(no subject)

[melannen]

Wow, it's been awhile, huh, and what a post to leave up as my last one. Um, sorry? My laptop is not dead (yet) although the graphics card seems to be failing fast so I do still need a new one. I was really sick for about two weeks right after I posted that though (theoretically not Covid??) and worn out afterward, and had to get a FAPA zine in and behind on everything because of that and then Thanksgiving holiday happened and there was just a lot, mostly not bad. But I've been around! I've been cuddling my cat and writing fic and working on Yuletide along with everything else! I'm even like 80% sure I didn't default on Yuletide!

I'm five days into my winter time off and starting to feel like I am catching up on life again, so as evidence that I've still been around I have done my 2023 AO3 wrapped (reading) stats. ^_^

(I did this using the extremely unfinished AO3.js on Github, which gave me a CSV of my 80 pages of reading history for the past twelve months, and then loaded it into Google Sheets to go wild with UNIQUE() and FLATTEN() and COUNTIF() and SUMIF() to get stats. I don't understand AO3.js or Google Sheets enough to teach other people but in theory you can do it too.)

AO3 History pages have some issues for this - they record every fic you visit while logged in on AO3 whether you read it or not, they remove all data for deleted works, and works only show up the most recent time you read them (so if you read the same fic multiple times in a year it will only count once.) And of course they don't show if you're reading logged out or from downloads. But in terms of total wordcount I'm going to assume those mostly balance out.

So, from Dec. 1 2022 to Dec 1 2023:

• Works: 1593 (Avg. 4.3 per day)
• Total wordcount: 29,975,729 (82,125 per day)
• The equivalent of approx. 300 full-length modern novels, which makes me feel a bit better about my much lower Goodreads stats for the year. (I'll do Goodreads and podcasts at year end, they're a little easier to get.)
• Average wordcount per work: 18,000
• Median wordcount per work: 5,144

Fandoms:

The data you get from the download is unwrangled, so the fandoms data is a bit of a mess.

Raw, there were 555 different fandom taggings used, but that counts every combination of fandom tags as a separate thing (so "MDZS, Untamed" and "Untamed, MDZS" count as two different ones)

There were 514 different individual tags used, counting each used tag separately (so "MDZS, Untamed" counts as "MDZS" and "Untamed".) Using individual tags, my top 15 fandoms of 2023 were:

1. Hermitcraft SMP 208
2. 3rd Life | Last Life SMP Series 188
3. 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù 129
4. 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV) 111
5. Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types 110
6. Minecraft (Video Game) 77
7. Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game) 63
8. Dream SMP 49
9. Les Misérables - All Media Types 36
10. Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series) 34
11. Batman - All Media Types 33
12. Naruto 31
13. Ted Lasso (TV) 30
14. Les Misérables - Victor Hugo 29
15. Video Blogging RPF 28

But as you can see, there's a lot of overlap of basically the same fandoms, many of which are being counted twice on the same fics; it gets much worse as you go farther down the list. So I did some seat-of-the-pants wrangling in the spreadsheet (using the rules that make sense to me, not the actual wrangling rules) and ended up with a much more accurate list of 203 distinct fandoms I read fic in (+ a bucket category for actual multi-fandom crossovers.)

So here's the top 40, hand-wrangled, and each work only counted once. Similar, but notably different! Also not really many surprises for me.

1. Hermitcraft extended universe 392
2. MDZS/Untamed 163
3. The Witcher 141
4. all Marvel 71
5. Dream SMP 56
6. Les Miserables 50
7. Batman extended universe 40
8. Shane & Ryan extended universe 32
9. Actual crossover 30
10. Naruto 30
11. Ted Lasso (TV) 30
12. MYCT, general multiverse 21
13. Star Wars 19
14. OFMD 18
15. Game of Thrones 18
16. Transformers, all media 17
17. Coldwave extended universe 15
18. Arthurian fandoms 15
19. Good Omens, all media 15
20. Star Trek: The Original Series 14
21. Murderbot 14
22. SVSS 13
23. Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee 13
24. No Fandom/Original Work 11
25. Bujold 10
26. Doctor Who 9
27. Homestuck 8
28. The Thick of It 7
29. Avatar: The Last Airbender 6
30. Dresden Files 6
31. Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling 6
32. Stargate Atlantis 6
33. Discworld - Terry Pratchett 6
34. Legend of Zelda 5
35. Pacific Rim 5
36. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 5
37. Lord of the Rings 5
38. Casablanca 5
39. Social Media Anthropomorphic 5

(When you get below 5 the data gets less useful as it's more likely to disproportionately have ones where I clicked through but didn't read most of the fics that were counted.)

Interestingly sorting the same list by word count comes out notably different (the difference is probably a combination of how much the fandom trends toward longfic, and how I was finding my reading - MDZS I pretty much only read via trusted recs at this point, which lean toward longer finished stuff. Hermitcraft I was a bit less picky. Also for this one, I excluded all the ones where there were only a couple of long fics showing and I knew I hadn't actually read them through this year.)

Fandom	# works	#words
MDZS	163	4662660
Hermitcraft	392	4327600
Witcher	141	1828091
Marvel	71	1760707
Les Mis	50	1299143
Dream SMP	56	1205839
Crossover	30	1134532
Naruto	30	934600
Batman	40	932898
Ted Lasso (TV)	30	700352
SVSS	13	654800
Ryan & Shane	32	546754
Avatar: The Last Airbender	6	515997
OFMD	18	472526
Transformers	17	466587
GoT	18	466117
Star Wars	19	415481
Dresden Files	6	317016
Coldwave	15	294215
MCYT General	21	276356
Gundam Wing	3	252842
Arthurian	15	239363
Star Trek: The Original Series	14	228378
Pros	2	219643
doctor who	9	217319
The X-Files	4	198884
Smallville	4	183469
Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling	6	174299
Jurassic Park	3	165417
Stargate Atlantis	6	157307
MacGyver	1	144668
Legend of Zelda	5	131610
Good Omens	15	127275
1.Check Please!	4	106966
White Collar	4	102021
no fandom/original work	11	97368
Murderbot	14	95228
Highlander	3	92974
Pirates of the Caribbean	1	90393
Homestuck	8	85511
Kings (TV 2009)	3	83263
Thick of It	7	75551
pacific rim	5	72550
Bujold	10	71664
Venom	4	67515
Locked Tomb	4	67180
The Eagle	4	61456
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine	5	50516
My Hero Academia	2	45338
Machineries of Empire	13	36267

(For the record, the wrangling I did that wasn't just obvious 'these all belong under the same 'all media types' tag':

• Arthurian - everything King Arthur related, including Merlin
• Batman - Everything with a member of the Batfamily in it
• Dream SMP - everything focusing mostly on members of SBI or the DSMP
• Hermitcraft - Hermitcraft, Life Series, Empires, and everything focusing mostly on Hermitcraft/Life Series members
• Marvel - everything Marvel Comics
• Minecraft - Hermitcraft/DSMP crossovers or fic about other SMPs or the broader Minecraft multiverse
• No Fandom: Original Work, No Fandom works, Fandom - Fandom
• Rogues: Stuff from the cluster of fandoms around Coldflash (LoT, Flash comics, other DC TV, etc.)
• Shane & Ryan: Buzzfeed Unsolved, Watcher Media, and related stuff
• Sherlock Holmes: All Sherlockian fandoms

I also pulled freeforms, so here's the freeforms used on at least 3% of the fics I read this year:

1. Hurt/Comfort 169 10.61%
2. Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence 150 9.42%
3. Fluff 136 8.54%
4. Angst 127 7.97%
5. Canon-Typical Violence 85 5.34%
6. Slow Burn 72 4.52%
7. Angst with a Happy Ending 68 4.27%
8. No Tags 68 4.27%
9. Anal Sex 67 4.21%
10. Post-Canon 59 3.70%
11. Emotional Hurt/Comfort 58 3.64%
12. Humor 56 3.52%
13. Alternate Universe - Modern Setting 50 3.14%
14. Established Relationship 50 3.14%
15. Getting Together 49 3.08%

Kind of surpised Hurt/Comfort is so high up because I wouldn't have said it was a favorite genre, but I guess I did read a lot of Life Series stuff... otherwise these are mostly pretty generic

I decided not to do pairings because, ugh the wrangling, and I don't really read based on pairing mostly, but here are the stats for categories:

By individual tag (which counts works multiple times if they were tagged multiple times):

• F/F 47 2.95%
• F/M 182 11.42%
• Gen 532 33.40%
• M/M 851 53.42%
• Multi 149 9.35%
• No category 72 4.52%
• Other 94 5.90%

That puts me slightly higher than AO3 as a whole on works tagged M/M, Other, and Multi, substantially higher on Gen, and substantially lower on everything else. (Based on the 2021 tag data dump, but I'm pretty sure AO3 as a whole has also had a lot more gen since 2021, mostly in Minecraft fandoms, so I'm not sure if that really says much.)

By tagging (Each work counted once):

• F/F only 25 1.57%
• F/M only 74 4.65%
• Gen only 422 26.49%
• M/M only 632 39.67%
• Other only 55 3.45%
• Multi only 58 3.64%
• Multiple tags, also tagged Multi 45 2.82%
• Multiple tags, not tagged Multi 164 10.30%
• Multi +1 46 2.89%
• None 72 4.52%

Ratings:

• Explicit 385 24.17%
• General Audiences 314 19.71%
• Mature 187 11.74%
• Not Rated 114 7.16%
• Teen And Up Audiences 593 37.23%

A lot more Explicit and Teen than the 2021 all-archive stats, lower on General Audiences, and similar for all the others, which is super interesting! I wonder why I didn't have more Mature too if I was leaning more toward the higher ratings. Possibly MCYT authors are more likely to skip straight to Explicit for anything even a little racy than the archive as a whole is?

• Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings 340 21.34%
• Graphic Depictions Of Violence 96 6.03%
• Major Character Death 74 4.65%
• No Archive Warnings Apply 1115 69.99%
• Rape/Non-Con 18 1.13%
• Underage 14 0.88%

Lower on Chose Not To Use, higher on No Warnings Apply, everything else vaguely the same. Interesting given that my ratings were higher! But that may also come back to my largest fandoms tending to rate high but not really do anything very out there with it.

....and in theory the next step is to go through the list and find stuff to make an all-year recs list but we'll see if that happens.