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TOASTYSTATS: THE STAR WARS FANDOM AWAKENS!
I took a look at what’s been happening in the Star Wars fandom since the release of The Force Awakens (and earlier).
A special request, because I know there’s been some controversy in the fandom: be kind to one another in the notes of this post. Thoughtful discussion of ships or anything else is awesome, but don’t be mean about what anyone else likes. I see every reblog note and tag in my activity tab, and any ship hate or other wank will make me a sad toast.
Click through for summary, notes, updates, corrections.
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Omissions & corrections
Oops -- I left out one of the highly active ships! Poe Dameron/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren has had 311 fanworks and should be just above Poe/Rey in the above AO3 ships list.
Finn/Poe
Edit1: I’m still curious about the Finn/Poe dropoff, despite suggestions and partial theories... I’d love to hear your thoughts and theories on that and anything else that gets you thinking in the slides above. One thing that has been suggested to me by a number of folks is that John Boyega said around the time of the dropoff that the Finn/Poe romance was only in Oscar’s head. A couple things make me a little skeptical that this tells the whole story... (1) Rey on AO3 and #Reylo on Tumblr starting to drop at the same time -- what’s going on there?? and (2) have you ever known a slash fan to let a denial of “It’s not going to be canon” shut down their shipping? :) Still, it could be a contributing factor!
Edit2: Another factor many people have brought up: race. It seems very likely that is an influencing factor here -- how could it not be, given that society at large (and fandom as a part of it) certainly have a LOT issues around race, and in aggregate, POC ships are much less common across most fandoms. However, I don’t think that’s the whole story, either -- it’s interesting that Finn/Poe had a meteoric rise at the start (when so many ships featuring POC never get popular at all), and followed by a steeper decline than I’ve often seen. And it’s also interesting that (white) Rey also saw an early peak, at least on AO3. So it’s not a super simple story there of how race caused this, even though it’s a likely contributing factor.
There are also some fascinating discussions going on in reblogs about how -- partly because of race and perceived problems around fetishization of non-whites in fic -- some fans might be more comfortable writing kinky shit for Kylux than Stormpilot. Really interesting -- I’ll try to aggregate some of those notes here later.
Edit3: I got some questions about whether the ship tags I chose on Tumblr made a difference -- answered here.
I also did some stats looking at average kudos for each ship, and how explicit each ship is.
Other notes
I know a lot of people are eager to see these stats ASAP, so I’m actually not going to write further extensive notes to start with... though I’ll come back and fill them in as they occur to me. Please do let me know if you have questions, corrections, or clarifications, though! (I almost let a huge error in my data slip through that said that Finn had almost no fanworks about him on AO3 relative to the other characters -- who knows what other issues there might be that you can help me catch! :) If you see something that seems impossibly weird, do please let me know.)
But here are a few things:
- Raw data! Have at the spreadsheet, yo. :)
- Everything in that screencap of all the Star Wars subfandoms is available more legibly here (scroll down).
- I chose the other 5 top fandoms most active at the moment based on my 2015 Year in Fandom stats.
- Some folks thought I didn’t include polyships -- I did! Finn/Poe/Rey is there on the slides. :D (Sharing my biases here -- it’s my fave ship!) More details about other polyships here.
- Thanks so much to Mrs. Toasty, Lisa E., and their housemates for beta feedback. Remaining errors are my own.
- Thanks for brainstorming about the stormpilot surge/dropoff on Twitter from a bunch of awesome folks -- sorry if I missed anyone -- @DanaSuze and @elizabethminkel @betty_days @jsalowe @arcadianmaggie! I will try to go back later and collect those notes and theories and add them here. Thanks also for general delightful banter and encouragement. :D