Star Wars Fandom Data on AO3

Data was collected on Friday March 29th 2024 at approximately 10:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time from a logged in account.

I was bored this morning, so this happened.

For a while now, I've been curious about the stats for the Star Wars fandom on AO3. It's a very fractured fandom, where everyone can find their niche and never venture far outside of it if they don't want to, and it's also an old fandom, dating back to a time before the Internet even existed. Yet it continues to march on stronger than ever, even if it looks very different depending up on which side of the fandom you choose to be in.

In the Star Wars - All Media Types fandom supercategory on AO3, there are 258,173 works. The top 10 subcategories along with their work counts are as follows:

Keep reading

Death of the author: Treating the author’s stated interpretation of their own work as merely one opinion among many, rather than the authoritative Word of God.

Disappearance of the author: Treating the context and circumstances of the work’s authorship as entirely irrelevant with respect to its interpretation, as though the work had popped into existence fully formed just moments ago.

Taxidermy of the author: Working backwards from a particular interpretation of the work to draw conclusions about what the context and circumstances of its authorship must have been.

Undeath of the author: Holding the author personally responsible for every possible reading of their work, even ones they could not reasonably have anticipated at the time of its authorship.

Frankenstein’s Monster of the author: Drawing conclusions about authorial intent based on elements that are present only in subsequent adaptations by other authors.

Weekend at Bernie’s of the author: Insisting that the author would personally endorse your interpretation of the work if they happened to be present.

I thought this was going to be a joke, but these are all very real things you see people do.

I’m never more serious than when I’m joking.

had to nab these tags from @ravenvsfox

I'm fully in agreement here, but I was reminded the other day that there are huge parts of fandom as a whole that are not freaks in the same way we are.

There's apparently some grumbling about these titles being divisive, but I think it's useful to be able to make the distinction between transformative fandom and curatorial/curative fandom. The first is what we're talking about here—fanfic, shipping, headcanons, etc. that transform canon in some way. The second is focused on canon as it is. For this reason, I've also seen it called affirmational fandom. People who are active in this kind of fandom may, for example, curate fan wikis or collect merchandise. There are also plenty of people who engage in both kinds of fandom!

Anyway, my point is, there has always been this other kind of fandom that us freaks may not identify with. But when people come into transformative fandom and start clutching their pearls like we haven't always been here, too? Yeah, then they need to see themselves out.

I barely follow any serial media nowadays so I only ever encounter this in epistolary artifacts, like a found-footage horror movie, but one thing I really think is funny is when people are following along with something as it releases and talking about how it’s being really clever and setting up a rare, compelling thematic commentary, and then later on it turns out that none of that panned out and the ending was mediocre and everyone was just extrapolating an illusory better plot in their mind’s eye

normally when a post gets this many notes this fast I mute it but I’m having a great time reading all the different stuff people are applying it to, placed in the reblog tags like burnt offerings

things that will be 10 years old next year:

• Suicide Squad
• Rogue One
• Deadpool (movie)
• Captain America Civil War
• Zootopia
• Moana
• Moonlight
• Mystic Messenger
• Overwatch
• the bottle flipping trend
• the Trump vs Clinton election
• Pokemon GO
• Yuri on Ice!!
• Voltron Legendary Defender

do x reader writers know how hated they are by a majority of tumblr users. like i honestly wouldnt even care that much if they could all 1. use a read more. a basic function of the site. and 2. tag their posts with just "#x reader" thats it. no character. please. god please i just want to blacklist these without blocking you but you make it so hard