Maximum number of self-created fanworks for an unpopular fandom/ship

[g_uava]

What's the upper limit of fanworks you've created as a self-sustaining fan? That means relying on yourself primarily to sustain your own interest to complete your creative projects since your fandom/ship/favourite is so obscure that feedback and other fanworks to inspire you are hard to come by.

Also, would you have wished to have created more for the same unpopular fandom/ship, even if there remains few others who are just as invested?


The most I've created is around 30,000 words of fics and fewer than 10 non-writing fanworks (icons, gifsets, fanvideos) for a rare pair from an old fandom. It's so rare that there were (and still are) no other English language fanworks for the ship aside from what I've created.

I'm satisfied with what I've created and am glad to move on to another canon that involved tackling a new challenge in my fanworks. But if I were to write for the ship again, I'd more deliberately include a larger variety of fun fanfic tropes in my fics.

Comments

[bluedreaming]

This is a fun question!

My fandom is probably Goth (2008)/GOTH (Manga)/ゴス - 乙一 | GOTH - Otsuichi. I’ve only created eight works or so, but it’s a tiny fandom and I continue to dip back into it, so it’s more about the self-sustained motivation 🎉

It's a little confusing across the three media tags with cross-tagging, but:
- if you're looking at the movie tag, there are 15 works, of which six are by me, four were created for me (based on my works), two are ficlets in an anthology-chaptered work, and two are in Chinese (they’re pretty long though, about 20k each! I will get around to reading them one of these days!)
- The book tag adds another work that was written as a gift for me ♡ ♡ ♡
- The manga tag adds one other flashfic.

And that's it! Seventeen works across the three media tags on ao3, and I have another drabble & podfic pair or so that I never got around to getting on ao3, so 19 total that I know of. I do feel, though, that the fact that five of the works being directly related to me means that I’m responsible for 13 of the 19 works. (Though I did write one of them as a gift for someone else.)

I like to dabble in some other small fandoms (I'm currently kind of creating an umbrella fandom of a couple of spooky-adjacent picture books) but GOTH is kind of the one that I keep coming back to.

Edit: honestly, I think most of my experience with creating fanworks is self-sustaining, especially now that I don’t do as many events anymore. It’s nice!

[g_uava]

'I’m responsible for 13 of the 19 works' -- Awesome, from posting in multiple tags related to the canon, it's like you're everywhere in the fandom! When you come back to it, do you create fanworks from pre-existing ideas you haven't got around to working on or do you come up with fanwork ideas for the canon as time goes by?

[bluedreaming]

it's like you're everywhere in the fandom
Hopefully people who stumble across it don't find me annoying!

To be fair, some of them are podfics of previous stories I'd written, so as fair as unique narratives there are fewer fanworks (alas). I do often come to GOTH as a fandom for drabbles, ficlets, and writing games, so those just usually pop up, though I have one wip for intoabar and a percolating crossover for GOTH & Hyouka so it's probably a case of both! (Pre-existing ideas and coming up with new ones.)

In many ways, it's nice to have a little fandom like that.