Inspired by this post about haobin, this post about fanfic statistics, and a comment about ZB1 in the fastest growing fandoms. I actually started working on this immediately after seeing the first post, but I took a really long time and this is only happening now.

How exactly has ZB1 fanfic evolved? This post’s data encompasses all works under the ZEROBASEONE and Boys Planet tags, tracked over time.

https://preview.redd.it/mfp3t5iezj1b1.png?width=1275&format=png&auto=webp&s=31e72915503504dd0f347511fdd1b572af25647e

https://preview.redd.it/f4ly2f6hzj1b1.png?width=1275&format=png&auto=webp&s=b51538a954523bab9cacd42c271c56bc92bc0acb

All of the data is pulled off of AO3 and manipulated in google sheets. I wanted a more in-depth look, so I focused on publish dates of the individual fics. I also went through the tags manually and consolidated the majority of repeats/exceptions/typos (including other languages), even the ones the tag system couldn’t catch, so the numbers will be slightly different. This is what took so long, but it was worth it, right? Right?

(This is actually my first reddit post, so sorry if things are a bit rough. Been lurking here for a while, but I figured some of you might appreciate the numbers. That again, nobody asked for.)

Rephrasing what others have said before, this is all for fun! I was mainly focusing on the numbers, and I’ve been staring at the data for so long that I’ve become desensitized to all the weirdness of this corner of the internet. I try to not take any of this too seriously, because these are real people, and I just hope for everyone’s sanity at this point.

• We all know Haobin is popular, and they’re VERY popular. Haobin has been the dominant ship for the entire show, even including the entire first half - back when they had barely interacted on camera. Up until the Tomboy episode on March 16, all the trajectories were fairly modest. After March 16 provided actual haobin content, the ship exploded.
• There is no rift between mattbin. Pre-Tomboy, they had a much more modest ratio of around 2:1 with Haobin, but the difference is that Mattbin held steady the entire show while Haobin took over the world. It looks like we can predict Mattwoong surpassing Mattbin in the near future, but they're doing just fine.
• Mattwoong is actually a very recent phenomenon, more than I expected. The tag’s takeoff corresponds exactly with the finale, and before that, they were less popular than all the other well known ships involving Jiwoong or Taerae. This is almost hard to believe as they are currently in third.

The finale boosted all members of ZB1 for obvious reasons. Haobin and Mattwoong benefitted the most leagues ahead of all other tags.....but they did provide a lot of content to work with. This arrangement is probably the neatest way to pair off the more popular members, and especially regarding the huge influx of viewers that came only for the finale episode, they would probably be the go-to ships for new fans with minimal context. The growth rate seems to have slowed down as of this week, but that’s expected after the post-finale hype has worn off and we don’t have regular weekly content dumps.

I can answer another question: boo_seok_soon guessed that the difference between Phanrae and Junrae in the fandom tags means that Phanrae was a more recent ship, or that the Junrae divorce hit hard. From what I found, Junrae is more popular and got about a one week head start, but Phanrae is not a recent ship. Phanrae and Junrae are practically parallel the whole time, and there’s no sign of the Junrae divorce. I think this was just a technicality of the tags shifting.

Funnily enough, the AO3 character tags were nearly able to predict the debut lineup. If the ZB1 lineup was determined from the power of shipping and the AO3 fandom (like all reasonable things), we would have 8/9 of the members: Zhang Hao, Sung Hanbin, Seok Matthew, Kim Jiwoong, Han Yujin, Ricky, Kim Gyuvin, Kim Taerae, and Ollie.

• This predicted lineup, based on total fics up until the date of the finale, stays the same even when filtering by status date instead of publish date (meaning that the fics counted have not been updated since the finale / were already completed. The publish date is more unpredictable in this case because zb1 members could have been added retroactively).
• The ranks are pretty decent. The main difference is 9th place - we trade Gunwook for Ollie. Gunwook is practically nonexistent when it comes to shipping (which is somewhat of a relief), and it shows. He also doesn’t have any strong automatic associations as a Jellyfish trainee.
• Ollie benefits a lot as one of the Yuehuaz, not to mention his relatively popular ship with Yujin. They’re so young........but I guess it could be worse?
• Even though Keita is the first non-debut character tag now (10th), he only surpassed Ollie after the finale, so even in this universe he doesn’t make the lineup.
• Taerae evidently benefits from being featured in both Junrae and Phanrae, and with their collective power, he still makes the debut lineup. Individually, Junhyeon and PHanbin are both below Keita, so they too suffer the same fate.
• Matthew and Jiwoong both make the lineup - their multiple friendships and ships throughout the show keep them consistently high, even without the boost from Mattwoong.
• This lineup successfully predicted Zhang Hao in first place, and not even by a close call - it called it weeks in advance. Up until Tomboy, SHanbin was first, but they switch ranks during that mission and Hao has held a slight lead ever since. They’re still practically glued together, just not with that one-fic difference in the other count.

Over the past week, I had a great time discovering that yes, you can hit that cell count limit in google sheets. I made a summary of the data and most of my graphs here if you want to take a look. (It might take a while to load.)

ZB1 Boys Planet AO3 Trends Spreadsheet

I starter out trying to keep this reasonable, but there’s still so many things I haven’t covered and it ended up a bit hopeless. Sorry, I forgot.

If you read all that, thanks! I put a lot of work into this. If you have any other fun observations to add, it would be great to see them!