Work Text:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Ratings, categories, & freeform tags
Word counts & works in progress
Reki and Langa around the world
AO3 resources, summary, & disclaimers
Introduction:
Hey! This is a brief data analysis I did for Reki's birthday (August 8th). Renga as a pairing has become massive since SK8 the Infinity's first episode, so I thought it might be nice to track the ship's growth throughout the first half of 2021.
Thank you to Regan (@pancake_surprise) for the inspiration (their SunaOsa presentation). Check it out if you're interested in SunaOsa, or fandom statistics in general.
This analysis covers languages, word counts, works in progress, month-by-month fic counts, and Google Trends timelines.
Timeline & overview:
The timeline section of this will track monthly totals, as well as fic totals at the end of each month. On July 31st, the date of data collection, there were 3121 fics in the 'Hasegawa Langa/Kyan Reki' tag on the Archive.
The first Renga fic was uploaded on the same day as SK8's first episode: July 10th. From there, the pairing grew exponentially. They hit ten AO3 fics in the span of two days, and a hundred in less than a month. They also reached one thousand fics the week before the last episode of SK8 the Infinity.
The graph on the top-right shows fics updated each month, while the one on the bottom-left uses months as checkpoints to mark the increases in fics. March was the most popular month to update Renga fics: there were 679 fics in March, almost 22 per day.
The parameters of this Google Trends search were January 10th and July 31st. The most obvious peak in searches for 'reki x langa' came mid-March. (Also, just something to note: Google truncates 'langa x reki' and 'reki x langa' to one search term, so using 'langa x reki' will yield the same results.)
The reason I didn't search for 'renga' is that it's a search term with uses outside of SK8 the Infinity, and its other meanings would have skewed the results.
Ratings, categories, & freeform tags:
The ratings 'General' and 'Teen' make up more than 70% of all Renga fics. They're nearly tied for most common, with only 1.1 percentage points between them. An additional 11.3% of works tagged 'Hasegawa Langa/Kyan Reki' are marked Not Rated.
After M/M, the most common category for Renga works to be tagged is Gen. Only 187 Renga fics are not marked as M/M. This may mean they contain slight relationship undertones and as a result, are tagged Gen. It could also include polyamorous relationships (which fall under the 'Multi' umbrella), cis-swaps, genderbends, or something else entirely.
Nearly 64% of Renga fics are otp:true, which means they only have one relationship tagged: just Reki/Langa without any side pairings. The amount of fics that are otp:true has decreased since SK8's airing. While SK8 was on the air, the otp:true percentage was 67.53%, and now it's 63.89%. That's a difference of 3.64 percentage points.
Here's a tip for sorting by only otp:true fics on the Archive!
The most popular characters, besides Reki and Langa, were Miya, Joe, and Cherry Blossom, followed closely by Shadow. Langa's mom, Hasegawa Nanako, was the eighth most common character.
The pairing typically tagged alongside Renga is Joe/Cherry, or Matchablossom.
This bar graph shows the most common freeform/additional tags. Among them are several SK8 the Infinity-specific tags: 'Insecure Kyan Reki,' 'Hasegawa Langa In Love,' and 'Kyan Reki is a Ray of Sunshine'!
For a closer look at the crossovers, feel free to check out this chart:
Word counts & works in progress:
If you need another frame of reference, 173k is about half the length of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
Reki and Langa around the world:
The most common countries where 'reki x langa' was searched were Peru, Chile, Vietnam, Argentina, and Ecuador. By contrast, the five regions where 'SK8 the Infinity' was most searched were Hungary, Georgia, Puerto Rico, Poland, and the Philippines.
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.
Mandarin accounts for 4.1% of the total Renga fics, and 47.9% of all non-English language ones. In the SK8 the Infinity tag, there are 399 fics written in Mandarin: 6.1% of the total, and 59.6% of the non-English works.
I checked Pixiv for the tag #ラン暦 (langa x reki) in order to find fic written in Japanese (under the 'novels' tab). The tag has 1427 works, 901 of which are novels. In addition, the tag #暦ラン (Reki/Langa) has 283 works. 148 of them are novels.
Fanfic averages:
With this data, we can extrapolate roughly what the average Renga fic looks like: complete, M/M, with No Archive Warnings, written in English, otp:true, rated General or Teen, and a word count around 17k words.
AO3 resources, summary, & disclaimers:
Umbrella 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: I'm doing a Genshin Impact-related case study at the moment, so if you or someone you know is in that fandom, is a regular user of Lofter, and knows how to possibly search it for pairings or tags, shoot me a DM on Twitter!)
The links to all three AO3 scripts are here: history of kudosed fics, tag tracking, and kudos/hit ratios. You'll need a script installer in order to add them to your browser. I use Tampermonkey - you can download it here!
The pride flag skins are available here.
Thank you!
Thanks for reading! If you'd like me to analyze a particular fandom, tag, or relationship, you can DM me on Twitter or send me a Tumblr ask/message to request :)