just went for my third read of “tympani” of the year and found its hits at the fun number of “123,123”. what a legend you are!
Okay I was a little too late to see that (I DO like pretty numbers thank you anon) but I got there in time to see a pretty good variant:
Tympani my beloved unexpected smash hit. Unexpected because it is in large part a comedy and I am deeply insecure about writing humour, and also judging by bookmarks/comments, *this* is the fic of mine that broke HRPF containment and gets readers who've never touched the fandom before (tag ur niche kinks authors, people are searching for them).
I am deeply curious where General Dynamics will land relative to Tympani over time. Tympani has an 11-year head start and I do not have any sense of the trajectory of growth in kudos over time, alas, but IIRC it broke 1000 kudos not long after posting it. I feel like GD has been even more popular than Tympani was at the time of posting, but I posted Tympani as a one-shot and GD has grown its readership over time so it's hard to compare - and of course only people who read WIPs are reading GD. McDrai is a relatively less popular pairing than 1988 was at the time (it's like... ~5th most posted right now, believe it or not, nope more like 9th it was 5th in 2024 but 1988 was #1) but I think overall HRPF is (a) larger* and (b) somewhat more multipairing and the D/s trope is popular enough people will read outside their pairing for it.
*Much of the growth in HRPF fics posted per year is due to willmack, but not all of it! It's actually crazy looking at the stats - willmack went from 0 to nearly 40% of HRPF in 1.5 years, but it's mostly additive, which means the total # of HRPF fics posted last year significantly exceeded any previous year. E.g. there were ~2200 more HRPF fic posted in 2025 vs 2024, and 1000 of those were willmack, but the other 1200 weren't!
