Some B2MeM Statistics by Zdenka
Mar. 21st, 2017 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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b2memB2MeM 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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.
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.
