#the link to the story on AO3 is in the comments

[cooking-with-hailstones]

The Legend of Zelda: stats of the kingdom

A Statistical Analysis of Popular Fanfiction in the Legend of Zelda Fandom on AO3

I like numbers and stats and for some unfathomable reason I find it calming. So over the past couple weeks, I’ve been making this spreadsheet!

DISCLAIMER: This is not a judgement of the quality, value, or merits of any of the fics on this list. It's just me being curious about what's popular with the Legend of Zelda fandom on AO3.

Feel free to go explore the spreadsheet. My own observations and analysis under the cut.

TL:DR, Link has a lot of kinky sex. Sidlink and Zelink are vying for who’s the most popular ship. Also, this fandom has a shit ton of sub categories that are truly islands unto themselves and have their own conventions.

Methodology: I'm including all fics from the first page of AO3 results (20 fics per page) sorted by:

Hits

Kudos

Comments

Bookmarks

Anything tagged under the Legend of Zelda and Related Fandoms tag that was in the top 20 most hits, kudos, comments, or bookmarks made it into the spreadsheet. This ended up including 51 fics in total.

I put all the fics into one single spreadsheet in order to compare the differences between fics that are really high on the kudos count but not the hit count, or what has a lot of comments but fewer hits. Basically, I'm throwing a lot of things together to observe what gets engagement and looking at patterns that emerge!

Popular fandom subcategories:

Botw (41 fics tagged as such)

Linked Universe (9, including one mostly set in the world of BOTW)

OoT (2)

(I do wonder what it would be like to run these numbers on other fanfic sites, given the popularity boom of ao3 over the last 15 years or so. But also, Botw was an insanely popular game even by Zelda standards, so… who knows?)

Zelda

Tags:

Character tags: Obviously, Link was by far the most popular character, but here are the characters that had a minimum of 3 appearances per category. Yay champions!

Sidon

Mipha

Urbosa

Revali

Daruk

Story tags: Again, just going by sheer numbers, here are the story tags that appeared at least 3 times in every category:

Slowburn

AU – canon divergence

With honorable mentions to fluff, angst, double penetration, anal sex, amnesia/memory loss, and mute or selectively mute Link, who all cracked above 3 instances in 2 separate categories.

Relationships:

This was a tight race, but shoutout to Sidlink for eking out the win for the most highly rated ship in the Zelda fandom with 13 fics qualifying in my ranking. Zelink is close behind at 10 fics. (That being said, Zelink takes it by volume: 7,797 fics tagged as Zelink vs Sidlink’s 2,193)

Other popular ships:

Revalink (8) (this one surprised me! I didn’t realize my beloved birb was so popular)

Miphlink (3)

Link/Monsters (2)

Sidon/Reader (2)

Ganzelink, Ganlink, Malink, Miphzelink, and Miphzel all made single appearances.

(Pls don’t start ship war discourse in the notes kthanx)

All right, let’s deep dive into the numbers!

Fics in all 4 categories:

Interim - starkraving

Sands of time -tirsynni

Congrats you are officially the most popular Loz fics across all of ao3! at least according to my particular scope of analysis.

Fics in 3 categories:

Displaced - socksock

Drown In Me - bacchanalia

Alone We Fight - SilvermistAnimeLover

Blood Moon Rising - MarquesGillette

Popular authors (people who show up more than once in multiple categories sorry comments georg)

MarquesGillette

MaryDragon

SilvermistAnimeLover

ObakeAri

Hits:

Top 5 most popular fics by hit count:

Displaced - socksock

Interim - starkraving

To Save Hyrule - orphan_account

Sands of time - tirsynni

Drown In Me - bacchanalia

Min: 117,917 – Sidon’s Epic Pining Adventure (ObakeAri)  

First page by hits:

Max:  189,622 – Displaced (socksock)

Average: 145,385

Average wordcount for fics with the most hits:

140,909

Kudos:

Top 5 most popular fics by kudos count:

Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy - Icka M Chif

Interim - starkraving

To My Dearest Friend - surveycorpsjean

26 Minutes and 42 Seconds - T_5Seconds

Blood Moon Rising - MarquesGillette

First page by kudos:

Min: 4917 – Finding Link (Umbreonix)

Max:  10321 – Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy (Icka M Chif)

Average: 6981

Average wordcount for fics with the most kudos:

41,136

Comments:

Top 5 most popular fics by comment count:

Carlos from MarvelandZeldaFan's Children of the Heroes - KR5

This is an Adjuration - notfreyja

My Art - KR5

Sidon's Epic Pining Adventure - ObakeAri

Priestess of War - KR5

Woohoo! You all get to meet KR5 aka Comments Georg. Comments Georg has long conversations and RPs in the comments of their ao3 posts, which are usually fanart. TO BE CLEAR, THIS IS TOTALLY FINE AND COOL! I think it’s quite delightful! However, it does completely bork my ranking system because outside of comments, these posts do not have a lot of engagement (like, less than 100 hits and less than 20 kudos) and I don’t think they count towards my analysis of “what is popular in the Zelda fandom writ large”. But they qualified based on my criteria. Which I think speaks to the weakness of my criteria more than anything else tbh…

Anyways, shoutout to Comments Georg for truly showing off what it means to be a statistical outlier.

First page by comments:

Min: 1568 – The Quiet River Rages (MaryDragon)

Max:  43808 - Carlos from MarvelandZeldaFan's Children of the Heroes (KR5)

Average: 4131 (which goes down to 2042 if we exclude KR5’s impressive max, which is a full order of magnitude more than notfreyja in second place with 3470 comments. Very much demonstrating the power of a statistical outlier!)

Average wordcount for fics with the most comments:

275,593

Bookmarks:

Top 5 most popular fics by bookmarks count:

Interim - starkraving

Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy - Icka M Chif

Sands of time - tirsynni

To My Dearest Friend - surveycorpsjean

Alone We Fight - SilvermistAnimeLover

First page by bookmarks:

Min: 973 – Expatriate (thehoyden)

Max:  2984 – Interim (starkraving)

Average: 1468

Average wordcount for fics with the most bookmarks:

70,027

Fic Ratings:

Observations:

G: 3 (literally all fanart from KR5)

T: 22

M: 8

E: 17

Unrated: 1

I ran this twice. Once including crossovers, and once excluding crossovers. This filtered out a lot of large drabbles and things like “flash fiction fuckings” which, no judgment, you do you, they just weren’t super relevant for what I was looking for. If you wanna see these stats including all the multifandom stuff that shows up, here’s the link for that:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DXDKXutIzVC-Iac93fFSDohAkphrn67yV-DmRt9xXmU/edit?usp=sharing

(I’m going to break academic professional analysis here and get on my soapbox for a sec – please don’t post big multifandom drabbles where you tag like 20 different fandoms and every single kink that gets written about across 103 different chapters. This is literally what series are for. These kinds of things just clog up the tags, and it also makes it harder for people to find the things you’ve written that they want to read! I know this was a convention on ff.net, but this is not ff.net! We can make authors' lives and readers' lives easier!)

There were 38,427 fics in the tag “Legend of Zelda and Related Fandoms” (including crossovers, that goes up to 41,634). I manually added one back in though because it was entirely a botw story, just loosely inspired by another game.

Linked Universe fans comment a LOT. Strong correlation between high comment and Linked Universe fandom subsection. Y’all are very involved and active, and you show support to your authors. I salute you!

Sidlinkers, y'all are horny and I respect it.

Zelinkers, dear god we do love a slowburn.

All the most highly kudos’d fics are very low in the comment count. It’s almost an inverse correlation.

Excluding crossovers increased the correlation between hits and kudos quite dramatically.

There were not very many au’s other than canon divergence. Only one modern au as far as I could tell from a cursory examination of tags.

Lots more clustering, far less disparity between min and max numbers than when I ran this with A:TLA numbers.

Far less consensus on a vibe. Way fewer big writers, but lots of little writers doing their own thing.

Truly a lot of E fics. We are horny bastards.

We need more stuff written for games other than BOTW!!

There aren’t as many fics that are like “oh everyone in the fandom has read these fics”. There are probably those fics in each subcategory of the fandom, or within the specific ships, but there aren’t as many general fics that have entire fandom-wide appeal.

If you want more of this kind of egregious nerdiness, I did this with the top fics in the A:TLA fandom a couple weeks ago: https://www.tumblr.com/cooking-with-hailstones/751749202663669760/statistical-analysis-of-the-most-popular-atla

Thank you for reading! This was a lot of fun, and I hope you found it interesting. Shoutout to the Hateno Hangout discord for helping me refine this mess :P

Further shoutout to my partner who helped with writing some SQL to help with tag analysis. Truly partner of the year.

[muffinlance]

EMERGENCY FANFIC PROTOCOLS: ACTIVATED

Hey while AO3 is down

Here is a GDrive link to all my downloaded fics (it's OVER 9,000 2,000)

Mostly Avatar, also The Magnus Archives, Danny Phantom, Teen Wolf, and a few others

Mostly unsorted, some not even intentionally downloaded because the auto-downloader I use is Like That, so consider this a glorified "give me a random fic" button

MAKE SURE TO KUDOS THE AUTHORS WHEN AO3 IS BACK UP

>>> Linkie link <<<

Edit: Note that when AO3 comes back up that link will go dead again... until it's needed, once more

EMERGENCY FANFIC PROTOCOLS: DEACTIVATED

...Until next they are needed

If you were going through these for fic recs, check out my AO3 Bookmarks for the more curated list.

To make your own fanfic backups, I recommend AO3 Downloader or FanFicFare. (I'm not tech support for either; please don't message me for help.)

Happy reading!

[ksbbb]

PSA:

OK so I feel that this needs to be said again and I am not talking to everyone. Please don’t think I’m talking to my followers or most of my mutuals on here, but I do think it’s something that should be addressed again. If you don’t like a story, you are under no obligation to read it, and you can easily click out of it or completely find a way to never read my stories again.

Just because you don’t like Theo, doesn’t mean you should be coming onto a story and trashing him as a character and in doing so, trash me as a writer in my story because of some issues you have with the way Jeff Davis wrote a character.

We all write stories for free, and in our own personal time for fun. I understand everyone’s story is not for every single individual, and I think it’s important that we understand to be a productive member of society and not trash people on the website because you feel some type of way about a character.

I will not be taking my story scenting down. Thank you.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk .

I am a Theo Stan until the day I die 

Here’s the story in case other people would rather read it and don’t worry I did delete those comments.



[moonshine-nightlight]

Hi, hi! I've been reading some of your work and when I saw you had a tumblr I just had to come pay your inbox a visit.

I just wanna say, I really love how you write! It's so, so easy to get immersed in your stories, to the point where something kind of funny happened in my case actually XD

So there I was at midnight, browsing the monster romance side of AO3 when I came across Finally Woken. I was looking something on the shorter word count side, but the summary had me very interested. So I go, hmmm I think I'll just read the first chapter to see how it is and if I like it I'll come back to it tomorrow. I definitely liked it, but wanted just a bit more, so I clicked on the second chapter. Then the third. And fourth. And so on until oops, I binged it and it was 4 am hdjsgaca

And then the next day, I was once again browsing. And came across Don't shoot the messenger. And I go, well last night was a success but tonight I definitely only read the first chapter and then if I like it finish tomorrow. Aaaah the lies we tell ourselves. Did not even notice it was the same author until I was halfway through it. This one I managed to finish before 4 am at least XD

And then! The next day! Once again browsing in bed! I come across Sacrifice! Once again didn't look at the author until later! Take a guess at what happened next, surely you will never expect the outcome! (The outcome was exactly the same. I could not stop reading. My self restraint is in shambles.)

So yeah! I just wanted to one, come and thank you for such wonderful stories, and two, compliment the heck out of your writing skills because your pacing, and atmosphere and descriptions are top notch. Like the sense of anticipation before Satrasi knew what that captain had done was chef kiss, or the sense of dread building up to the ritual and then calm once Tai finds the reader. Or the sense of domesticity as time passes with Heshi.

All reader characters and monsters feel unique as well! My personal favorite story so far is Don't shoot the messenger, Satrasi has me swooning fdhdgzh But honestly I loved all of them so much and they're going to my favorite monster romances stash. Oh also, I'm 100% going to go back and reread, kudos and comment more thoroughly on each story, but I was on another account like a fool the first time I read them all gahdgdh So hopefully you'll see me in AO3 soon as well!

Alright I've been rambling enough already haha, so yeah! Tldr, You're a great author, I am weak and procrastinated going to bed because I wanted to read your stuff, love what you do, take care! :D

@roaring-letters

thank you so much! this was such a good message to get and i've been hoarding it for lik 2 months lol because work has been so busy which is why it was even better to get such a nice ask - it really cheered me up!

i'd say i;m sorry for the accidental repeated trapping and keeping you up until 4 am but its kinda the greatest compliment ever lol so i guess i'm not sorry

i'm so happy you enjoyed the stories and the characters and the atmosphere of the stories! my writing means so much to me and i'm always worried that i'm not getting whats in my head down onto paper right so comments/asks like these are so so heartwarming because it makes me feel lik i am in fact getting it right :D

thanks again!!!!

[imagine-mokey]

This is the 9th chapter of the "Lost is Found."

This time travel story involves each of the Beatles going back in time separately, going on their own adventures.

This is Ringo's story, the second chapter.

Ringo Starr is a captain of a ship in the colonial time period. The Beatle is sailing to the Americas when he discovers a slave child within his crew. How does the 20th century man deal with such an outrageous cruelty in this dark time of history?

[beatleshalloween]

This is a really sweet George Harrison story, dating in the mid 1990s. A cute story of a man looking for something to do on Halloween which wasn't much fuss.

[pansextastic]

I promise not to do this often, but this was an exception of the amount!!

Thank you to all my readers, especially those who leave me kudoses and comments! Feel free to criticize me by the way.

[catlover4536]

Ao3 is down AGAIN and I am suffering because I didn't download any fics as I reasonably thought it was over. Please I don't wanna crawl back to Fanfiction Net! I can't even get into my account there and I think I'll actually die a little if I seriously have to use wattpad.

[hanniconda-balls]

(Mostly) Hannigram AO3 MasterDoc

Hey all my Hannigram fiends. I have read an absurd amount of Hannibal fanfiction over the years, so I have decided to comprise them all into a MasterDoc so that they are more easily found. I will put the link at the bottom of this post, and comment any other fic recs!

[vianwrites]

Let's Do Writing Prompts (A Game)!

So, I have these set of cards that I use whenever I need to find inspiration to write (it's not really meant to be used in the way I am using it, but that's beside the point). So, I decided to share the game and the writing prompt with you all. If you are interested, read on...

So, this here is the deck of cards called "Talecraft".

It has 3 different types of cards:

The red sun one is called a "Genre" stack, the blue gender symbols are called "Archetypes", and the yellow key are Key cards.

I've pulled from the stack (after shuffling it, of course) one genre card, two archetype cards, and a key card which will be the prompt.

For the Genre, we have:

For the Archetype:

And for the Key:

So, let me explain what the actual prompt is:

Write a Forbidden Love Horror story with a Chosen One and a Coquettish Woman. You can pick which of the Archetype characters is the main protagonist and which one is the main antagonist. It can be an original story, it can be a fanfic. But, if you want to do this you HAVE to comment here a link to your work so that I can read it (and comment, of course).

So, for information's sake (because Tumblr is still acting weird for me with commenting on my own posts or on other's and also replying to them, I'm going to put the card explanation for the Chosen One card here (since it was hidden behind The Coquette card):

"The Chosen One. Must typically fulfill a prophecy to save mankind. Almost always portrayed as from humble origins, then sometimes discovered as from a noble family. Often portrayed as guided by a Wise Old Man. Examples: Anakin Skywalker from Star Wars, Harry Potter"

So, yeah, I'm really hoping others will pick up on this and there'll be an abundance of new stories we can read and comment to. (Again, just post the link or tag me or whatever so that I can curate them all).

[fireheartwraith]

I just realised the one shot i made in 2019 has almost 4.5k hits 😳

Is this fame?

[fluffykitteninabox]

hey btw, don't steal people's fics from ao3 to make text story videos on YouTube

that's not cool

[talietikasero]

oh i almost forgot. i got this comment on my fic last night and have been thinking about it all day

[imagine-mokey]

This is a sweet 2 story series involving Paul and Ringo during modern day.

[beatleshalloween]

Story newly updated!

The Beatles find themselves transformed back in time in separate time periods, living lives as different people, while able to remember their old life in the 1960s.

[pansextastic]

I'm updating "The Lost is Found!"

I was trying to update all my stories in order but I just couldn't resist any longer.

The Beatles find themselves transformed back in time in separate time periods, living lives as different people, while able to remember their old life in the 1960s.

I had started this story last year for the Beatles Halloween 2021, but couldn't finish it. So now I have and I'm submitting it for this year.

Beatles Halloween 2022

Day 4 Time Travel

Past

The Beatles are running away from some crazy fans, when they discovered a peculiar shop.

Chapter updated 3/23/2024

This story is in the process of being updated.