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@the-ao3-stats
just another ao3 stats blog ✨
feel free to request any sort of specific stats you're curious about!
LINKS:
Fandoms
Language
Date - Words - Comments - Kudos - Bookmarks - Hits

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All Shen Jiu | Original Shen Qingqiu Ships (/ only)
Shen Jiu is somewhat of a well-used fandom bicycle, with his 344 unique relationships — that number beats even the protagonist of SVSSS Shen Yuan, who can only boast 305 unique relationships!
(those numbers are obtained by looking at the AO3 tags search page; it includes ships which currently have 0 works, but which had to have existed in some form for the tag to be canonized. both counts include & relationships as well, since it's impossible to remove them from the overview)
Here is a list of all slash relationships for Shen Jiu:
1 . Shen Jiu/Yue Qingyuan — 3103 works 2 . Original Luo Binghe/Shen Jiu — 2482 works 3 . Liu Qingge/Shen Jiu — 2002 works 4 . Shen Jiu/Shen Yuan | Shen Qingqiu — 1059 works 5 . Luo Binghe/Shen Jiu — 344 works 6 . Shen Jiu/Original Yue Qingyuan — 297 works 7 . Shen Jiu/Xiang Fei | Shang Qinghua — 266 works 8 . Shen Jiu/Tianlang-jun — 189 works 9 . Mu Qingfang/Shen Jiu — 170 works 10 . Shen Jiu/Everyone — 138 works 11 . Original Liu Qingge/Shen Jiu — 119 works 12 . Shen Jiu/Original Character — 102 works 13 . Qiu Jianluo/Shen Jiu — 100 works 14 . Liu Qingge/Shen Jiu/Yue Qingyuan — 93 works 15 . Shen Jiu/Zhuzhi-lang — 90 works 16 . Shen Jiu/Shen Yuan | Shen Qingqiu/Yue Qingyuan — 57 works 17 . Gongyi Xiao/Shen Jiu — 56 works 18 . Shen Jiu/Original Male Character — 56 works 19 . Cang Qiong Mountain Sect Peak Lords/Shen Jiu — 42 works 20 . Luo Binghe/Shen Jiu/Shen Yuan | Shen Qingqiu — 40 works 21 . Qiu Haitang/Shen Jiu — 39 works 22 . Qi Qingqi/Shen Jiu — 33 works 23 . Ming Fan/Shen Jiu — 33 works 24 . Liu Qingge/Shen Jiu/Shen Yuan | Shen Qingqiu — 31 works 25 . Original Luo Binghe/Shen Jiu/Shen Yuan | Shen Qingqiu — 28 works 26 . Shen Jiu/Wei Qingwei — 28 works 27 . Original Shang Qinghua/Shen Jiu — 25 works 28 . Linguang-jun/Shen Jiu — 23 works 29 . Mobei-jun/Shen Jiu — 22 works 30 . Cheong Myeong/Shen Jiu — 19 works 31 . Shen Jiu/Other — 19 works 32 . Jiang Cheng/Shen Jiu — 18 works 33 . Shen Jiu/Wu Yanzi — 16 works 34 . Liu Qingge/Original Luo Binghe/Shen Jiu — 16 works 35 . Shen Jiu/Original Female Character — 15 works 36 . Shen Jiu/Su Xiyan/Tianlang-jun — 13 works 37 . Shen Jiu/Xin Mo — 12 works 38 . Liu Qingge/Luo Binghe/Shen Jiu — 12 works 39 . Original Luo Binghe/Shen Jiu/Yue Qingyuan — 12 works 40 . Luo Binghe/Original Luo Binghe/Shen Jiu — 11 works 41 . Shen Jiu/Xiang Fei | Shang Qinghua/Yue Qingyuan — 11 works 42 . Shen Jiu/Reader — 10 works 43 . Original Luo Binghe/Shen Jiu/Original Yue Qingyuan — 10 works 44 . Sha Hualing/Shen Jiu — 9 works 45 . Liu Mingyan/Shen Jiu — 8 works 46 . Shen Jiu/Shen Jiu — 8 works 47 . Ning Yingying/Shen Jiu — 8 works 48 . Liu Qingge/Shen Jiu/Xiang Fei | Shang Qinghua — 8 works 49 . Mobei-jun/Shen Jiu/Xiang Fei | Shang Qinghua — 8 works 50 . Original Liu Qingge/Original Luo Binghe/Shen Jiu — 7 works
All Cheong Myeong Ships (/ only)
Cheong Myeong is the main character of the Return of Mount Hua novel. As such, he is featured in the most ships in the fandom — 47 out of 121 (39%).
The following is a list of all Cheong Myeong ships:
1 . Cheong Myeong/Tang Bo — 610 works
2 . Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Cheong Myeong — 264 works
3 . Cheong Myeong/Jang Ilso — 71 works
4 . Cheong Myeong/Im Sobyeong — 61 works
5 . Cheong Myeong/Cheong Myeong — 60 works
6 . Cheong Myeong/Original Character — 33 works
7 . Cheong Mun | Jang Mun/Cheong Myeong — 32 works
8 . Cheong Myeong/Tang Gunak — 26 works
9 . Cheong Myeong/Original Female Character — 25 works
10 . Cheong Myeong/Shen Jiu | Original Shen Qingqiu — 19 works
11 . Cheong Myeong/Reader — 17 works
12 . Cheong Myeong/Cheonma — 15 works
13 . Cheong Myeong/Lee Songbaek — 14 works
14 . Cheong Myeong/Namgung Dowi — 10 works
15 . Cheong Myeong/Everyone — 8 works
All Return Of The Mount Hua Ships (/ only)
There are a total of 121 slash "/" relationships in the RotMH fandom, including 6 for which the total number of works is 0 but the tag exists on AO3 (suggesting that such a work had once existed, had been in someone's drafts, or is currently hidden in an unrevealed collection)
Below is the full table of all the relationships:
Cheong Myeong/Tang Bo — 610 works
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Cheong Myeong — 264 works
Cheong Myeong/Jang Ilso — 71 works
Cheong Myeong/Im Sobyeong — 61 works
Cheong Myeong/Cheong Myeong — 60 works
Tang Soso/Yu Iseol — 50 works
Ho Gamyung/Jang Ilso — 38 works
Jo Geol/Yun Jong — 37 works
Cheong Myeong/Original Character — 33 works
Cheong Mun | Jang Mun/Cheong Myeong — 32 works
Cheong Myeong/Tang Gunak — 26 works
Cheong Myeong/Original Female Character — 25 works
Cheong Jin/Tang Bo — 21 works
Cheong Myeong/Shen Jiu | Original Shen Qingqiu — 19 works
Jin Geumryong/Lee Songbaek — 18 works
Cheong Myeong/Reader — 17 works
Cheong Myeong/Cheonma — 15 works
Jo Geol/Tang Zhan — 14 works
Cheong Myeong/Lee Songbaek — 14 works
Jin Geumryong/Tang Pae — 13 works
Im Sobyeong/Namgung Dowi — 12 works
Cheong Myeong/Namgung Dowi — 10 works
Cheong Myeong/Everyone — 8 works
Cheong Myeong/Tang Soso — 7 works
Tang Pae/Tang Zhan — 7 works
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Jin Geumryong — 6 works
Cheong Myeong/Yu Iseol — 6 works
Cheong Jin/Cheong Myeong — 6 works
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Reader — 6 works
Yun Jong/Reader — 6 works
Tang Bo/Tang Bo — 6 works
Cheong Myeong/Jin Geumryong — 5 works
Lee Songbaek/Reader — 5 works
Jo Geol/Reader — 5 works
Cheong Myeong/Unpossessed Cho Sam — 4 works
Tang Bo/Yu Iseol — 4 works
Cheong Myeong/Tang Zhan — 4 works
Tang Bo/Original Character — 4 works
Cheong Myeong/Yun Jong — 4 works
Cheong Myeong/Meng So — 3 works
Tang Bo/Reader — 3 works
Yu Iseol/Reader — 3 works
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Baek Sang — 3 works
Baek Oh/Cheong Myeong — 3 works
Cheong Myeong/Tianlang-jun — 3 works
Cheong Myeong/Jo Geol — 3 works
Jo Geol/Sonic the Hedgehog — 3 works
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong — 2 works
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Yun Jong — 2 works
Cheong Myeong/Jo Geol/Yun Jong — 2 works
Lee Songbaek/Tang Zhan — 2 works
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Original Character — 2 works
Cheong Myeong/Shen Jiu | Original Shen Qingqiu/Tang Bo — 2 works
Cheong Myeong/Ho Gamyung — 2 works
Im Sobyeong/Jang Ilso — 2 works
Jin Geumryong/Reader — 2 works
Jin Geumryong/Yu Iseol — 2 works
Shen Jiu | Original Shen Qingqiu/Tang Bo — 2 works
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/SpongeBob SquarePants — 2 works
Cheong Myeong/Other — 2 works
Cheong Myeong/Xiang Fei | Shang Qinghua — 2 works
Cheong Myeong/Hye Yeon — 2 works
Cheong Myeong/Tang Pae — 2 works
Tang Pae/Tang Soso — 2 works
Unpossessed Cho Sam/Tang Bo — 2 works
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Cale Henituse | Kim Rok Soo — 1 work
Baek Sang/Yu Iseol — 1 work
Cheong Myeong/Jiang Cheng | Jiang Wanyin — 1 work
Cheong Myeong/Original Male Character — 1 work
Cheong Myeong/Namgung Myeong — 1 work
Jang Ilso/Tang Bo — 1 work
Jin Eunryong/Seol Sobaek — 1 work
Tang Soso/Reader — 1 work
Baek Ah/King Julien XIII — 1 work
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong's Mother/Jin Chobaek — 1 work
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Hyun Jong — 1 work
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Lee Songbaek — 1 work
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong/Tang Bo — 1 work
Baek Sang/Jong Seohan — 1 work
Bloom (Winx Club)/Cheong Myeong (Return of the Blossoming Blade) — 1 work
Cheong Jin/Cheong Mun | Jang Mun/Cheong Myeong — 1 work
Cheong Mun | Jang Mun/Original Character — 1 work
Cheong Myeong/Lan Zhan | Lan Wangji — 1 work
Cheong Myeong/Luo Binghe — 1 work
Cheong Myeong/Undisclosed — 1 work
Cheong Myeong/Hyun Jong — 1 work
Cheong Myeong/Jin Hyeon — 1 work
Cheong Myeong/Jin Song — 1 work
Cheong Myeong/Tang Bo/Original Female Character — 1 work
Cheonma/Reader — 1 work
Cheonma/Yun Jong — 1 work
Courage (Courage the Cowardly Dog)/Yun Jong — 1 work
Jang Ilso/Original Female Character — 1 work
Jang Ilso/Rainbow Fish — 1 work
Jin Chobaek/Sama Seung — 1 work
Jin Hyeon/Tang Zhan — 1 work
Jo Geol/Original Character — 1 work
Jo Geol/Original Male Character — 1 work
Liu Qingge/Tang Bo — 1 work
Mu Yon/Yun Jong — 1 work
Namgung Dowi/Tang Pae — 1 work
Tang Bo/Everyone — 1 work
Tang Bo/Original Female Character — 1 work
Tang Bo/Tang Pae — 1 work
Tang Ho/Tang Hwa — 1 work
Tang Ho/Tang Pae — 1 work
Tang Ho/Tang Soso — 1 work
Tang Hwa/Tianlang-jun — 1 work
Tang Hwa/Tang Pae — 1 work
Tang Hwa/Tang Soso — 1 work
Tang Soso/Undisclosed — 1 work
Tang Soso/Tang Zhan — 1 work
Tianlang-jun/Yu Iseol — 1 work
Unpossessed Cho Sam/Jang Ilso — 1 work
Yun Jong/Original Character — 1 work
Ki Mokseung/Lee Songbaek — 0 works
Baek Oh/Other — 0 works
Cheong Myeong/Gojo Satoru — 0 works
Cheong Myeong/Jang Ilso/Tang Bo — 0 works
Ho Gamyung/Original Female Character — 0 works
Jo Geol/Lee Songbaek/Yun Jong — 0 works
In total, the relationships cover 61 various characters. Here are the characters which appear in the largest amount of ships:
Cheong Myeong — 48 ships
Tang Bo — 18 ships
Baek Cheon | Jin Dongryong — 13 ships
Reader — 10 ships
Yun Jong — 10 ships
Jo Geol — 9 ships
Jang Ilso — 8 ships
Tang Pae — 8 ships
Tang Soso — 8 ships
Lee Songbaek — 7 ships
Yu Iseol — 7 ships
Jin Geumryong — 6 ships
Original Character — 6 ships
Tang Zhan — 6 ships
Original Female Character — 5 ships
Average total AO3 stats
Inspired by various posts showcasing people's stats, I wanted to get a base average for user stats. If you wish to contribute, please fill in the following form!
This form intends to gather data in order to establish the baseline of what are the overall stats for the average AO3 writer. If you wish to
The data obtained will be fully anonymous and only used as a part of a whole dataset. If you know someone who would be interested in filling it in, feel free to share it around! Thank you <3
i've gotten a decent amount of responses, so i'm going to start crunching the numbers soon; last chance to have your stats included!

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in the face of some comments on the latest survey post, i'd just like to say: yes, your statistics page DOES count private bookmarks. that's the whole point why i ask for the data from your statistics page, which ONLY YOU, THE AUTHOR has access to.
also, works you've put on anon are also counted in your stats tab; works you've orphaned/deleted aren't
i feel like some people either have a misinformed idea of how the statistics page work, or are thinking of something else entirely 😔
Average total AO3 stats
Inspired by various posts showcasing people's stats, I wanted to get a base average for user stats. If you wish to contribute, please fill in the following form!
This form intends to gather data in order to establish the baseline of what are the overall stats for the average AO3 writer. If you wish to
The data obtained will be fully anonymous and only used as a part of a whole dataset. If you know someone who would be interested in filling it in, feel free to share it around! Thank you <3
still cleaning up the data for what i actually gathered it for, but it looks like october this year had the most fics posted on ao3 in any given month BY FAR
(also it's pretty funny how you can see when october hits practically every year xD)
A claim I often see sensible people make is that AO3 is not representative of fandom as a whole. And I agree with this! I think that fandom encompasses a lot of different groups and AO3 is merely one segment of a much broader spectrum of fannish activity. Lots of fandom activity doesn't revolve around fanfiction at all, and even in the segments of fandom where it does, not all fanfiction is on AO3. People like to generalize about fandom based on AO3, partly because it's what they are personally most familiar with, and partly because AO3 makes it very easy to see stats, while other sites often obscure that information or don't make it available at all. If you see a claim that "fandom always prefers M/M ships" for instance, that's a claim based on someone looking at AO3 and no further, and it's therefore an inaccurate (or at the very least, unproven) claim.
So, I have no desire to push back against the notion that AO3 isn't representative of all of fandom. I think that it's correct! But it often goes hand-in-hand with another claim that I do want to question. That is the claim that not only is AO3 not representative of fandom more broadly, but that it is in fact the smallest of the 'big 3' fanfic sites (the other two being fanfiction.net and wattpad).
This used to be true! But I don't think it's true anymore. I think in terms of number of posted works, it probably falls in between the two, and in terms of traffic, it's probably the biggest.
Now, I will say up front that I have absolutely no way to determine how many of wattpad's works are fanfiction. I have no REAL way to determine how many works there are on wattpad at all, because they don't make this information available anywhere that I can find. Googling for 'how many stories are there on wattpad' gets claims of 665 million works. It might be true, I have no way to prove or disprove it. It sounds like a lot to me, but who knows. (For instance, it actually says '665 million uploads' but how many of those are later deleted?) But even if that number is accurate for the site, a lot of what is on wattpad is original fiction. So trying to guess how much of that alleged total is fanfic is pretty impossible. If someone has an idea, feel free to try it and see how that goes, and let me know!
But fanfiction.net, while it doesn't make it easy to get overall numbers for the entire site, does at least provide numbers for works per category, like this:
These numbers are, to be clear, inaccurate. If you click through to the fandom, you will see a much lower number - sometimes as low as half the displayed number on the category page. For instance, if you open the Supernatural page, there are 96.2K stories listed, not 127K. You might say, ah, but Nary, fanfic.net also includes crossovers separately from the other fics in a fandom, and maybe those totals include the crossovers! They might, but the numbers still don't add up even when crossovers are included (I spot checked this across several fandoms to be sure). I can only assume that the 127K number is something like 'all Supernatural works ever posted, including ones that later got deleted'. It certainly doesn't represent the current actual total of works available in that fandom.
So to get somewhat more accurate numbers, you have to look at each fandom's individual page. Today (November 16, 2025) I did this for the top 100 fandoms in each category (Anime/Manga, Books, Cartoons, Comics, Games, Misc, Movies, Plays, TV) with the following exceptions: in Comics, Plays, and Misc there weren't 100 fandoms to go through, or before I got to 100 I was down into very small numbers of works, like double digits. In those cases, I stopped before reaching 100 fandoms because I didn't feel like counting up a lot of fandoms with ~50 works. In TV, conversely, there was a longer tail of fandoms with ~2000 or so works, so I kept going up to 150 fandoms to capture most of those.
I added up the totals for each set of top fandoms, and then the totals across the board. I got 5,553,596 works.
This is certainly leaving out a lot of works - a ton of fandoms that have triple digit or lower counts of works wouldn't have been counted by this method. I'm not claiming this is the accurate total of works on ff.net - just that this method covers the big fandoms there.
AO3, as of today (November 16, 2025), has 16,260,000 works. I do believe this is a relatively accurate number reflecting works currently actually available on the site (obviously it's rounded but other than that).
I think there's no way that fanfiction.net has 10 million more works that I didn't count using my quick and dirty method. I think that sometime in the last several years, AO3 passed it in terms of number of works on the site. Again, I can't compare it to wattpad, but that would put AO3 at least in the middle of the three sites, not at the bottom.
And then there's traffic, which is another measure of what people can mean when they talk about 'how big' a site is. And here, I think it can be shown that AO3 is far in the lead of the other two. This data was taken from similarweb, a service that compares website traffic (and other things, but traffic is what I'm interested in here).
This is a comparison with what similarweb thinks are the websites most like AO3 - it correctly figures it's closest to fanfiction.net and wattpad.com (and tvtropes which is interesting, if not really relevant here). The traffic to each site over the last 3 months (August 2025-October 2025) shows AO3 with over 2x the traffic of wattpad, and 7x the traffic of fanfiction.net.
Wattpad still has more unique visitors, according to the further breakdown of info similarweb provides on engagement.
AO3 has nearly double Wattpad's page views, however, and nearly 10x as many page views as fanfiction.net.
I don't know how really useful this is, but I wanted to share it so that people who like to think about fandom stats can take it under consideration (or tell me I'm wrong if they see a mistake I made!) and so that more generally, we can consider reframing our view of AO3's relative size and popularity compared to other big fanfic sites, so (especially those of us who have been around AO3 for a comparatively long time) aren't still operating under our impressions of what things were like 5-10 years ago.
Hope you enjoyed, let me know if this is helpful at all, or if you can think of things I overlooked!
We see from our metrics that we do about 3.3 billion page views a month. With Sunday's hitting about 120million page views a day.
Thanks, both of you, for these really interesting numbers! <3
@naryrising I concur about Fanfiction.net vs. AO3. There's a Fanfiction.net search hack that I think (but have not verified) probably returns most of the results on the site. Using this hack, I'm currently getting nearly 8.2M results for Fanfiction.net, which is just over half the size of AO3. It could also be an overestimate; I don't know whether some deleted works are still being counted in that total. But between this and the numbers you gave above by surveying the biggest fandoms, I would agree that it seems quite likely that AO3 is bigger than fanfiction.net.
And according to a search I just did on their site, Wattpad.com has a total of 704 Fanfiction stories:
😂😂😂🤦🤦🤦 Wattpad's native search is worse than useless!
I tried to estimate the size of Wattpad, FFN, and AO3 back in 2018 based on sampling a bunch fanworks and extrapolating. A few highlights:
The numbers Wattpad gives publicly about number of uploads are almost certainly number of chapters, not number of stories (and chapters on that platform tend to be quite short and numerous).
In Nov 2018, I estimated that Wattpad might have around 8M fanfics and seeemed to be growing fast. I thought at that time it was probably bigger than and growing faster than both other sites. (It also had a bigger spam problem, though.) I had to do a lot of guessing, so my confidence was relatively low.
In Nov 2018, I estimated 7.7M for Fanfiction.net -- which would mean it hasn't grown much since then; that's consistent with the trends at the time that showed it slowing down a lot.
Based on the sizes and growth trends I saw then, I would not be at all surprised if Wattpad (still) has more fanfic than AO3. But I also don't think the number of stories is anywhere close to those huge numbers of uploads that they've officially given. But also, their search basically doesn't work at all, so there's a lot of guesswork.
Re traffic, I do wonder whether SEO tools more substantially underestimate Wattpad traffic than AO3 traffic because Wattpad has an app. (I assume a lot of AO3 visitors also go directly to AO3 rather than clicking through from search results, but if you're in an app there's not even a chance that you'll accidentally search for "wattpad" rather than going to the site directly.) But even if Wattpad traffic is probably more underestimated, AO3 gets 3.3B pageviews/month of actual traffic, which is enormous!
So I think your overall point stands. regardless of the size of Wattpad: AO3 is hardly the scrappy underdog among the biggest fanfic sites, these days! :)
I also really appreciated your thoughtful intro about all the people saying that AO3 is not representative of all of fandom, as someone who makes such statements. :) I started making caveats about my own analyses when AO3 was much tinier, when it was obvious that it was a tiny subset of fannish activity. I still think it's probably true that there's a huge amount of variation between fannish activity the various platforms (both for the reasons you mentioned, and based on my own experience -- I haven't done any big comparisons since 2019, but I always saw large differences when I compared platforms). There's also a huge amount of variation in fannish experiences between different fandoms and sometimes between different ships. It's worth remembering that when doing any analysis, and being very cautious about overgeneralizing. But it's also worth noting when drawing data from AO3 that AO3 does capture a very large amount of fanfic-related fandom attention these days, and we shouldn't dismiss it as just a weird outlier!
Anyway, thanks for the data dive & thoughtful writeup!
Fastest Growing Fandoms on AO3 This Week (09/16/2025)
Every week I pull data on how many fics are in each fandom and compare to the previous week, then calculate the percentage increase to determine fastest growing fandoms. Since this naturally skews towards smaller fandoms, I have included the same data filtered to Over 1k, 5k, & 10k fics.
Overall:
Over 1,000 Fics:
Over 5,000 Fics:
Over 10,000 Fics:
Source: AO3 Fandom Dashboard

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I am obviously about to comment on it but just saw a wenclair fic @safics-with-0-comments spreadsheet with 251 kudos and not single comment and that's genuinely insane. Sorry it is.
And exactly what all of us have been going on about.
Yup!!! Leave comments, please!
ive seen fics with as many as 350 kudos with no comments. pre-2020 too, so you cant even use the "covid ruined fandom" excuse
interesting thing with high-kudosed commentless fics is that some have comments disabled! there's no easy way to tell before clicking on the fic, but when sorting commentless fics by kudoes, you have to go down to the 36th one before you find the first one you even could comment on (and even that one is moderated)
i've done some random sampling and it seems that the vast majority of commentless fics above 600 kudos either doesn't allow comments or moderates them (so they won't show up until the author approves them). In other words - it was only around page 30 of results where regular commenting started being more common
it's not really an issue and nothing can be done about it, but it definitely startled me the first time i saw works with thousands of kudos and no comments on them 😂
Poor Little Meow Meow: Who Are The Sad Wet Cats of AO3
There are twenty characters with canonized tags declaring them "Sad Wet Cats"; Here's the list in descending order of usage!
Pomni Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 136 works)
Dream of the Endless Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 70 works)
Ángel Missael Castañeda Vega Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 70 works)
Wilbur Soot Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 53 works)
Bruce Wayne Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 37 works)
Wang Yixiang | Nicholas Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 35 works)
Technoblade Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 35 works)
Aoyagi Touya Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 31 works)
Alhaitham Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 17 works)
Yoisaki Kanade Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 14 works)
Clorinde Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 9 works)
Kamishiro Rui Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 8 works)
Neuvillette Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 8 works)
Shinonome Akito Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 8 works)
Branzy Acts Like A Sad Wet Cat: ( 7 works)
EthosLab Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 6 works)
Celine Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 4 works)
Solas Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 4 works)
Tim Drake Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat: ( 4 works)
TommyInnit Acts Like A Sad Wet Cat: ( 3 works)
Sifting Through The Tags (1)
AO3 tags bring forth a wealth of enjoyment (which blogs like @ao3screenshots @ao3screenshotss and @dear-ao3 certainly show) so I've decided to have a look through the last-canonized freeforms to see what's hiding in there!
These are by no means all recently canonized tags, merely those I found in some way entertaining
Steve Rogers Never Becomes Captain America (7 works) - it's interesting how it took until now to get it canonized, despite the oldest work being dated at 2015!
Bad Parent Van Hohenheim (12 works) and Parent Van Hohenheim (17 works)
Don't Forget 03 Oct 11 (52 works) - I find it a bit ironic that it had been canonized sometime in September
No Spoilers for Game: Hollow Knight: Silksong (6 works) - A very vital tag to have /genuine
Pianist Uchiha Sasuke (4 works) - no notes
H. P. Lovecraft Is Rolling In Their Grave (10 works) and I'm Not Sorry H. P. Lovecraft (4 works)
A couple dozen tags earlier, the tag I'm Sorry H. P. Lovecraft (5 works) has also been canonized
Celine Acts Like a Sad Wet Cat (4 works) [😂 there are currently 20 such tags canonized with various characters and i will be making a post listing them all right after this one]
The Honmoon Ships It (6 works)
Inappropriate Use of the Honmoon (12 works)
Chicken Or The Egg? - This Is How It Started
(this is mostly caused because i misclicked when sorting some tags and i decided to go down this rabbit hole 🥰)
The Oldest Works
AO3 has been created in October 2008 and entered open beta in November 2009 - so then, why are some works dated as being older than that? The reason is that AO3 is, as the name says, an archive, which allows users to backdate their works. That would make finding out the oldest works difficult - if it weren't for the fact that each work is numbered in the url, in ascending order.
The oldest work, which would have had the number 1 is unavailable - likely due to being deleted or the number having been used up for a test - but we do have the others!
(2) All You Had to Do Was Ask by Élizabeth (watersword) Fandoms: Dead Poet's Society (1989) 13 Sep 2008
(3) Analysis of the Obvious by Élizabeth (watersword) Fandoms: Lord of the Rings RPF 13 Sep 2008
(5) Dense Like Chocolate Cake by Ice is Blue (ice_is_blue) Fandoms: Yami No Matsuei 13 Sep 2008
(6) Dedication by Ice is Blue (ice_is_blue) Fandoms: Gravitation (Anime) 13 Sep 2008
(7) Dedication by Ice is Blue (ice_is_blue) Fandoms: Gravitation (Anime) 13 Sep 2008
(8) His Place In the Universe by Ice is Blue (ice_is_blue) Fandoms: Avatar: The Last Airbender 13 Sep 2008
(9) Life With Terrans (Five Things Ronon Notices) by Kass Fandoms: Stargate Atlantis 13 Sep 2008
(11) Are You Happy Now? by Kass Fandoms: Stargate Atlantis 13 Sep 2008
(13) An Ordinary Grown-Up Lady by Élizabeth (watersword) Fandoms: Chronicles of Narnia 13 Sep 2008
(15) Written by the Victors by Speranza Fandoms: Stargate Atlantis 05 Sep 2007 <(backdated work)
(16) Proximity by astolat Fandoms: American Idol RPF (Season 7) 13 Sep 2008
(17) Decline and Fall by orphan_account <(oldest orphaned work) Fandoms: Harry Potter - Rowling 13 Sep 2008
The Oldest Tags
According to the tag search feature, the tags canonized first were, in this order, the Media tags (categories like "TV Shows", "Movies" etc, to which all fandoms belong), Ratings, Archive Warnings, and Categories (interestingly, those consisted only of Gen, F/M, M/M and Other at the time; F/F had been added on later, when "Closer" (23) by zvi needed to use it)
The first "regular" tags (as in: belonging to the four main categories) canonized had been:
Character: Sam Winchester
Character: Dean Winchester
Character: John Winchester
Relationship: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Relationship: Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester
Character: Sean Bean
Character: Viggo Mortensen
Character: Orlando Bloom
Freeform: Romance
Freeform: Drama
Freeform: Humor
Freeform: Pre-Slash
Character: Ronon Dex
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Relationship: Ronon Dex/Jennifer Keller
Freeform: Complete
Character: Rodney McKay
Character: John Sheppard
Character: Susan Pevensie
Character: David Archuleta
Character: David Cook
Fandom: American Idol RPF
Character: Harry
Freeform: Hogwarts
Relationship: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
fanfic loves to follow current events, especially ones where certain leftists on tumblr have very strong opinions about them. as the saying goes, "the devil works fast but ao3 writers work faster."
in the days following the unitedhealthcare ceo shooting, dozens of fics popped up, the vast majority of which were explicit shooter x reader or shooter x self-insert OC. in contrast, following the shooting of charlie kirk, fics also popped up rapidly, but these were much more focused on crossover characters shooting kirk or even works that were not really fanfic but simply clowning on kirk's death.
given that this contrast can be seen even before the release of images of the respective shooters, it speaks to a deeper difference in the way the shootings were glorified: the unitedhealthcare shooting was portrayed as an act of resistance against a corrupt system, thus putting the focus on the shooter, while the kirk shooting was portrayed as an act of political violence justified only by sheer hatred against the subject, thus putting the focus on the shot.
in this essay i will-

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the devil works fast but ao3 writers work faster.
the work in question is the blood on your hands is shared with mine by Anonymous!
Additionally, the following freeforms had since been canonized:
Charlie Kirk Dies - 6 works
Charlie Kirk Shooting - 10 works
There has been a number of characters put forward as the doers of the deed in the tags: Jason Todd (2), Sangihun (1), Light Yagami (1), Jay Ferin (1), Wednesday (1), Inhun (1), Dick Grayson (1), Mike Wheeler (1), and Natalie Scattorcio (1), with more used for fics but not tagged
Out of the 118 works in the Charlie Kirk character tag, only fifteen had been posted prior to the assassination (103 posted since September 10th, 2025)
Curious abt my story now aren't ya.
-Candy anon (hi chat, I'm traversing blogs now XD)
very much so! 👀
hi there 👋 welcome to my little slice of ✨ ao3 statistics ✨ 🥰
as a fun fact: the tag "Candy" is used on 4,361 fics! 🍬 Most commonly in the Supernatural fandom (352 uses, 8% of total uses), with the runner-ups being Harry Potter (171), Marvel Cinematic Universe (150), Original Work (141), Teen Wolf (141), and The Avengers (103)