#famof5

My top 5 stories on ao3 ranked by kudos:

Of dogs and deer darcy (1065 kudos) (Sterek)

Pigtails (794 kudos) (Stackson)

Jet Black Camaro (697 kudos) (Sterek)

Homebound (551 kudos) (Merthur)

I'll be feeling fine (448 kudos) (Sterek)

My bottom 5 stories:

shining through (47 kudos) (Stoyd)

Ancient Mystery (45 kudos) (Stisaac)

The apple pie life (26 kudos) (Wincest)

Plans (19 kudos) (Wincest)

As I in slumber (19 kudos) (Allydia)

Are you surprised? Why?

Mmmhmmm... I’m not surprised at which types of stories are more or less popular, no, but let’s just go through them one by one quickly!

Of dogs and deer darcy is my most popular fic on both ao3 and tumblr, and I guess I can see why! It’s just a cute little piece of soulmark fluff :D I’m actually somewhat happily surprised that it takes the top spot on ao3, too, because I always thought that the main reason it was so popular on tumblr was that it got reblogged by BNFs, so it’s lovely to see that the fic itself appeals, even when not promoted by people more popular than me^^

Pigtails really was a surprise! It was my first time writing Stackson and I was overwhelmed by how hard this fandom goes for its ship! I hadn’t really been in much contact with Stackson before writing this, never really thought about those two together until I got the prompt that inspired that fic and so I just worked through my issues with those two and those two in a relationship all on my lonesome while writing this fic and then I published it and was blown away by the positive response! So thank you, Stackson fandom, you are awesome!

Jet Black Camaro is another surprise! Not so much because of its plot - it’s a 5+1 of Derek’s family embarrassing him in front of Stiles and totally cramping his style, so nothing problematic there, but because I wasn’t really happy with this fic when writing it! I spent ages agonising over it and really not being happy how it turned out, and I was still not completely happy when I finally published it, so I didn’t expect it to get popular at all! So that was a lovely surprise!

Homebound! I’m super happy that Homebound is up there because I really love how that fic turned out! It was originally supposed to be just five sentences long - part of an ask game where @loverofcake gave me the first sentence of a fic and I was supposed to write the next five - well, those “five” sentences were 500 words long and the fic ended up 12k long in the end, so I failed that challenge, but I got a wonderful (in my unbiased opinion :p) fic out of it, so thank you again for that first sentence, Clara! I hadn’t written much Merthur before that, just small ficlets on tumblr, so I didn’t know what to expect from posting this on ao3, so I’m really happy at the popularity of it!

I'll be feeling fine, finally. This one certainly has time on its side, it was the fourth fic I ever published on ao3, more than three years ago now! So it has had time to rack up the kudos, but it has also been very consistently gaining kudos over the years (two more just yesterday!), so it can’t be just age that keeps it in the top five^^ It’s set in the once upon a time very popular Neckz’n’Throats Universe (and really, fandom, when did we start forgetting about Neckz’n’Throats???? Gimme more of it, please!!), and has mates and fangboners and oh my! It’s ridiculous, but I’m also still ridiculously fond of it, so I’m glad that my readers seem to be fond of it, too :D

Now to the sadder end of the scale, the five least popular ones. Not very surprisingly, it’s all rare pairs and/or unpopular formats/topics down there.

shining through is the latest fic I have posted on AO3, so I’m hoping it’ll still gain some notes and creep upwards a little. It’s a cute Stoyd with tattoos and a bit of silent pining and first kisses??? Please read it and love it? Though shining through moving up in the ranks will unfortunately mean that where the heart is is going to be in the bottom five again which I’m very sad about. While posting this fic was the worst experience I’ve had so far on ao3 (and I’m still really mad about that), it is still my personal fix it fic, subtitled “Derek loves everyone, and everyone loves Derek” and I wish it would get so much more love than it has gotten so far! But you can’t force people to love fics, so I’ll just have to learn to live with its unpopularity, I’m afraid. Though I have gotten the most wonderful comments on it, so if people read it and love it, they truly seem to love it, so that makes me happy at least!^^

Ancient Mystery being down there isn’t hugely surprising either - it wasn’t posted that long ago either and it’s just this really short, ridiculous ficlet of Stisaac singing What does the fox say with a bunch of kids - cute, but not particularly profound. It is cute, though!!

The apple pie life and Plans belong together, so I’ll deal with them together, too. Those two are first of all Wincest, which will put some people off, then they are set in the ABO universe, which puts some more people off (though it really is the most fascinating universe!!!!), and then they are true old school drabbles, so just exactly 100 words each, and adding all of that together, it really is not a huge surprise to find them almost at the very bottom. They were more of a writing exercise for me, too, so I’m not too bummed out about them not being popular, though.

Sadly last, but not least is As I in slumber. It’s an Allydia fic set just after the 3b finale, so it deals with major character death and grief, and my tagging game wasn’t very strong back then, so I’m not surprised not many people click on this fic. It is supposed to be a sort of fix-it fic, but neither summary nor tags make that clear, so yeah, it’s probably mostly my fault that it hasn’t gotten much attention. Add to it that this was written literally years ago, and I’m not sure I actually want it to attract much attention now!^^° Still though, I like it, and it is a sort of fix it fic (I certainly entertained thoughts of adding to it, turning it into a proper fix it once upon a time), so go read it :DD

Optional: What is the average number of notes on your fics?

I’m not going to count up the notes on all of my tumblr fics (and honestly, that average would probably make it cry, because many of my fics struggle to break past 20 notes - too many rare pairs? *sighs*), but my fics on ao3 get an average number of 274 kudos! Which isn’t too bad, I think! It’s certainly not a big number compared to many other authors, but it’s a nice enough number for me! :D

What is today’s date in case you do this again?

August 14th 2017