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

( More tag stats, at detailed length )

....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.

centreoftheselights

centreoftheselights

centreoftheselights

• There are 69 fandoms represented (more or less, depending on how you split things up, but 69 seems like a good number for some reason...)
  
• This is 21 more fandoms than in the non-OTP data! This is due largely to the fact that the number of MCYT ships dropped from 15 to 1, although a few others also dropped considerably. (BTS, on the other hand, gained considerably.) This makes me feel very justified in my original hypothesis!
  
• There are 77 M/M ships, 10 F/M ships, 8 F/F ships, 1 Gen ship, and 2 Other ships (both Other are characters of unrevealed gender.) The difference between this and centreoftheselights' stats is probably almost entirely down to the loss of those 15 Minecraft gen ships (as well as mostly-background gen ships from a few other fandoms.) The fact that the difference was almost entirely made of of M/M probably both says something about the fic fandom writes (even popular non-M/M ships are more likely to be background) and about how different fandoms tag (fandoms with M/M juggernaut ships are often less likely to tag for a lot of background ships.)
  
• For race, I used centreoftheselights's categories where they were there, and did my best to use their criteria where they weren't. There were 96 White characters, 72 Asian characters, 26 racially ambiguous characters, 2 Latino characters, 3 Indigenous characters, 1 Black character, and 1 Afro Latino character. This is a drop in White vs non-White compared to the original list, but again this is probably almost entirely down to all the MCYT gen ships dropping off (and many of them being replaced by kpop or jpop ships.) There were 81 ships where both characters were the same race (by those criteria) and 19 where they were not. There were 38 White/White pairings and 33 Asian/Asian pairings and 9 Ambiguous/Ambiguous pairings. All mixed-race pairings had at least one White character in them.
  
• There were no ships with more than two people (the only one on the original list was a background MCYT canon ship that dropped off the list.)
  
• This has a lot more of what I'd consider "old classic" ships than the original list. That might be partly down to people uploading old fic being less likely to include a lot of extra tags (or down to people still writing in older fandoms being less likely to use a lot of tags!) (Mulder/Scully is still on the top 100? I triple-checked that one!)

centreoftheselights

1. I have been seeing everybody's posts about the heat waves striking everywhere and I send you lots of sympathy. But also, I am tired of all the "you people from warm climates like the American South know how to handle the heat, it's different," comments. Americans do not know how to handle the heat, we just know how to throw more air conditioning at the problem until the entire world burns down.
   
   As someone who *is* acclimated to hot summers without relying on A/C, I have been sitting in my work, with me and all my coworkers in winter layers, wrapped in a fleece blanket, with my hands literally hurting from the cold as I type, reading the bit from our facilities people about don't worry, we're going to recirculate inside air instead of bringing new air from outside to save strain on the a/c (in the middle of an airborne pandemic) while being desperately jealous of those of you getting to spend time in nice old insulated brick 35 deg C buildings with ventilation and windows that open. (I go outside for lunch to enjoy the lovely 35 deg C weather and occasionally hide in the mechanical room to warm up.)
   
   I know that's not really a consolation when you're broiling. But please try not to be jealous of the large part of the US where everyone spends half their income trying to get cooler by burning fossil fuels and will immediately melt and die if their A/C ever fails (which it probably will because the ventilation systems are also badly designed) because their buildings aren't designed for their climate even before global warming and they don't know how to live in it. Save that for countries that actually do know how to handle heat.
   
   (I'm working on a post on ways to learn to happily live in 35 deg C summers without relying on A/C but it keeps getting longer so maybe it'll be up by next heat wave?)
   
   (For those of you hitting 40 deg C today though yeah sorry, *nobody's* jealous of that.)



2. On that note I just started writing a modern Southern Gothic Locked Tomb AU based on that agonyaunt post about the guy who married his daughter's bridesmaid but all either of them actually care about is the High Victorian house, because anything that will get me writing these days is worth a start and this is definitely the time of year for southern gothic, but then I realized I was basically writing "Rebecca but what if everybody except Mr. de Winter was a lesbian and Mrs. Danvers was actually Rebecca's ghost but only the protag could see her and also she was best frenemies with Mr. de Winter's illegitimate daughter who was living out her own separate Gothic plot in the background with her new wife's family".
   
   And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that but I feel like I oughta read (or at least watch) Rebecca first, so I'll be able to catch it when I reference it involuntarily, and I don't want to read and or watch Rebecca, so me and this fic are at a stalemate.



3. Which got me thinking a lot about how I really like Gothic (and its subgenres) in *theory* but I actively dislike or avoid most of the classic Gothics and a lot of newer ones, as part of my ongoing attempts to try to figure out what I think about horror, and I think with Gothics maybe it comes down to:
   
   
   • I like the aesthetic
     
   • I like the claustrophobic, stifling, incestuous mood
     
   • I like the focus on small-scale, women's concerns, and the actual acknowledgement of class that often shows up
     
   • I like the focus on setting and personification of setting! Give me a love story about a house or a town any day!
     
   • I like the ambivalent way it tends to treat with the supernatural.
   
   I don't like:
   
   • the misogyny (and parallel misandry, that often doesn't believe there are non-terrible men.)
     
   • the compulsory heterosexuality (or, well, I like it when it's part of the claustrophobia, but not when the story doesn't seem to realize any alternatives are even options)
     
   • the way the misogyny and misandry and compulsory heterosexuality often combine to put the heroine in a fucking awful happy ending
     
   • the frequent humorlessness
     
   • the horror elements when it leans on them
   
   
   So basically I want queer as hell gothics where people are terrible people but in ways completely delinked from their gender, and also who are willing to admit that sometimes you just have to laugh. Which I guess explains why I always want it in fic but am very chary about actual published ones…



4. A huge amount of my fandom time lately has been with Minecraft streamers, and I haven't talked about it here because at first I felt like I didn't know enough about it and then I felt like it was *too much* to talk about, and then I figured I could at least do an enemy fic recs post about it even if it really doesn't do 'shipping' like most fandoms do. –and then Technoblade, one of the most popular content makers and also probably one of the best people in the fandom, died of cancer way, way too young, and I just didn't know what to say. It's the first time I've ever been this deep in a fandom when someone who was still actively part of telling the story died, much less an rpf-adjacent one when the real people are so centered, and since I haven't really been talking about the fandom I don't really even have people who are also in the fandom to talk about it with. I was still working through his back catalog from a year ago when he passed so even the people who are fans aren't really in the same story place I am.
   
   ( but here is some stuff )
   
   
   Anyway to vaguely tie this up to the earlier topics, here's a really good Southern Gothic AU MCYT fic that wouldn't fit in an enemy recs post:
   
   devil town (100526 words) by hoorayy
   Chapters: 18/18
   Fandom: Dream SMP
   Rating: Mature
   Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
   Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Eerie vibes, Angst, Toby Smith | Tubbo and Wilbur Soot and Technoblade and TommyInnit are Siblings, Mystery, Horror, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Character Death, small town horror, sbi family but they’re dysfunctional as hell, none of them are bad people though. they’re just all a bit fucked up, religious trauma, mind the tags! this is a dark story pls be aware of that when/if you read, Murder, Blood, Hallucinations, kinda. it’s complicated., Implied/Referenced Skeppy, for legal reasons that was a joke, Angst with a Happy Ending, i promise it will be okay. you’ll see, Alexis | Quackity and Toby Smith | Tubbo are Siblings
   Series: Part 1 of we’ll make it another night
   Summary: The night Tommy disappeared, it went like this: Tubbo screamed the words that became his goodbye. He can’t accept that Tommy is gone, because that would be accepting that the last words they exchanged were angry and intended to hurt. So he doesn’t accept it. He’ll search for years if he has to.



5. Today is the quarterfinals of the fandom brackets on fictional_fans! Down to eight fandoms, and it looks like the final four will probably be Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Yuletide. Not exactly a surprising result, and yet somehow I'm still surprised. But you still have just over an hour to vote! Anything could happen!

• Astielle by unpretty (100000+ words)
  Chapters: 30/?
  Fandom: Original Work
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings per chapter
  
  Summary: A half-feral hero, a monster king, a bastard prince, and an open world. Bound by destiny, they save or slay one another, an endless cycle of death and rebirth. When the Moonlight Monster rises, the Starlight Hero is Astielle’s only hope. Unfortunately, she’s a little busy with her rock collection.?
  
  This is original fantasy poly romance by a fanwriter who is best known for her DC comics fanfic. You may recognize it from my Yuletide letter! It is a WIP but it's 100000+ words and it's very good. It's more-or-less inspired by Legend of Zelda:Breath of the Wild, but it's entirely it's own thing and you don't have to know any Zelda. The three main characters are the reincarnations of three people who have been bound together by fate for generations, always reborn to never be alone. In every cycle, things go bad and at least one of them kills at least one of the others (though the lines of allies/enemies/lovers don't always fall the same way.) Until this time around. Will they manage to cheat fate and never turn against each other this time around?



• His Greatest Adversary Yet (15418 words) by architeuthis
  Fandom: Original Work
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Retired Male Superhero/Male Supervillain Who Keeps Seeking Him Out Because He Misses Him
  Additional Tags: Superheroes, Supervillains, Villain Protagonist, The Smallest Indivisible Unit of Identity Porn, Worldbuilding, Cosmic Wonder, Comic Book Science, Sexuality Crisis, Presumed Dead
  Summary: Doctor Nowhere doesn't do the nemesis thing. But the Blue Beacon hasn't been seen in a while, and the more he learns about why, the more it haunts him.
  
  This one is terrible because I will never be able to tell people that Max Missing is my favorite supervillain and have them know what I mean. I usually try to avoid talking about how much there needs to be more of a story, but this one is clearly designed on purpose to make people scream that at the end. Also it needs to be the core of a massive universe - maybe not Marvel sized, but at least My Hero Academia sized, it does an amazing job of sketching out this whole superhero universe in barely 15000 words about Max the retired chemistry teacher who got bored and realized he really liked being a supervillain! And also didn't realize he was gay until at age 65 he stumbled over his nemesis out of uniform, and couldn't look away. (There is, at least, a sequel fic, which helps a little.)



• The Tsar’s Indecent Hot Sauerkraut Wrestling Ring: Hot Cabbage Rampage (18079 words) by beautifulduckweed
  Chapters: 3/6
  Fandom: Ursula Vernon (Twitter), VERNON Ursula - Works, The Tsar's indecent hot sauerkraut wrestling ring - UrsulaV (Tweet)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
  Additional Tags: Inspired by Twitter, Imperial Russia, Hot sauerkraut wrestling, Indecent hot sauerkraut wrestling, Erotic hot sauerkraut wrestling, There were no sauerkraut tags on AO3 before today but I sure am fixing that, Russian-typical misery, Cabbages, Enemies to Lovers, There's a Good Place reference here, I can't help it if Chidi said it first okay, Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions, the flames are hot but their hearts are chilled, Training Camp, Masturbation, Wrestling, Oiled Wrestling, Finally some smut over 15K words into this allegedly smutty fic
  Summary: Ivan is a simple farmer boy with little to his name, and then the Tsar's men take away everything he has to live for—except revenge. This summer, read the story of how one lowly peasant with nothing left to lose takes on the corrupt national pastime of hot sauerkraut wrestling, and takes down the entire Russian empire in the process.
  
  I guess this one isn't technically original work because it's based on an Ursula Vernon tweet but c'mon, it's the tale of love among the indecent naked hot sauerkraut wrestlers!

Fanfic Plot Structure Generator

Pairwisest

One of the side-effects of Drifting is that Drift partners are no longer capable of being sexually attracted to each other. At all. Dr. Newton Geiszler is not happy about this.

alasse_irena

The Stargates' universal translation effect can sometimes make secret communication in enemy territory difficult. Luckily, Rodney has a plan.