Character Tracking: A History · 4:04am January 6th
So at least some of you are aware that one of the groups I'm part of and help with is Time Action Glory Challenge, a group dedicated to boosting the exposure of underused characters. Part of this is that the group started tracking story count by character tag back in mid-2017. First it was maintained by Impossible Numbers, then CoffeMinion, then back to IN, then a roughly year pause (EDIT: the data of which has now been retrieved!), then I picked up the load.
Because I'm absolutely poisoned by curiosity and have too much time on my hands, I undertook a little side project about a month ago. I went through, took all that data, and compiled it into a single Google Sheets spreadsheet. And as a result, there's now a single source file that lets you look at the growth of any particular character tag across the last six and a half years, going from July 2017 to January 2024. (Plus longer, as I update in the future.) I even put in a few basic graphs, mostly as a proof of concept!
Some observations:
- Foal characters were generally much more popular in the site's early days, but have greatly slowed down in usage. This is visible in characters like Dinky Hooves and Rumble, who both have pretty high story counts but very little growth. There's basically only two foal characters who have significant growth past 2017: Flurry Heart and Button Mash.
- Equestria Girls characters have generally grown a lot faster than their pony counterparts. Sunset Shimmer, as a prime example, started the chart almost dead even with Queen Chrysalis. The bug grew about 37.5% across six years; Sunset grew by 105%. Oddly, the individual Shadowbolts buck this trend and have been largely static despite their group tag growing well.
- Bat Ponies are actually one of the strongest growth tags, more than tripling their number despite having almost zero actual canon and no named characters.
- People freakin' LOVE Tempest Shadow. Most new tags that take off need about six to eight quarters to reach the 100 mark; Tempest did it in less than two.
- Anon also has stupidly high levels of growth. He's quadrupled over the six years, and there's a very visible acceleration point that's basically a 'RunicTreetops started writing here'. (Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the other very strong growth tags is Self Insert, which absolutely skyrocketed in the 2017-2020 period.)
- Some character tags just... I feel bad for them. Mr. Stripes has been sitting at 1 story since 2017. Others - like Little Strongheart - have basically been a flat line across the chart. (She's gone from 83 to 86 stories in six and a half years.)
I do wonder how much these would change if not for the limit on 5 character tags per story. It's a different matter whether, say, Little Strongheart makes a non-speaking cameo in a story, but there are plenty of times I had more than 5 characters who play a significant role but I had to leave out of the tags because they weren't one of the 5 most important ones. (This is why I don't have Mulia Mild and Gustave le Grand tagged, for example.) That said, point taken that it's also a different matter for these characters to have a starring role, which is really where they'd show up in the tags, versus them being in a story, even playing a significant role, that are about other characters.
Oh, and there's the issue of some characters not having tags until years after the show introduced them, so that older stories just had to use "Other" unless the authors noticed and went back to add tags to those stories (provided they still had character tag slots available).
wow lol XD guy's got reach!
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That's a problem that's quietly vexed me for a while. I wish there was something to do about it - not only because of this silly desire to track character numbers, but because it makes searching for stories more difficult - but it's pretty calcified. It's frustrating.
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91 stories with the same character across about a year and a half. It's an absurd level of production and a level of character focus that almost nobody else has. (Plus Runic's popularity has probably picked up a number of others following the lead, but that's harder to quantify.)
A few observations of my own from the spreadsheet and the graphs:
Evidently the fan theory that Cozy Glow is not a foal, possibly not even a pony, has stuck in some corners like glue.
Yes, I know she can't really be applied to this list, debuting not only during the measured period as opposed to before, but also being a villain and thus subject to a totally different wavelength of interest as regards potential stories and character dynamics.
Um… how did you reach that figure for Sunset? Chrysalis' growth is correct (5226 stories at the end to 3798 at the start), but Sunset should only yield growth of 105% (7671 stories at the end to 3741 at the start). Typo in copying 37.5% and adjusting it?
In any case, the growth of EqG is amazing. Well, less growth and more that it levelled off far slower than other areas as general site traffic and output went down. For instance, the main FiM tag went from 9,355 new stories in 2,017 to 5335 in 2023, down 42.97%. EqG, on top of peaking in 2018, went from 1,405 in 2017 to 932 last year, down 33.67%. Measuring its historical growth isn't easy, as I'm not fully sure when it gained a series tag (either alongside the second film or the third), but it basically took off as its own fandom series after "Friendship Games". Possibly because it had its own full cast and higher potential for stories aside from FiM.
That and, even in MLP, the allure of many of the same tropes and playgrounds as high school anime is hard to ignore. That is undeniably the attraction for a lot of people.
A part of Present Perfect screamed internally at this news, no doubt.
I was sure Cozy Glow would pass this quick, given her relative popularity these days, but apparently not, as it took her six quarters too. That said, she's right at the heels of Flurry and Tempest as the most popular late-era FiM characters. Amazingly, despite the very low popularity of the New Changelings, Thorax is quite close to them with 589 stories (ahead of lifers like Berry Punch and Twilight Velvet). I suppose, similar to Celestia, being the benevolent ruler of a race will get you tagged for a small role in a lot of stories.
At first, this beggared belief, as when checking her tag, she's had 14 stories published from the back half of 2017 to the present. Then I saw the sheet, spied that she's fluctuated up and down, and realised those 14 new stories are counteracted by deleted/delisted stories (and the odd removed character tag)*. This prompted me to fully notice just how many stories get removed/delisted over time.
The chart started with 110,230 stories published as of June 30th, 2017. Searching over that same period now returns 99,637 stories. This isn't completely accurate, given the chart's current end, based on the series tag, is 429 stories greater than the search results, but it's close enough. Point being, across six-and-a-half years, 9.61% of the stories published in the site's first six years (July 10th 2011-June 30th 2017) have been delisted/deleted. I would not have guessed anywhere close to that many stories became no longer viewable.
* I also noticed Twilight Sparkle went down 674 stories as of Q4 of 2017. Not having been around back then, I have to wonder, what caused that? No other major character seems to have a drop off that would indicate a site-wide purge of inappropriate stories/accounts. The merging of the temporary unicorn and alicorn Twilight tags would explain it, with stories that had both tags originally, but I could have sworn that happened far earlier than July-September 2017. That's what folks have estimated when I've asked them when it happened, anyway.
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In particular, I'd have to imagine Rarity's parents would, at the bare minimum, rival the Pie parents (50-70 stories each) had their tags been around as long, and more likely, they'd be at the just-over-or-under-100 level of Rainbow Dash's parents. How they didn't get tags until 2023, I don't know…
Worth northing no one has reassigned tags to them for any story older than 2019, so hopefully people will continue to realise that more. Amazingly, Hondo is ahead of Cookie with 9 to 5, the only Mane 6 parents (and only established male-female couple in the show) for which this is true.
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Obviously not a panacea, but do you structure your coverall searches like (as follows) to pick up mentions in the long description. If people write their "other" characters in the long description, that can be a workaround for people who want to mention more than the maximum limit:
strongheart -#little-strongheart
That said, I suspect you may already have tried the above.
Itʼs always nice to read your statistics, TCC56. Seeing character growth and trends with certain tags is simply fascinating. Thank you for it.
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Hold up a second. There used to be separate tags for unicorn and Alicorn Twilight? Really?
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Yep. It was before my time, of course, but Fimfic's regular story output was so huge back in the day (2012 and 2013 have over 20K stories, and that's with all the ones deleted or delisted since), and the fandom uproar over Twilight getting her wings was so huge, that it was judged to be a good call. Or Knighty got enough complaints about it. Eventually, once the uproar had died down, the fandom that stuck around had grown to accept alicorn Twilight, and it was felt two separate tags were redundant, they were merged.
As indicated, though, while I could never get concrete answer asking around when this happened, it did seem to be a lot earlier than mere months before the 2017 movie.
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Huh. I was also not around when Twilight became an alicorn, having entered the fandom in late 2014. Iʼve always known Twilight as a princess. But I can imagine the uproar that such change had caused in the fandom. Guess you learn something new every day.
And the stories that the seperate tags. Are the tags still on ʼem?
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Dude. I came to the show in late 2017, the fandom in 2018, and even then I still came across tons of stories about the uproar over her wings (also Derpygate). It beggars belief you could have been there a year later and missed that.
What I believe happened is, the Unicorn Twilight tag (which had more stories) was renamed to just Twilight. Any story with Alicorn Twilight as a tag was reassigned the new Twilight Sparkle tag and had Alicorn Twilight deleted. So stories which had both tags already (those about her ascension, mostly), would have effectively lost a character tag – this is what I suspect the Twilight Sparkle tag in the sheet dropping by 600-odd fics comes from.
So, no story with either Twilight tag doesn't have the combined one now, if that's what you were worried about.
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Yup! They're both really fast gainers. Sunset's gained three positions and Starlight fourteen, which doesn't sound like a lot until you note that in their neighborhood the difference between spots on the chart is several hundred stories. And yes, a lot of those early popular background ponies have largely vanished (Caramel is another notable here, and you can see several further down like Raindrops and Seabreeze who these days are Literally Who? characters.)
That's just what THEY want you to think. (But yes, I didn't include her there because her villain status puts her in a different category, to my mind.)
That's exactly what happened. Oops.
Exactly. There's a reason I noted Tempest as a skyrocket. The only ones that possibly break the mold are the G5 main cast, but because of the lost data we can't be 100% sure.
Story decay does have a significant impact, though I think in that case it may be worse than the norm. SparklingTwilight did two blogs recently trying to tackle the problem a bit, but it's very difficult to track.
I saw that myself, but I'm not really sure. It's possible there was a transcription error way back then when Impossible Numbers was writing the post, but it's so long ago there's no way to verify. Whatever it was, something got weird there. And probably not a purge of some sort, because it doesn't reflect in other tags.
They'd probably be at least on the Mr/Mrs. Shy level if earlier, yeah. And the male-female couple tag pairings are really interesting that way. Leaving aside couples that didn't get together until later on (like Mac/Sugar Belle or Maud/Mud Briar), the female character has more stories than the male. With only four exceptions: Hondo and Cookie, Filthy Rich over Spoiled Rich, Cranky Doodle over Matilda, and Sky Beak over Ocean Flow. The first is brand new, and the fourth only has a difference of a single story, but the middle two are interesting to theorize on.
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There was even a news post about it, which I stumbled into during my research.
(Also you're welcome! I love doing this stuff and I'm glad others find it interesting too.)
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Raindrops is particular is almost a mirror of the Anon situation; I'd be willing to bet a hefty chunk of her stories are LunaVerse or inspired by it, so once that dropped off, so too did she.
Hm. While we couldn't put in data for them into the spreadsheet, their number of fics at that stage would be low enough that, between here and Fimfetch, it would be possible to at least get some halfway decent estimates. It'd be accurate enough to at least see how many quarters it took them to pass 100 stories, anyway.
I just went and did a quick search, and since the numbers now are less than they would have been at the time due to purged stories, I can pretty accurately confirm that all of the Mane 5 passed 100 stories between the Q4 2021 and Q1 2022 thresholds. Which would mean Sunny, Izzy and Hitch took four quarters (due to their tags being added before the end of March 2021, to pick up peanuts during the first while before the movie came out), while Pipp and Zipp technically only took two, due to their tags being added later. How's that for an anomaly?
No other G5 character broke 100 stories until after data was tracked again.
Alas, this is true. The number of deleted stories is too great for those six years to use it now, and trying to use Fimfetch will mean including stories deleted from before July 2017 (which is a lot more than those since). Short of some other automated internet archive backup, wayback machine style, this is a quirk we'll likely have to live with.
That said… based on the range of where this quirk happens, going from 25,093 to 24,419 to 26,101, I'd be willing to bet the middle figure was meant to be 25,419. This would have the increase between these quarters for Twilight very similar in range to other characters around the same figures (namely Celestia and Luna). Obviously without concrete proof, it can't be put in, but there's my two cents.
I mean… it seems pretty clear. Filthy Rich was a character for the fandom to use for three-and-a-half years before Spoiled Rich, and even though his character tag seemingly didn't exist until 2017, it's enough of a lead for recursive tag additions to account for most of the difference (I reckon the rest comes from his businesspony role and his comic outings giving a few authors who choose to pull from there meat to chew on). As for Cranky Doodle, he dominated in "A Friend in Deed" over Matilda and has far more of a personality for comic roles,
Thank you also for answering my query as to when the tags got merged – December 2014. Good thing I quickly realised to not look through those toxic comments, though. Even as someghost who pretty adamantly prefers Unicorn Twilight, and frankly would have preferred those tags were kept separate, I'd never go as far as those people.
Also, one last thing. I noticed a quirk in the graphs for G5 characters. They all start using the label for Q4 2017, but with the data for Q3. This essentially means every line has the correct data but each label is off one, and at the very end, it only shows data for up to Q4 2023, despite the label. In particular, this means the data after the year-long hiatus only shows five data points, not six.
Not sure how it happened, and it would have been something you'd have caught and addressed after the next quarter when you updated it, but figured you'd want to know.
That kind of data is quite fascinating, and they really gives you a lot to think about.
But really, as cool as data compilation is, I wonder what can we make of it? What's next, arranging interviews for the people who do considerable output of certain characters? New brainstorming for obscure early and unused characters?
Who knows, data is cool but I'm sure they're meant to be used somewhere instead of sitting on a chart in a neat pile.
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It is! Not honestly surprising, though - they're main cast for the new series, so I'd expect them to at least have an Equestria Girls-esque curve if not better.
Hm. I'll have to investigate further. That's odd.
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We're... supposed to do things with information?
Seriously though, I have no idea of any practical use for this information. I just like numbers. I'm sure somebody can find a use for it, but personally I just enjoy looking at information and trends and stat curves. Trivia is fun!
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Ok that Littlestrong Heart stat is sad. I specifically remember realizing she was exclusively a 2012/13 phenomenon. Crazy underperformance from a S1 character. One offs didn't start being forgettable until S4 IMO