In September 2016, @mostlymilkwood made some fancy graphs using statistics available from Ao3. I haven’t seen anything else similar to this, so I figured I’d crunch the numbers for May 2019.

For starters, what has happened between September 2016 and now?

-Before the Storm announced in June 2017

-Before the Storm Episode 3 (final episode) released in December 2017

-Captain Spirit, LiS2, and the Comics all happening in 2018 and 2019

As a disclaimer, I haven’t really read any fanfics (I’ve been immersing myself in fanart instead), so I don’t know anything about the LiS fanfic universe beyond these statistics.

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Interestingly, these proportions are quite similar to what they were September 2016, although Ao3 now has over 50% of all LiS fanfics.

Ao3 - 4352 (54.78%)

FanFiction.net - 2608 (32.83%)

Wattpad - 984 (12.39%)





This is essentially the same as it was in September 2016.

74.4% of fanfics are tagged as either F/F or M/M.





Fanfics per day in the period January 31, 2015 to September 30, 2016. As you can see, there was a big increase after Episode 4, and a huge spike after Episode 5 was released.

I believe the big dip on the October 20 point means that fanfics which were active between October 1 and October 19 (the interval which this point represents) were very likely to get updated immediately after the release of Episode 5.

With Before the Storm there was a similar trend. A huge peak after the final episode, and dip in the period immediately before Episode 2 (suggesting fanfics active during that time were likely to get updated).





Now, a graph showing everything that has been published on Ao3.



The dip before the bike spike on the right edge of the graph is April 15. So, about a month ago. I suppose we can interpret this to mean that those fanfics which should be considered “active” generally update within 1 month?

From the period of October 1 to April 15 there is also a smaller upwards trend. Without looking at the content of those fanfics, it would be difficult to determine whether those are fanfics which are “semi-active” and lagging behind the bulk of active fanfics, or if the release of the comics and LiS2 episodes were boosting the number of fanfics being produced in that period.



The only real changes in the top 10 is that Rachel/Chloe is now 2nd place, in the wake of BtS being released. Max/Kate has also taken 4th place, beating the Warren/Nathan pairing.

The Max/Chloe tag is present in a whopping 45.7% of all fanfics, followed by Rachel/Chloe at 15.4%. As a testament to LiS1’s popularity, Amberprice is barely more popular than the Max/Victoria ship! The chart below shows the percentages for all the top 10 ships.



In September 2016, Max/Warren was in 11th place with 49 works (2.6% of all fanfics at that time). I only see 99 Max/Warren works now (2.3% of all works). For the consistent amount of hate this ship gets, wouldn’t you have thought it would be more prevalent, rather than a tiny little piece of the fandom?

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In conclusion, the fanfiction branch of the fandom is as active as ever, really really likes Pricefield, and is Hella Gay™.

