Born Incomprehensible Yesterday

Something like Breaking Bad, for example, has low squiggability (that’s what I’m calling this quality). It’s tightly written, the characters are consistent, there’s little left to interpolate or extrapolate. Obviously, people DO write fanfic of Breaking Bad, but it still has a low squiggability score. Whereas something like Supernatural has a high squiggability score. Fantasy and science fiction often have high squiggability scores. This suggests squiggability could also be related to worldbuilding and potential for people to borrow a premise or setting.

I thought for sure the episodic shows (like Supernatural, Sherlock, Dr. Who) would dominate the fanfic world. As in, there'd be more fics for episodic/procedural shows than season-focused/serial shows (shows like Heated Rivalry, Good Omens, Stranger Things). The hypothesis being that there was more room for invention around a show that itself kept inventing more characters and situations for its world.

Now, I'm a humanities kid, NOT a math kid, but I think I did a reasonable breakdown, and--again, I spend an honest-to-god eight-hour day on this--it turns out the two structures are equally squiggable:

Of the ten most popular non-anime TV fandoms (I just know nothing about anime and I suspect there are new variables introduced by the norms of anime/manga storytelling that affect their squiggability), looking at shipping specifically (just cuz that's what I was curious about) five of the ten were procedurals and five were serials!

Here's a shot of my spreadsheet:

These numbers are old - there are constantly new fics being posted, yay! - but my takeaway generally stands, I suspect.

(I don't remember what the row colors meant anymore, ie why some are white, lol. The gray/fainter rows are for secondary ships from the show, where the show had multiple ships with over or near 10k fics posted for second, third, etc ships.)

5.2 | Redux II

Not much to say, except that they are infinitely graceful and elegant. I love that they are slightly feminine (really the best feature in male hands: his are the hands of a piano player, an artist, a reader, an intellectual) and, probably made for a heightened haptic perception and capable of tactile memory.

I think the New Spartans breaking his finger was the single most physically painful torture moment of the entire series for me.

John Everett Millais (8 June 1829 – 13 August 1896) The Bridesmaid Oil on panel, 1851 20.3 x 27.9 cm (7.99" x 10.98") Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, United Kingdom