Work Text:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Ratings, categories, & side pairings
AO3 resources, details, & disclaimers
Introduction:
Partially for Tartali Week (July 14-20), and also partially out of pure curiosity, I gathered some data to track the progression of the Childe/Zhongli tag on AO3 since the pairing's growth has been so explosive. You can read this without any prior statistics or math knowledge! Please enjoy.
Thank you again to Regan (@pancake_surprise) for inspiring me to model this format off their SunaOsa presentation. Check it out if you're interested in SunaOsa, or just some fandom statistics in general.
Timeline & overview:
This tag analysis covers a fair bit of ground, and it's significantly more extensive than my previous one for Matchablossom. Some of the topics include language popularity and search trends, how Tartali Week impacted the rate of fic posting, and the makeup of the tag regarding categories, side pairings, and ratings.
The first fic tagged Childe/Zhongli on AO3 was posted on October 16, 2020, 18 days after the game's open release. It's reasonable to assume that's when most players probably reached the Liyue quests and met both Childe and Zhongli.
Game8's walkthrough for Chapter 1, Act 1 (Of the Land Amidst the Monoliths) was released around October 7th (via Wayback Machine), and the earliest I can find of someone having begun Chapter 1 of the Archon Quest is September 30th, in this YouTube video. Zhongli doesn't appear until the second act (Farewell, the Archaic Lord).
Furthermore, casual players would likely have taken more time going through at their own pace rather than speedrunning in an attempt to upload a guide or walkthrough as soon as possible, so I'd posit a guess that they would have arrived at this part of the main storyline awhile later, somewhere from the beginning to middle of October.
Almost 50 fics were uploaded in the second half of October alone.
This is a graph of the number of fics uploaded each month from October to July. The reason for the decline in July is not that fic counts are decreasing or that fewer works are being posted, but that this data was collected on July 9, so the July values account for only 9 days rather than a full month.
In fact, the rate of uploading in the first 9 days of July (28 fics per day) far outstrips that of the previous month, where the daily rate was around 18.
The above shows an incredibly consistent rate of fic posting from October to July, calculating work totals for the end of each month. The slight plateau at the end is also due to the same data collection quirk I mentioned earlier.
I compared two related search terms on Google trends for general patterns and also the popularity of each term: 'Tartali' and 'Zhongchi.' The main factor in determining a pairing name is the relationship dynamic (top and bottom), which is why Tartali and Zhongchi can't be used interchangeably. However, occasionally people will just choose one based on how it sounds, and the dynamic specifics tend to matter much less when it comes to SFW works.
Please note that Google trends graphs only account for English-language search terms and countries where Google is a primary search engine.
Ratings, categories, & side pairings:
Teen and Up rated works make up almost 33% of the Childe/Zhongli relationship tag, and Explicit works account for another 27 percent. M/M is by far the most common category to tag Tartali fics with; less than 300 Childe/Zhongli fics are not marked M/M.
This may mean they contain slight relationship undertones and as a result, are tagged Gen. It could also polyamorous relationships (which fall under the 'Multi' umbrella), cis-swaps, genderbends, or something else entirely.
Over time, the percentage of fics that are otp:true has decreased. For example, from October to December, the percentage of otp:true works was 69.6%. From the beginning of 2021 to the date of data collection (July 9th), this percentage was 55.9%, a decrease of 13.7 percentage points.
The same as AO3's tagging conventions, the slash (/) is used to indicate a romantic relationship and the ampersand (&) is for a platonic one. The most popular pairings tagged with Childe/Zhongli included Xiao/Venti, Chongyun/Xingqiu, and Beidou/Ningguang.
Only about 1 out of 100 fics tagged Childe/Zhongli used more than one fandom tag. Besides Genshin Impact, the most popular fandoms were Danganronpa, Boku no Hero Academia, and Arknights.
Freeform tags & word counts:
The three top freeform (additional) tags are Fluff, Not Beta Read, and Angst. The most common character in Childe/Zhongli fics, excluding Childe and Zhongli, is Xiao.
I checked the 20 most recent fics on AO3, so the statistics wouldn't be skewed by underlying factors like the relation between words and popularity (example: more words = more popular/more hits/more bookmarks). The average word count out of these 20 works was 22,197 words.
Filtering by 'works in progress only,' we find there are more than 1k Childe/Zhongli fics that are not completed: 28.6%.
Childe and Zhongli on the map:
Since AO3 is a predominantly English-language platform, this obviously isn't indicative of Genshin fandom as a whole, but there were plenty of non-English Childe/Zhongli fics on the Archive. Mandarin is the second-most common language with 91 fics, followed by Russian (60) and Indonesian (31).
After posting this, a wonderful commenter (Somnambulista) went and checked the main Russian site for posting fanfiction and found some Childe/Zhongli-related work! I've included their addition here below, quoted to make sure I don't misrepresent anything:
just in case you're curious as i was, i checked out the main russian fanfiction site (ao3 isn't the most popular one here sadly, i love its layout and tag system and literally everything else way more) and there are about 1.2k childe/zhongli fics. I can't tell the exact number bc it'd be a pain to count with that interface but there are A lot, including some translations. just wanted to let you know that those 90 fics are people maybe crossposting or to link the translation properly, bc russian audience here isn't as big.
So thank you to Somnambulista for the information! Something to keep in mind when you're considering the language makeup of Tartali as a pairing.
Out of curiosity, I also checked Pixiv's 'novels' tab for fic written in Japanese. In the "#タル鍾 (Tartaglia/Zhongli)" tag, there are 384 novels, and 1047 works overall (including illustrations, manga, etc.). Conversely, the tag "#鍾タル (Zhongli/Tartaglia)" (the same difference as Tartali vs. Zhongchi) has 1039 works in total, 617 of which are novels.
The five regions where 'childe x zhongli' is most often searched on Google are the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand. The shade of blue on the map shows the search density. This map only figures in countries where the English conventions and names are used, as well as places that Google operates heavily in.
Fanfic averages:
After finding the most common option for each aspect of a fic, I discovered that the average Childe/Zhongli fic would look something like this: rated Teen or Explicit, No Archive Warnings, M/M, written in English, otp:true, completed, and approximately 22 thousand words.
Tartali Week Analytics:
For the Tartali Week data (July 14-20), I also included July 21st in case of late submissions or time zone differences, because AO3 posting dates change according to UTC.
The rate of fic posting went up wildly in Tartali Week. From June 28 to July 5 (an eight-day period just like the one I'm using for Tartali Week), there were 152 works; an average of 19 per day. From July 6 to 13, there were 175 - almost 22 each day.
During Tartali Week, 429 fics were posted, a 245% increase from the previous week. That's more than 61 average fics each day.
I pulled together all the fics that were either A) in the Tartali Week AO3 collection or B) tagged as a variation on 'Tartali Week,' coming up with 145 unique fics. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go through all of the other 284 works uploaded during this time to find indications that they were written for Tartali Week in the author's note, summary, etc. so there may well be more fics posted for this event that I'm not aware of.
The rest of my data about Tartali Week relies on statistics about works in the collection, excluding fics that were tagged but not added to the collection.
Like the overall Childe/Zhongli tag, fics uploaded for Tartali Week tended to be either Teen and Up or Explicit. However, Tartali Week fics erred much more on the side of Teen and Up: 38.8% of them are rated Teen, versus 32.6% of all works in the Childe/Zhongli tag being rated Teen.
'Tartali_Week Twitter's Tartali Week' was the most popular freeform tag. The others were 'Top Tartaglia | Childe/Bottom Zhongli' (the dynamic implied in the ship name 'Tartali'), Fluff, and Alternate Universe - Modern Setting.
This graph illustrates the number of fics uploaded on each day of Tartali Week, from July 14th to 20th. The days with the most works were Day 1 (in which the prompts were First Meeting, Confession, & Scars) and Day 7 (Childe's Birthday, First Kiss, & Last Meeting).
English accounted for more than 90% of the Tartali Week works, but other languages included Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
The collection's otp:true percentage was 78.64%, considerably greater than the overall Childe/Zhongli tag's percentage (less than 60%).
AO3 resources, details, & disclaimers:
I'd like to put a huge disclaimer here that this is an incredibly English-centric presentation. AO3 is the site I use most often and it has the most easily collected data, but it is by no means the end all be all of fandom, and there are plenty of other fanfiction platforms out there with different demographics.
(Speaking of which: if you or someone you know is a regular user of Lofter and knows how to possibly search it for pairings or tags, shoot me a DM on Twitter!)
Here are the links to all three AO3 scripts: history of kudosed fics, tag tracking, and kudos/hit ratios. You can download the Tampermonkey script installer here!
Thank you!
Thanks for reading and I'll see you around! I'm planning to do more Genshin-related analyses soon in case you're interested :)