Work Text:
Archive of our Own and Fanfiction.net differ on a number of major content-related variables -- among them are rules for allowable content and ways of labeling genre. I was curious to see how the two differ in terms of most common genres.
>> Fanfiction.net
FFNet lets users select up to two genres for their fanfics. There are a fixed set of possible genres, and "General" is the default genre. As far as I can tell, there's no way to browse or search the site by genre, so you can't see how many fanfics are in the "Romance" genre, e.g. -- you have to first select a fandom or do a keyword search in order to get the genre breakdown.
I arbitrarily selected 6 common words that don't seem genre-specific, searched FFNet for them, and wrote down the number in each genre. The words were: again, what, when, now, have, can. The relative proportions in each genre stayed relatively stable across these keywords. So I used the totals across all these keywords as a sample of FFNet.
Note also that FFNet doesn't allow explicit sexual content on their site, as well as having various other restrictions (no RPF, no Choose Your Own Adventure, no non-textual fanworks, etc). AO3 has no such content restrictions.
Caveats: There may be errors due to sampling. Also, these genres are overlapping, since fanworks can have 2 genres.
>> Archive of Our Own
AO3 doesn't have preset genres, instead allowing users to create "freeform" tags to describe content. (AO3 also offers a bunch of special tag categories for information like fandom, pairing, or character.) AO3's tag wrangler staff decides which tags are synonyms or subtags of one another -- which means that if someone tags a story "AU i guess?", it will end up included in the canonical "Alternate Universe" tag as well.
I browsed the most popular AO3 tags and chose all the ones that looked like they were bigger than the minimum size -- at least the same font size as "Canon Related".
Caveats: The FFNet list of genres is complete, but this isn't even close to a complete set of tags on AO3. There may be errors due to missing tags in this tag selection process (either AO3 retrieval error or my own overlooking something -- I just eyeballed it). Also, these genres are overlapping, since fanworks can have as many tags as a user wants. Not only that, some of them could be subsets of others (I think).
>> Observations
Romance and relationship-focused themes are very popular on both platforms. Humor, Angst, and Hurt/Comfort are also very popular on both platforms.
By limiting the number of genres one can pick on FFNet, the platform focuses more attention on fewer categories. AO3 has a lot of romance-related tags (Romance, Relationship(s), Sexual Content, etc), but no single one of them dominate as much as FFNet's Romance genre.
A few of the most popular AO3 tags don't have corresponding genres on FFNet -- Alternate Universe, Sexual Content (disallowed under FFNet's rules, in most cases), and Fluff.
FFNet handles crossovers and fusions separately from fanfic that only has one fandom; I wonder if that affects the fact that they don't offer Alternate Universe as a genre in its own right, or whether they are trying to stick mostly to bookstore genres. On the other hand, Hurt/Comfort is definitely not a bookstore genre.
The fact that AO3 allows explicit sexual content is evident in the popularity of sex-related tags (e.g., Sexual Content, Smut, Porn, BDSM, Firsts -- which includes the very popular subtag First Time).
Several of the top tags on AO3 aren't topical but provide other info -- e.g., Drabble, Original Characters.
Most people don't write Westerns. ;)
I can't really tell from this if there are large differences in genre preferences on the two platforms (aside from the disallowing of sexual works on FFNet), due to the various differences and limitations.
Edit: one more -- I'm now wondering, what's the difference between Porn and Smut? AO3 apparently doesn't wrangle them together...
>> Limitations
FFNet has been around a long time, and I don't know its genre history. E.g., maybe Westerns is a new genre that will gain popularity. Or maybe the relative popularity of the other genres is shifting. Maybe there weren't even any genres for a long time; I'm not sure. Also, maybe I chose poor keywords or there's something else wrong with my methodology -- I don't have a lot of familiarity with the platform.
AO3 is a relatively young platform. On AO3, the freeform tag system means that sometimes someone thinks of a new way to tag content and it spreads around; sometimes something falls out of favor -- the numbers and types of tags are constantly evolving.
In both cases, this is all about how people choose to tag things (and the way the tag wranglers have chosen to categorize tags), not necessarily the actual content of the fanworks.
I haven't looked yet at doing something similar on Wattpad or other platforms.
Different fandoms and fannish subcultures also have pretty different conventions for tagging and categorization; I would love to explore this more eventually.
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