I was going to start this with a link to the last time I did a meme about the stats on my AO3 account…but apparently I have straight-up never done one!
Welp, no time like the present.
Most hits: He Says He Is An Experimental Theologian (114,570). First installment of the “retelling Welcome to Night Vale with daemons, also filling in gaps in the character development” AU, which spent a long time as my most-popular series overall…and wow, it turns 10 years old this November.
The runner-up is Cover of Knight (94,025), first installment in my current most-popular series. The overall series is still ongoing, so it’s racking up the hits more quickly; it’s not a question of if it overtakes Experimental Theologian, but when.
Most kudos: Cover of Knight (4,835). First installment of the “Team Moon Knight interacts with other Marvel Cinematic Universe characters, with increasing shenanigans to cover up the fact that they’re a plural system” series. Started in late June 2022, had already taken the crown by late November. Has the advantage of being episodic, so even if you’re mainly a fan of just one MCU sub-franchise, you can read those specific chapter(s), find them satisfying, and maybe get hooked into reading the rest.
I expected Experimental Theologian (2,546) to be the runner-up, but no, Persephone’s Waltz (2,559) has just-barely overtaken it! My longest and most popular Madoka Magica fic, the “what if Homura just locked Madoka in a basement for a month” timeline. These two are both enduringly popular, so I can see them continuing to trade off second place for a while.
Most comment threads: A Blinking Light Up On The Clouded Mountain (1,313), the second major installment of the WTNV-with-daemons AU. It has dramatically fewer hits (65,194) than Experimental Theologian; seems like the more casual readers dropped off, but the ones who were invested enough to comment stuck around, and commented more as the drama and mystery leveled up.
Cover of Knight (1,291) is a close runner-up. Reveals by Knight (224), the major follow-up to CoK, is still way down the list — I’m just noting it here because it gets more comments per chapter than CoK did, and I plan on making it at least as many chapters. Check back in a year.
Most bookmarks: Cover of Knight (1,233). Probably recently surpassed the runner-up, Experimental Theologian (1,058).
Most words: Clouded Mountain (313,788). Dramatically outstripping the runner-up, Experimental Theologian (182,093). Cover of Knight (56,605) is all the way down in 8th place.
The #3 place is taken by State of Grace (108,448), the Colbert Report “what if character!Stephen was plural” fic — which doesn’t even come close to any of the other stat records! It was written before I got an AO3 account and then crossposted, so the bulk of the interaction was back on the Livejournal/Dreamwidth version.
Fewest words: A four-way tie between a series of “exactly 100 words” fics. Three for WTNV: On Schedule (boy, this one turned out way too optimistic), Serenity Prayer (creepy and unsettling by design), and the way you flip your hair gets me overwhelmed (just fluff). One for Jeeves & Wooster: Lemon (a pun on its use to mean “NSFW”).
I know I’ve also done a bunch of “exactly 100 words” fics for the Colbert Report — but these were also pre-AO3, and only got crossposted as part of bigger TCR fic compilations, so you can’t just find them in the stats.
Final observation: Only have to post 10 more Moon Knight fics before it becomes my 2nd-most-written fandom! (By number of works, not by word count. I’m not going to sit around and manually add up word counts.)
It would need 59 works on top of that to take 1st place. Which seems like a less-reachable goal, if only because the energy I would usually put into “standalone one-shots” is mostly going into “mostly-standalone episodic chapters in the Cover of Knight universe.” But 2nd place? Yeah, that’s on the horizon.
Classic!
Humanist+Humorist 