To live is to continue protecting

Like - putting aside the question of whether the amount of fanfiction a piece of media receives is an accurate reflection its cultural impact (I abide by the fanfiction moss analogy, sometimes good media just does not beget transformative work), looking at AO3 for numbers just feels disingenuous. AO3 was operating in 2009 but in my memory it wasn’t really in vogue during the time that Avatar 2009 was in theatres. If you’re looking for fanfic based on media from the 2000s, I find that Fanfiction-dot-net is the better website to look at; Castle 2009 only has 4,808 fics on AO3 at the time of writing, but it has over 23,600 fics on Fanfiction-dot-net. It’s not that Castle 2009 had no cultural impact, it’s just that AO3 wasn’t the website being used when that show was in the zeitgeist to capture that cultural impact.