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TOASTYSTATS: Did the US election influence fanfic production?
I've heard some folks talk about using fanfic to cope with/distract themselves from the recent US election (I’m in this camp, though I’m not ignoring the real world), and others, like the hosts of @fansplaining, discuss not being able to focus on fandom right now. I wondered which of these impulses was currently stronger overall in fandom.
TL;DR: as of two weeks following the 2016 election, there’s been a big post-election spike in fanfic production on AO3 (~30% increase) -- which is unusual for this time of year. Though, of course, correlation is not causation -- there could be some other cause(s) at play. And while some people may be turning to fandom for distraction, there’s a bigger increase in ‘Angst’ than ‘Fluff.’ (Edit: please note that all of this is necessarily based on a small time frame, as we are only a couple weeks out from the election! Take this all with liberal salt, accordingly, in terms of trying to infer root causes or predicting future trends.)
I gathered daily data from AO3 for the pat 5 years in order to compare this year to past ones. I figured even if we did see a spike or a drop in fanworks, that might be normal following an election -- or just normal for November. The past 5 years have the benefit of containing another presidential election, as well as a midterm election and two off-years. I looked at the total amount of fanworks produced in each of the two weeks leading up to the US election, and in each of the two weeks following it. (If you look at the above graph, 0 on the x axis is Election Day -- Nov 8, 2016.)
Based on the above graph, we can see that most years have a fairly flat production rate surrounding the election. 2016, however, departs strongly from this pattern with a 32% increase from the two weeks leading up to the election.
You can also see this increase by zooming out and looking at the overall production of fanworks on AO3 over the past ~5 years:
Whoa, that spike. The other spikes are almost all around the end of year holidays, summer vacations, etc.
So what exactly are people writing more of? I speculated maybe they would want a lot of fluff. But between ‘Fluff’ and ‘Angst’ (two of the largest tags), I guessed wrong about the pattern over the past 5 months:
While it’s true that a higher percentage of AO3 works continue to use ‘Fluff’ than ‘Angst,’ it’s angsty fic that has seen the more dramatic increase. And, well, yeah. I get that. I would love to know whether people are writing more relationship angst, or dystopian angst, or what exactly the specifics are, but I did not delve into that here.
Though the numbers are much smaller, people are also writing more political RPF (~one year shown):
I thought about analyzing the details of what people were writing in this category, or in the tags of particular political figures, but found I have no appetite right now.
Other analyses that would be interesting: how has reading changed on AO3 vs. writing? (Maybe the spike in hits, kudos, etc. is even higher!) And, as always, expanding beyond AO3.
All of the above findings might well be brief trends. We’ll have to check back in in a bit to see how fandom’s response evolves. Until then, however you’re personally handling the aftermath of the election, I hope you and your loved ones are as well as can be. I’m pretty sure this is a stressful time for a great many people both in and outside the US... take care of yourselves, folks. <3
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