#creator waves

Sometimes you look at a chart and it just makes sense, and for me it was this wonderful visualisation of the Sherlock fandom by @fffinnagain​ that came across my dash the other day. Full disclaimer - I didn’t even read their full post, but I think this is one way of looking at the data that speaks multitudes for itself. 

Take a look here and tell me what you see!

I’ve divided the “waves” here into a few categories - “On Air”, when ATLA was airing for the first time, “Pre-LOK”, the time between ATLA and LOK, the “LOK era” which is self-explanatory, and then every year individually after that. A creator is assigned into a wave based on the date of their earliest fandom work (due to the way AO3 works, this isn’t always the date they published their first work, but rather the date this work was last updated). 

Once the creators are assigned to their groups, the colors are used to track any additional works they produce in the fandom. Such works are counted up per month, which explains the small local variations in these waves. I’ve marked a few key dates on the graph as well - one or two of which might explain the 2020 boom ;)

The ATLA Renaisance of 2020 brought almost 10x the amount of new creators to the fandom as any other year! How many of these fanwork creators will be around in a couple years? Well, judging from previous waves, it does seem that contributions from creators who entered a fandom die off to a trickle come the next year. The bunch that entered during the LOK era seem to still be contributing consistently however, and there’s a definite resurgence of the OG fans coming back to the fandom, as you can see from the little blue-purple bump in the year 2020. 

We’ll have to wait and see if the new fans are here to stay - but for now we can enjoy the wonderful content they produce!

Let’s take a look at the next-gen Avatar fandom, too. Overall there are far less works in the Legend of Korra tag, although its release on USA Netflix has given it a popularity boost as well - one that’s even bigger than the one it got from the landmark series finale.

I’m interested in eventually examining the crossover of creators between these two fandoms, to answer questions such as: how many creators participate in both fandoms, and of those, what’s the fandom of origin and the lag between the crossover? 

Anyway, for now, tag urself I’m a 2019 ATLA baby, and I still can’t believe I’ve never written a stand-alone for LOK (side-eyes my fanfic drafts folder).

Sherlock Creator waves (praise the tenacious!)

From my last post on Sherlock fanworks creators (those active on AO3), after series three we see (a few) more creators no longer posting to the fandom than are joining, and I’ve heard a number of people voice concern that a lot of the long term contributors decided to leave after this new dose of canon and the fandom conflicts that followed. Many of us have heard of beloved creators backing away, and that is enough reason to ask: Have we lost more people than usual?

 To answer this, I grouped Sherlock creators by the time of their first postings to AO3, refer to here as Creator Waves. In the plots above, we have the contributions of each semi-annual wave of creators since the show started airing in mid 2010.

Plot 1 shows the number of creators from each wave posting per week, all stacked on top of each other (interactive plot). From this, it is clear that recent contributors add the most fresh works to archive, while the numbers of active creators from each wave shrinks over time to be a whispy tail. These tails of the early creator waves are made by many of our most tenacious artists, those who have give us classics and continue to be shape our common culture. (One day I might get back to this as look at how seniority relates to popularity…)

The shape here is much the same as seen in my last post, with series 3 making a big spike in productivity, similar to the jump from series 2. And looking at the creator waves around this time, it is evident that the excitement isn’t limited to the new voices. Given that we know that the number of active creators per wave decays over time, is this bump important to all of these waves or just some?

Plot 2 let's us compare these waves on their respective time lines: it reports the number of active contributors in each wave after their first six months in the fandom (interact with it here). That decay is even more obvious here, a common rate of attrition across the waves. Or mostly: the early joiners to fandom seem a bit more persistent than those who've popped in as the show gained greater popularity, but the shapes are about the same. Edit: Here is more analysis on the rate these waves decay. TLDR: it's exponential and the half-life of sherlock creators posting to AO3 is around a year.

In this second plot, I’ve marked where series 2 and series 3 land on each of creator wave's timeline. For all of these waves we have a distinct bump for series 3, perched on top of the expected reduction of active contributors. Series 3 did have a galvanising effect, bringing people back to share new creations. (I haven’t assess this statistically, but the pattern is pretty strong, so I doubt a time series model would suggest otherwise.)

While we have seen slightly more creator attrition since series 3, and some people have announced their departure the Sherlock Fandom, that isn’t the whole story. Whatever their reasons, plenty of creators, old and new, came to share works via AO3 around the airing of series 3, and the fandom is still going strong as we enter our second year of haitus.