Discussion Novel Updates Analysis - Genres (Feb 2020)

Hi, welcome back to numbers and charts with Scrya! If you have not seen my previous thread, where I analysed the general trends of projects on Novel Updates, by their ratings and number of readers, click the link below.

Novel Updates Analysis (Feb 2020) [Part 1]

You can also view my next few threads here:
Novel Updates Analysis - Tags (Feb 2020) [Part 3]
Novel Updates Analysis - Synopsis (Feb 2020) [Part 4]

In this thread, I will be looking solely on the genre statistics. Here's what I will be covering!

2. Genre analysis

1. Overview
2. Biannual growth trend
3. Common genre combinations
4. Statistics of genre combinations
   1. Ratings
   2. Number of readers
5. Wordclouds of novel descriptions
   1. All novels
   2. Xianxia and Xuanhuan
   3. Yaoi and Shounen Ai
   4. Fantasy
   5. School Life
6. Conclusion

2.1. Overview

Below is a pie chart that shows the distribution of genres across the projects on NU. I actually did not expect Romance to make up such a big bulk! Is the Romance genre being labelled a little too loosely?. :thinks:



In case you’re too lazy to zoom in and see which genres have the smallest following, Sports novels have the smallest count, followed by Shoujo Ai, Mecha, Yuri and Wuxia, in that order. Yes. Shoujo Ai and Yuri! Where are all my GL novels! I like BL novels, but having some more GL novels won’t hurt right! For Sports though, it kind of make sense? Since it’s hard to imagine the sports playing field based on just descriptions alone.

In any case, here’s the entire list of numbers if you’re more interested in that.



Projects on Novel Updates can take up a total of 35 different genres. Of course, there isn't any novel with 35 genres. The novel labelled with the most genres is Maou Gakuen no Hangyakusha, 14 of them in total.

Novels on NU have an average of 5 genres attached to them. Here's how the distribution look like.


2.2. Biannual growth trend

For this section, given that we more than 30+ genres in total, I decided that I would just share genres that show significant trends. If you have a genre that you would like to see trends of, but I didn’t display here, just comment down below!



Fantasy projects have been staggering a little with about 250-300+ every 6 months, while more comedy projects are being picked up since the start of 2019. Romance projects on the other hand have been increasing steadily over the past few years, with a peak increase in the first 6 months of 2019.



As some of you might have guessed, Yaoi/Shounen Ai projects have been increasingly picked up over the years. Josei, Shoujo, Historical novels too are being picked up more in the recent years. It seems like novels targeted at the female audience are getting more popular!



Lastly, among the more “sensitive” genres, Smut and Adult novels seem to have an increasing trend, while the increase of Ecchi novels seem to be slowing down. Mature novels seem to have a rather stable increase.

2.3. Common genre combinations

So we know some stats about the genres, but what genres usually come together?

Because there’s hardly any noticeable differentiation when I first looked at combinations of 2 and 3 genres, I will be sharing combinations of 4 and 5 genres in this section.



As one would expect, Adventure, Fantasy and Action genres can usually be found together.

However, I would like to nitpick here. Don’t Xuanhuan novels usually place emphasis on supernatural powers rather than actual martial arts!? There’s a total of 483 Xuanhuan novels, and looking at the chart over here, close to half of them (rank 22/23) are paired with Martial Arts? Come on!



Now looking at the combination of 5 genres, and of course, Adventure, Fantasy, Action combinations topped the chart. It seems like these 3 genres are pretty standard in a lot of novels.

2.4. Statistics of common genre combinations

Now, let’s try to plot out the relationship between groups of genres, and other measures like average ratings and average number of readers.

For this part, I will only be looking at 4-genre combination groups that have appeared in at least 50 novels. In total, there's 455 of them.

2.4.1. Ratings



Interestingly, Romance novels, especially those geared at the female audience, seem to top the chart in terms or ratings.



Looking at the other end of the spectrum however, novels which are sensitive in nature seem to get the short end of the stick in terms of ratings.

2.4.2. Number of readers



In terms of readership, novels geared at the male audience have the higher ground. This is most likely due to there being a higher overall male-to-female ratio in the community.



Novels which are categorized under both School Life and Ecchi seems to have smallest readership.

2.5. Wordclouds of novel descriptions

Well now that we have all these boring things out of the way, let’s have some fun with word clouds of the 100 most common words found in novel descriptions! I initially wanted to leave this for the very final section of my analysis, but eh, this thread seems to be a little dry already, so I decided to that something fun would be needed so that you people will follow along to my next thread!

Note that most of the genres have word clouds that are overlap too much, so I only included some genres that show significant differences.

2.5.1. All novels



Of course, "World" and "Life" are common words because of all the isekai novels I guess!

2.5.2. Xianxia and Xuanhuan



Over here, we can see that words like "heaven", "demon", "immortal" and "God" appear a lot more, as they are the central to the Xianxia/Xuanhuan genre.

2.5.3. Yaoi and Shounen Ai



For Yaoi/Shounen Ai, we have "man" and "love" among the words to take center stage. Some common surnames like Yu and Bai can also be seen here~

2.5.4. Fantasy



For fantasy novels, we can see that "hero" and "magic" come up pretty often in the descriptions.

2.5.5. School Life



Lastly, looking at School Life, we naturally have school terms being more common. Though it was disappointing to see that words like "world" and "magic" can be seen here too, which kinda implies that the school life novels carry fantasy-like characteristics.

2.6. Section 2 Conclusion

1. I foresee an increasingly growing trend in the number of female-targeted novels and "sensitive" novels in the upcoming months. Male-targeted novels will increase at a constant pace as they have been for the past 2 years.
2. People do not seem to like novels that contain Ecchi elements. This can be seen by the decreasing number of Ecchi novels being taken up, along with their poor readership.
3. This is just my opinion, but some novels are categorized under certain genres even though those genres are not the core of the stories. I especially feel that the Romance genre is being used too liberally.

Whew, writing this section took longer than I thought it would. I thought it would be easier since I didn't have to explain much as compared to the previous one, but new ideas just popped in here and there, and I ended up changing a lot of things. So yeah, here you go!

If you like to see word clouds of genres not listed here, please let me know and I will quote you in a new post with those word clouds. Or if you have any other things related to genres that you wish to know, feel free to ask too!

Stay tuned for the next part on tags!

 

...

*slow claps*



Edit: Back from a quick reread after expressing my awe for this thread.

I can't comment much since about 90% of the novels in my reading list is composed of yaoi, but yeah gotta say that this thread is cool and I want to use it as a reference for presenting stuff.

Also, yay for the super increase of pickups of yaoi novels! We must aim to beat at least the fantasy genre! ♪ヽ(･ˇ∀ˇ･ゞ) Beating romance is probably impossible since yaoi is usually basically romance (＾∇＾)ﾉ♪Also, it makes sense that the romance genre will prevail cause almost all novels add a love line or two in every novel to spice things up (unless it is focused on a certain topic? like horror or suspense or something) although technically they are not romance, but usually they get tagged as romance anyway? Idk.

Thanks for this it is very interesting.

 

Not surprising to see "sports" at the bottom, not when NUFfians be lounging around reading novels in their free time.

 

Ecchi will probably go on a decline, because who wants to read softcore when we can go full hentai?

Frankly the reason why there is an increase in works targeting female, like BL and Smut, is mostly due to the fact that we as a weaboo community has finally accept the fujoshis no matter how weird they are, considering how much of a freak we are ourselves. Though please, stop rubbing BL in the threads...

 

Yaaaay I've been waiting for this!!

I do think that for an the ppl joke about it they don't really seem too smut focused...

I am also surprised at the lack of GL love. Huh.

 

Good job

 

Wow that's an amazing analysis

 

yes.
other genres that often being misused are Fantasy, Comedy, Martial Arts, Tragedy, and Adult.

not for long. my broom is ready.

ppl likes to label everything that even has a resemblance to fight scenes, or some game-y skills with MA.

all in all, nice chart. . have some icecream to replenish your sugar level

 

The ecchi fanbase will probably get split into either non-ecchi romance fans or hardcore smut/adult novel readers. It's also partially because the novel origin country demographics are changing. Ecchi is still very much a Japanese-loaded term, but as novels from China and Korea start to dominate the scene, the proportion of romance and fanservice that combine to form the unique concept of "ecchi" will diminish, as the other two countries have different standards for how to mix romance and sex.

I do think the female-targeted romance novels are increasing (which I for one celebrate, even though I am male). Part of this increase is actually structural - romance novels in general are shorter than fantasy-action novels, so translators can finish them relatively quickly and start a new project, while a xianxia or xuanhuan translator may be stuck for years translating just one 3000-chapter series. As opposed to a modern-day josei romance series, which usually tops out between 50-200 chapters. So in the same time one xianxia novel gets translated, 10 or more josei romances could be completed.

 

Whoaaa what type of tool did you use for analysis and graph? *0*)/

 

Interesting

 

Thank you for the eyegasmic graphs. Also, holy cow look at the rate of increase of yaoi novels compared to other genres, it's twice more than any others from the period of dec 2018-jul 2019. No wonder it was odd that 7/10 titles I've been clicking on were yaoi (not that I'd mind) Also, interesting to see that in the most recent biannual period of jun 2019 - dec 2019, the rise in historical novels is higher than yaoi novels. Though, I'm pretty sure it also encompasses a lot of other genres (could contain both yaoi, shoujo and non-cp elements)

 

You should save your broom for when I upload my tags analysis.

Interesting insights! What do you think would be a good way to take these factors into account so as to make a fair comparison?

Everything is done in Python, with the matplotlib and seaborn visualization packages! Wordclouds are made with the Wordcloud package!

 

not starting yet. just taking notes and stalking for now.

soon™.

 

Most people don't know that the Romantic Subplot tag exist, so they end up using the Romance Genre instead of the appropriate tag.

 

I'm just glad the Yuri and Yaoi wars are stabilising, for my people's sake, for @Fossil's sake...still not gonna read it.

　 　､ゞ ヾ∧""'∧;, ヾ. It's meh.
　　ヾ　 （ OㅅO） 彡
　 ﾐ　　　　o　 o　 ミ 　ﾌﾞﾜｯ
　~彡　　　　　　　 ﾐ
　　/ｿ,, 　,０; ,;;:､０ヾ`

 

The one that's the most misused is "Historical". Proper historical novels are stories about real people, places, and events. But a quick browse of the novels that get put in the "Historical" genre will show that a ton of them literally say "taken to another world" in the description. At the end of the day, probably only a tenth of these books are where they belong.

 

ಠ_ರೃ) Then should we wait for someone to fix it?

 

The problem is that anyone fixing it would have to actually read these books!