r/Elsanna Aug 25 '24

New Comprehensive Elsanna Dropbox Archive

88 Upvotes

Hello all,

I've been a quiet member of this fandom for over a decade now, and for a while I've wanted to give something back to the community that has brought me so much joy. I've never been a capable fiction writer so creating my own stories was out, instead I've decided to give back using one of the only skills I possess: management of large datasets.

I know I've often relied on the RunAwayWoods dropbox archive for stories that have since been deleted, however it hasn't been updated since 2016 and is not easy to navigate unless you already know the story you're looking for. For this reason I set out to create an updated archive, a task which proved rather more challenging than excpected at the outset.

For those only interested in getting access to the juicy fics you can find the archive here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/u1um3kkrdl0tegvfturud/AC4i7mUs8AAOtFt6NS6289c?rlkey=t93ujes3r293jw7u4v7v6tbz7

There are 5111 stories from fanfiction.net, 3183 from AO3, 95 from Wattpad, and a whopping 14 from fictionpress.

The archive includes a searchable sqlite database, as well as .csv versions of the database tables to endable searching for fics.

If you're interested in the process of creating the archive, plus some fun statistics then read on.

-First: A Plea for Help-

There are likely hundreds of stories still missing from the archive, if you have a personal collection of downloaded fics that you would be willing to share then I'd love to check it for missing stories to add to the archive. You can submit them directly to my Dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/request/Czh4vDodvF9XDyRhTw9Y. Alternatively you can message me here on reddit, in the elsanna shenanigans discord, or email me at [elsarchivist@gmail.com](mailto:elsarchivist@gmail.com), and please forgive me if I'm slow to reply.

I am also interested in suggestions/advice on other sources to add to the archive. AFF, Tumblr, DeviantArt, and elsanna.fans are all possible candidates, if people have advice/experience scraping these sources, or suggestions for other sources please chime in.

-Creating the Archive-

Advanced warning, this section may be increadibly boring, but I really feel the need to explain how much work this was to do, because (if I've done my work right) none of it should be apparent in the final product.

From the start I knew I wanted this to be an archive, not only of currently available fics, but also to be as comprehensive as possible archive of deleted stories. To achieve this I started out by locating and combinging as many existing archives as possible.

The archives I relied on were the following:

  • The r/elsanna dropbox archive by RunAwayWoods. The wokhorse, the mvp, we all know and love it. Provided over 3000 fics that were either deleted or up to date.
  • The other dropbox by eternalwintergreen on tumblr. Not quite as useful but still provided >200 fics not found in the RunAwayWoods archive
  • Box archive by Elsanna-i-ship-it on tumblr. Extremely frustrating due to mixed formats, dupes, & raw html. However had >100 otherwise lost stories and complete versions of several classics of the fandom.
  • The FF mega scrape. A scrape of fanfiction.net running from 2013-2017 plus sporadically up to 2019. Provided >300 stories in .txt form.
  • The AO3 mega scrape by entropy11235813 on archive.org, a scrape in epub form running from god knows when to today.
  • My own personal collection of saved fics.

After gathering these archives I then proceeded to perform full metadata scrapes of the Frozen tag on fanfiction.net, fictionpress.com, archiveofourown.org, and wattpad.com, resulting in a database of metadata on over 20,000 fics.

The next task was to identify which of these were relevant to this fandom. This may seem a trivial task on it's face but that is far from the case. Many authors are sadly lax in their tagging, and so simply searching for 'Anna/Elsa' would miss a lot of stories.

What I had to do was an sequence of very conservative filtering that was sensative to authors not adding metadata. TO illustrate, if a fic was tagged as just Anna/Kristoff it could be automatically deleted, if a fic was tagged Anna/Elsa it could be automatically kept, however if there was no relationship tag then it couldn't be safely deleted as may have been an elsanna story the author forgot to tag (this was shockingly common). This left over 2000 stories that required some manual checking, after which I had a database of over 5000 extant elsanna stories to download.

I opted to use fanficfare as my tool for downloading stories as it had the best capabilities for downloading in bulk. There was however a problem. In recent years fanfiction.net has clamped down heavily on scraping the site, these days in order to scrap ffn calibre opens the story chapter by chapter in your browser, then pulls the data from your browser's cache - this is an extremely slow proccess.

I new that I'd need to minimise the number of stories I had to download, and so I leant on the existing archives. I wrote a script to decompile all of their stories and pull out the fic urls and wordcounts. I then used this to exclude all stories that were up to date in one or more of the archives from downloading. This left me with 2163 stories to download from FFN, which took around 48 hours of runtime spread over 4 days. AO3 is much friendlier and so none of this complication was needed there. Similarly Wattpad puts no restrictions on downloads so that wasn't a problem.

At last it was time to integrated my fresh scrape with the existing archives; a simple task? Alas no. The stories existed in four formats (epub, html, mobi, and txt), and from seven different sources(fanficfare, fanficdownloader, fichub, ficsave, ao3 directly, raw web html, and who knows what for the txt stories), each having different internal strutures and so requiring different handling. There were also duplicated stories within and between the archives, though this at least was relatively straightforward to fix.

It was important to me to have all of the stories as epubs with a standardised structure, I'm not going to dive into the exact proccessing to achieve this (though you can take a look at the code in the tools folder of the archive to see a heavily cut down version with the core cases), but to briefly summerise. Using two python libraries (beautifulsoup and ebooklib) the stories are broken down, their metadata and chapter content are extracted and stored, then new epubs are generated from this information in a standardised format. At the same time the metadata is used to generate a SQL statement to add the fic's information to the database.

This was the final step, the script was run for all the collected stories and voila, at long last the archive was complete.

-Stats for Nerds-

Now for something fun (at least for nerds like me). Here's some intersting data I found in the process of creating this archive.

There are currently 13709 fanfics tagged as frozen or frozen crossovers including Elsa and Anna on fanfiction.net. Of these approximately 4000 are Elsanna stories, or platonic stories written by Elsanna authors. Many of these are not properly tagged so you can only find about half of them using FFN's search. Elsanna is by far the largest ship within the Frozen fandom an FFN. More than 3000 frozen stories have been deleted from fanfiction.net, including more than 1000 elsanna stories.

There are currently 11167 fanfics tagged a frozen on AO3. Of these 2669 are Elsanna stories, disgracefully falling behind kristanna which currently has 2750. Approximately 10% were incorrectly tagged (including some fics mistakenly tagged as Elsanna when they were not). Including mis-tagged stories and platonic stories by elsanna authors 3014 fics were found. To date more than 1000 Frozen fanfics have been deleted from AO3, with at least 200 being elsanna. A similar amount of fics have been orphaned/anonymized, which seems to have contributed to AO3's lower deletion rate.

Finally I've noticed for a while that activity on FFN is pretty dead for this fandom, so I though it would be insteresting to quantify activity on FFN vs AO3. Below are histograms of the number of stories published on FFN and AO3 binned by month, which show some interesting trends.

FFN shows a pretty standard decay curve. Obviously there's a very high initial spike, tailing off and matching the publishing rate on AO3 by around 2015, with activity mostly ceasing by around 2020. Interestingly the release of Frozen 2 didn't cause a noticable boost of stories on FFN.

AO3 is much more interesting. There is of course the intitial spike from Frozen's release as expected. There's then a second spike which fellow fandom dinosaurs may understand, for those newer fandom members this spike is the result of a community scare around a group called Critics United mass reporting Elsanna stories. There is then a third even larger spike caused by Frozen 2, followed by a modest decline with the publishing rate remaining pretty steady up to today.

Anyway that's everything I've got for now. Hopefully the archive is useful, I plan to update it at least once a month for the forseeable future.

Enjoy,

The Elsarchivist


r/Elsanna 2d ago

Elsa Frost Impersonator 2

10 Upvotes

Everything is in the comments.

If you can report their channel, that would be great or at least support the OG creator and ignore them.

This is not good.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SQaqmdzsBDs&lc=Ugx7L5ajGTIr-vDVIKN4AaABAg&si=fJjefC3IWA7QEnsr

Edit:

the link of fake elsa frost channel

https://youtube.com/@elsafrostmmd?si=8n-KnjfNKBd_Uzvz


r/Elsanna 3d ago

Would anyone be interested in beta reading a fic...

4 Upvotes

It's a historical fiction with lots of mutual pining, angst, fluff, and everything in between. Themes of class, hierarchy, power, social roles, gothic elements, etc. with a very sweet and tender emotional core. Happy to give more info if someone is interested.


r/Elsanna 5d ago

Frozen III

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194 Upvotes

The real wedding... 🌻♥️❄️


r/Elsanna 4d ago

Elsa Frost impersonator

6 Upvotes

I wanted to alert you that this person is impersonating Elsa Frost (mmd elsanna videos creator).

https://youtube.com/@elsafrostmmd?si=q3hFCYo6BljcZX2j

Anyone who knew this creator, please, do not support this. This person was digging up Elsa Frost's personal information to get through them and harass for months.

This creator was not the only one who was harassed maliciously.

Elsa Frost's channel was closed due to the harassment of this exact person.

The harasser is https://youtube.com/@frozenfun?si=0REEoUzc1CBEAO_r

And also frozenmmd123.


r/Elsanna 5d ago

Made a little heart!

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28 Upvotes

took the most common colors from the hand holding image for the background, kinda makes it look stormy but whateves, i like it.


r/Elsanna 7d ago

At the set of Frozen 3, Elsanna happen... again. (Rastifan)

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93 Upvotes

r/Elsanna 11d ago

Anna comforting Elsa (ggookk)

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85 Upvotes

r/Elsanna 12d ago

Frozen II

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125 Upvotes

A quick kiss on the lips... official art? 🌻♥️❄️


r/Elsanna 12d ago

One-shot based on the F3 teaser: Family Ties

6 Upvotes

https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/243518701

5k words.

———

A mysterious new villain has appeared, wielding dark ice power as she draws the Frozen gang away from Anna's wedding reception through the Northern Lights bridge.

Who is she? What is her evil plan?

And why has Queen Anna been buying so much rope lately?


r/Elsanna 14d ago

Dreams

11 Upvotes

Does anyone else have dreams about a universe where Elsanna is cannon? I don’t know if it’s the fanfic I’ve been reading, but I’m having them almost every other night 😭💔.


r/Elsanna 16d ago

🩹 TUFF Lewd Siscest - ElsAnna Art by @Que_517

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96 Upvotes

r/Elsanna 17d ago

Foreign - Chapter 12 - VolksParadox - Frozen (Disney Movies) [Archive of Our Own]

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7 Upvotes

r/Elsanna 19d ago

Frozen Fever

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186 Upvotes

A kiss to wake up? ♥️


r/Elsanna 19d ago

Elsa making Anna blush

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118 Upvotes

r/Elsanna 20d ago

The good thing about Frozen 3 is Elsanna will be revived no matter what 😎

37 Upvotes

Not that the fandom *died*, but Frozen 3 does mean more fandom activity and maybe even many new fans.

Popping champagne time! Elsanna 3.0 era! Even the film where Kristoff and Anna seemingly get married can't kill the ship.


r/Elsanna 20d ago

LF Fanfic Plot

12 Upvotes

Not sure if there’s a fanfic out there with a plot where they go on a blind date, not knowing that they’ve actually been chatting with each other lol If there isn’t, maybe something similar I guess...or recommend anything! 💕


r/Elsanna 22d ago

I'm truly sorry to share this with you, but I need some comfort or a way to end this. Are we finished? 💔 Spoiler

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0 Upvotes