AO3′s Big Fandoms
I have a meta question I am investigating, and as part of that, I’ve been trying to determine what the big fandoms on AO3 are. I’m not ready with my meta, but I thought people would be interested in the list.
First, I looked at the fandoms by media type pages because they have an easily-accessible work count. (It’s not entirely accurate, but it will do for looking at broad questions.) Then I picked out everything with over 10,000 works. I sorted through those and made judgment calls on what counted as separate fandoms and what counted as a valid single fandom grouping. I also had to decide what media type to count sprawling metatags as, and I was looking for categories that might have meaningful analogs outside of AO3.
(For example, “Arthurian” looks big, but that’s just Merlin plus micro-fandoms, while “Stargate” looks big and that’s SG1 and SGA, which overlap and share characters but are treated as separate fandoms by fans much of the time. ‘Real person fiction’ is massive but not on my list because I don’t think it counts as a single fandom. ‘DCU’ isn’t that valid a grouping, but it doesn’t break down neatly into 10k+ fandoms, so I left it because I felt it was more misleading to omit all of its subfandoms, which include Smallville and Arrow, but also lots of non-live action stuff.)
This was all fairly arbitrary: there are a zillion 9k fandoms on AO3 that are obviously large and that I’ve left out, but it gave me a manageable set of fandoms to work with and I think provides a realistic snapshot of what’s going on on AO3 right now. The total came to 35, and not always the set I expected. (There’s much more anime and manga on this list than I would have assumed, for starters.)
The Biggest Fandoms on AO3 (more or less)