#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.

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Comments

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.