Some B2MeM Statistics by Zdenka

[zdenka]

B2MeM Prompt and Path: Meta on Fandom (orange path)
Format: I don’t know, statistics?
Genre: nonfiction, meta
Rating: n/a
Warnings: n/a
Characters: n/a
Pairings: n/a
Creator’s Notes (optional): My Wild square roll sent me to complete a prompt from the Orange Path. I’m also working on something more complicated, but it may take me some time to put all the pieces together, so in the meantime here is a quick and not very scholarly bit of fandom meta, in the hopes that some people will find it interesting or amusing. In fact, I am going to be as meta as possible and share some B2MeM-related statistics, involving the fanworks that are posted to this very community.
Summary: Ever wanted to know who the most popular B2MeM character is? Read on!

As you are probably aware, I’ve spent a lot of time with the b2mem tags over the years, as a tagging volunteer and now as a mod, and they are near and dear to my heart. It’s been interesting to me to glance through them sometimes and see which characters or genres are most popular -- and I thought it might be interesting to others as well. As a mod/admin of the LJ community, I can sort tags alphabetically or by usage; the data in this piece come from looking at those pages. Non-mods can’t look at those, but you can look at the community tags page if desired. Anything that I say here covers five-and-a-fraction years of B2MeM from 2012 (when this LJ comm was created) to the present, but not the years before 2012. It also applies only to works that were posted to (or linked on) the b2mem LJ community; it does not include works written for B2MeM that were only posted to other places (AO3, Tumblr, etc.), or never posted at all. All statistics provided here are current as of 12:45 a.m. EST, 3/21/17.

Characters

Who is the most popular B2MeM character? Well, the most popular “character” is not a (specific) character at all: the most frequently used character tag is character:oc (316 uses). It seems B2MeM participants enjoy creating works which focus on or include original characters. I know I’ve seen a wide variety of OCs here over the years. The most popular canon character in B2MeM is one who is also very popular in fandom: Aragorn, tagged 221 times.

Here are the top ten by usage:

#1. OC: 316 uses
#2. Aragorn: 221
#3. Maglor: 141
#4. Faramir: 98
#5. Maedhros: 94
#6. Frodo: 86
#7. Sam: 74
#8. Elrond: 68
#9. Gandalf: 63
#10. Pippin: 61

-There’s a mix of Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings characters in the top ten, with LOTR slightly predominating (though of course Elrond is frequently written in both, and Gandalf could appear in a Silmarillion context as well).

-One thing that stands out to me is that all of the characters in the top ten are male. OCs can be male, female, or other (and the tag doesn’t differentiate), but no canon female characters made the top ten list. The most frequently tagged female character is Arwen, at #11, who is tagged 60 times. Merry and Fingon are tied for #12 (55 uses), Fëanor is #13 (50 uses), and then the next female character is Éowyn, who is tied with Bilbo for the #14 spot with 43 uses.

-The Hobbit movie fandom doesn’t seem to have made it into B2MeM (or vice versa) to any significant extent. The most popular character who appears only in The Hobbit book or movies and not in LOTR or the Silmarillion is Thorin Oakenshield (6 uses). Of Thorin’s company, Glóin gets 2 uses, while Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, and Fíli get 1 each. Other Hobbit book or movie characters include Thranduil (10 uses), Beorn and Smaug (3 uses each) and Bard and Tauriel (2 uses each). There is also Dís (4 uses), who isn’t mentioned by name in the Hobbit book or movies but has a significant presence in Hobbit-based fanworks in the larger fandom.

-There are also many characters who show up with a single use each, for example: Aldarion, Dior, Fimbrethil, Grishnákh, Landroval, Otho Sackville-Baggins, Pearl Took, Tevildo, Thengel, and Zamîn.

Format

Top Ten Most Popular Formats:

#1. drabble: 439 uses
#2. ficlet: 403
#3. short story: 305
#4. chaptered: 81
#5. poetry: 76
#6. art: 54
#7. digital art: 43
#8. drawing/sketch: 21
#9. vignette: 20
#10. rec list: 17

Though fanfic is by far the most popular format, art makes a showing at places #6, 7, and 8; non-fiction/meta shows up at #10.

Genre

Top Ten Most Popular Genres:

#1. gen: 410 uses
#2. drama: 160
#3. family: 128
#4. romance: 105
#5. humor: 101
#6. angst: 94
#7. character study: 88
#8. chaptered: 81
#9. poetry: 76
#10. gapfiller: 73

As you can see, gen is by far the most popular genre, with 410 uses. That matches up with my general impression of the trends in B2MeM works.

But what about works that aren’t gen? The genre tags also include the following:

-slash: 38
-het: 17
-femslash: 15

for a total of 70 tags for type of pairing.

That surprised me a lot -- I believe there is more gen, proportionately, than shipfic in B2MeM, but not to quite that large an extent! Then I thought that maybe people aren’t always tagging their shippy fic with a descriptive genre tag, and there is evidence to bear that out: the “genre:romance” tag has 105 uses, significantly more than the slash, het, and femslash tags combined. Not all fics tagged romance would necessarily fit neatly into those categories, but from what I’ve seen, most of them would. (And not all shipfic would be tagged for romance.) It seems that B2MeM participants do not tag consistently for pairing type, and therefore I don’t feel I can draw firm conclusions from the data available.

My non-scientific impression of B2MeM works is that the trend is for gen and lower-rated fanworks. There are some exceptions, however. Again, this may not be the full number, but 6 fanworks are tagged genre:pwp (plot what plot/porn without plot).

Path

For this year, so far, the paths in order of popularity:

#1. red: 45 uses
#2. purple: 40
#3. blue: 30
#4. green: 24
#5. yellow: 12
#6. orange: 8

That’s not surprising to me; the people who feel capable of producing more works over the course of the month would logically take the longer paths, and the longer paths have more prompts that fanworks can be made for.

Some number-crunching which I decided not to do

I thought about also trying to judge each year’s activity level, which would be interesting, but I ran into difficulties right away. The number of posts each year isn’t equivalent to the number of fanworks produced. There were some years where the mods made a prompt post every day, and some where they didn’t. It’s not easy to pull out the number of mod posts. There is no overarching “mod post” tag, but a different set of tags are used each year. I counted 31 different tags for mod posts over the course of B2MeM.

And then I discovered that LJ won’t give you the total number of entries per year (as far as I know) -- only the number of entries per day. I’m not interested enough to do that much arithmetic! But anyone who wants to look at those numbers can find them in the LJ comm’s archive.

I hope some of these numbers have been interesting! Feel free to comment with any additions, corrections, questions, or other thoughts.

Comments

[independence1776]

This is all really interesting!

Speaking as the genre tagger, gen is definitely skewed, largely because I tend to use it as a catch-all category if romance isn't the focus and/or if I couldn't see another appropriate tag. (I try not to listen gen alone if I need to decide on genre, though. What other people do is up to them and I don't add more tags than what they list in the form.) So a fic may have brief Aragorn/Arwen, but the plot is Faramir and Aragorn, I'll tag it gen rather than het. The het/femslash/slash categories I usually use for fanworks that center on those relationships. And all of that presupposes I need to come up with the genre rather than using what people have already listed.

[zdenka]

Oh good, I was hoping you'd comment as the genre tagger! I'm glad you find it interesting.

[hhimring]

Those figures are interesting!
I do think, as a subjective impression, there may be quite a number of female characters among the OCs.

And I think people may have become a bit less prone to using type of pairing as a genre category than they used to, especially as the header specifies pairing anyway.

[zdenka]

I do think, as a subjective impression, there may be quite a number of female characters among the OCs.

Yes, I think so too. I would even guess that there have been more female OCs than male ones, but I wouldn't venture to state the exact proportions.

And I think people may have become a bit less prone to using type of pairing as a genre category than they used to, especially as the header specifies pairing anyway.

Hmm, that may be true. It is true that the header specifies pairings and so tagging for pairing type isn't necessary to convey that information. I'd guess that it also depends on when and where people started in fandom and the habits they developed. My first fandom archive was AO3, which has pairing type prominently listed in the posting form, so I just got used to adding that info to all my fics, and now I do it out of habit even when I'm not on AO3. But not everyone does that.

In case it's not clear, I wasn't trying to suggest that people should tag for pairing type -- I have no opinion on whether they do or don't. I was just looking at the numbers.

[hhimring]

I didn't think that you were suggesting people should change their tagging habits.

What I said about possible shifts in attitude was motivated by my familiarity with SWG, which revised tagging for slash some time ago, so that tagging for the slash genre (and the het genre, also) applies when the fic focuses on the ship. So slash and het pairings that are not the main focus are less likely to be tagged as genre by anyone who has taken that particular policy change on board, although they can of course be indicated in the summary (as opposed to the tagging) and they often are.

AO3 does not really tag for genre at all, do they (just optional free-form tags), although they do tag both for pairing and pairing type as distinct categories.

As for B2MeM, the pairing information in the header is obligatory, not optional as on AO3, the pairing information is therefore always there or should be (and the character's genders are mostly known, I suppose), but the header is obviously less searchable for statistical purposes than the tags.

So both is a factor here: what people think "genre" means (and whether they think slash is one) as well as what they think should be tagged--and what information they think needs to be given (regardless of category or tagging) may be another thing again.

Sorry--that is a very long-winded response!

[zdenka]

Ah, all right. I wasn't aware of that change on SWG (I guess I'm not really aware of everything that goes on there).

No need to apologize for being long-winded! I agree with everything you've said here, and it makes sense.

Having come to fandom through AO3, I often feel confused when I'm asked to assign genres to my fic, as on MPTT or SWG, and my mind goes blank. Having gen or pairing type as a "genre" is a relief to me, because it's simple and unambiguous -- if I can't figure out what would be appropriate, I just check off gen or pairing type and then I'm done. But that's my own brain's particular hang-ups.

[hhimring]

I think the change was before you joined SWG.
My memory of this has gone just a bit fuzzy, but I think what happened was that the slash warning tag was automatically converted to a slash genre tag. Authors were invited to take the slash genre tag off, if they thought it didn't fit, and alerted that it would not be an archive requirement to warn for reference to homosexual relationships in the future.

[zdenka]

Whoa, SWG used to have a required warning for slash? I'm glad they don't do it that way anymore.

[hhimring]

As I said, my memory of this has gone vague so I do hope I'm not disseminating misinformation...
I believe Dawn said at the time that she'd never really liked adopting that warning but had felt that in the climate in Tolkien fandom when she started out it was unavoidable if she wanted to avoid friction.

[independence1776]

What I'm remembering (and I also could be wrong) is that it wasn't specifically slash that was pointed out in the warning, rather that there was a warning for het sex and a warning for slash sex, both of which had mild-moderate-explicit gradations. These turned into categories with the reformatting.

[hhimring]

Very possible!
My recall of this might be very self-centered.
At that time, the only relationship that would have concerned me would have been Maedhros/Fingon, because anything else in my fics was strictly gen.

[independence1776]

At the time, I was pretty much a gen and het writer. So it makes sense we remember what affected us.

[elwenlj.livejournal.com]

I was surprised to see the proportion of gen. fic. It seems B2MeM attracts a different kind of writer to mainstream fanfic

[independence1776]

Mmm, possibly not. I'm the genre tagger; I only tag what people list in the header (so if a slash fic isn't labeled there as slash, I don't tag slash). I also tend to use gen as a catch-all category, which includes stories with background het and/or background slash under the principle that background het is often treated as gen so background slash should be as well. So gen is more "general" than pure "lacks romatic/sexual relationships."

On the other hand, one of the main groups participating is MPTT/lotr-community, which is gen-focused. So there is likely more gen here than elsewhere.

[zdenka]

As Indy was saying, the tagging numbers don't necessarily reflect what's there -- the evidence suggests that not all shipfics (or shippy art, etc.) posted here are tagged as such. So while there is a lot of gen, I don't think it's quite as a high a proportion as those numbers would suggest.

It seems B2MeM attracts a different kind of writer to mainstream fanfic

That's one possibility. It's also possible that writers who usually write shipfic or porn are less likely to write those works for B2MeM, for whatever reasons.

[just-jenni.livejournal.com]

These statistics are truly fascinating. For instance I am surprised by the low number of slash fics. And this makes me want to concentrate more on writing about the female characters in Tolkien's world!

Thank you for this extremely interesting meta post! :)

[independence1776]

Speaking as the genre tagger, I can explain the "low" number: it's not actually low! There are plenty of slash fics that aren't tagged slash. Unlike SWG and AO3 and other archives, they're not category tags; they're additional information tags people can add if they want. They're not mandatory.

The het/femslash/slash tags I only add if I'm the one deciding what tags go on the fanwork, mainly when the genre field is left blank. I only add those tags when the fanwork centers on the relationship. If the relationship is background-only, I mostly use gen under the principle that if background het is treated as gen, so should background slash.

If people write slash relationships but don't list slash in the header field and don't tag slash, then I don't add the slash tag. People decide what they want to put in the genre field in the header; what's there is literally all I will list in the tags. I don't want to take the risk of adding something that the poster may not want there or see as accurate.

[zdenka]

As Indy was saying, the numbers in the tags don't really reflect what's there -- there is more slash (and shipfic in general) than those numbers would indicate. Since many people posting fanworks with slash or other relationships to the B2MeM comm don't tag them as such, it isn't possible to draw conclusions about the real proportions without doing a lot more investigation.

I'm always happy to encourage more writing about female characters! (And if you find that it inspires you to have prompts, Legendarium Ladies April takes place on Tumblr next month: http://legendariumladiesapril.tumblr.com/)

I'm glad you found it interesting!

[just-jenni.livejournal.com]

This was a real eye-opener-I hadn't realized that so many people didn't tag their fics as slash (when they're slashfics).

Thanks so much for that link! I would love to contribute to that challenge (and I write best IMO when responding to prompts).

[zdenka]

I hadn't realized either! But I guess different groups of fans have different tagging habits.

You're very welcome. I hope you enjoy it if you participate. I think it's a neat event.

[liadt]

I thought there would be more female characters, but perhaps they are in the OCs?

[zdenka]

There definitely have been many female OCs written for B2MeM! I don't have evidence either way, but I would guess that at least half the OCs are female.

There have been many excellent B2MeM works created for female canon characters, but it seems male canon characters are more popular. If you look at the comm tags beginning with character:, you can get the full list.

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating. Most of my stories feature Aragorn or OCs! I leave the tagging to the experts but know my few romance stories would go under "het".

[zdenka]

I'm glad you found it interesting! Evidently you're not alone in writing about Aragorn and OCs.

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

BTMEM is a great chance to use OCS. I just wrote an Arwen story, so hope that means Arwen gets into the top 10.

[zdenka]

Ah, excellent! And I've tagged it for characters, which means it will be counted in the numbers.

Yes, I just checked and she's tied with Pippin now for #10. We'll have to see where the ranking stands at the end of the month!

[engarian.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting. I love looking through stats like this.

- Erulisse (one L)

[zdenka]

I'm glad it was interesting to you!

[dawn_felagund]

Not surprisingly, I loved this!

Some of my thoughts ...

• I'm relieved at the diversity of sources B2MeM seems to attract, even if it means that my beloved Silmfic doesn't seem to be dominant. :) One of my concerns, once B2MeM moved beyond being an SWG event, was that B2MeM as a Silmfic-only event would stick, despite efforts to communicate the contrary. This is part of why I've advocated for reducing the role of the "sponsoring groups" and slowly removing them: There is a gap of creators--a fairly large one!--who write high-rated LotR/TH fic who might feel like their work isn't welcome if the sponsors were a Silmfic archive and a genfic archive. It seems like at least removing the impression of B2MeM as a Silm fandom event has worked. As for the genfic ... the data is less sure on this. There is probably still work to be done here.



• It seems like the Tumblr/AO3 crowd, though, is not really on-board. I think if they were, we'd see more Hobbit fanworks and more woman-centric fanworks. (And probably more higher-rated fanworks as well.)



• It would take forever, but it'd be interesting to go through and look at what ratings are actually posted here. I've written a lot of adult-rated stories but nothing I'd remotely consider PWP; I don't think the two really overlap that much, especially among the creators who seem to be attracted to B2MeM. (Largely veteran fans whose interests seem to be more in exploring characters/Middle-earth/the canon than in writing the "porn" that many multifandom people seem to think is the sole purpose of fanfic in every fandom.)



• I'm not surprised that drabbles and ficlets are the most common formats; this somewhat confirms the criticism I've heard that B2MeM encourages volumes of shortfic writing while leaving authors who prefer longer formats out in the cold (although we modly people have actively tried to make it easier for participants to use the month to work on one or a few longer/more time consuming pieces).



• I may do that arithmetic at some point! :)

Thank you for sharing this! It was the most fun I've had reading a B2MeM entry in a while. (I'm such a data nerd! ^_^)

[zdenka]

I'm very glad you found it interesting! I'd be curious to see any more stats/analysis/other info you come up with, if you decide to investigate further.

I consider myself part of the AO3/fic exchanges crowd, though I'm not on Tumblr. But I also have a very wide range of interests, so I do a little bit of everything in terms of characters/sources/pairing types. I don't know how common or uncommon that is in fandom generally.

I don't think of "porn" as a pejorative in a fandom context; I was using the word sort of loosely to mean works containing explicit and erotic sex scenes, whether they have plot and characterization in addition to the sex or not. It's not something I'm any good at writing (and I am primarily a genficcer at heart), but I have no objections to it.

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

It kind of makes sense to me that original characters are so popular. As others have said, I'd guess a lot of those are women, and when the canon doesn't give you a lot to choose from (I'm speaking more about Lord of the Rings since I don't know the Silmarillion) people do tend to make up their own. Plus writing in that world from a perspective other than the heroes is always fun. It was really interesting to see these trends; thank you for pulling this together.

[zdenka]

That makes a lot of sense as a motivation for writing OFCs, and indeed I've written some for that reason myself. It definitely applies to the Silmarillion also -- there are more female characters than in LOTR, but fans who want to write more than one woman together still often need to invent OCs for that.

Plus writing in that world from a perspective other than the heroes is always fun.

I agree! And I think Middle-earth is a great world for OCs.

I'm glad it was interesting to you!