"Guys where do you pee?" Reddit comments visualised

slide from the launch of gpt5

There's a specific kind of PR spam I get a lot that involves marketing firms coming up with cool quirky topics to look up on Google Trends, finding out what the data is on a national level, and then turning that data into a cute trend graph.

While discussing one such trend search, I started wondering what the top fanfiction fandoms were on a state by state level, so i did it myself.

The results were honestly not what I was expecting!

Methodology: I searched Google trends for "fanfiction" by state and then noted the top related queries for the past 12 months. If not enough data could be generated for related queries, then I looked at the top related topics. If those results were wonky, I searched top related queries from 2004-present.

Harry Potter is universally the #2 fandom behind Naruto, with the exception of Iowa, in which Harry Potter was ranked 1st, and trailing at a very distant 2nd was.... NCIS Hawaii, and Colorado, in which the top 3 fandoms are Miraculous Ladybug, RWBY, and Percy Jackson.

RWBY, My Hero Academia, and Percy Jackson were generally the most popular third place fandoms.

Wednesday Addams is by far the most popular related character topic. One notable exception is Pennsylvania, where the top related character is, uh, this random gentleman from General Hospital?

AO3 was by far the most-googled related fic archive ahead of ff.net and wattpad. (Though to be fair, Wattpad tweens aren't googling Wattpad, they're just opening the app.)