Wattpad As A Resource For Literary Studies. Quantitative And ... - PLOS

3.2 Stories

Within the English titles subcorpus, there are around 2.3 million fanfiction stories (9.3%), a rough estimation due to the complexity of telling fanfiction apart from other fiction through the analysis of titles only. Thus, the majority of stories published on Wattpad are works of fiction creating original storyworlds. With respect to popular themes, Tables 2–4 show the most frequent words in book titles for the 13 most popular languages on Wattpad.

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Table 2. Most frequent words in titles for English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, and French with English translations.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226708.t002

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Table 3. Most frequent words in titles for Vietnamese, Indonesian, German, and Russian with English translations.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226708.t003

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Table 4. Most frequent words in titles for Italian, Polish, Malaysian, and Tagalog (Filipino) with English translations.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226708.t004

“Love” is the top word for every language, except German, for which “life” (leben) is more frequent. There are words that occur in almost every language, with different proportional frequency: “girl”, “life”, “friend”, “heart”, and “dream”. There are also some notable exceptions: Indonesian does not mention “girl” and “life” often; Russian, Vietnamese, and Turkish do not mention “heart”. Only Western languages mention “world”, “new” and “never”. “Without” is in the 20 most frequent words for many languages but in English does not occur within the 300 most frequent words. Only a few languages talk about “death” frequently and among them for Polish authors it is quite an important topic. Polish are also the only ones talking about “hope”, together with Filipinos. Only in Russian titles “suicides” are quite frequent. There are also unique themes, i.e. words that are quite frequent in only one language. For Tagalog (Filipino): “runaway”, which is the third most frequent word, “rich”, and a word expressing the surprise for something previously unknown, pala. For Malaysian: “memories”, “child/son/daughter”, and “boss/leader”, which can occur both to indicate a superior at work or the leader of a gang. In this second meaning, Malaysian is unique with English in having many stories about “bad boys”. Beside Malaysian, family relationships are important for Vietnamese too, as attested by the word “family”. Moreover, Vietnamese also has a supernatural positive theme, attested by “celestial”, “constellation” and “god”. Tagalog (Filipino) is the only language, together with Turkish, to use “beautiful” quite often. Italian and Spanish pay more attention than other languages to physical details, especially the “eyes”. Regarding female roles: “princess” is frequent only for English, Polish, and Russian.

In many languages, there are two groups of words that give us more information about reading preferences, those about fanfiction and those about literary genres. Inspiration for fanfiction is different worldwide, in some languages is dominant while in others does not occur at all in the 50 most frequent words. References that are extremely popular in English, like Harry Potter and Harry Styles (a singer), do not occur in other languages. The only fanfiction theme which is common across more languages is K-pop, with stories about the two most famous boy bands, “BTS” and “EXO”. In Indonesian, Korean words like saranghae and oppa may refer to fanfiction but have also been absorbed in language uses outside the genre, given the influence of Korean culture in South East Asian countries. The analysis of words also revealed preferences for genres. Collections of very brief compositions are quite popular in many languages (“thoughts”, “lines”, “sentences”, “quotes”, “words”, “remarks”). “Diary” (including “rantbook”) and “oneshot”, too, have a transnational success. The latter are stories consisting of only one chapter, whose length can vary from a few hundred words up to a few thousands. English shows a peculiar preference for the “x reader” genre, which refers to stories written in second or first person and whose protagonist is the reader [77]. In Malaysian, “roleplay” and “memes” are clearly the dominating genres. Turkish have a preference for “horror” stories. Vietnamese and Spanish readers like “danmei” and “yaoi”, that is stories about male homosexual relationship targeted to female audience [78].