Just exactly how mighty is the Cinderella Boy fandom??
@nevernovember I promised I was gonna do something with your data so I did something with your data
I think that even now, we sometimes underestimate the strength we've gained as a fandom over these past three years, so I did a little something to prove us wrong if that's the case. This time, focusing on the wonderful world that is creative writing (on AO3, of course).
First of all, let's warm up by boosting our egos a bit. I went to Webtoon and chose the comics with the most views on the whole platform — some of these have literally hundreds of millions of views (CB only has a bit more than 3 million, to put that into perspective).
And this is what I found looking into their respective tags on Ao3:
Do you all see what I'm seeing?
If you're not very familiar with the community on ao3, these are the cb numbers:
What do you mean CB has more fics on AO3 than fricking Unordinary, which has 1.4 billion views on Webtoon? YES, billion with a 'b' — that's more than a thousand times CB's numbers on Webtoon!
This series has existed for a decade, and CB, with its 3 million views and 3 years of existing in the platform, just beat that? Just like that??
Okay, I may be overreacting a bit, but you have to admit that it's impressive. In the screenshots I showed before, there are series such as Lore Olympus, True Beauty, and The Remarried Empress. And they're all even less relevant than CB in this respect while being basically the most important webcomics on the app.
Now, does that mean these series don't have any fanfiction? OF COURSE NOT! In fact, I know there's a massive community for True Beauty on Wattpad, for instance. However, my objective right now is to only make comparisons regarding their presence on AO3, because AO3 is actually really cool and we love Ao3 (also because both platforms tend to attract different audiences depending on lots of factors, especially the type of content and age of the consumers).
Anyway, this is true for some of these series (the bigger ones), but I can't say the same for most smaller series that are still significantly bigger than CB. There are several series with great viewing numbers on Webtoon that have almost no fanfiction on any website. Take Swolemates, for example. It has more than 7 million views on Webtoon — still a lot more than CB — but there isn't a single fic on Ao3 or Wattpad. There's simply nothing.
Well, after spending hours looking through many webcomics, I could only find two examples that break this pattern:
Thing is, both of these series have been on Webtoon for two years longer than cb and have 95. 3 and 15 million views respectively—that really is a lot. So taking this into account I think we're still doing pretty well, and it's still impressive how small the difference is!
Part two: the growth of the fandom
[This will be a bit more maths-heavy than usual so skip to the 'Results' part if you'd like]
Firstly, this is the rough scatter plot of the data. (Number of fics published per month since the first cb fanfic was released):
You see that pink oval I drew on top of the graph? That just means there is a correlation beetwen these two variables and that it's a strong one.
How strong? You might ask. Weeeeell, there are a few mathematical tools that can help us to understand that. This will make it easier to see the growth of the fandom and predict how well we'll do in the future!! (pretty much)
Okay, so basically, we want two things. First, to find a simple equation that will allow us to approximate the scatter plot to a linear function. And second, to find its Pearson correlation coefficient to see if our approximation is accurate and, therefore, if it is safe to say that we have been growing consistently and will continue to do so.
In order to find these two things, I first needed to calculate a few more things than just the number of fics per month. I entered all the data into the following two-way table:
Now, to calculate the linear function that approximates the data from the scatter plot and its Pearson correlation coefficient, we use the following formulas respectively:
This is the boring part where I do the calculations. I'm just putting them here as evidence, but skip straight to the results — that's the important bit.
Okaaaay, first of all, with the new information we've acquired, we can now plot the linear function on the scatter plot. It would look like this:
Its equation is the following:
But the important thing here is that the coefficient that we were looking for ended up being approximately: 0, 922
You see, the closer this number gets to 1 (or -1) the stronger the correlation between the two variables that we were analyzing are. And since the number is positive, that means the correlation is positive as well!
To put it into perspective, a number above 0.7 is already considered a strong positive correlation sooo yeahhhhhh
Anyway, to summarise, all of this means that we can (sot of) say that ever since the first ever cb fic was published back in 2023, the community has done nothing but to grow— create more content, share it with the world for free and bring new cb enjoyers to our blatant cult! :D
Now, that's just beautiful!
I knew we were passionate and all but I really can't think of a way these results could have been more encouraging.
Lesson of the day: We are mighty!!
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For all the second part of this post, @nevernovember collected all the data in this post, I only did the math.
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