be just like a super naïve judgment or question, but I would be really interested to see some of the gender demographics, the way people identify in some of these fandoms. Because my instinct has always been, with some of those, that it’s like a younger and more male cohort of people. When I’ve seen those kind of fanfics in the past, it’s struck me that that seems to be who’s writing them—I would love to know if maybe AO3 is, is that affecting AO3? Is that something that’s changing? Is AO3 becoming more, sort of, for everybody, and not as, you know, strongly weighted in one way or the other.
DT: I think that’s really interesting. I also know that there are some YouTubers who talk about Minecraft, and it occurs to me—some of them also have fandoms, and I’m not sure whether or not works about the YouTubers sometimes get tagged also with Minecraft—
ELM: That’s interesting.
DT: —or what actually happens. So I think, yeah, I’d love to investigate this further.
ELM: Add that, add that to your 50 more questions to ask! [DT laughs] Yeah, it’s interesting. It just makes me think too that like, there are real limitations to doing demographic surveys of people who use any fanfiction platform, including AO3, and there’s huge numbers of people who are using it who were not gonna—we would never reach with a Twitter or a Tumblr survey. You know. And there are reasons why, in our last survey, when we asked for ships, we got a huge range of ships, but like—we got a lot of Destiel, you know? [laughs] It wasn’t like we got thousands of whatever, if we got ships in the Minecraft fandom, I don’t know. I played Minecraft once with a seven-year-old, and he was embarrassed for me, I think. So. [all laugh] He just asked me to just chop wood for him, and…
FK: Yeah, that’s a good thing to do.
ELM: I just sat in the corner and just chopped the wood like, “I’m so sorry.” This was only a couple years ago. But…
FK: This is funny because I feel like as a person who likes The Sims, if you got into the right chunk of Minecraft you could… Oh wait. You don’t like, with The Sims you like making your characters do things, you don’t like building stuff.
ELM: I hate building stuff.
FK: If you were the dollhouse kind of Sims person…
ELM: Oh, Flourish.
FK: Then you would be a Minecraft person.
ELM: You know, I just bought the Mermaid Island land, and there aren’t enough houses to move into! I’m not gonna freakin’ build a house for my mermaids!
FK: Well, if we played together, or if I played on your account or whatever, I would build you a house, cause that’s the thing I like.
ELM: Oh my God, yeah! My mermaids could use a bigger house. Now they have three kids.
FK: Wow.
ELM: And this—
FK: We are not going to have a collective Sims game. This is not how our friendship is gonna go forward, Elizabeth, even though I kind of proposed it, it’s not gonna be a successful proposal.
ELM: Toast, just so you know, they’re all X-Men characters, in case you were wondering.
DT: Oh, excellent. [all laughing]
ELM: They’re mermaids and they’re X-Men characters. Yeah.
DT: Side note, I just watched X-Men: First Class this week.
ELM: Stop!! Why didn’t you lead with that?! That’s the only thing I want to hear you talk about!! We can talk about this afterwards.
DT: Let’s talk about that more afterwards.
ELM: All right! Great. I can’t wait. I have a whole bottle of wine.
FK: OK wait wait wait, hold up. I actually do have a real question for you on this, on this, OK?
ELM: On X-Men First Class?
FK: Are you ready to get back to the topic?
DT: Yes.
ELM: Aww. OK. Fine.
FK: All right. So you were just saying that there were a bunch of fandoms that were, like, growing, and that were non-Western, and also that there were a bunch of non-Western fandoms. Are those still—I mean I know English is obviously still the largest language on the Archive Of Our Own, but is that growth all happening in English? Or is it because Archive Of Our Own is getting more language communities and therefore those things that people in those language communities are interested in are also getting more fanworks? Does that make sense?
DT: Yeah. So that’s a great question, and I have sort of a partial answer. I started to look at this just for English and Mandarin, as the two largest languages, and looked at about 15 of the big fandoms to see how many of them were primarily English-language, primarily Mandarin, or large groups of other languages.
What I saw there is that there are some very large or fast-growing fandoms that seem to be primarily Mandarin, so like, Super-Vocal is a TV reality show in China, and Arknights is a game there, but neither of those seem to have spread very far into like, English-language fandoms, from what I can tell. They’re mostly Mandarin fanworks. So there’s a whole bunch of properties that seem to have large non-English fandoms, primarily.
But, for a lot of big fandoms like The Untamed and the series of Chinese novels that it was based on, and the other novels—some of the other novels by the same author, those fandoms are a mix of Mandarin and English, and they’re still over 70% English for a lot of those fandoms. They’ve sort of hit the cross-cultural mix, and you see a bunch of both languages in there.
And then everything else that I’ve looked at so far, including a number of K-Pop and anime fandoms and all of the big Western fandoms I’ve looked at—those were over 90% English-language. So there may be fans from all over, but mostly they’re writing their fanworks in English.
ELM: That is very interesting, and this is something that I would like more cultural context on. Like, the qualitative companion to this. So I don’t know who’s gonna give that to me.
DT: I am not the person to provide the qualitative answers, but I would really love to hear them also! So I look forward to hearing some feedback.
ELM: OK. Why don’t we take a quick break and then we can shift gears a little, maybe talk about some of the other areas that you looked at.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back, and as usual on the other side of the break, I think that we need to talk to you about Patreon.
ELM: I really wish you could, you could say that without making it sound…
FK: It’s not possible.
ELM: …like…
FK: Can’t do it!
ELM: …you knockin’ on the door, holdin’ a Bible.
FK: Actually, I can, I can do it, but I don’t do it, because it annoys you so much and I love to annoy you.
ELM: I don’t think that’s why, but all right. Patreon.com/fansplaining, that is the way that we support the podcast, Patreon—as I’m sure everyone knows at this point—you can pledge tiers, as little as $1, as many as the many dollars it would take to get Flourish to make you Wesley Crusher’s ugly sweater. Is that the exact…?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Formal term? Of the sweater?
FK: Yeah. It’s ugly rainbow sweater.
ELM: Oh wow. Even better. But, but! More likely you’d be pledging at our most popular level, which is $3 a month, which would get you access to a whole range of special episodes, including a bunch of them on tropes, or $5 a month would get you a very cute pin, which Toast has—unless you lost it.
DT: I lost mine at GeekGirlCon! But it was the best pin.
ELM: I couldn’t remember if we gave you a replacement or not! We didn’t!
DT: I would love a replacement pin.
ELM: All right. Well, we’ll get you one, but you have to promise to put a stronger back on it.
DT: I promise.
ELM: It’s kind of on us, but you know, whatever. And then, importantly, $10 a month, we just sent out our most recent Tiny Zine, which Toast also received. Toast, give us your review please.
DT: It was so great! It was incredibly cute and the fan art of Giles was amazing. [ELM laughs]
FK: And we still have some! So if you pledge $10, like, you can still get one.
ELM: It’s really handy to have a patron right here to give, like, live reviews of all our products. But Toast endorses this stuff, so that could be you too.
DT: Highly endorsed!
ELM: So that’s patreon.com/fansplaining, and as some patrons have seen recently, Patreon now allows you to do it in the currency—I know it’s, you can do it in pounds sterling or euros. I don’t know if it’s every currency, but we definitely have people who have been adjusting, so if you live in Europe and this has been a reason that you’ve avoided pledging, get excited: you can do it in your own currency now!
FK: You can also support us in other non-financial ways. For instance, by writing in! Like we’ve been encouraging you to do this whole time! So you can send us a message at fansplaining at gmail dot com, send us a message on social media, we’re fansplaining everywhere, you can call in—we love that—at 1-401-526-FANS. And you know, if you have answers to any of the questions that Toast and we have come up with, or if you have more questions, you know, let us know and we love featuring that!
You can also, you know, tell other people about our podcast, leave us a review on your favorite podcatcher, you know, just generally be a mensch and help us out in those ways.
ELM: Be a mensch.
FK: Elizabeth’s shaking her head at me, I think because I used the word “mensch.”
ELM: Yes. I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t know, Flourish.
FK: I don’t know what to say.
ELM: You just talked about—you can’t just be like “I’m just gonna love Jesus and then appropriate the term ‘mensch.’”
FK: [laughing] And then use the word “mensch”!
ELM: I’m just saying! I’m not Jewish, so I can’t really speak on this, but just saying.
FK: Is it, is it—yeah.
ELM: Just saying.
FK: Stolen valor.
ELM: Yeah. All right. [DT laughing] Moving on now.
FK: Back to Toast, is I think where we’re moving on to.
ELM: OK. So we’ve done volume. We’ve done fandoms. We’ve done velocity of fandoms. I don’t know what the last one was. I took physics a very long time ago. What else did you look at?
DT: So I also looked at which tags were popular in the sort of additional tags set, and you know, we talked earlier about hypotheses that some fans had that maybe fluff would be incredibly popular and I was very curious: are people mostly writing fluff? Are they mostly writing angst? What other things are coming up besides that?
And what I saw was that the top most popular tags are pretty much the same top most popular tags that we see all the time. So fluff is incredibly huge, and then Alternate Universe and Angst are also incredibly huge, and good ol’ Sexual Content. So all of these are actually meta-tags that contain many, many other more specific tags. But those four are kind of the hugest tags this year, as well as other years.
ELM: So one thing I love about this—and when we did our Tropes Survey, which we hearkened back to in our last episode, we did that back in 2016—the [laughs] the narrative that like, it’s fluff versus angst in some sort of like, binary battle, is just like—continually, I mean, whatever. Maybe there truly are two extremely distinct groups of people that will never cross paths or like, barely a Venn diagram or whatever. But like, they both are consistently as popular as each other in all sorts of metrics. Like, even in a very small sample of the like, 1500 fics that have been sent into “The Rec Center,” it’s always about the same number neck-and-neck. Because I will very regularly pull out suggestions of different tropes for lists we can do, and say how many. Oh, Toast, can you guess the two that always have a ton? I bet you can guess.
DT: Wait, wait. The two…
ELM: So like, I’ll pull out—I’ll be like—we need at least 10 or 15 in a tag to ostensibly make a list that’s not only, like, Teen Wolf fics, or whatever. We need a little wiggle room to make a list of like, six fics, right? So I’ll pull it out and I’ll be like, “Found Family has this many and, like, College AU has this many,” but can you guess the two tags that always, far and away, way more than angst, way more than fluff, way more than everything else, always?
DT: Alternate Universe and Slow Build?
ELM: Well, we call it Slow Burn, as everyone else… [laughing]
DT: Sorry! [laughing] AO3 for some reason has this meta-tag called “Slow Build” that includes mostly Slow Burn.
ELM: That’s really funny. OK.
FK: That’s confusing and frustrating!
ELM: Actually, I think that if I had a better way to measure this, AU would be as high as you’re suggesting, but because I have to do it just by pure search terms there’s, like, no way to—cause people will either say the kind of AU or they will, sometimes they won’t tag it that way at all in their recs, and they’ll just say like, “Steve is a florist!” Right? And they won’t write like “Flower shop AU.” And it’s like, OK, I get it, you know. So I made an AU list today and I actually had to read through a lot of them to just quickly scan and say like, put it in a tag.
So Slow Burn, yes. But can you guess the other one?
DT: Is it Hurt/Comfort or is it Found Family?
ELM: It’s Hurt/Comfort by a mile. People love that shit. [all laugh] It is very funny to me, cause it’ll always be like, there’s like 100 Hurt/Comforts, and the next one will be like 20 Fluffs or something. And I’ll be like, “All right, guys.”
FK: But you know, we laugh but when you think back to like, when Henry was writing Textual Poachers, and the other book that was coming out around the same time—
ELM: Flourish!
FK: —took the attitude that Hurt/Comfort was like, the thing that was most important about fanfic. Like, Camille Bacon-Smith, that was like a big chunk of her argument, was that Hurt/Comfort was the thing that you should care about. And Henry’s take was that slash is the thing that you should care about, as a concept. And I mean, we know who sort of came out on top in the long term in terms of like, what people liked to cite.
ELM: Fascinating.
FK: But…I’m just saying it’s a big deal!
ELM: The answer is “why not both,” honestly. They usually go, they often go hand in hand.
FK: Porque no los dos, I say, in the worst accent of all time.
ELM: Yeah.
DT: Doesn’t surprise me at all that you see a ton of Hurt/Comfort in “The Rec Center.” Hurt/Comfort is sort of the next biggest tag after all of those ones that I just listed. It’s consistently a very popular theme every year, and it was very big in 2020 as well. So. Definitely seeing a lot of combinations of sort of the fluffier stuff and the angstier stuff and the hurt and the comfort all mixed together, so I agree tha tit’s funny that those are treated as a sort of a dichotomy sometimes.
ELM: It’s interesting to me even—I brought this up, I’m interesting myself right now—but it is interesting thinking about like, how people will tag their own work versus how people would tag a rec. Like, does someone have to think it’s like, super angsty or super fluffy to ever tell us?
DT: Right!
ELM: You know? Whereas Hurt/Comfort is quite easy. Or like, one that’s always popular with us is Character Study, and I think part of that is the kinds—there are definitely biases amongst people who are sending in recs, and I think that we tend to get some more…I didn’t want to say like “intellectualizing,” but I do think there is a little bit of an element of that, like, people definitely send in idfic, but they also will send like, “Oh, a fascinating character study, blah blah blah,” which is great too! I love that. You know? Whereas I wonder if that’s something that people would be as likely to tag their own work. That’s something of a judgment of someone’s work, to say “this feels like a character study,” as opposed to a descriptor. Which is interesting to me. Tags are interesting to me!
DT: Tags are interesting.
FK: So wait wait—I’m curious though because it seems like you, what we’re all talking about though is like, all these meta-tags that are up at a very high level, right? So like, what about the things that were at a lower level of tagging? Like, what are the patterns in there? Cause I can imagine that like, maybe all these things are happening at a sort of normal rate, but is there stuff happening within the—you know, within the tags that are being compiled into these that’s interesting?
DT: Yeah. So, I mean, that’s a great question and a lot of my stats, I did not actually go in and break down all of these meta-tags in some of these, in most of these cases. But I did look at, as with the fandoms, I looked at which kinds of tags were particularly fast-growing this year as well as which ones were just extremely, you know, big overall. And in the fast-growing tags, I found some interesting things.
I will note that these are…because of the way I do the stats, I was getting an awful lot of multi-chapter works that were recently updated being included within these works. And so some of these tags are perhaps most likely to appear on something that has a bunch of chapters and is a longer work. But I did still find it really interesting that when I looked at things that got used like, over a third of their occurrences were in 2020, I saw that Happy Ending was an extremely common tag in this sort of fast-growing, highly-active tag category. And Pining and Slow Burn were very big themes.
ELM: In a way that was notably growing?
DT: Yeah.
ELM: That’s interesting.
DT: So again, it could also be the case that it’s just a ton of very long works have updated this year and they may all have that tag.
ELM: “It’s been going on for years, just the slowest build.”
FK: Sure, but I am interested in Happy Ending though, because Happy Ending is different, right? I mean, you can have a slowest build, and I buy that, but Happy Ending—I don’t think I’ve ever, even fics that have happy endings, I don’t know that I’ve tagged them Happy Ending historically.
ELM: Oh, but like, you’ve seen—I’ve seen so much discourse in the last, like, two years about how people should be required to tag whether it was HEA or not.
DT: Oh!
FK: I have, but I’m interested that it’s like, grown so much in this year in particular. Maybe, maybe that’s catching on in a way that like—maybe I’m the asshole now for not tagging my works Happy Ending!
DT: That’s really interesting.
ELM: I’ve seen recent stuff where people will be really explicit in the tags, saying like, “Starts with this pairing, but don’t worry, this pairing is the one that—” you know, that kind of thing. Just really, because they don’t wanna…
FK: I’ve seen that more in the past than just straight up Happy Ending.
ELM: That’s interesting.
DT: One thing that I’ll note is there’s also, like we said, there’s plenty of sub-tags for a bunch of these and, there are tags like Angst With A Happy Ending, is one of the common ones in there, and so on. And so I think it’s also interesting to see—perhaps people are also finding it maybe more important to say “Yes, there are hard parts of this fic, but ultimately it ends happily.” I’m not quite sure how it breaks down, but.
ELM: That’s really interesting. Yeah. I mean, we’ve talked over this past year about—I remember we talked about this when we had Betts on, and talking about how people live-narrated in the comments their worries that you were not going to give them a happy ending, you know?
FK: It’s true!
ELM: Not that everyone always does, but it’s like, 99 times out of 100, don’t worry about it! [laughs] You know?
FK: Particularly if you’re reading the genre of the story correctly, right?
ELM: Yeah, yeah! I mean, maybe that’s part of what challenges people about it. We were talking about it with some of the comments I was getting on the longfic I published at the beginning of this year, and like, it’s not a romance—as we discussed in the last episode, it’s not a romance novel, right? But it’s, I think it’s pretty fanfictiony. There’s action and then they don’t die. [laughs] You know? So like, I don’t know what…
FK: Yeah, but it is true that there’s more of a—there’s more of a question there. If it’s not a romance novel, it doesn’t necessarily have a Happily Ever After, or even a Happy For Now.
ELM: Yeah, it’s true. But anyway, OK. So back to tags though.
DT: Yeah, I mean, I also wonder—so I saw an interesting bunch of highly-active tags that were like, Trauma, Injury, Harm To Children, Blood, and a bunch of sub-tags of those tags.
ELM: Yikes!
DT: And I think that actually I, I looked into this a tiny bit and it seemed to be mostly due to a few newly-large fandoms like My Hero Academia and stuff, which I think is about schoolchildren, so it might make sense that people would warn if there was potential harm to children, for instance. But I think, from what I can tell, a bunch of those sort of potentially traumatic-sounding tags are mostly due to individual fandoms getting popular and not due to, say, things happening this year being extremely traumatic for all of us, potentially. And so I also wonder if you’re putting tags on your work like Trauma and so on, maybe you’re also more likely to say Happy Ending to let people know. But that’s purely speculative on my part right now.
ELM: That’s interesting.
DT: I also saw a bunch of awkwardness kind of tagged in various ways. So— [laughs] Dorkiness and Idiots In Love and some other awkward tags—
ELM: Dorkiness?
DT: —were very popular and those I found really pretty charming, actually.
ELM: I would love you, all right. I wanna commission some stats. I want you to do, like, a correlation. Like, does Dorkiness appear with like, High School and College AUs? Or fandoms set in high school and college? I cannot imagine reading a fic about adults in an office that was tagged Dorkiness no matter how awkward they were. It’s such a high school word to me, you know?
FK: Oh, I think I can imagine that. I think that people definitely would use that. Like…I believe that people use that for that.
DT: There are also a lot of sub-tags that are like, Steve Is A Dork.
ELM: Oh yeah, yeah.
DT: So-and-So Is A Dork. And I think maybe that gets used more broadly, not just in high school settings but in a bunch of different fandoms. So-and-So Is A Dork may kind of become a meme that people use.
ELM: I am pretty sure there is one of those in my fandom, but I can’t remember the exact wording, and it also doesn’t really make sense to me, because it has nothing to do with his characterization. That’s fine. I have a, like, a grudge against tha tkind of—that kind of catchphrase tag, you know?
DT: I find them kind of charming, but yeah, they’re not always the most informative.
ELM: Grudge. Grudge! My tag would be like, Elizabeth Has A Grudge Against Catchphrase Tags.
DT: Yes, that is your tag!
FK: It’s actually just, it would get shortened to Elizabeth Has A Grudge.
ELM: Oh yeah, that would be a general grudge thing, but fanfic about my hatred of those kind of tags.
DT: Oh my goodness. Now I want tags for everyone, this is great.
ELM: Make it real meta.
DT: Speaking of meta, though! I actually noticed this other interesting category of tags that were popular this year: tags that kind of, rather than giving content information about the story, give some kind of meta info. So there seems to have been a big rise in Not Beta-Read, which I thought was really interesting.
ELM: Only this, like, this year? Really?
FK: I was gonna say, this seems—surprising to me!
DT: I think the thing is people are explicitly using the tag more than they did before.
ELM: As opposed to just putting it in the notes.
DT: Right.
ELM: That’s interesting.
DT: I don’t know what caused that to become more of a thing that you put in tags rather than author notes, but I thought that was an interesting trend. There was also a bunch of people using tags like How Do I Tag? and I’m Bad At Tagging. [all laugh] Which again—I find kind of adorable.
FK: How do tags work?
ELM: Just don’t tag it then! Just be like, oh.
DT: Oh, but it’s so cute!
ELM: That’s really funny.
DT: I also really kind of was totally charmed by the tag I Wrote This Instead Of Sleeping, which was very popular this year.
ELM: This was something that you’ve seen a notable rise in?
DT: [laughing] Yes!
ELM: That’s very funny to me.
FK: I feel like that’s a very familiar feeling, though, right? There have been many times this year where, although I was not writing fic, I was like, “My sleep habits are just fucked.”
DT: Yep!
FK: They’re just fucked, right? So like…someone’s writing fic during that time!
DT: I totally relate to this.
ELM: I’ve written fic instead of sleeping, for sure. You just get goin’, you’re like, I’m goin’. I’m up. I’m awake! Yeah!
DT: I’ve done stats instead of sleeping, too, so. There we go. [all laugh]
ELM: When you put these up, tag it with that. I Calculated These… I don’t know, what’s the verb?
DT: I Analyzed This Instead Of Sleeping.
FK: You might have also been tabulating some things.
ELM: Yeah! Yeah.
FK: That could also have been happening.
ELM: OK. So we are running short on time, but we have one final thing that I requested.
DT: Yes.
ELM: It’s extremely topical.
DT: Yes.
ELM: All right, so: last Thursday, Vladimir Putin was just going about his day. [FK laughs] And he was like, “Yeah, yeah, Russia!” And then he found out that Destiel went canon, and he wrote a letter of resignation. Did I get the details right?
DT: Totally accurate, as far as I can tell from Tumblr. [all laughing]
ELM: The actual story, for anyone who doesn’t have social media and is not in the Supernatural fandom, is that in the third-to-last episode ever of the CW’s 15-season-long… What do we call it? Is it a monster-of-the-week show still? What genre is it?
FK: I mean, actually it’s considered horror.
ELM: Interesting.
FK: But it’s horror in the same way that like, The X-Files is over. Which is not that much.
ELM: Show. Serialized show. 15 seasons.
FK: Serialized show about supernatural beings.
ELM: And, uh…
FK: And, I feel like at this point that is the thing that like…
ELM: I like that we’re explaining Supernatural right now. [laughs]
FK: I mean, I think that it is important, I think that it is important to say I feel so much sunk cost fallacy with this God damned show that I know I’m gonna watch the final season. I haven’t yet. But I know I’m gonna do it, even though I also know that I’m gonna find it deeply miserable in a variety of ways, because I’ve watched 15 fucking years of it.
ELM: When, when—oh, have you watched the previous 14 seasons?
FK: I’ve watched the previous 14 seasons!
ELM: I didn’t know that. Have you, so do you like, watch it year by year, just all at once? You don’t watch it week by week.
FK: Yeah. No, I don’t watch it week by—I did watch it week by week at one point, but now it’s like, a season’s over and I’m like, “All right. When am I just gonna binge the whole season and find out what happens?” And then I do.
ELM: That’s really funny.
FK: And then I’m like, “Oh. I guess those things did happen. I sure saw their faces for awhile longer. That was an experience I had.”
ELM: So Flourish is a fan, is what we’re taking away. [FK laughing] Anyway, point is that this was the third-to-last episode, and it was day three of the U.S. Presidential election, and everyone was completely climbing up the walls, up the trees, up everything, like, just spinning in impotent like, rage and anxiety about the responsibly methodical pace at which important states were counting their votes. And, uh, Destiel—the main ship—went canon, homophobically, as the memes say. Or sincerely, as the fans say. One half of the ship said “I love you” and then was sucked up by some goo and taken to Super Hell. I got it right, right?
FK: Super Hell.
DT: Super Hell. That’s right.
ELM: Mega Hell.
FK: You did. You got that right. He went to Super Hell. It was like the quickest bury-your-gays that ever happened.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Just, scoop! Like a little vacuum cleaner.
ELM: Anyway, so there’s been an explosion on my Tumblr dash of Supernatural activity, including from many people who I had—I have had these tags muted for like, literally eight years. [FK laughs] But many people who I know are, haven’t really been in that fandom for a long time, were posting about it. I would click on them occasionally and unmute them and some were sincerely responding, but a lot of people were engaged in like, memes and shitposting and stuff like that. All in good spirit, right? And so…
FK: I mean, as a person who really has, has enjoyed Supernatural in many ways over the years, like, I’m not sure what you do with that other than shitpost about it. I understand the other option is discoursing about it.
ELM: Flourish, you’re going to get so many angry letters from people who are seriously discoursing about it if you just keep going down this path.
FK: You know, it’s OK! I do understand, like—I don’t understand in my soul but I do understand it in my observation of people, that the other option is to discourse about it.
ELM: So I’m going to redirect everyone: if you have commentary about this episode, send it to Flourish Klink. [laughter] It’s @flourish on Twitter. And not to anyone else involved. I’m not a part of this.
FK: Thanks. Thank you. Thanks for that.
ELM: Anyway, my question that I asked Toast yesterday was, I saw someone on Tumblr or Twitter somewhere say that they had to click through like, some ridiculous number of pages, like 50 pages, to get to fic that had been written before the Destiel canon episode, which was like a week ago. So I said, is that true? I mean, I don’t doubt that person’s experiences, but has there been a huge explosion or is this just an extremely productive fandom in general? Can you measure how much of an explosion there has been since the 5th of November?
DT: Yeah.
ELM: Guy Fawkes Day.
DT: And that was a great question. I had also seen that post, or some variant of it, going by, saying “Oh my gosh there’s 54 pages of new work since this happened” and I had fact-checked that before you asked me—
ELM: Oh my God, really?
DT: Because I wanted to reblog it but I fact-check these things before I reblog them! [laughter] And sure enough, by the time I checked, shortly after that post was made, it was already 60-something pages. So yeah.
ELM: Wow!
DT: As of today, when I looked earlier, there were 1500 fanworks or so that had been produced since November 5th, which was about 75 pages to go through on AO3. And so that sounds huge, but also, Supernatural itself is just a really huge, highly-productive fandom and has been for many years. It’s got like, over 230,000 fanworks total.
ELM: That’s wild.
DT: So I did a little bit more digging to try to understand, is this actually a huge surge for such an active fandom? And it is. What we have seen is that this works out to be about, like, close to 200 new works per day since Destiel went canon, and that’s more than two times as many as the fandom was producing earlier this season, and more than three times as many as it was producing in the off-season. So definitely a big surge in sort of average daily fanworks.
But I also, I think you then said, “Well, how big is that really compared to like, other big fandoms that are active right now?” Which I also thought was a great question. And I went and looked at a number of other fandoms of sort of similar size, and basically Supernatural had been chugging along and producing about as many works per day as like, Batman fandom. And then it shot up since November 5th to be more like DCU overall.
And so there are some fandoms that are even bigger, like, My Hero Academia and Harry Potter are producing more than twice as much stuff right now as Supernatural is, even after the surge—
ELM: Wow!
DT: But those are very few. So that’s impressive.
ELM: That’s wild for Harry Potter, though.
DT: I know, oh, I know. But you know, it’s jumped up to almost as much as like BTS, and some of the other—just some of the most popular fandoms overall. So it surged from “quite huge” to “extremely huge” and there’s only a few other fandoms that are outpacing it at the moment.
FK: Huh. I wonder how much that is also because it was so big in the past, and so I know that like—if you’ve ever watched Supernatural, then you couldn’t avoid having some kind of a reaction to that, whatever reaction it was. So I wonder if it just brought it back into people’s minds.
DT: I would be really fascinated to see some future analysis of how many of the authors producing these things, you know, had been active in the fandom—many years ago, perhaps—and came back because of this event, versus how many people were pretty active in the fandom already.
FK: And is it all—it’s all Destiel? Is that…?
DT: It’s not all Destiel.
FK: What’s going on?
DT: Or at least it’s not all tagged Destiel. We saw a big jump from roughly 30—or sorry, roughly 40% Destiel before it went canon, to about 60% of the works are tagged with that relationship since November 5th, so that’s a really sizeable jump. But it’s not all tagged with that relationship.
ELM: OK, you know the one that I am familiar with, right?
DT: No, say more.
ELM: Obviously the most important one that was written since November 5th, where I believe Castiel owns Four Seasons Total Landscaping and Dean owns Fantasy Island Adult Bookshop. [all laughing] Which is exquisite and that person deserves all the prizes.
DT: Absolutely.
ELM: I, I saw today—I’ve seen Tumblr posts about that story that now have like 10,000 notes in the last day, which is really incredible, and I saw one today that said “Your OT3, you could do this with your OT3 and have the third person own the crematorium.”
DT: Yes. I actually reblogged that. [FK laughing] I just didn’t realize that there truly is a story that this post was based upon.
ELM: Oh, you didn’t know?!
DT: NO!! [all laughing] Yeah, see, I haven’t even ever watched Supernatural, but even I’m posting stuff about Supernatural because this is so memeworthy and it intersects with so many other of my favorite memes, like Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
ELM: The greatest story of 2020 by far, I love them so much. Yeah, that’s what—we included a tweet in “The Rec Center” today, who in your OTP owns the adult bookstore and who owns the landscaping company. And I hope that everyone can answer that.
FK: This is great, we can classify everybody by adult bookstore, landscaping or crematorium.
ELM: Yes. I don’t know about what your current OTP is, Flourish, I will say that for mine I’m pretty sure that Charles Xavier owns the sex store. That seems correct, right?
FK: Yeah. I think that Janeway owns the sex store and Seven of Nine owns the crematorium.
ELM: OK, you can’t leave out Four Seasons Total Landscaping. That needs to be the most important.
FK: But I don’t know who owns Four Seasons Total Landscaping in this fandom! Who on Voyager owns Four Seasons Total Landscaping? Ah, the Doctor does.
ELM: I have never seen this show.
FK: And he’s really annoying.
ELM: So I’m just gonna nod along to you right now.
FK: He’s not part of—this is not an OT3, to be clear. The Doctor is not part of this relationship. To be perfectly clear. Anyway.
ELM: Toast?
DT: I think Mary owns the sex shop and Sherlock has the crematorium and John works at the landscaping place.
FK: That’s correct. [ELM laughing] I believe it, yeah.
ELM: Yeah, that’s right. Oh, I just had a vision of Martin Freeman doing landscaping. [all laughing] This is great.
FK: Did this, was this the first positive thought that you’ve had about Sherlock in a really long time, Elizabeth? I feel good about this!
ELM: Yes! I don’t have to spit on it on the floor anymore! [laughter]
FK: Wonderful. I feel like you’re, like everybody’s grown and experienced some joy, and it’s wonderful.
ELM: I even, I tried to make myself love the memes on November 5th that were like “This is how Sherlock can still win,” or “how Johnlock can still win,” and I was just like—I need to let my sadness go so I can just enjoy this joking post, and I still couldn’t. And I had to just move back to—it’s fine. It’s all right. [laughs] Anyway! OK. So this is the only, I guess you guys are saying “Dee-stiel,” I’m gonna continue to say it wrong as “Dess-tiel.”
DT: I just imitate whoever spoke right before me.
FK: It’s Dean and Castiel, so it’s “Dee-stiel.”
ELM: It just doesn’t feel right to me! I’m just gonna question the, what literally probably a million people have done in the past, and just say I’m gonna go my own way. Flourish, you can’t lecture anyone on pronouncing things incorrectly, because…
FK: Did I lecture you? I did not!
ELM: No, no. But OK. So my question is: I’m not suggesting that all of these new fics are crack, I’m curious if you were able to get a breakdown. Because I think that a huge portion of these fandom terms were all trending on Twitter and were huge on Tumblr, but I think it would be misleading to suggest that a majority of that content was sincere and fans talking about the episode. I think that a lot of that was memes and dunking, but I do think that fanworks are—tend to be different in this realm. It’s like, it’s not gonna be thousands of crackfics, right?
DT: Right. So, yeah. And I didn’t actually look specifically at the crack tag, so all I can say about it is it hasn’t shown up—nothing crack or crack-like has shown up in the top 10 additional tags for the works that are being produced. What I did see a ton of that didn’t surprise me at all were Fix-It and Canon Divergence. Both surged quite a lot. [laughter]
FK: We gotta suck him out of Hell, my friends!
ELM: Mega Hell? Super Hell? Ultra Hell?
FK: Super Hell. Ultra Hell.
DT: Black goo super Hell.
FK: I don’t know, Super Hell is what everybody calls it.
ELM: Hell Max.
DT: Yes! But I did also see a bunch of Coda used, and I don’t know whether or not that means Coda is more canon-compliant and just adding on to the ending of the episode, or whether some people combine that with Fix-It. But I saw all of those things that sort of comment on how the works fit in with the episode. In fact, 14% of the works actually used the episode name as a tag, or something related to the episode tag. So Post-This-Episode, or the episode name itself.
So a lot of things were specifically talking about how they fit in with the episode. and then we saw a giant surge of the Angst tag, up from about 12% of works before November 5th to 22% of them since November 5th. So lots more Angst. But we also saw an increase in Angst With A Happy Ending, which we kinda talked about earlier, when we were talking about happy endings. So a bunch of people wanted to not explore crack, but explore the actual emotions surfaced in the episode, and then in many cases I think bring a happier ending.
ELM: Are you saying that crack isn’t an actual emotion? [laughs] That could be evoked by an episode of television?
FK: We have all learned over the past week, if we didn’t know before, that crack is an actual emotion that we can be experiencing.
DT: It’s true!
ELM: I mean, I knew that before. But you, I actually, this is prompting—now I have a very big question to ask for you to do future research on. So like, I think it’s fascinating, the impulse in like, the two days after this episode aired, with two more episodes to go before the entire show, where they’re presumably gonna resolve this, that people still felt compelled to write, like, immediate reaction fic.
DT: Yeah!
ELM: I know that like, thinking of Sherlock, after Season Two there was a ton of fic trying to resolve that. And you knew that—like, everyone who wrote those, they didn’t think that they were like, predicting the future. They were just like, “Here’s how I’d resolve that.” I’m sure some people felt like they were making a prediction. But that wasn’t the purpose. And I’m wondering like, between the two Avengers films, did a lot of people try to say like, “Well, here’s how I would resolve it,” that kind of thing? Is there a way to get that kind of timestamped, like, how much activity—or is that too hard of a…
DT: Yeah!
ELM: In between these big, kind of, cliffhanger—I’d be like “Well, why don’t you just wait two more episodes to see what happens? Does he come out of Super Mega Hell?” But obviously for a lot of people the impulse would be like, “I gotta get him out right now, immediately I’m gonna write my response!” And that is something that’s foreign to me, personally, because I need to sit with things a little more before I can write about them.
DT: Yeah, that’s interesting. And I will say, perhaps an even closer parallel in Sherlock: in Season Three Episode Two there was like, a wedding that ended in a way that left a number of people dissatisfied. And I wrote a fic, like, the night that I saw that episode.
ELM: Wow!
DT: And it’s my most-read, most-kudosed little ficlet that I have, and there was just like this huge surge of fix-it fics, just within the one week between that and the next episode, and none of us expected our little fix-its to come true or anything. So like, I have seen that happen in fandoms that I’m very familiar with, and we could totally track that through other events, but I don’t actually have stats about that overall. But I do think there’s an interesting difference between the kind of, the—”now there’s been a movie or a season that has finished and everybody’s gonna have several years, or at least a buncha months, to write about it,” and the “we know there’s more coming next week but it doesn’t matter, we all have to rush and like, give our takes on it.” And so yeah, I don’t have anything to say about that statistically yet. But I do think that’s really interesting.
ELM: OK, so you’re saying you’re gonna research it for me?
DT: [laughs] Uh…
ELM: Someday.
DT: I don’t know, is there like, an ugly Wesley sweater in this for me? Yes, yes I think you…
ELM: Flourish will promise you the sweater [all laughing] if you do this for me.
FK: Oh, I see: you get your question answered, but I’m the one who has to knit the sweater.
ELM: You know…
FK: This is our relationship in a nutshell.
ELM: I don’t know. I’ll give you something. Do you want me to write you a fanfiction?
DT: Yes I do. [laughs]
ELM: All right. But it has to be in a fandom…
FK: Elizabeth is really good at doing that.
ELM: …that’s not Sherlock.
DT: That’s fair.
ELM: Or Good Omens.
DT: But you know me, also. If you give me a question I’ll be like, “Oh, I don’t know if I can do stats on that,” and then I will come back to you with stats on it, like, a short while later. So.
ELM: You’ll text me before this episode comes out and be like, “Actually…”
DT: Yes.
ELM: “Just crunched some numbers…”
FK: That is how your brain works. I know how it is.
ELM: It’s great.
FK: We’re grateful that your brain works like that, also, Toast. Thank you so much for all of these amazing stats and for these insights. I can’t tell you how great it is to have you just, like, show up and drop some information on us!
DT: Oh, yay! I love talking about this stuff, and I love talking about it with you both. You ask great questions and it’s lots of fun.
ELM: Aww, thanks!
FK: Well, we’ll definitely be having you on again, as we always promise and as we always do!
DT: Excellent. I look forward to it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: Every time we have Toast on, it is a delight.
ELM: Yeah, I think that we made a mistake frankly, not speaking to Toast on the air from 2018 to now. I mean…
FK: I can’t believe we did that!
ELM: I think part of that is we, we were on a panel with Toast last year at GeekGirlCon and hung out a bunch in Seattle, and so I think to us it was like, we’ve gotten a lot of Toast! But like, that’s very selfish, because we weren’t thinking of everyone who listens to or reads the transcripts of this podcast who didn’t have the pleasure of hanging out with Toast.
FK: That’s true. That’s true. Very selfish of us.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But I do wanna talk about something that came up in the latter part of our conversation with Toast, because…
ELM: Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
FK: No. [ELM laughs] We have gotten a lot of messages from various people about covering what happened with Supernatural, or what is still happening with Supernatural I suppose, as far as like, Destiel being canon and the ending of the incredibly long series and all of that. And I just wanted to address it a little bit, because I don’t know how deep we’re gonna get into it beyond what we did in this episode.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I mean, it depends on the future I guess, but…
ELM: If people have specific questions, but one thing I noticed in the things that we were being tagged in was a kind of a strange assumption that we would sort of dig into fandom specifics, particularly some inter-fandom arguments…inter? Intra? Just in this fandom. Isolated to the Supernatural fandom.
FK: Yes. There you go.
ELM: About dynamics between the, the various actors and the writers and the fans, and while I think all of that is interesting to look at as an example of, say, fan-creator interaction or the way that actors’ beliefs or stances intersect with fans and with the text itself, anyone who’s listened to this podcast for any portion of time knows that we don’t usually dig into that in the way that like, say, a blog for that specific fandom would. Like, we might use it as an example, but we are not here to analyze the activities happening within fandoms in terms of like, discourse. And that is not to diminish it or to say “oh, that’s just wank, I don’t wanna touch that” or whatever, it’s just not something that we engage with unless it’s a fandom that we’re actually in—and even then…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I definitely think that we’ve brought up things in Harry Potter fandom by way of example that were very much inside baseball of those fandoms, but it’s often to illustrate a larger point, not to say like, “What the hell was up with that period in Harry Potter fandom where we were all arguing about this?” You know?
FK: So like, maybe, maybe we’ll have—maybe we’ll find some angle into this where we’re talking about, like, really long-running fandoms and the way things change over time, or whatever. Maybe we will want to do something that’s about, I don’t know, I guess there’s a lot of discourse around queerbaiting and all of this, I assume. There always is. So maybe we’ll talk about that and this’ll be an example or whatever. But it’s really unlikely that we’re gonna do just like, an episode that’s like “Here’s what happened in Supernatural fandom over the past three weeks and here are our takes.” So we just wanted to be clear about that.
But we are very happy to answer, like—if you have specific questions that you’d like us to address on air, like, if you have something, like a really particular part of this that you’d like to hear us talk about—we’re always happy to answer people’s questions and sort of talk about things in that context too. So if you have anything in particular that you’d like us to weigh in on, then send us an actual question. And otherwise this will probably get, you know, folded in to the great tapestry of Fansplaining episodes over time. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. I mean…
FK: Can you fold things into a tapestry? This is not a great metaphor.
ELM: I suspect this will make an appearance on our list of fandom Year In Review—but perhaps not in the way that people in the Supernatural fandom currently would expect, nor the way people who are not in the Supernatural fandom would expect.
I’ve kind of loved this because I follow plenty of people who are currently in SPN fandom, and they…I don’t know if they’re unaware, but they seem to be operating in a totally different sphere where they’re sincerely talking about the show. And then I follow all these other fandom people who are only dunking.
FK: Yep!
ELM: And I was talking to someone in the latter group, and she was like, “I didn’t know anyone was sincerely talking about it.” And I was just like [laughing] OK! I’m sorry! This is still a large fandom that people take seriously, and it’s not all jokes, and obviously there’s some, like, crossover where you can seriously be invested and also wanna do a bunch of jokes. It’s not like—
FK: Yes.
ELM: Some…
FK: Yes.
ELM: Super-serious endeavor at all times. But I just find that funny. So there’s definitely kind of a pan-fandom fluency here with the memes around this that I think obviously counts as one of the biggest fandom developments of the last few months, so. [FK laughing] We’ll talk about that. Don’t worry.
FK: All right. OK. I think this was a great episode, I’m glad that we did it, I feel like all of the numbers have rinsed out my brain, like, from the other bad numbers that we had to follow all the time…and still probably have to follow…
ELM: I’m still thinking about Oakland County, Michigan.
FK: NO! Don’t bring it back! [ELM laughing] I just told you that my brain had been rinsed and now you’re, like, getting it messed up again! Elizabeth, I don’t…
ELM: What do you think about Maricopa County, Arizona, Flourish?
FK: Elizabeth. Elizabeth. I will talk to you later.
ELM: OK, bye Flourish!
FK: [laughs] Bye.
[Outro music, thank yous, and credits]