Fish Song

Mr. Lee said be so fr right now 🤨

hey everyone come look at some cool graphs about fandom

aka: welcome to a statistical breakdown of the top 100 fics by kudos in the Batman - All Media Types Tag on ao3.

aka: my vindication for why i genuinely believed danny phantom was part of the dcu

So! Starting off: How many kudos do the top 100 fics have? Altogether, they amount to 1,805,647 kudos.

How many kudos does the #1 fic have and did you notice anything weird about the data? Why yes! So the #1 most kudosed has 73,889 kudos. Which is SIGNIFICANTLY more than the fic in second place with 39,709 kudos. 34,180 more, to be exact. That difference is so insane I gotta admit I am curious if that stat is actually accurate or if perhaps something happened somewhere because the difference is. Astronomical. In comparison, the difference between fic #2 and fic #3 is 6,955 kudos, and the difference between #3 and #4 is 1,490 kudos. So perhaps you can see why I am just a tad suspicious. I'll admit, fic #1 is popular! I've read it before and I really liked it! But statistically- I have a lot of questions. A lot.

How many kudos does fic #100 have and what's the difference between fic #1 and #100? Fic #100 has 12,900, giving us a difference of 60,989 kudos between first and 100th place.

Now for everyone's favourite part: GRAPHS.

What's the breakdown of ratings in the top 100?

(legend: e=explicit, g=gen audiences, t=teen, nr=not rated, m=mature) To nobody's surprise, only one fic with an E rating makes it into the top 100 (E fics tend to have a narrower audience for various reasons, plus gen fics are BIG in batman fandom rn). To my surprise, T actually made up the majority of fics in the top 100. I'd predicted that it would be G fics on top, I'm guessing this difference between hypothesis and reality is because I did not account for people rating fics with profanity as T. Otherwise, this breakdown wasn't too surprising.

What're the warnings in the top 100 like?

(legend: CNTW=chose not to use archive warnings, GDV=graphic depictions of violence, N/A=no archive warnings apply, MCD=major character death) (could NOT make the graph label the little pink slice between CNTW N/A and GDV, so fyi that one is CNTW, GDV, MCD, and it has 1%.) Unsurprising: N/A makes up the majority. also only one MCD tag is present and Underage Sex and Rape/Non-Con are not present at all. Surprising: CNTW is second most popular! Also it is seen here being used in combination with other tags like MCD and GDV, which. Personally I didn't know you could do that. Makes sense though!

How many are complete fics?

(legend: y=yes, n=no) Most of them!

Hey everyone guess how many F/F fics are in the top 100

(legend= o=other, n/a=uncategorized, m/m=male/male relationship, m=multi, g=no romantic or sexual relationships) Zero!!! No M/F ships either i will say. Unsurprisingly for batman fandom, gen is the CLEAR winner here. Also unofficial survey based on my observations only -> some ships that were present include: Superbat, Timkon, Jaytim (and probably more but i desperately did NOT have to want to officially track this and add more data points to what is already a very crowded spreadsheet.)

How long are these works and how's that relate to kudos/hits?

(x axis= length, y axis= hits)

(x axis= length, y axis = kudos) So two big outliers here, one the work with 400000+ words, the other the work with all the kudos (and thereby hits) that was discussed earlier. But discarding those I think we can see from this graph that length is fairly irrelevant when it comes to how much interaction a work gets. From observations a lot of popular works fell within 1,200 - 5,000w category, and there was a weird lack of works in the 15,000-20,000w category. As in there was only one. It was a oddly noticeable absence.

Kudos/hit ratios!! I find these really interesting

(y axis = kudos/hit ratio) What is a kudos hit ratio? # of kudos divided by # of hits, equaling the percentage of hits that resulted in a kudos. Commonly lower on multichap fics, as people will click on them multiple times to read new chapters but can only leave kudos once. This is a stat that is probably meaningless and unimportant. But I find it interesting. So you all have to see it now.

When are these fics from ? aka: POSSIBLY THE MOST INTERESTING DATA SET YET!!!

(x axis = date in m/d/y format, y axis = kudos)

(x axis = date in m/d/y format, y axis = kudos) Available in both scatter and bar graphs! So with this I was curious if older fics would have more kudos cause they'd had more time to accuulate them. And I also wanted to know: Why do I (new-ish DCU fan) feel like the Batman fandom is so young considering it's about a media that's been around for 85 years? And here's my answer! Most of the top 100 was posted in the last 4 years! There are only 2 fics that are older than 8 years old!

This is SO INTERESTING to me. Why is this happening? In similar fandoms (Marvel), I regularly find works from 2012, 2014, etc, that are high in kudos. Hell, I just went and checked and 5/10 of the most kudosed fics in the Marvel tag are from pre 2016! What's going on with Batman-AMT? Just from casual engagement in fandom I'd been getting the sense that there was a big boom in the popularity of Batman on AO3 sometime relatively recently and this data really feels like confirmation.

I'll open this up to other fans: have you noticed this phenomenon? And if you were on Batman AO3 4-5 years ago - any insights? From the date alone I'd guess it's somehow pandemic related (sudden majorly stressful event caused mass desire for comfort like the type found in batfam gen fics, thereby launching the genre into previously unseen levels of popularity)? But idk! Tell me your thoughts! I'd love to unravel this!

Who's writing the top 100?

All in all, 68 authors make up the top 100. Shoutout to powerhouse @envysparkler, who makes up 11% of the top 100. Following that are TheResurrectionist and Just_here_for_a_laugh with 5% each, @unpretty and smilebackwards with 3% each, and foldingfacets, helenabertinellis, Ididloveyou_once, adelfie, Vamillepudding, Drag0nst0rm, AutumnHobbit, IzzyMRDB, Blueseabird2, and @motleyfam with 2% each.

AND NOW MY VINDICATION

In my previous stats post, I mis-grouped Danny Phantom as a DCU property because my experience in fandom had brought me to legitimately believe it was part of the DCU, especially as I'd never heard of it before or since. Well, with this graph, perhaps you can see why. Danny Phantom makes up 12% of the top 100. TWELVE. The only other crossover in the top 100, Spider-Man, makes up only 6%. Notable absences were Miraculous Ladybug and White Collar, which, while being very popular crossovers for DC and Batman, apparently didn't grab enough kudos to make the list.

So there you go!! Anyone have insights on anything discussed here? I'd really love to hear about it!

[All data collected from AO3 Nov. 29, 2024.]

I've been getting the wrong kind of allowance my whole life 😭😭

you will not BELIEVE how this worked out for him

it’s so funny that u can just color text on this website boom bitch im green now. youre hearing me talk greenly. in a green fashion. green green green

I find it absolutely baffling that people still can’t understand that a refusal to vote for Kamala Harris is essentially a vote for Trump. You can disagree with her stance on Israel all you want when she’s in power. But it’s irrelevant in the context of this election. It doesn’t have a bearing on the lives of millions of Americans. It suck’s what is happening in Palestine, but refusing to vote for Kamala because of it won’t help them, nor will it help Americans who want to live their lives freely.

It’s time for these idiots to stop with the performative activism. Because I know for a fact they’ll be the ones crying the hardest when they lose their rights and freedoms, all because they allowed Trump to get into the White House.

Danny was utterly unamused with current situation.

current situation being he was stuck as phantom babysitting his own corpse. because apparently if you summon a Halfa just the wrong way they get split into a full ghost and a zombie which currently was trying to climb a fire escape for some ancients forsaken reason!! why'd they even summon some protector spirit from Illenois? why is it doing a backflip? How does it know how???

what's worse is he's currently in Gotham because Jazz wanted to go to Gotham U and his parents decided it was a good idea to do a family vacation together in the America's most crime ridden city. and he hasn't got a chance to tell them yet about the whole halfa thing and he's not telling them now while HOLY SHIT HOW HE GOT IMPALED he looked away for ONE MOMENT!!

Danny just lost track of his corpse... in gotham

why's his zombie so restless again?

the bats are now looking at a ghost who is chasing a talon around gotham. which is concerning.

danny meanwhile:

Phantom: Daniel James Fenton YOU WILL NOT COMMIT MURDER LIKE THAT

Talon Danny's corpse: 🦉

merlin and arthur killing elon musk

i hate elon musk.

Millie, everyone