Kitty Madness

“If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”

I was curious if I could figure out just how TV-centric AO3 is.

There are a lot of ways of answering this question and a lot of factors to consider, but the chart above is my attempt.

Once upon a time, US fanfic zines were dominated by live action US TV series—plus Star Wars, The Professionals, and the occasional wacky outlier like From Eroica with Love (yes, really).

So looking at AO3 as a whole rather than just recently-posted works, I expect to see the TV category being massive. Not only are there many older US live action shows, but that category also includes many live action TV-ish things from around the world (Netflix, etc.) and sometimes includes non-live action TV. As expected, it's a honking big category. But there are other big ones too, even looking in aggregate.

The blue data above are total work counts taken from AO3's index pages. The red data have the "All Media Types", "& Related Fandoms", "Ambiguous Fandom", etc. taken out. I've adjusted metatags or removed them to reflect when they're double-counting works. I've moved bigger fandoms to a single media category. Reality music competition shows stayed in Celebrities & Real People and got removed from TV and Music & Bands, etc. Harry Potter went in books, not movies or whatever else. Plenty of franchises could go in either Video Games or Anime & Manga.

Plenty of works are crossovers too, so the work counts implied by the data will always be far higher than the total work counts on the archive.

The blue data are extremely messy, but cleaning that data is a somewhat subjective process, so I've included both.

But regardless, TV is clearly a huge category but not a majority, not even a slim majority. (AO3 currently has 17.5 million works.) It has strong competition particularly from video games and anime/manga even after things like Star Wars metatags are removed from there.