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[melannen]

I have decided to run a tournament! Because it's summer here and why not. I have made a list of the current most popular fandoms on AO3 and then I will post daily single-elimination polls until we have narrowed it down to one fandom! This is a chance to vote on which fandom should win against all the other fandoms, and argue about in the comments!

Today is going to be the qualifiers round. This is my full preliminary list of 100 fandoms, generated by a secret algorithm (me creatively abusing AO3 search). The fandoms here don't always exactly correspond to AO3 tags because I don't always agree with how AO3 divides up fandoms, and also when there are multiple fandoms in a connected universe or adapted from the same source, I've used the highest-level fandom I knew for them. Mostly because we could have done a whole tournament with *just* Marvel fandoms otherwise and who needs that. :P

The results of this poll + a couple of other factors will narrow down to the final list for the tournament and give me the seeds. So please vote! And please share the poll around so we can get lots of votes!

ETA: AAAHH The first one is supposed to be 9-1-1 and I can't edit the poll! Please vote like it's 9-1-1. I fixed that like five times! #@% excel.

ETA 2: I've had several questions about this so I just want to reiterate: the question here isn't do you know enough to have a valid opinion, it's do you know enough to have any opinion at all. Kneejerk, gossip-based, and/or poorly informed opinions welcome, as long as you have one.

Poll #27225 Fandom Brackets Qualifiers

This poll is closed.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 194

View Respondents

I know enough about this fandom to have an opinion about it.

View Answers

9-1-2001
16 (8.2%)

Ace Attorney
29 (14.9%)

Arthurian Mythology
80 (41.2%)

ATEEZ
7 (3.6%)

AtLA
94 (48.5%)

Bandom
25 (12.9%)

Bleach
19 (9.8%)

Boku no Hero Academia
22 (11.3%)

BTS
21 (10.8%)

Buffyverse
111 (57.2%)

Bungou Stray Dogs
5 (2.6%)

Criminal Minds
46 (23.7%)

Critical Role
29 (14.9%)

Dangan Ronpa
9 (4.6%)

DC Universes
66 (34.0%)

Detroit: Become Human
16 (8.2%)

Disney/Pixar Animation
85 (43.8%)

Doctor Who
125 (64.4%)

Dragon Age
41 (21.1%)

EXO
8 (4.1%)

Figure Skating RPF
17 (8.8%)

Final Fantasy
37 (19.1%)

Fire Emblem
15 (7.7%)

Five Nights at Freddy's
8 (4.1%)

Fullmetal Alchemist
46 (23.7%)

Game of Thrones
76 (39.2%)

Genshin Impact
6 (3.1%)

Glee
41 (21.1%)

Good Omens
124 (63.9%)

Gravity Falls
20 (10.3%)

Haikyuu!
12 (6.2%)

Hannibal
51 (26.3%)

Harry Potter
149 (76.8%)

Hetalia
21 (10.8%)

Homestuck
32 (16.5%)

Johnny's Entertainment
6 (3.1%)

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
10 (5.2%)

Jujutsu Kaisen
6 (3.1%)

Kingdom Hearts
19 (9.8%)

Kuroko no Basuke
6 (3.1%)

Law & Order
32 (16.5%)

League of Legends
9 (4.6%)

Legend of Zelda
33 (17.0%)

Les Miserables
63 (32.5%)

Lord of the Rings and Middle-Earth
116 (59.8%)

Marvel Universes
119 (61.3%)

Mass Effect
27 (13.9%)

MCYT
8 (4.1%)

MDZS
39 (20.1%)

Men's Football RPF
7 (3.6%)

Men's Hockey RPF
28 (14.4%)

Miraculous Ladybug
20 (10.3%)

MIRROR
0 (0.0%)

Naruto
25 (12.9%)

NCIS
42 (21.6%)

NCT
5 (2.6%)

Nijisanji
0 (0.0%)

No Fandom
35 (18.0%)

Once Upon A Time
37 (19.1%)

One Direction
12 (6.2%)

One Piece
8 (4.1%)

Original Work
53 (27.3%)

Our Flag Means Death
64 (33.0%)

Overwatch
10 (5.2%)

Percy Jackson
18 (9.3%)

Persona
11 (5.7%)

Phandom
7 (3.6%)

Pokemon
38 (19.6%)

Resident Evil
11 (5.7%)

Rooster Teeth
5 (2.6%)

RWBY
8 (4.1%)

Sanders Sides
2 (1.0%)

SEVENTEEN
5 (2.6%)

Shadowhunters
24 (12.4%)

She-Ra
50 (25.8%)

Sherlock Holmes
104 (53.6%)

Shingeki no Kojin
13 (6.7%)

Star Trek
137 (70.6%)

Star Wars
131 (67.5%)

Stargate
94 (48.5%)

Steven Universe
44 (22.7%)

Stranger Things
37 (19.1%)

Stray Kids
5 (2.6%)

Super-Vocal
2 (1.0%)

Supernatural
80 (41.2%)

Table Tennis RPF
0 (0.0%)

Teen Wolf
55 (28.4%)

The 100
21 (10.8%)

The Magnus Archives
30 (15.5%)

The Owl House
12 (6.2%)

The Vampire Diaries
16 (8.2%)

The Walking Dead
15 (7.7%)

The Witcher
66 (34.0%)

Tokyo Revengers
1 (0.5%)

Transformers
24 (12.4%)

Undertale
19 (9.8%)

Voltron
22 (11.3%)

Yu-Gi-Oh
16 (8.2%)

Yuri On Ice!
51 (26.3%)

something I will mention in comments
13 (6.7%)

Comments

[harpers_child]

It depends on which Dragon Age and which Final Fantasy. I can possibly borrow Final Fantasy information from the SU. All of my info on Game of Thrones comes through fannish osmosis and a handful of fic.

[melannen]

I know clumping them together will make some of these tough, but the idea is to vote on the fandom not especially the canon, so if 90% of the fandom is about one part and you have an opinion on that, it's probably good enough. This is not meant to get a fair or reasonable or unbiased or well-informed result in any way...

But it's up to you what you think is enough information to have an opinion! I wavered on Final Fantasy because I did watch one of the movies and have read... some fic and known enough people who are into it to have absorbed some of their opinions. Dragon Age all I know is that there may or may not be dragons in it after all.

[mecurtin]

I am including fandoms that I know about only from watching my kids play the games & listening to them talk about (& write) fic.

[melannen]

That seems valid. I mean, if you could look at it on a list of fandoms and feel like, that fandom is better (or worse) than some other fandom, you know enough to have an opinion!

[shadaras]

I love that "No Fandom" and "Original Work" are choices here! :D I'm excited to see how this goes.

[melannen]

I am not really sure what No Fandom is going to do there, but Original Work definitely deserved a spot!

[mecurtin]

The fandom I will mention in comments: Yuletide.

[melannen]

You're absolutely right, that belongs on this list. I knew there was something I forgot because it didn't have a fandom tag!

[starwatcher]

Also:
The Old Guard
The Sentinel

[melannen]

I was honestly surprised the Old Guard didn't make it, but it seems to be firmly midlist rather than 'most popular'. Actually unless I missed something I don't think there are any movie fandoms on this list, except for ones that are part of really large universes! I guess they don't have the staying power these days?

None of the pre-LJ fandoms made it on the list. I was using AO3 numbers and most of them just don't rate using AO3 numbers, even the ones that have big-for-the-time archives moved over.

[china_shop]

Ha, not one of my three primary fandoms (historically speaking) are here. (How is Due South not?)

[melannen]

It's well pre-AO3 and a lot of the smalltime fics didn't move over, I think. (Also, pre-AO3 and post-AO3 fandoms just don't scale.)

I think most of your fandoms are solidly in the ~10000 fics midlist. Which is a lot! But doesn't get them in top 1000. (There are many fandoms at ~10000. Maybe someone should do a Minor Leagues tournament. :P)

[slashmarks]

Also (for varying definitions of "a fandom that exists," but all of these get semi-regular discussion and/or fan work by people who aren't me):
Imperial Radch
Dragonriders of Pern
The Old Guard
Benjamin January Mysteries
The Locked Tomb
Greek Mythology/Religion and Lore
Kushiel's Legacy
Yellowjackets

[melannen]

All great fandoms but none of them make it into the top 100 cutoff by overall AO3 popularity. Some of them can definitely file under "yuletide" which I think is going on, per the suggestion above.

[primeideal]

Table Tennis RPF is among the top 100 fandoms? Like I knew about hockey and football, but this surprises me, huh.

Is it dominated by one OTP or lots of different ships? Teammate-shipping? Rival-shipping? Non-English fanworks? I would have no idea where to even begin osmosing Ao3 table tennis fandom!!

[melannen]

I combined several lists to get this one, and one of them was stuff that has been popular specifically in 2022, so Table Tennis isn't top of the list all time but it's very high for past six months. Unfortunately it's all in Chinese and I know at most a dozen characters, so, I got nothin'. All I can guess was there was some kind of upheaval in Chinese-language Table Tennis fandom relatively recently.

[cofax7]

Farscape!

[melannen]

Hate to tell you this, but Farscape qualifies for Yuletide based on its AO3 presence!

[sheliak]

X-Men!

... but file that under Marvel, I guess. Even if it does often veer off in its own direction, officially or not...

(And I have opinions on Warhammer fandom but the version of the fandom I have opinions about is, ah, much smaller than the fandom at large.)

[melannen]

Yeah, Marvel is covering a multitude of sins there. (if the final ends up Marvel v. DC I will be so mad.)

[graveexcitement]

Hamilton (the musical)? It's got 19k works on AO3. My next biggest that I don't see here would be The Umbrella Academy (Netflix show), but that's only 14k.

[melannen]

The cutoff for getting in solely on numbers was just over 20k, I believe. Some smaller ones got in based on other things (I also looked at things like top kudos and recent activity, but Hamilton didn't make it on those either.)

It migjt have judt squeaked in if I'd added Ametican Revolution RPF or something but that seemed like stretch! ( There are a lot more fandoms in the 10-20k range which is part of why it cut off there.)

[alexseanchai]

yes, do not conflate—is it Dan and Phil?— with Danny Phantom

[gingicat]

Do you mean "enough about canon" or "enough about current or past fannish discourse about this canon"? In general, I try not to follow discourse that devolves into angry yelling.

[melannen]

I feel like "it's full of angry yelling, avoid" is definitely sn opinion? But it's up to you!

[author_by_night]

Schitt's Creek! Comedies usually don't get fandoms, but it's a pretty sizable one, albeit with seemingly zero DW presence (which makes me sad - it's mostly on tumblr and twitter, which confuse me as fandom platforms). I'm surprised it didn't make Ao3's list, though, as there are a lot of fics. Maybe it's still considered small by Ao3 standards?

Once upon a time I would have said Harry Potter, but I haven't been in it properly in years* and I get the sense a lot has changed. OFMD and Buffyverse are things I am fandom adjacent to - not really IN the fandoms, but love the shows and am very aware of the fandoms. I've dabbled more in the Buffy fandom than OFMD.

[melannen]

Schitt's Creek is in the very large ~10000 midlist category on size!

It definitely sounds like you have opinions on those others, though!

[silveradept]

It sounds like there would be quite the dust-up in the Not Prime Time category (after the fic exchange that was for things that were just outside Yuletide eligibility but that hadn't become megafandoms in their own right.)

[melannen]

It does!

That would also be a much larger list though, much harder to winnow down to even a 100 fandom longlist - part of the reason I set the cutoff where I did is that the number of fandoms went up exponentially from there. Someone else can run that. ^_^

[quailfence]

Drat, if I’d seen the bit about “fandom” then I definitely would’ve picked Marvel and Star Wars, probably Supernatural, and maybe a few others that I haven’t seen/read canon (or only a little bit of canon in the case of Marvel) but have interacted with the fandom a bit.
On a related note, I’m surprise to see that I’m not the only one who voted for The Owl House, given that I’ve seen zero fannish activity for it on DreamWidth besides two of my fics and a promotional banner for a multi fandom event. My guess is that it’s not those people’s main fandom and/or they do most of their fannish stuff for the show on Tumblr, where the active fanbase seems to mostly be.

[melannen]

You can change your vote as many times as you want! I'll probably close the poll midmorning Monday but until then you can keep changing your mind.

I think a lot of DW people have fandoms they're at least peripheral to that they never talk about here because they don't think there's interest. (Maybe this tournament will help with that some!)

[tarlanx]

The fandom I will mention in comments: The Old Guard

[melannen]

It's been mentioned above! It's sort of midlist and hasn't really had a lot of activity in the last year, so it didn't make the list - I did check on it. ~10000 works really seems to be the point at which a fandom reads as a "large fandom" to people but there are several hundreds of fandoms in that range.

Actually, I don't think there's any movie fandoms on the list? There's ones like MCU and Star Wars that started with a couple movies and then went way beyond that, but I don't think any fandoms that are mostly one or two movies are on there. I guess they just don't have the staying power to get the really huge fic numbers over time, and there aren't any current big ones that don't fall under other umbrellas.

[satsuma]

I’ll be very interested in seeing the final tally for this! My general impression of DW is that the fandoms popular here only loosely correlate with what’s popular on ao3 but perhaps once you’ve already filtered to the really large fandoms that kind of variation stops showing up quite so clearly

[cathexys]

That is a really good point!

It'll be interesting to see...

[mommy]

It looks like Dreamwidth users go for different fandoms than what AO3 shows is popular. I know Boku no Hero Acadamia/My Hero Acadamia is a megafandom, but it barely has a blip here. I guess it's because the fandom skews younger?

I hope Star Trek stays in the top five as these polls go forward. It's been popular for generations.

[melannen]

It definitely does! I don't even know if it's so much an age thing as a place thing - the newer fandoms are heavily on Twitter and Discord and Twitch and TikTok and don't have as much overlap with the classic Western audiovisual media transformative fandoms, and may not even know Dreamwidth exists.

It may even be as much an AO3 thing - even back when AO3 was just a twinkle in Astolat's eye, there were huge music RPF, anime, and videogame fandoms that LJ slash fandom just didn't ken. The change is maybe more that they're all using the same infrastructure for the first time!

[the_bi_ballerina]

The fandom I said I would mention in the comments: BBC Merlin.

I have other fandoms I adore (Leverage, Warehouse 13, The Old Guard) but I would probably not categorize those as large fandoms by any definition (though I firmly believe Leverage should be more popular than it is).

[melannen]

Merlin is folded in with Arthurian Mythology, on the "use biggest umbrella fandom" principle. I may pull it back out though, it's like 90% of that tag.

If the Old Guard sequel takes off like the first one, it might make it to the top! But it was one of those movies that was big for awhile and then died down fast.

[krait]

Some tough picks here! There are 3-4 of those I clicked where I only "know" a specific part of the fandom, and probably not the part that is popular. ("Final Fantasy" being a prime example; I'm familiar with 2 out of the 15-18 parts of the franchise, and the vast majority of the AO3 activity is centred upon the parts I don't know. Same with "Legend of Zelda.")

It'll be interesting to see how the field narrows.

[melannen]

I'm going to be combining this poll + total works + current posting rates to get the final list and the seed, but how exactly I weight those is probably going to depend on how the numbers fall out overall. So we'll see!

[bluedreaming]

I know why this isn’t on the list because it doesn’t work that way, but one of the fandoms I’m currently most active in is the podfic fandom, which I personally think is a really great fandom, but hard to quantify like this 😂 I did vote for no fandom because I think voiceteam results in a fair bit of no fandom (i.e. about fandom in general) stuff so that’s at least a bit representative. (Though I know no fandom covers a lot more.)

I’m less involved but I wonder if vidding would also be a little similar? It definitely has some dw presence too.

Edit: I thought about this a bit more, and it feels like if the Kpops were collapsed into one umbrella fandom, then I could vote for it, because I still kpop to that extent, but I don’t for individual fandoms enough to vote for any specific ones (or the ones I did enough to have opinions for as a single entity I wouldn’t want to vote for anymore). Brains are weird, I guess.

[melannen]

That is an interesting thought! It might be cool to do something like this with vidding/podfic/fanart/meta/etc. in the list. Although I feel like that might come off a little more personal? It's one thing to say Star Trek is better than Star Wars, but that kind of feels different than saying my vidding work is more important than your fanart work.

I'm thinking I might end up collapsing KPop together. I'm going to see how the seeding works out, and if only one or two of them make it through, I might just combine the rest. (Bandom and Johnny's Enterntainment are also sort of umbrella music RPF fandoms, although they're a little more cohesive than kpop, I think, but it might still make sense.)

[megpie71]

Interesting to see the classic Tumblr Trilogy (SuperWhoLock) have each showed up in there.

I think there's a lot of fudging in there, because a lot of the mega-fandoms are actually more like containers for series (just off the top of my head: DC, Marvel, Final Fantasy, Persona, Dragon Age, Voltron, Transformers, Star Trek, Stargate) - often very long-running series - rather than individual items. For example, in Final Fantasy there's something like seventeen separate numbered games (two of which are MMOs), at least a half-dozen sequels, spin offs and prequels, two movies (one connected to a game series, one separate to all of them) and that's before we even get into things like the cross-overs (such as the Dissidia sub-series, the cross-over events with other games by Square Enix, and the cross-overs into games by other studios; never mind Kingdom Hearts!). Which means when you're putting something that size up against something like "Our Flag Means Death" (which has so far had one series and I think the second's in production?) the success of OFMD in getting into the top 100 is impressive!

[melannen]

I mean, I wouldn't call it fudging when I said outright that's what I was doing! :P

I think most fandoms - even relatively contained ones like OFMD - have lots of people who are only into parts of the fandom, but not all of, though, so I don't think it's unique to the big umbrella fandoms? The real issue is that if I split up, say, Marvel and Star Wars, half the list would be just those. And that some of them are harder to easily split than others.

But that's also why there's a handicap for currently popular series that may not have the long history. :D A lot of the newer fandoms on the list don't have the sheer number of total works but they rate in current posting volume.

"Something I will mention in the comments"

[psiten]

Nominating three fandoms: The Macross franchise! Prince of Tennis! And CLAMP!

Re: "Something I will mention in the comments"

[melannen]

Unless there are large fandoms that belong under the umbrellas that aren't wrangled right (and I think I know them well enough that I don't think there are?) those are all sadly well too small. (Macross looks like it's super small on AO3, like a deci-yuletide or less, which I'm surprised at!)

[fred_mouse]

Not adding anything new, but I'm going to be very interested in seeing how this plays out. Because I've ticked a few for being 'aware' of them at whatever level (Game of Thrones), one where I have run away from the fandom Very Quickly (I suspect there are too many candidates on this one), and one because it was a friend's favourite show (Walking Dead)

[melannen]

Me too! Those are all extremely good ways of having an opinion. (I hope some of the people who are being very cautious about which fandoms they have opinions about here lose some caution in the voting!)