So I had a ramble about how important it was that Hanes and Ubeda purposefully played a mlm couple in CATS, and how that affected the fandom, and I stand by that, but I do also now have some additional data that really shows how much the 2019 movie affected Tuggoffelees specifically.
We see the Hanes and Ubeda bump there. And then the movie was announced.
This does actually play to my personal experience. I heard about the movie, which got me looking back into fandom and finding out about Tuggoffelees being canon in the Broadway show. Which lit the fire once again!
An interesting comparison I was able to find. Now Google Trends is weird and there are conflicts with some search terms so this isn’t perfect (for example, M/istoria is also the name of a UK Real Estate Group, so doing shipname vs shipname is completely screwed up). I wanted this data, though, to add to my point that queer wasn’t the norm in this fandom until fairly recently.
