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When authors no longer want to be associated with their AO3 fanworks, or when they want to delete their account but not their works, they can choose to orphan them. At that point, the author is listed as orphan_account. Following up on fleetwood-mouse’s question (and some helpful responses from other readers), I decided to take a closer look at the orphaned works on AO3.
HOW MANY ORPHANED WORKS ARE THERE ON AO3?
As of September 1, 2014, there are 8083 orphaned works on AO3 -- that’s less than 1% of the total works on AO3 (0.64% of the approximately 1.27M works).
WHICH FANDOMS HAVE THE MOST ORPHANED WORKS?
The top 10 fandoms with the most orphaned works are among the most popular on AO3:
However, if we add in the number of un-orphaned works, we can see that some of these fandoms are disproportionately orphaning works:
Homestuck, One Direction, and The Hobbit have especially high rates of orphaning works (2.2%, 2.1%, and 1.4% respectively). But keep in mind that in some cases, a single prolific author (or a few) choosing to orphan all their fic could be responsible for a large proportion of these works.
DO ORPHANED WORKS DIFFER IN THEIR USE OF RATINGS OR WARNINGS?
The breakdown of ratings for the orphaned works is almost the same as for AO3 overall:
There’s slightly less General Audiences fic and slightly more Not Rated in the orphaned works. But I’m not sure if this is a reliable difference; we’d need to gather more samples over time to know. If it is there, the difference is small.
What about warnings? Again, let’s compare the distribution of warnings on orphaned works to that of AO3 overall. (Keep in mind that the warning categories are checkboxes -- they are optional and not mutually exclusive.)
It looks like the authors of orphaned works are slightly more likely to use all of the warning labels -- including No Warnings Apply -- which is interesting. My hypothesis is that authors who know enough about AO3 to know how to orphan works are probably power users who are also more likely to tag their works more carefully and comprehensively. But I haven’t tried to test that.
I haven’t done any significance testing here. But it looks to me from eyeballing the graph that -- even after accounting for the overall tendency of orphaned works to use more warnings -- orphaned works are proportionately more likely to use the Underage warning than most AO3 works. If that’s true and a reliable difference, that could indicate that people are more likely to be uncomfortable about having authored fanfic with underage sexual content than with the other warnings.
DO ORPHANED WORKS DIFFER IN TERMS OF POPULAR TAGS?
Looking at a bunch of the most popular tags overall on AO3, we see that orphaned works are a bit more likely to be tagged AU than other works, but far less likely to be tagged Humor or Romance (perhaps unsurprisingly). I’m mildly surprised that the Fluff tag is used about the same amount in orphaned works, and the Angst tag somewhat less.
DO ORPHANED WORKS DIFFER IN TERMS OF TABOOS?
Warning: some potentially squicky taboos will be named in the third subsection of this analysis.
Are orphaned works more likely to be private?
Authors can lock their works so that only other AO3 members can view them. 2.3% of orphaned works are locked, vs. 1.6% for AO3 overall. (Answer: probably yes, though I haven’t run significance tests.)
Are orphaned works more likely to be RPF?
When I search for “rpf” occurring in any field, I find that 606 orphaned works contain that term in the metadata, and 68307 works on AO3 overall. That means that 7.5% of orphaned works contain "RPF" in the metadata vs. 5.4% of AO3 overall. (Answer: probably yes, though I haven’t run significance tests -- and I get confusingly different results when I try to search for RPF as a tag, or related tags, so this answer could be wrong.)
Are orphaned works more likely to use various taboo tags?
I looked at a number of tags that I thought some authors might consider taboo, then tossed out any that were too uncommon (I kept only those that occurred at least 10 times in orphaned works and at least 100 times overall). Then I compared the proportion of orphaned works with each tag to the proportion of AO3 overall.
It looks as if fanworks involving incest, bodily fluids, or necrophilia are the most likely to be orphaned out of the topics addressed here.
Keep in mind that a single author that likes to write a particular kink could sway these results substantially. As an example, these tags are also far more likely to be used on orphaned works than on AO3 overall: “POV Third Person”, “Past Tense”, and “Word Count: 100-1.000” (a whopping 8%, 22%, and 10% of each of these tags’ uses, respectively, have been orphaned). This is in large part due to 108 orphaned works that use all three of these tags; these may all have come from one author or a handful of authors who used these tags a lot more than average.
Are orphaned works' authors more likely to be sorry?
A search for “sorry” yields 542 orphaned works and 53599 works overall. That means “sorry” occurs in 6.7% of orphaned works vs. 4.2% of AO3 works overall. (Answer: yes, though I haven’t run significance tests.)
FURTHER RESEARCH
I'd love to hear from readers who've orphaned works -- why have you chosen to do so? Feel free to let me know over Anon ask! (Or tell me over email or non-anon ask, but mark it private if you don't want me to share.)
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Thanks to consultingpiskies and wrangletangle for helpful answers that got me pointed in the right direction, as well as fleetwood-mouse for the question!