hello #sakuatsu nation literally no one asked for this but today I offer you: calculating the average rate of change of the number of fics uploaded to the sakuatsu tag on ao3 since January

disclaimer: I did this at 2am and in no way can confirm all the numbers are 100% accurate

now, let's look at the numbers:
I took one for the team and went through the sakuatsu tag on ao3 and counted the number of fics uploaded in each month, then divided by the number of days to get our average number of fics/day for every month

disregarding the few prophets who were posting sakuatsu fics in 2017, the start of the brain rot can be traced back to late January of this year. Starting from Jan 21, the average number of fics/day uploaded for that month was about 0.27

fast forward to present day, the number of fics uploaded in the first week of November alone was a whopping 106, giving us an average of about 15.14 fics/day

if we take those two number, we can find that on average, the average number of fics uploaded each month increases by about 1.37 between each month

yet this suggests a purely linear relationship. if we look at our table again, we can notice significant upticks in our avg fics/day every month or so

though not 100% perfect, this is still much more indicative of an exponential growth

and if we input a trendline for comparison, we can see that the average number of fics/day is increasingly exponentially between each month

tldr; sakuatsu stans are truly insane and built a fanfic empire off of nothing but crumbs and a nickname, and it doesn't look like it's going to slow down anytime soon

you know when my calc teacher said her class would have "real world applications" I don't think this is what she had in mind