kalakirya

Two for one! 2022 Stats here we come!

Nearly 11 hours of podfic posted in 2022, nearly three-quarters of which was No Chaos In the World, a Dorian/Iron Bull story that I love to pieces and which I was also working on in 2021, which is part of why it's misleading to do this by posted podfic, but it's what I have, so here we are.



yeah that tracks XD

Next up, what's the AO3 category of the main relationship?


Well, I was trying to podfic less m/m, and 2022 wasn't a good year for that, at least for duration. Now that I know that, I'm going to try to do better in 2023.

In 202..1? I think? I realized that this question was a little weird because it was squishing together the objectives of "making more podfic that's not just about dudeslash" and "making more podfic that's not about cis-men" so I also have a graph for the latter question.


Well, not great in terms of duration of podfic, actually not as bad as it could be in count. Still need to be better.


Which brings us to the series of stats that started it all, which I still don't think I'm doing right, but I'm trying, and I'd rather try and get it wrong than not try and never know. So: podfic produced by racial/ethnic background of the main character, where "main character" is "who I remember the story being about several months after I made it" and "racial/ethnic background" is a series of checks, first against the character's self-definition in the story, lacking that against their self-definition in canon, lacking that against their actor/voice actor's self-definition, lacking that. It's messy and deeply imperfect, but it's what I've got. Also, these categories are highly awkward and imprecise, and by their nature reductive. I'm American, and trying hard, but am probably fucking up.

Dorian Pavus and The Iron Bull to the rescue! I smashed this one the fuck out of the park, duration-wise! So that's v cool and I'm very proud of that. Also made basically the same overall amount of podfic (duration wise) for Black characters as for White characters (1:08:46 and 1:04:38 respectively) and I'm very pleased with that. Still more podfics by count for White characters, but overall I'm focusing on combined duration/length of podfic, so that gets a pass, given how by duration I've done really well on this metric. Go me!

So. Final 2022 podfic thoughts? It's really hard to podfic non-dudes, partly just because there's less fanfic for them (and fewer canons/characters for fandom to accrete around). Which isn't an excuse, but is a bit of reason. So. working on that. But, progress, personally!

More than a year late! But 2021 stats will be tricky because I'm not sure how to categorize "In Heavier Air" (a Dragon Age: Inquisition story with an Avvar inquisitor, where the Avvar are a sort of fantasy!indigenous group), so I'm focusing on 2020 for now. 2022 is going to be even more complicated, because I'm almost done with a fic that focuses on Iron Bull, but that's also a problem for later.

So, 2020! A trashfire, obviously, but what did it look like in podfic terms for me personally? Did I actually manage to podfic more characters of color and femslash? more podfic focusing on not-cis!men?

(please ignore the line connecting the counts - I can't figure out how to get rid of it, but the data isn't in any particular order, so it's meaningless)

(also please ignore that it says "length" instead of "duration" /o\)


Well, An Eye For Quality is dragging up my overall stats, at any rate! I started recording that in 2018, but I'm only counting things in the year I posted them (unless I post as I go), so here we are! It was just under 58% of my total podfic output by duration, which is wild. Otherwise I did a lot of Guardian podfics and two Lilo & Stitch and one Lilo & Stitch & Moana podfics for the chromatic characters podfic anthology. Overall total was 15:43:26, so just shy of 16 hours. Not anywhere near my max, but not bad for the trashfire that was 2020.


Well, my 2019 stats record that I wanted my overall podfic amount (measured in duration) to be less than 50% m/m, and I did it! Overall m/m was 19% of my total, compared to 59% of my total being f/m. Femslash as a percent of dudeslash is still low, but better than last year - roughly 30%, which is my new all-time high! I keep trying to go in hard on this one and it's always hard, which is deeply frustrating, but still worth doing.

In 2019's stats post I realized that I was trying to use this stat to measure both time spent on non-m/m and on non-cis!men, which are related but different stats, so here's the graph for gender of the main character, where "main character" is mostly, but not exclusively, the pov character. It's not a perfect science, and I'm not sure everyone would agree with who I've designated as "main character" (is the main character of Kisses Don't Count, a Discworld story from the pov of a cis!woman dating a genderqueer person, "about" the former or the latter? I've lumped it into "female", but I'm still not sure)


So in 2020 I mostly made podfic about women! I haven't run the stats on previous years, but I don't think that's always been the case, so that's cool! I'm trying to increase the amount of time I spend podficcing non-cis!men, and I don't think I'll manage this much of a difference in future years, but it's something to aim for.

Which brings us to the series of stats that started it all, which I still don't think I'm doing right, but I'm trying, and I'd rather try and get it wrong than not try and never know. So: podfic produced by racial/ethnic background of the main character, where "main character" is "who I remember the story being about several months after I made it" and "racial/ethnic background" is a series of checks, first against the character's self-definition in the story, lacking that against their self-definition in canon, lacking that against their actor/voice actor's self-definition, lacking that (as in the case of, once again, Kisses Don't Last) their depiction in official art (Discworld book covers, in this case). It's messy and deeply imperfect, and is going to come back to bite me in 2021 and 2022, but it's what I've got. Also, these categories are highly awkward and imprecise, and by their nature reductive. I'm American, and trying hard, but am probably fucking up.

Here goes.



Well, this is where An Eye for Quality comes back to bite me. Since Bella (genderbent!Bilbo) isn't defined/described in the fic, and Bilbo is played by a white guy in the Hobbit movies, all 9+ hours of that go under "white"; ditto 2.5 hours of "Kisses Don't Last". I did make a lot of podfic for Guardian, which brings up my count for podfic focused on people of Asian ethnicity/background, but overall Not Great. I had managed two years running of mostly making podfic NOT focused on white people, and fucked that up in 2020. I also didn't manage a single podfic focused on a Black character, which I'm pretty ashamed with. It's too late for 2021, but will do better in 2022.


So, better on some scores, worse on others. I do think that keeping track of everything is helping me be more mindful of how I spend my time, though, which is good. This effort started because fandom can be terribly, wildly, willfully racist, and I wanted to try to be center marginalized characters in my fannish output. Several years later, it's a mixed bag, but at least I know what's in there, and can keep working on it.

I should be working but instead I'm writing up a breakdown of 2018's podfic, which is.... very me XD Well, I made WAY MORE podfic in 2018 than in 2017, though, as I said in last year's post, that masks the fact that I started working on Changes of Perspective, a >9 hour Rivers of London (Peter Grant/Thomas Nightingale) podfic, in 2017, and only finished in 2018. In numbers, I produced 12 hours, 08 minutes and 34 seconds of finished podfic (well, no, I made more than that, but we're only looking at podfic that were not collaborations, gifts, exchanges, or auction-items, the reasoning being that this is actually a question of how I spend my fannish energies, and in all those instances I don't have as much control over my own output). That's triple what I produced last year, but less than half of the year before that, so *shrug emoji*



so there's this, which mostly shows that Changes of Perspective ate my life. I do love making long podfics :D what this doesn't show is that one of those dragon age inquisition podfics is from April, before I had any interest in actually playing DA:I, and the other is from December, after I had logged over 100 hours of playtime and fallen in love with everyone. But the latter would not have happened without the former :D Next up, categories!



well, I had made a resolution last year to podfic more femslash as compared to dudeslash, and I didn't /o\ in fact, I almost finished the year without posting any femslash at all, but happily was able to fix that. Buuuuuuuuuuuut my femslash amounted to 4.3% of my dudeslash, so I missed that resolution. I also missed the resolution where dudeslash wouldn't make up more than 50% of my total output. Ugh. I'll try again next year.




To reiterate how this section is done, because it's less obvious than the others: podfics are split up depending on the racial background of the main character, where main character is defined as "who is the story about/who gets the most screentime." This is done by the super-scientific "who do I remember this story being about" test.

Also, it's obviously very tricky to define the race and ethnicity of fictional characters, some of whom are never physically described (see: Juno, from the penumbra podcast), or who may exist in a setting to which real-life categories don't map easily (Dorian Pavus, you beautiful peacock). But these media do exist in our world, where we do have variously-defined concepts of race and ethnicity, so we're going with that.

Obviously there's a lot to be said about how American (and subsets thereof!) concepts of race and ethnicity are not universal, and that's very true, but this is ultimately to help me examine where I'm putting my fannish energies, and I am American, so I'm afraid that I'm going to go with my gut :/

So! My other resolution was to have podfics focusing on poc be more than 50% of my output, and I nailed that one! Obviously Changes of Perspective, which focuses on Peter Grant, whose father is White British and whose mother is Fula and originally from Sierra Leone. I also had a podfic about Erik Killmonger (The Wandering God, Erik/Heimdall) and another that was about both M'Baku and T'Challa (A Rare Bloom, M’Baku/T’challa). Finally, I had two that focused on Dorian Pavus, from the fantasy land of Thedas, about whose real-life equivalent race/ethnicity much digital ink has been spilt. The game creators* meant him to be Indian, and cast a British Indo-Fijian and Malaysian voice actor (Ramon Tikaram) to play him, so I’m comfy coming down on the side of “fantasy!southeast asian.”



So! A good amount of success on the podficcing-non-white-characters front, very little success on the podficcing-non-dudeslash front. Will try to keep one success going and make the other one happen, and I'm happy to say that I'm currently queued up for both, though I am a bit worried that the second of my big projects won't be done this year, which would put the non-dudeslash part in jeopardy. But, all I can do is try, so wish me luck!





* sources were lost when the bioware forums were taken down, but several are saved here:

https://medium.com/@amandahjean/stop-whitewashing-dorian-pavus-75c11974411e 

http://dragonaging.tumblr.com/post/90568515838/knight-enchanter-dragonaging-im-sorry-guys

k, so here are my stats for 2016. As before, these are the podfics that I published during 2016, not counting co-pods, and only counting chapters 4-6 of And Never Been Kissed (ANBK), because I was posting that one as I went, and counted chapters 1-3 in 2015’s stats. A note: last year I was super careful and made sure that all the graphs used the exact same pixel scale; this year I used the same axes on (nearly) all the graphs, and they’re more or less to the same pixel-scale… but not exactly. And they can’t be clearly compared across years, because I did the intervals differently. They are comparable! But be careful with the axes.



The first that sticks out is I made roughly ten hours less podfic in 2016 than I did in 2015. This is due to a number of factors, and while they’re possibly not as great for listeners, they’re good news for me: I podfic partly to deal with stress, and in 2016 I wayyyyyy less stressed than in 2015. 2016 was terrible in many many ways, but for my personal life it was pretty great. So that’s good! But means less podfic. Roughly 10 hours less.

Critical Role, Mad Max: Fury Road (MMFR), Rivers of London, Sailor Moon (SM) and Star Wars: the Force Awakens (SWFA) are fandoms I hadn’t publicly posted podfic in before, and I didn’t work on several long-term loves, including the Fast and the Furious, the Vorkosigan series, Person of Interest, Avatar: the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Young Wizards, the Hobbit, and Supernatural. I still participate in all those fandoms! And to be honest I hadn’t fully realized that, for instance, I didn’t make any Supernatural podfic this year O.o



Category-wise, I made quite a lot of dude slash – over half my output, in fact, was m/m (52%). That’s actually up slightly from last year (50%) and way up from 2014 (35%). The vast majority of that is ANBK. Next up is gen (nearly 5 hours, most of which is Exclusive), then het (entirely Come Away to the Water), femslash (mostly Velvet), and poly (all Poe/Finn/Rey). While I was kinda disappointed to see quite so much dude slash, I was glad that 10% was femslash! Still low, but way better than 2015 (5%) or 2014 (2%).



In the racial/ethnic analysis… well, less than three-quarters of my output was about white people! 74%, to be exact. Which is less than last year (96%) or 2014 (90%*)! But still very high. But lower! 16% of my output starred black characters – again, mostly Come Away to the Water, which stars Naevia, played by the amazing African-American Cynthia Addai-Robinson. Next up was Asian characters with 7% - mostly Velvet, a Sailor Moon pre-canon story. The remaining 1% was for latin@ characters (hi Poe!) and <1% for characters whose background is undefined (but non-white): Kima of Vord, my darling angry Paladin of Bahamut, who lives in an undefined D&D universe and is described as “brown/dark-skinned” and is played by a white dude. #CriticalRole.

So, I met my goal from last year’s snowflake challenge! My goal was to make 2016’s ratio of dudeslash-to-ladyslash 1:10, and it was actually 1:5! Go me! (last year was 1:100, and 2014 was worse than 1:200).

This year, I will aim to continue to improve that ratio. But, with a recognition of the fact that podfic, as a medium, is subject, more than many other types of fanworks, to the limitations of fandom, rather than only those of the media content (I feel like I should add several more embedded clauses, just for the hell of, but I won’t – much), and also because I’m trying to aim for a more intersectional fannish experience, my goals for 2017 are:
Dude-slash will make up no more than 50% of my output, and 50% of my output will focus on characters of colors.


*this was several years ago now. I wrote this up at work and wasn’t going to go back and check what, exactly, I podficced. I did this from memory, and as such, it’s inexact /o\

I did a quick-and-dirty analysis of my 2015 podfic output, and realized that while I'd done one in 2013, 2014 was lacking. And I was curious. So here it is! My total was 33 podfics over 25 fandom which came to 38 hours 44 minutes and 11 seconds of podfic. Or so. I was really tired when I pulled these numbers together, and have since noticed that the by-fandom and by-category numbers don't match. But I'm not going to worry about that. The other possibility is that I made 31 podfics totalling 38:12:48. Close enough.

Again, these are just the podfics that I did alone. There were a whole bunch of co-pods and not!podfics, but that gets confusing, so they don't appear here).

Here's the podfic-by-fandom breakdown for 2014

The time is measured in 72 minute units, because that was what it did automatically and this is supposed to be a quick-and-dirty thing and figuring out how to change that doesn't fit with quick-and-dirty. The fact that the colors are reversed from the 2015 version is unintentional, but I decided it was cute. Otherwise it's the same set-up: length of all podfics in that fandom put end-to-end is in the orange columns, measured on the left (the gridlines line up with this axis), and the number of podfics made in the fandom is the blue dots, measured on the right. A few things pop out: I did a whole bunch of one-off podfics, one super-long hobbit podfic (Sons of Durin), a bunch of merlin podfics (which is interesting, because I don't remember having done that many!), and I guess those Fast and Furious podfics really added up!

Here's that information as a table

fandom

19th century civic allegory

AtlA

DCU

DrWho

ds9

F&F

ff7

GotG

hobbit

hockey

HP

labyrinth

leverage

MCU

merlin

pacific rim

PoI

she ra

sleepy hollow

spartacus

spn

W13

west wing

xena

xmen

count

1

2

1

2

2

7

1

4

1

1

1

3

7

5

8

1

1

1

1

1

7

1

2

1

1

time

0:04:18

0:03:36

0:07:01

0:05:28

0:04:04

1:34:35

2:00:47

1:32:04

10:52:43

0:19:02

0:03:10

0:24:38

0:55:42

6:56:35

3:38:14

0:22:56

0:06:09

0:06:39

0:29:34

0:30:23

7:29:32

0:12:42

0:30:44

0:08:09

0:05:26

Now here's the category breakdown



Wow that's... not a lot of femslash. And quite a lot of gen! More gen than dudeslash, as a matter of fact, though only by 15 minutes and 11 seconds. The poly, incidentally, is a combination of Guardians of the Galaxy (MFMMG, where G is for Groot), Final Fantasy VII (MFMM), leverage (MMF) and MCU (ninesome! MFMFMMFMM). In 2015 I apparently didn't podfic anything with more-than-two romantic parings. Otoh, the first one I did in 2016 was Rey/Finn/Poe (which was a co-pod, so it won't appear in the 2016 analysis, but it's kinda cool anyway).

Here's the same information in a table

gen	ff	mf	mm	poly
17	6	5	21	12
13:59:54	0:36:36	1:32:59	13:44:43	8:18:36

One of the things that really pops out at me, in both the 2015 and 2014 analyses, is that I really don't do that much femslash. Which is kinda upsetting, because that's one of the things that I really try to make an effort to do. In 2014 I made 36 minutes of femslash in 5 podfics. In 2015 I made 11 minutes in 6 podfics. Whiiiiich is actually a kinda misleading comparison, because in 2014 I made 8 more hours of podfic overall. It makes more sense to say that in 2014, 0.16% of my podfic was femslash while in 2015, 0.62% of my podfic was femslash. Sadly, I'm pretty sure I didn't do that math wrong. That's less than one percent. (though actually in 2015 it works out so that my femslash output is just over 1% of my dudeslash output. It's 1.0085%, to be precise). I feel a little bet better when I'm reminded that of the 17 gen podfics in 2014, 13 focused on female or genderqueer characters (it was 10/19 in 2015), but that's still a very very far cry from doing more non-dude-slash, which is a thing I would like to do.

Also, to be honest, I sorta massaged the data? a bit? not really? ish? That nearly 11 hour hobbit podfic is, in my opinion, gen, and in my data it's listed as gen. But on Ao3 it's listed as Thorin/Bilbo. Which... eh... idk. They do kiss, but it's literally in the last line of the nearly 11 hours. And if it's a slow burn, it's so slow as to be entirely unnoticeable. But. I wanted the thorin/bilbo crowd to find it. So it's tagged. And if it's in the dudeslash category, my numbers get very very sad. So it's gen. but with an asterisk of Were I Some Sort of Official Something This Sort Of Thing Would Be Frowned Upon, But I'm Not, So Fuck It.

I need to be making more femslash, is the takeaway here. Bring on the Xena! (NO REALLY. GIMME ALL THE RECS. I"VE BEEN HAVING A HANKERING FOR SOME OLD SKOOL XENA/GABRIELLE)