Feast, Famine & Fandom Disengagement in Steven Universe

Like a lot of other fans I know, I’ve been alternately bemused, delighted and frustrated by Cartoon Network’s approach to releasing new episodes of Steven Universe, especially given it’s one of CN’s flagship shows. Bursts of new episodes - bombs - followed by extended hiatuses have become the norm. While this strategy initially proved to be a huge success, and may well have helped the show go on to be the bonafide hit it is, it didn’t seem to me like anywhere near as much of the audience came back for the most recent bomb. In fact, as someone who’s been around the block a few times, my fandom death spiral sense isn’t so much tingling as it is standing on street corners and accosting random passers-by with a sign proclaiming The End Is Nigh.



But since we all know anecdata isn’t and , and I am a nerd who has two hours of commuting time to kill every day, I thought I’d try to see what’s actually going on - at least to the extent I could be arsed. After all, Steven Universe only slipped from #1 to #2 spot on Tumblr’s End of Year metrics thingie and, in news that I know will shock many, it’s possible that I may actually have been wrong before.

Once. Twice, at most.

A very long time ago.

Buckle up for some stats!

Some notes before I begin:

I am not a statsismagician.



Also, transcription errors. Rejoice in these, for they will justify you telling me, at length, how and why I Am Wrong.



For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll be referring to gaps between content of less than or equal to four weeks (=> 28 days) as a break and gaps greater than four weeks as a hiatus

and gaps greater than four weeks as a It’s only covering the period of 2015 to the end of this January. This is because the data shows that the fandom pretty much didn’t exist before Stevenbomb 1. If you were a fan of the show in 2014, you are probably not real and should get that looked at.



The way calendar weeks work out means that week one of a given year usually starts in the the last week of December the previous



Dates on the horizontal axis of charts are ‘week ending in’ and are inclusive. Some of you might note that said weeks ending are, oddly, doing so on a Monday. This is primarily because I wanted to peg things to Tumblr, and the Tumblr fandometrics are the only set where I can’t control the capture period enough to even approximate a given time period.



Sometimes I use a secondary axis. I have done this to confuse and anger you.



Sometimes I reverse the vertical axis. .uoy regna dna esufnoc ot siht enod evah I

With release schedules, there are three sets of data: one for tv, one for online, one for other.



The tv and online sets cover official US broadcast and official online release of entire new episodes.



The other set covers other official releases - the Classroom Gems series, for example, books authored by Sucrose - and episodes that were released early outside of the US.

series, for example, books authored by Sucrose - and episodes that were released early outside of the US.

For the shorts, to give an idea of overall official content volume, I’ve given them a value of .05 per 30 seconds of content, rounded to the nearest interval.



For the games, books, soundtrack etc, I’ve given them an utterly arbitrary value of one.



I haven’t included all of the books, just the ones that seemed to generate buzz, and haven’t included any comic books aside from the OGN. You may disagree with that decision, but I was sick of transcribing dates by this point so you can bite me or do it yourself.

The data itself is here if you want to tell me in more exacting detail how and why I am wrong.

Ok, now that’s all out of the way, let’s start with the release ‘schedule’:



What’s that? What’s that you say? Today is… Titans Go day?

Well, nothing surprising here. After a fairly traditional release schedule for 2015 (and 2014, it must be said), the show quickly moves into using the bomb format almost exclusively after the first Stevenbomb. There is, however, a bit of clustering at the start of each year in terms of episodes - the only time nothing was released in Week 2 was 2017. Week 20 is also another good one, so keep an eye out in mid May.

I was also surprised that there’s not really a pattern, at least that I can see, with regards to release of additional, non-episode content. I figured we’d see either such secondary material released prior to the start of a bomb, to generate and capitalise on hype, or mid-hiatus, to try to spike interest while everyone’s in the doldrums. Neither seems to be happening reliably. Then again, maybe I should have been less lazy and captured more of the book and comic releases.

Now, here’s an example of why you can’t always rely on averages to give you a good idea of the bigger picture or trending: if you look exclusively at episode releases, the average length of a hiatus is ten and a half weeks. If you include all of the major non-episode releases - that is, the Sugar-authored books, OST and Save the Light - and foreign early releases, the average drops to… eight weeks. Not a huge difference, even though the first case includes more and longer hiatuses, including two, at 17 and 23 weeks length, than the longest in the latter at 15.

A better way of looking at it, to give a real idea of the irregularity of the schedule and impact of hiatuses, would be to look at what proportion of each year can be considered a break or hiatus.

… that’s not anywhere near as rosy a picture now, is it? Well, I guess that just means more room for the good stuff!

Tumblrweeds?

Now for the juicy stuff: what happens when we match the schedule to available measures of fan engagement. At least the ones I could be bothered to (and was technically capable of) harvesting)?

Let’s start with Tumblr, as it’s what kicked my curiosity off.

Since the start of 2015, Tumblr has published a more or less weekly set of stats posts at @fandometrics listing the top twenty fandoms in a given category. Steven Universe sits in the TV category and therefore is competing against live action darlings such as Orange is the New Black and Stranger Things and special events like Eurovision, as well as other western animated shows like Adventure Time in the weekly rankings. How said rankings are determined is a bit of a black box, but we know it’s somehow derived from the following:

How many posts were created that contain a tag



How many times that tag was searched for



How many times a post using that tag was reblogged



How many times a post using that tag was liked



In addition to the weekly stats, Tumblr has also done an end of year retrospective for 2016 and 2017, where the tv category is split into live action and animated. Steven Universe ranked first TV for 2016, and second for 2017. First to second isn’t that bad, right?

So, after holding the number one slot for virtually all of 2015 and 2016, with an average rank of of 2.6 and 2 respectively, 2017 sees drop of a full two and a half slots, to 4.5. That’s not bad, but that’s not great either, and there’s a very clear difference between the 2017 rankings and the rankings in the two previous years. It’s much, much more apparent where the hiatuses are.

Perhaps, again, this is an area where averages don’t give us a great idea of the real picture. A better reflection might be the amount of time spent in the #1 slot, and within the top 5.

When we look this way, we see that Steven Universe was ranked #1 for only 6% of the year in 2017, compared to 44% in 2016 and a frankly impressive 60% in 2015. Time in the top five is just about as bad, with SU spending 68% of the time in the top five, compared to a staggering 96% of 2016 and 88% of 2015.

It also strikes me just how sharply the rankings are dropping now, after a bomb.

(note: hiatus length here is the amount of time between episode release on tv or online and includes double-ups)

Not shown above, but the break after the last bomb (what I’ll call Homecoming bomb/arc) was brutal in terms of rating drop. After just a week, we were back down to #4, and by week four had hit #8. The Stranded event faired little better: it didn’t have as sharp an initial drop, but by week four was sitting at #8 again. It took the Great Hiatus of 2017 twenty-one weeks to fall that far. Previous hiatuses, no matter the length, never fell below a four .

Now, this actually doesn’t necessarily mean that the total level of discussion is dropping. We don’t have any visibility on real numbers here, and don’t know exactly how Tumblr is determining what tags count towards Steven Universe - or any other fandom. And there are almost certainly other factors at play, particularly the growth of tumblr as a platform. Indeed, 2015 had a lot more one-off events make the top five than either 2016 and 2017 (including the Superbowl of all things), which suggests to me that Tumblr’s growth is diluting the impact of any one fandom, or that they’ve changed the way they’re tracking tags, or both . However, the decline in ranking correlates very well the hiatuses, particularly the 2017 droughts.

How’s it looking on the fic front?

While I can and probably should write about what a miracle AO3’s tagging system is, its search engine, to be frank, is the spawn of satan. One of the things it’s especially terrible for is finding stuff in a specific date range because all searches are relative to the current date - that is, you don’t enter a date itself, but tell the engine how many days ago you want it to start looking. It’s also rather unclear what, results, exactly, it’s returning.

So I turned to the AO3 scraper. And then to @oathkeeper-of-tarth who actually ran the damn thing for me which, seriously, bless them because it took for fucking ever because it’s rate limited to one query every five seconds or so. This (eventually) produced a metadata dump of all 8109 works published under AO3’s Steven Universe (Cartoon) tag from its inception to January 31st, 2018. The data set included the publish date, which I’ve used as the basis for the next chart. I’ve used this instead of the last update date because a multi-chapter fic has a life an inertia of its own, and I therefore think that measuring new works provides a more accurate reading of fan engagement with the source material at that point in time than the last updated date.

Gee, I wonder what weeks the bombs were?

We also see a very similar pattern as with Tumblr, with much greater consistency in output in 2015 and 2016 compared to 2017 and 2018. Interestingly, the bomb and special seem to have had a much greater - but not more lasting impact. And, while 2017 (a bit over 2700 new works) suffered a drop in production from 2016 (a bit over 3000), it wasn’t as bad as I’d been expecting. 50 new fics a week seems relatively healthy given the previous average was 55, and cartoons aren’t really known for their fic fanbases. And that’s interesting because it’s at odds with what I’ve been hearing from those around me - i.e. the Archive is increasingly barren and they are Despair.

What I suspect has happened has been a shift in focus. Knowing the the likes and dislikes of those in my social circle (birds of a feather, yadda yadda), I’m guessing that this is a move away from Crystal Gem-centric stories and towards Connverse and Lapidot-centric stories, possibly coupled with an increase in human AUs.

The dataset I have from the Archive includes all of the tags, so I could probably test this theory out if I were feeling particularly enthusiastic. However, doing so would involve cleansing the tags for more than eight thousand records and christ on a cracker people you do not need to tag your Three Diamonds/One Planet fic with every single possible permutation of the ships involved why would you even do that canonical tags exist for a goddamn reason people i cant even-

Something something reddit pun something…

Reddit is known to skew male and younger compared to most sites, and therefore would skews much more male than media fandom traditionally does. This makes it an interesting contrast to Tumblr, which skews female and younger, and the Archive, which I believe skews female and older (citation need). There is also the handy reddit metrics site, and also this lovely thing called the reddit pushshift api, with which one can do Things which, in my case, generally involves working out where one forgot an ampersand.

Hey Jekyl, when did Jailbreak air?

More of the same, really.

What interests me most about this set is not just it’s quite apparent that the post-hiatus bombs failed to gain much traction, or that there’s that spike at the start of each year because of Week 2 releases, but that early online release isn’t really doing all that much at all compared to a regular release.

Let Me Google That For You

Way back in early 2016, fans started to get antsy about the hiatus, blaming the new bomb format for it. This prompted

at least one site

to defend the bomb format on the basis that it was doing absolute gangbusters for the show in terms of generating buzz and raking in the viewers. And this was absolutely true. I mean, look at this

and tell me that this isn’t an accurate depiction of the CN marketing and scheduling teams at the time.

And that’s just the US stuff, not even the worldwide stats. But then you extend it out another year…

A little less sploosh and a little more

But those are kind of just…. lines in a void, devoid of context. To give a better idea of how the show’s performing, let’s step out to worldwide, and grab the whole Adventure Time set. We’ll also chuck in The Amazing World of Gumball - a bread and butter show for CN - in as a baseline.

And here’s SU verse the two tumblr darlings: the guys that are sometimes a giant metal space lion and the chick who is sometimes or perhaps all the time a ladybug I think?

So, SU is currently sitting around Gumball levels of internet hype, but is and continues to to better than other darlings - though Voltron looks set to eclipse it soon.

Wot I Think

There aren’t that many things I, at least, can take away for absolute certain from this exercise. We can see that the bombs, once immensely effective, are no longer having as much impact. We can also see that the most recent bomb and special event have, well, been not so much bombs as damp squibs. We can also see that, as a whole, the level of engagement has been falling, but that Steven Universe is still doing better, even much better, than other cartoons, including other fandom darlings.

To say anything else would be wild-arse speculation based on partial information. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading a hundred different versions of ‘The Butler Killed Pink Diamond (And Also Pink Diamond Was The Butler)’, I’ve learned that this is an area in which Steven Universe fandom truly excels.

My first thought was that this is because bombs have become normalised. Virtually everything on CN has bomb-style release these days; it’s no longer a special, hype-worthy event. That would fit, to my mind, the pattern of increasingly sharp drop-offs. A bingeable release is great at attracting massive amounts of hype for all of about two weeks after release, after which point your audience moves on to talk about other things.

And I think that’s part of it, but not the whole of it.

I was honestly very surprised to see how low the numbers were for the last few releases, particularly the Zoo arc/Out of This World event. With that one, there was hype. There were genuine ‘wham’ moments. There was lore. There was a cliffhanger. A kick-ass song. And the hiatus leading up to it wasn’t really all that dire, lengthwise, although it certainly was irritating.

But then I thought about what each of the bombs contained and I think the problem might be not so much the bomb format per se, or even the hiatus itself, but that the show’s focus has shifted since the Summer of Steven event and a good chunk of the fanbase isn’t really on board with it. And by that I mean we’ve gone from



to

Steven is a sweetheart, and, yes, is the titular character of the show, but I’m not actually here for him. I never have been. I’m not here for the Lars or Sadie or any of the townies either (with the exception of Connie I will fight you). I am 100% here for the gay alien sentient space rocks prodding buttock and taking down names in a neat cursive script. And when I look at the graph below, I’m increasingly certain that I’m not the only one. More to the point, I think the problem is that my our beloved gay space rocks are utterly MIA.

I mean, look at that. The last time any of them had a star outing, an outing in which they were not supporting another character’s story, was Three Gems and a Baby, back in December, 2016. And that’s an ensemble piece with Greg. To get to a non-ensemble outing, you have to go back even further: to the Summer of Steven for Amethyst and Pearl (Earthlings and Last One Out of Beach City), and to the Answer in Season Freaking Two for Garnet. Tiger Philanthropist, you say? Actually about Steven, say I. Mindful Education is a Garnet episode? Garnet is a plot device for Steven and Connie’s story.

That’s over eighteen months and nearly two whole seasons - more for Garnet. That’s the real hiatus.

The next bomb will likely be in April (thanks Hulu!). Said bomb has a very good chance of containing a good chunk of the long-awaited Rose/Pearl and Rebellion backstory. I also suspect that a major reason for the 2017 hiatus was to build up enough of a content library to try to replicate the success of 2016’s Summer of Steven event in 2018. But I don’t think they’ll replicate that success, nor will the show will see the return to the kind of prominence that it’s had in the past unless it brings the Crystal Gems back to center stage, and is willing to space out new episodes content a little bit more - and has got another ‘Stronger than You’ breakout moment up its sleeve.

Begun, the death spiral has.

Tl;dr: Now the bombs don’t work, they just make it worse but I wanna see rose quartz again