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ive-a-problem-to-flaunt · 5 months

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hi what.

so I looked at ao3 stats for Bad Buddy again - this time, I looked at the stats of the fics written in the week following the release of each ep.

My initial draft for this post began with a longer explanation of what I did and why - but I'm scrapping that [and pushed it below the cut, if anyone's interested] in favour of incredulously asking how the heckity dizzle was there a noticeable dip in the number of fics featuring Wai after ep 9:

Here is a graph showing the number of one-shots (i.e., fics with only one chapter - more on why I counted only one-shots under the cut) using the character tags for Pa, Ink, Korn, and Wai written after the release of each ep:

FASCINATING.

For context, ep 9 is about the aftermath of the curtain drop + Pat gets shot + Wai helps get the footage from the bar and makes up with Pat and Pran. So I totally expected most fics from that week to focus on Wai tbh (more accurately, I expected at least light Wai-bashing lol. Listen, I adore Wai, but that is the ep in which it's revealed he dropped the curtain). I know there's a fair number of fics that explore Pran/Pat/Korn confronting Wai, Wai apologising, or other stuff like that, so I thought I'd see mostly those kinds of fics. But nope! Most authors decided Wai didn't need to be the focus at all.

But then I wondered how the total number of fics looked - if fewer fics were written overall that week, then it would make sense for the number mentioning Wai to fall too. So I made a graph of the percentage of fics written in a given week that used these character tags, and Wai falls slightly here too!

Notably, the percentage of fics focussing on Pat and Pran remained roughly the same here. So I'm assuming most authors focussed on PatPran's reaction to the curtain drop (and gunshot) rather than Wai after ep 9.

I also like that Pa was present in fanfiction every week, right from the first ep :)

Also yes, the steep rise in Wai and Korn after ep 10 is definitely conspicuous - I'll get to that in a bit!

First I wanna clarify that while pulling these numbers, I noticed that there are many fics use the Pat/Pran relationship tag but don't use the character tags, even though obviously the characters are present. So that means these numbers aren't representative of the exact number of fics focussing on each character - they're just indicative of the trends. Though honestly that can be said about everything in this post, because there is always the possibility of tagging errors in fics.

Onto WaiKorn and InkPa! I made graphs of the fics using the relationship tags too, so here's InkPa and WaiKorn:

These two and PatPran are the most popular, but I had to remove PatPran to make this graph easier to read, rather than squishing these two ships at the bottom of the graph under the far more active PatPran tag. xD

Initially I had also included the platonic pairings in this graph (like Pat&Pran, Pat&Korn, etc.) but I removed them after I realised a lot fics tend to mix up romantic and platonic pairings and use '&' pairs for romantic fics too, so the numbers were quite off. I was a bit disappointed about that tbh, because I really, really wanted to see how many fics focus on platonic relationships and also fics with Pat&Pran in non-romantic contexts. Ah well.

[Although if we do assume the platonic tags are accurately used, then some interesting takeaways are that there's a peak in Pat&Pran fics after ep 7 (the bet era) and also a smaller bump in Pat&Korn fics after ep 10 (unsure why).]

So yeah! With those disclaimers done, onto the sudden jump in Wai and Korn mentions after ep 10!

The number of fics focussing on Wai and Korn rose steeply after ep 10, as did the frequency of the Wai/Korn relationship tag. So naturally I checked the ep and yeppp, that's the ep with the WaiKorn drink product placement scene/the one in which Wai walks in with a crepe and Korn tries to make up with him. Suddenly that sudden jump in WaiKorn's frequency makes a lot of sense, heh.

Also shout-out to that single WaiKorn fic written immediately after ep 2 itself bfkhgkdhh that author was really ahead of their times (iirc when I checked, the author said that fic was inspired by a behind the scenes video that featured Drake giving Jimmy a quick kiss on the cheek at one point).

And heh, I love that Ink appears in ep 4 for the first time and there's immediately two fics with InkPa.

I can't say I'm sure why InkPa rose to their highest peak after ep 11 - I skimmed the ep while writing this post and I can't find any particular reason, so I'd love to hear if anyone remembers any InkPa moments in that ep that inspired so many fics focussing on them!

Also, I was curious about InkPa-centric fics (as opposed to fics where InkPa is a background ship), so I used ao3's otp: true filter. What this filter does is show fics in which InkPa is the only ship. So that means InkPa is definitely the primary ship in those fics, but unfortunately it also removes InkPa-centric fics with other background ships.

In any case, I made this graph that shows the most common ships and compares how many fics feature each ship (this graph is not limited to the fics when the series was airing; it's the total fics written as of 22/11/23):

The blue sections are the fics that feature only that ship, and the total column height (blue+orange parts together) is how many fics include the ship overall (either as a main or side pairing). [OTP: False is the filter for fics that have multiple pairings.]

Unsurprisingly, PatPran dwarfs the other two. InkPa is more frequent than WaiKorn (there's a difference of about 100 fics overall). Notably, there are more fics where PatPran is the only ship than fics with multiple ships (i.e., there's more blue than orange for PatPran). However, that gets flipped for both InkPa and WaiKorn - there are fewer fics where they're the only ship compared to fics that feature multiple ships.

Aaaand giving the relationships a rest, onto the friend groups! I wanted to see which of the friends are the go-to when an author needs someone from the architecture and engineering gangs to turn up, so here's the (cumulative) graph of fics using each character in the week after each ep came out:

If anyone wanted to see the frequency with which each gang (including Wai and Korn) collectively appears after each ep:

Admittedly, this isn't the best graph because a fic that features both Wai and Safe, for instance, gets counted twice. So the length of each bar does not reflect the number of fics written that week. But this graph kinda helps compare which characters were popular when.

Also, I think Wai and Korn should be treated as a separate category since they appear on their own a lot and likely skew these results. So here's the same graph sans Wai and Korn:

Turns out Louis was the most frequent when the series was airing! There were 18 fics with Louis, 16 with Chang, 14 with Safe, and 13 with Mo. That changed afterwards though, because if I look at all fics written as of 22/11/23, the numbers are still close to each other but Chang is the most popular with 168 fics, followed by Mo with 166 - making the engg gang more popular overall? Louis is in 154 fics and Safe in 150.

Also, I was a lil surprised by the fact that many weeks feature only two or three of them rather than the whole gang(s). Like why would only Chang and Louis appear in fics after ep 12, while after ep 11 only Mo and Safe appear? And all four of them only appear together following ep 6! Also, often it's one person from engg and one from architecture that appear - I have no idea why that is the case but I'm intrigued.

okay I'm going to draw this post to abrupt end and stop talking about numbers now because this is getting quite long and dense, but yeah! Here's what the characters and relationships looked like in the fanfiction after each ep. :]

Oh, and as to why I started this whole thing: Back when I made this post, I looked at what kind of fics each ep of Bad Buddy inspired using the freeform tags (and I made it a chart race, which is always fun, heh). It led to a bunch of fun discoveries - though my fav is still canon divergent fics rising noticeably after ep 5 (in which Pran walks away from the rooftop) and ep 11 (in which PatPran head to the beach and the preview implied they'd break up in ep 12) - unsurprising that the fandom collectively decided to throw canon out the window for a bit there. xD

[Under the cut is a lil more context about what I did and why I made the choices I did.]

Last time, I couldn't settle on how to handle the multi-chaptered fics. I was working off the assumption that fics written in the week after an ep were likely mostly inspired by that ep (I don't expect that to hold true for every fic, but I wanted to see the overall trends after each ep and this was the best way imo), and multi-chaptered fics kinda mess with those numbers because they span multiple weeks and because of the way ao3's filters work.

But then the other day I stumbled across destinationtoast's stats re: the Ted Lasso fandom's response to season 3. First off, it was very validating to see someone else also do a similar analysis to what I did. :D (My approach, that I figured out on the fly, wasn't total bullshit, whoop whoop!) But I also liked how Toast dealt with the multi-chaptered fics problem: simply ignore them skfhskhg. Ao3 allows looking for single-chaptered fics only, so Toast looked only at one-shots written in the week following an episode's release. It worked since apparently the majority of the works in the fandom were one-shots, so the results were reasonably accurate.

I decided to try something similar and give the week-wise stats of Bad Buddy another go, because the issues I identified in my old posts on the fics written when the main series and OS2 were airing are still niggling me. Initially I expected that ignoring multi-chaptered fics wouldn't give me accurate results, since a sizable chunk of Bad Buddy fics have multiple chapters - when I checked, 694 fics out of a total of 2565 fics (as of writing this post) have multiple chapters - that's nearly 30%.

But then I compared the number of single vs muti-chaptered fics written in the week immediately after each ep, and yeah no, it holds up alright in those weeks. Turns out, most of the fics written while the series was airing were one-shots - the largest difference I found was in the week after ep 10, when 15 out of 64 fics had multiple chapters. In every other week, the number of multi-chaptered fics updated was in the single digits, so I feel fairly confident about my numbers now. The numbers in this post should be a fairly accurate representation of what was being written each week.

I think the majority of the fics written while the series was airing being one-shots is interesting. Based on the fics I tend to read, I kinda assumed that multiple chapters were far more common, but I stand corrected! In hindsight, that kinda makes sense I guess. Also, considering that this is true for both Ted Lasso and Bad Buddy, I'm wondering if that's true for all fandoms - someday I'd like to see how this varies across fandoms/media/genres.

Also, I should note that there was a break of two weeks between the release of eps 9 and 10. In this post, I only counted the fics written in the first week after ep 9 and ignored the fics during the second week of the break. I didn't do this last time when I looked at freeform tags (I counted fics from both weeks in that post). I'm still not sure which is a better reflection of the impact of ep 9. (I'd love to hear any opinions on this! Actually I'd love to hear anything about this whole exercise, be it what I could do differently or theories on what can explain these stats).

also, this is completely unrelated but shout-out to @dimplesandfierceeyes who kept turning up in so many of the tags I was looking at! Like, the most recent explicit InkPa-only fic was by seekingmoonscapes, as was the last Louis/Safe fic, and even one of the (only five!) fics in the sparsely populated Coffee Shops & Cafés AU tag.

It could've been just a coincidence but it was very amusing and a delight to see the same name pop up frequently in many of the less-common tags :)

#also hooo boyyy ao3's hidden operators cheatsheet zindabad #there's a list of filters /officially/ called that by ao3 and it has options for stuff like single chaptered fics and otp: true #which was very helpful for this post - I didn't have to manually sort through the fics #I am SO glad I discovered that list #it has lots of other interesting options like backdated and restricted fics and stuff too- someday I'll finish my draft that looks at those #also. Pran appears in like 40 fics more than Pat?#a very superficial look into the fics with Pran and without Pat suggest those are largely either introspective fics #or focus on other relationships like Wai&Pran or Pran&Pa #while the fics with Pat and without Pran seem more focussed on Pat's realisation #this was v superficial tho so next time I wanna spend more time reading those fics #to see how Pat-centric and Pran-centric introspective fics differ from each other and which kind of scenes/eps inspire each #bad buddy #placeholder tag #also FFS I am once again hitting post past 1 AM - why do i keep doing this to myself #also apologies if I didn't explain any of the graphs or IDs well - I have been awake for too many hours in a row #feel free to lemme know if anything isn't clear and I'll do my best to elaborate!

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