AO3 is entering a new era

Counting fics, as Destiel fans will tell you, is serious business these days. 

At the beginning of 2025, AO3 users were eager to see the list of the top 100 most popular ships of 2024. Who would come out on top? Would Buck/Eddie reign above Aziraphale/Crowley? Where would the year’s new hot ships from shows like Hazbin Hotel and Arcane end up? But when the list was released, some fans immediately took offense at the placement of certain ships. For Supernatural fans, longtime standby Destiel (Dean/Castiel) ending up lower than expected was a shock. 

“i dont believe this one bit u mean to tell me sam & dean gen was posted more than destiel….” one user responded. Outraged fans investigated and found out that the statistics were, by some measures, inaccurate — Destiel had gained over 6,000 new fics that year, and when calculated by another means, was in 11th place overall. Phew!

Of course, ship wars within fandoms are as old as fandom itself — just ask a veteran of the Ray Wars. Back in the era of individual fansites, forums, and media-specific archives, there was no way for any group of fans to know how much bigger or more popular they were than any other given group. But the centralization of fandom on social media platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and, in particular, AO3 over the last decade and change has led to an increased awareness of fandom as a competitive and often conflict-ridden landscape. One fandom influences another, positively or negatively; tropes like Omegaverse and hanahaki catch on like wildfire; a new TV show experiences an influx of migratory fans from one that just ended, bringing their preferences and past drama with them.

While AO3 doesn’t encompass the entirety of fandom, it does represent a large chunk of today’s most dedicated (and literary-minded) fans. Its ascendancy has been recognized in its importance to the romance and sci-fi publishing industry, which increasingly relies on a pipeline of fanfic writers to fill the shelves with trope-filled bestsellers. AO3 statistics are a window into the wider world of fandom as new generations enter and expand its horizons, shifting focus away from previous dominant juggernauts like Destiel and toward a more diverse fandom landscape — and some fans might have to learn how to live with not being top dog anymore.  

When Lulu, aka centreoftheselights, compiled the original top 100 list like she does twice a year, she didn’t expect there to be such a big to-do over her methodology. As usual, she had taken into account the fact that many hundreds of Destiel fics were deleted, made private, or locked to non-users, which exempted them from her count, and made Destiel fall in her rankings. 

“This [issue] basically affects fandoms in proportion to how many old fics they have,” she explained. “Big older pairings tend to be lower on my [list] than they would be if I only counted how many new fics any given pairing has.”

One thing that fans have always loved to do, other than talk about their favorite media and characters, is to talk about fandom itself. Fandom statistics present an excellent opportunity for endless discussion, argument, and analysis. 

For anyone interested in analyzing AO3’s abundance of fanfiction, statistics have to be collected laboriously — AO3, technically an invite-only beta release, does not have an open API allowing easy access to platform data. Instead, individual users have to either manually check each ship tag for numbers, or set up a scraper program on a local server that works slowly through the same data. 

Although they are not officially released by AO3 or its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works, these kinds of unofficial statistics are regularly compiled and released by independent AO3 users who are interested in looking at trends in popularity for ships, characters, categories, and tropes on the platform. This group of dedicated fandom statisticians include Lulu and her compatriot Destination Toast, who runs Toastystats and releases regular comprehensive surveys of AO3, including more discrete categories such as “Fast-growing relationship tags with 5K+ works” and “Alternate Universe fanworks: which AO3 fandoms have a lot?”

Toast began collecting statistics while active in the fandom for BBC’s Sherlock, which was hugely popular on AO3 in the early 2010s. Why were there so many AUs? Which ships were the most popular, and which tropes? “I shared some of what I was seeing, and people were interested and had follow-up questions,” they said. “And so I was just satisfying other people’s curiosity.”

Lulu began analyzing and sharing AO3 statistics in 2013. The first year, she compiled them manually, but since then has written her own program to scrape the data, although she still spends time entering them into a spreadsheet and categorizing each ship by relationship type and race of characters. 

These latter details are of particular interest, because in many ways they reflect the changing mores of fandom. Lulu and Toast have been looking at AO3 statistics for over half of the platform’s lifetime, and have seen trends come and go. “The number of fics we’re talking about has gone up by an order of magnitude,” Lulu said. When Lulu began collecting statistics in 2013, the cutoff to crack the top 50 ships on AO3 was a mere 700 stories. Now it’s around 11,000. 

“The [origin] story of AO3 was very much trying to be a home for things that had gotten kicked out of other places,” Toast says. Which is true: The Archive of Our Own began as a project by prominent slash fans on LiveJournal, who were outraged at Fanfiction.net’s and LJ’s increasing tendencies toward censorship of explicit and queer fan content. 

One of those fans was Naomi Novik, who accepted the Hugo Award for AO3 in 2019. Borrowing from Virginia Woolf’s classic feminist text, her post “An Archive of One’s Own,” published in May 2007 under the fan pen name astolat, was a rallying cry for fans to create a fanwork website that was not subject to commercial whims of corporate owners. The goal was to be completely fan-run and fan-owned. 

This was a watershed moment for fans. Throughout the 2000s, fans had been struggling with how vulnerable fanworks were to takedowns and deletions — often for spurious reasons — that they were helpless to fight back against. But with the launch of AO3, fans had the freedom to post exactly what they wanted to without fear of losing their work. Naturally, given the preference for M/M slash ships and Western television, film, and books among AO3’s founders and their wider social circle (the first group of users on the platform), those types of fanworks were, and to some extent still are, the most represented. 

But since its founding, users outside AO3’s original audience have flocked en masse to the platform seeking that same security, stability, and ease of use. What began as a small and unlikely indie upstart, a David against Fanfiction.net’s Goliath, has now become a juggernaut in its own right, with 8 million registered users and a billion visits per month, according to Semrush data. That makes AO3 the 38th most popular website in the world, and the 18th most popular in the U.S. 

AO3 statisticians like Lulu and Toast have had a bird’s-eye view of the changes that have accompanied this growth.  

Lulu highlights the influx of anime, manga, animation, video game, and international music fans onto the platform beginning around 2015. “[Anime] fandoms were followed by the K-pop fandoms, Bangtan Boys [BTS] dominated the list for a couple of years,” Lulu remembers. “Then there was the Minecraft YouTubers. DreamSMP took over for all of 2020 and 2021.”

According to a set of statistics Toast compiled in 2019, Fanfiction.net (FFN) was the home of anime fandom through the 2000s and still hosts far more anime fic in total than AO3, especially for old favorites like Naruto and Hetalia. But anime series that premiered after 2010, when AO3 opened to the public, are just as popular or even more popular on AO3 than FFN.

With so many separate fandom subcultures gathered together under the same umbrella, AO3 has become a major bellwether for changes in pop culture at large. Statistics can provide insight into what new media is having the most impact with fans, and the reaction to those statistics on social media is likewise a sign of how the way that fandom sees itself has shifted. 

In addition to the growth of anime and game fandoms, another major change is the increase in F/F, or femslash shipping. While AO3 continues to be a bastion of M/M, far more than Wattpad or FFN, Toast’s data shows that the percentage of fic on AO3 tagged with femslash ships has risen from 5% to 15% since 2010. 

This is a change that many users have long been clamoring for, especially as the proportion of AO3 users that identify as queer women has grown. “Also, this partly represents [that] there’s more media out there that is more female-centric that is getting more attention,” Toast explains, with very recent fandoms for shows like Yellowjackets and A League of Their Own being highly represented. Those shows, while not necessarily critical or commercial successes, are finding devoted audiences among fans and fic writers, showing that there is a desire for F/F-centric shows in fandom that has only grown with the rise of media to meet that desire. The more franchises emerge that provide strong female characters for fans to ship, the more fans will ship them — seems like a no-brainer, right? 

Although Lulu points out that she’s still never had more than 10 femslash ships in her top 100, the amount of F/F is slowly but steadily growing, as are the number of fics for queer and gender-diverse characters. “I’ve seen a bunch of trans character [tags] and asexuality and aromanticism and [ones for] various flavors of queerness evolve over the course of AO3’s existence,” says Toast. “The conversation that we’re having about the labels that people use has evolved a lot.”

While Toast has been looking at changes in how characters’ gender and sexuality is described on AO3, Lulu has made it a point in her biannual lists to highlight the lack of racial diversity in the top 100 ships year after year. While there has been a large increase in the number of ships involving POC, she says, that’s mainly due to the increase in popularity of East Asian franchises, including shows like The Untamed and games like Genshin Impact. Unfortunately, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous characters are still few and far between on the top 100 list each year (although the top ship of 2024, Buck/Eddie from 9-1-1, includes a Latino character). 

This isn’t really unexpected — in the same way that AO3 has historically suffered from a lack of gender diversity in its top fandoms, the lack of diverse racial representation that Lulu makes visible in her color-coded list has long been an issue. Grassroots protests such as the End OTW Racism campaign have attempted to address concerns about how AO3’s parent organization deals with racial issues on the platform, including harassment toward users of color, but change has been slow in coming. 

But fandom statistics also show the ways that fandom is changing that nobody would have predicted. The threat of generative AI scraping and using AO3-hosted fics led to a spate of users locking down or deleting works, with fans frustrated at OTW’s seeming equivocation on AI issues by refusing to outright ban AI-generated works from the platform — this is the fluctuation that led to Destiel’s drop Lulu’s rankings, as older fans who had been writing in classic fandoms like Supernatural for years were more likely to fear the encroach of AI. 

Another of the most unexpected changes over the last decade has been the reversal of fortune of the Harry Potter franchise in fandom spaces. Like most classic mega-fandoms, it had reached a peak and was on a slow trajectory downward as people migrated to new fandoms — at least until around 2018, when it suddenly rocketed back to popularity. 

“Lots of people my age are like, ‘Harry Potter fandom died, didn’t it?’ No. Gen Z have found it, and it’s on TikTok,” said Lulu. The enormous and enduring popularity of the Marauders sub-fandom, which centers on Harry Potter’s parents and their friends at Hogwarts during the 1970s, was fueled by TikTok enthusiasm, in part for a lengthy fic centering on those characters called “All the Young Dudes.” 

Marauders ships in the top 100 at the top of 2025, according to Lulu’s analysis, include the juggernaut Remus Lupin/Sirius Black, which has some basis in canon, but it also includes totally fan-invented pairings and characters like “Jegulus,” aka James Potter/Regulus Black, and Marlene McKinnon/Dorcas Meadowes.

One important contribution that AO3 has made to the fandom landscape, other than being an impressively stable and long-lived pillar of preservation, is the spread of fanfiction as a tool to be used by anyone, for any media. Though fanfiction as we know it started out as the preserve of passionate Star Trek fans in the late 1960s and early 1970s, taking literary and publishing techniques they had learned from the existing science fiction community and applying it to television, fanfiction in the 21st century is a much bigger tent. Fic can be by anyone, about anything, and be just as welcome on AO3 as Destiel or Remus/Sirius. 

Based on Toast’s analyses, stories have gotten longer on average since 2014, and the number of fandoms that people are writing stories for has exploded. But of the 58,000 fandoms on AO3, over half have under 10 fics, and meanwhile a tiny 2.5% of fandoms have over 1,000, according to Toast. So while the few hundred most popular fandoms still make up the majority of fic on the site, and populate Lulu’s top ships list each year, one thing that AO3 has done to change fandom — as reflected in the statistics — is provide a platform for fanfiction not just about TV, films, and books, but about anything a fan’s mind can imagine. 

Original works, written in a fanfiction-esque style, are incredibly popular on AO3, and Toast and Lulu’s statistics both reflect the rise in popularity of Video Blogging RPF, the parent tag for popular Minecraft streamers and other YouTube personalities. DreamSMP is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to YouTube and Twitch fanfiction, which runs the gamut from the ultra-popular “Heat Waves” fic (which used to crash AO3 when it was updated) to thousands of fics for smaller and more obscure personalities. 

Toast points out that Minecraft-related fandoms have a much higher proportion of gen fic, or fic that doesn’t involve shipping. Instead, these fics focus on platonic relationships, many falling under friendship or found family tropes. Does this mean that shipping is on its way out? Not necessarily, but it does show that today’s young fans have tastes and techniques that are diverging from the origins of AO3’s founding population in fascinating ways — and it shows that AO3 as a platform is flexible enough to make these changes possible. 

The data collected by statistically minded fans is hugely helpful in visualizing the shifts brought about by successive fan generations. Fandom practices like fic and shipping come from a deeply emotional place, but by stepping back and looking at the numbers, fans can be brought down from heights of ecstasies (and anger) to look more critically at their own activity and the greater shifts. Some of the numbers may cause competitive contention between fan groups, and certainly shine a light on some of the deep-seated inequalities present in fanworks, but they are vital tools for fandom to be able to reflect on itself. 

That’s pretty important when it comes to stuff like shipping wars within individual fandoms, which can seem like the biggest deal ever when inside them. But by looking at statistics, fans can have a helpful reminder that they’re part of a larger whole — infinite diversity in infinite combinations, as one half of the original slash ship might put it. 

“Data can’t fully solve the whole conversation,” says Toast, “but I think it can enrich it.”