Femslash week in review: 2021-02-23 - 2021-03-01

High-level stats for week of 2021-02-23 - 2021-03-01

• Total works categorized F/F on AO3: 7442 (-441 from last week)


• Works I classified F/F: 4531 (-283 from last week) (2077 new, 2454 continued)


• 1.1% of all 411073 AO3 works I've classified F/F were updated this week

A few callouts this week:

• Well, this is a very flat week. It doesn't seem like Supergirl is going back to that top slot any time soon, but next week is a new week.
  
• I spent a bunch of time looking at destinationtoast's F/F stats, which I linked to last week as well. Destinationtoast uses a couple of much simpler metrics --- the grey bars showing "works not tagged F/F" and the secondary charts of "top fandoms where F/F is the main category" --- for what I spend most of my time on this project doing, namely, trying to tease out fandoms where you are going to have a good experience looking for F/F (where that's extremely subjective, but my interpretation has always been "find a lot of works which actually center multiple characters who are canonically non-male"). I think our metrics are probably about equally effective towards that goal. It's very non-apples-to-apples, because I'm not primarily showing you a "best fandoms of all time" view, but a week-by-week view. One of my main goals coming out of this analysis is going to be to try to come up with an all-time view that i can show occasionally. I conclude that there are a few different patterns of fandoms that make sense to discuss in the F/F space:
  1. Fandoms that are primarily F/F. These fandoms are easy; most of the works tagged F/F will actually center non-male characters, so you just measure how big they are, and you're done.
  2. Fandoms that are overwhelmingly non-F/F, but huge enough that there's a significant amount of F/F anyway. For these fandoms, you care both about how big the fandom is and about how much (and how) to discount for works with the F/F tag that may not be what femslash fans are looking for.
  3. Fandoms that are big (but not huge) and somewhat (but not overwhelmingly) non-F/F. These are the fandoms where I think actually doing the work-by-work analysis makes the most difference --- the simple bar size analysis can tell you that Overwatch is more reliable than Supernatural, but understanding the F/F ship diversity of pretty-big fandoms is what pulls fandoms like Dragon Age, Buffy, and Archie/Riverdale onto my all-time top 25.
  Anyway, I think Destinationtoast's analysis is great, and I'm hoping to pick up some things from it, do some more thinking about the quality of the one-dimensional metric I'm providing (and whether I want to be providing a one-dimensional metric, and hopefully get you some of those all-time-fandom-size charts.
  

( Full top-20 table and description of methodology after the jump )