mostly reblogs

We’re close to kpdh’s 1 year anniversary so I wanted to dive a little into the ao3 stats and see how things have shaped up over the year. And since it’s June let’s kick it off with some gay tags!

As a quick disclaimer, these tags account for a fairly small amount of the overall works a character has on ao3, around 1% or less, and there are also plenty of authors who write works with an intended sexuality in mind but simply don’t tag it. So these numbers are more an indication of what headcanons have some popularity to them, but that isn’t to say they're the only one within the fandom at large, or that one is better than another. Okay, we good? Cool!, Let’s look at numbers! Ladies first!

Most used sexuality tags:

If you’ve hung around the polytrix side of the fandom then most of these probably aren’t too surprising. Bi Huntrix was popular from the get go, and lesbian Mira and pan Zoey were quick to follow. There's been some Hashtag Discourse about lesbian Mira over the year and all I’ll say to that is: the true enemies are the ones claiming Mira (or any of the girls) can’t be queer at all, direct your anger toward them instead of other gay fans with different gay headcanons 👍 Anyway shoutout to lesbian Celine, we love a repressed woman living through doomed yuri.

As for any major shifts over the year I'd say that most of these settled pretty early on, as seen below.

The most interesting points are pan Zoey taking over bi Zoey back in September, and lesbian Mira becoming the most used tag from August onward. However, the gap between most of these isn't so big to be super notable, just interesting to see laid out on the page.

Now, onto the boys!

Their overall use of tags are much smaller with the exception of aroarce Baby, which I imagine came to be thanks to him not having an assigned love interest in the film. Admittedly I’m only ever in femslash fandom spaces and I don’t know what the general fandom has been doing with the Saja Boys, neither can I say if this is a kpdh fandom thing or a broader F/M and M/M fandom thing that they don’t use sexuality tags as much. It’s definitely fairly common in F/F fandom tho.

At the very least Poly Saja, Abby/Romance and Abby/Jinu all have around 200-400 works on ao3, and I’ve seen bi4bi rujinu posts consistently throughout the year so I don’t think these are Super Rare headcanons, it's more of an insight into tagging culture if anything.

I have a theory that the introduction of "lovergirl Mira" as a taggable term legit helped course-correct the fandom's perception of Mira early on. I remember in the first few months post-release there was some contention in fandom on how mean or nonchalant Mira was/would be toward the girls. I think this was partly due to the whole "falling for the character's facade", as well as the typical fandom thing of applying tropes and behavior they already like onto a character, regardless of how in-character it might be. So what's a Mira fan to do when the fandom is leaning toward posting/writing/drawing her as a cold, standoffish loser who barely gives a compliment?

Enter: Lovergirl.

In one word (two words?) everyone is suddenly able to encapsulate Mira's soft side in comments and tags. Art of Mira bringing the girls flowers? Such a lovergirl! Fic of Mira cooking for them? As excepted for a lovergirl! Screenshot of Mira smiling at either Rumi or Zoey? Lover. Girl.

And because I love a graph, here's one to show the use of the Lovergirl Mira tag on Ao3 over the year. It took about till October for it to really take hold which does feel about right from my experience in the fandom.

Now none of this is to say that people are wrong for creating/liking a more distant or colder interpretation of Mira (I've read a ton of pre-debut stuff with that setup that were all great) because at the end of the day she doesn't have that much screen time compared to Rumi or Jinu, and so is far less developed as a character. That's always going lead to varying interpretations as fans start bringing their own takes to the less developed areas of her characterization and backstory. The difference is now you're more likely to see Mira being a little (or lot) more soft and sweet alongside being cool and tough, which feels a lot truer to her character in general.

Anyway, it's been fun watching people warm up to Mira over the year and I think a small part can be credited to the lovergirl PR campaign ran by Mira stans :)