#24 – Not Sure If Serious or Playing Dumba

[dekedangle_rpf_mod]

This is the twenty-fourth post of Deke Dangle RPF Anon, a community for all your ice hockey anon meme needs.

THE RULES

1. Mods retain the right to delete, freeze, and/or screen threads and comments.
2. Meme rules do not require warnings.
3. Respect flock. Do not repost or share information from private tumblrs, locked twitter accounts, flocked LJ posts, etc.
4. No linking fans to their real life identities.
5. No looks bashing or body shaming. This applies to players and people associated with those players and their clubs, as well as fellow fans.
6. No embedded music.
7. No embedded images.
8. No spamming the meme, whether through repeated comments or other means. 
9. No discussing trolling, individual trolls, or their efforts.





Meme rules do not require spoiler cuts. However, this layout does allow for them. Any of the following tags will create a spoiler cut when closed: <div cut>, <span cut>, <font cut>, <font color="white">

If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to The Mod Post. 

Threaded View
Flat View
Top-Level Comment View

Next post opens at 5,000 comments.

Comments

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I was doing some stats fiddling on AO3 and I realized that no HRPF fic has broken 1000 kudos since the details of the Patrick Kane allegations came out, which makes me wonder how many of the quieter people in the fandom said fuck it and moved to greener pastures.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I would not be surprised if the fandom had diminished by significantly more than half.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Probably a lot, especially because K/T was probably the favourite (only?) ship of a lot of readers. (Just an impression I always had though.)

Do you remember by any chance what the most recently posted fic to break 1000 kudos was?

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

The most recent fic in the tag to break 1000 was a Check Please fic in July 2015 //eyeroll emoji

After that, it's a thehoyden fic in June 2015. Her most recent is at 938.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

It was Pass It On (Aug. 23, 2015) by thefourthvine, the one where Sidney Crosby texts younger players about their terrible life choices.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

News broke about Kane on August 6th, so I guess that breaks OP's hypothesis.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

not really. it can take a while to completely jump over to a new fandom in my experience.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

OP

Nah, that's why I phrased it as "details of the allegations came out", because I think a lot of people were on the fence about the issue for most of August as a result of all the confusion and conflicting details around the whole clusterfuck. I'd say it was more of a slow trickle as people's opinions solidified, rather than a mass exodus right when the accusation first happened.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Lawd I love that story.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I love this fic. I think I'm going to go and re-read it.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Looking at fics around that marker, most of them are from two or three years ago. I'm sure a decent chunk of people jumped ship, but it's likely a lot of good writers did, too, since fic as a whole hasn't been Great since then either.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

na

I came into K/T fandom about 2.5 years ago, and there was a BNF turnover right about then. It looks like a few of the most popular stories since I started reading have hit the 1k mark, but there was another turnover last fall and (thankfully) nobody has really filled the void. Meanwhile everyone who was writing S/G when I came in has mostly gone, and Stars fic has never quite hit the same popularity. The fandom is pretty clearly in a lull (especially with a few new mega fandoms like SWTFA pulling people), but I think with a really catchy new ship and some new blood it could easily take off again....just a question of if/when that happens.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

NA

I also think many of the others I consider good are writing rarepairs right now.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, just saying the fandom basically lost its top juggernaut, around the time another was stalling and the third didn't quite take off (I know people expected K/T writers and readers would go into those pairings but it didn't really happen). The people who stuck around did seem to mostly shift into rarepairs or rookie class fic (which isn't much more popular than rarepair, individually), and I also think SWTFA really drew off a lot of people. I don't know what other big fandoms are winding down now, but it seems like the last big influx of people came from TSN and GK, so maybe that'll happen with something else.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

If only swtfa fandom's fic choices aligned with my likes... I feel so left over in my fandoms atm. :(

I'm curious what will happen hockey fic fandom wise when more of the players from the 2015 draft class actually get to play in the NHL.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed on both fronts...I liked the movie but SWTFA fic just isn't doing it for me, and I v much doubt most of the rookie pairings will survive them all playing for different teams way spread out. Or they'll survive, but none of them is likely to draw a big following.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

So far. There are a lot of new K/T authors writing shorter fics. I don't think there'll ever be another 1000 kudo fic, because the number of people willing to read K/T fics has dropped significantly, but I wouldn't be surprised to see fics that WOULD have gotten 1000 kudos before being written in coming months/years.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

How long was it taking fics to reach 1k kudos before then? It's hard to judge how unusual that gap is without having some kind of baseline. It could be a year or so for 1k kudos was/is a normal pace for popular fics.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Another factor could be that hockey fandom is just the right size for the "sort the whole tag by kudos and read everything on the first few pages" approach, which, once the fandom's been established for a while, tends to lead to <100 fics having very high kudos (because people read through the top of the tag and leave their kudos on top of whatever kudos the fic had originally), and the rest of the fanworks stay at the fandom baseline for kudos numbers without that boost from newbies binge-reading. Add that on to the fact that a few of the juggernaut pairings are slowing down and you might have a fair hypothesis.

And more related to what you said: I did a little noodling around on the Wayback Machine to see if I could figure out how quickly things accumulated kudos, with disappointing results (the sample size was small and the results were inconclusive), but it generally looked like a lot of the stuff from 2015 hit 1k within 4-6 months of being posted. So it wouldn't surprise me if a post-Kane debacle work hit 1k eventually, but it doesn't seem to be happening as quickly as it did in at least parts of the recent past.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Personally, I think this is more indicative of the drop-off of crossover fans (of other teams/ships) than anything else. I'm a Pens fan, so I was always more of an S/G fan than a K/T fan, but I used to read a fair amount of K/T fics because I could still appreciate good hockey RPF. Obviously, a lot of former K/T fans have changed teams or left the fandom completely, but I think a pretty big hit has come from fans of other teams avoiding the pairing now. Even among S/G fans, there were certain K/T classics that most of us had read, and a fair amount who read outside the pairing. Now, someone could write a Tour de Force-esque fic and I wouldn't be surprised if it only got 500 kudos, just because there are fewer people (mostly K/T and mostly Hawks fans) likely to read it.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

I think your first paragraph is right on. Once a few fics get established early in a fandom's history, it's basically impossible for anything else to catch up. Not to say no other fics can reach 1k kudos, since that's obviously not the case, but that those original first few fics are just always getting more entrenched as the top-kudosed stuff, drawing attention from other newer fics. The fact that the two most-kudosed authors are thefourthvine and thehoyden adds to that, I think, since they're BNFs in their own right.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

A lot of writers and fans have created their own spaces off of A03.

I know for instance that K/T now has its own chatroom where members can talk to their heart's content about the pairing and people post fic and ideas.

So it might be that A03's space is no longer considered safe enough in order to post stuff in general. I really struggle with the environment there. It's not particularly supportive.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

This is a very K/T fan specific analysis, tbh. Happy(?) to see svmadelyn's back on her horse, I guess.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry, was using K/T as an example. There are rumours of a Sid/Geno one too but I'm not able to get any info on it.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's more that AO3 is primarily a longfic medium, tbh. It was never really my pairing of choice, but I have a friend who's still active in it, and from what she's said, a lot of the newer K/T writers on tumblr have mostly written shorter things. I see more "tumblr ficlets" on AO3, and the word count on standalone works is often under 5k. Most of them don't have moderated comments, either, so I'm not sure that there's a lot of conflict in AO3 comments anymore. I suspect that if these authors move on to writing 20k+ fics, they'll be on AO3.