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

[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.