#miphzelink

[demiboydemon]

While he was studying the blade, they were studying ✨him✨

[bookwyrmonastring]

The miphzelink fic I am working on!

Hand In Hand, We Can Save This Land is a fic where mipha has feelings for zelda as well as link. It is also zelink. The fic will start pre-calamity as our protagonists meet each other and fall in love. It's what I like to call a "wall-e romance", where there is plot given lots of focus, but romance is the driving force of the story. It's maybe like, 60-65% romance, give or take. I don't want to spoil anything, but mipha will not die during the calamity, link will not lose his memories, and the fic will have a happy ending.

Other fun stuff includes:

Purah/mineru (wlw in stem we love to see it)

Link likes to cook

Transfem zelda

Zelda tries to make a thunder helm for her gf

Mentions of Yunbo

The fic's name is a lyric from Prometheus Unbound from Chrono Trigger: The Musical

The name can be shortened to: Hand in hand, HiH, or hihwcstl

Sidon

Tulin

Magic Hrt

Link wearing skirts and dresses

[cooking-with-hailstones]

The Legend of Zelda: stats of the kingdom

A Statistical Analysis of Popular Fanfiction in the Legend of Zelda Fandom on AO3

I like numbers and stats and for some unfathomable reason I find it calming. So over the past couple weeks, I’ve been making this spreadsheet!

DISCLAIMER: This is not a judgement of the quality, value, or merits of any of the fics on this list. It's just me being curious about what's popular with the Legend of Zelda fandom on AO3.

Feel free to go explore the spreadsheet. My own observations and analysis under the cut.

TL:DR, Link has a lot of kinky sex. Sidlink and Zelink are vying for who’s the most popular ship. Also, this fandom has a shit ton of sub categories that are truly islands unto themselves and have their own conventions.

Methodology: I'm including all fics from the first page of AO3 results (20 fics per page) sorted by:

Hits

Kudos

Comments

Bookmarks

Anything tagged under the Legend of Zelda and Related Fandoms tag that was in the top 20 most hits, kudos, comments, or bookmarks made it into the spreadsheet. This ended up including 51 fics in total.

I put all the fics into one single spreadsheet in order to compare the differences between fics that are really high on the kudos count but not the hit count, or what has a lot of comments but fewer hits. Basically, I'm throwing a lot of things together to observe what gets engagement and looking at patterns that emerge!

Popular fandom subcategories:

Botw (41 fics tagged as such)

Linked Universe (9, including one mostly set in the world of BOTW)

OoT (2)

(I do wonder what it would be like to run these numbers on other fanfic sites, given the popularity boom of ao3 over the last 15 years or so. But also, Botw was an insanely popular game even by Zelda standards, so… who knows?)

Tags:

Character tags: Obviously, Link was by far the most popular character, but here are the characters that had a minimum of 3 appearances per category. Yay champions!

Zelda

Sidon

Mipha

Urbosa

Revali

Daruk

Story tags: Again, just going by sheer numbers, here are the story tags that appeared at least 3 times in every category:

Slowburn

AU – canon divergence

With honorable mentions to fluff, angst, double penetration, anal sex, amnesia/memory loss, and mute or selectively mute Link, who all cracked above 3 instances in 2 separate categories.

Relationships:

This was a tight race, but shoutout to Sidlink for eking out the win for the most highly rated ship in the Zelda fandom with 13 fics qualifying in my ranking. Zelink is close behind at 10 fics. (That being said, Zelink takes it by volume: 7,797 fics tagged as Zelink vs Sidlink’s 2,193)

Other popular ships:

Revalink (8) (this one surprised me! I didn’t realize my beloved birb was so popular)

Miphlink (3)

Link/Monsters (2)

Sidon/Reader (2)

Ganzelink, Ganlink, Malink, Miphzelink, and Miphzel all made single appearances.

(Pls don’t start ship war discourse in the notes kthanx)

All right, let’s deep dive into the numbers!

Fics in all 4 categories:

Interim - starkraving

Sands of time -tirsynni

Congrats you are officially the most popular Loz fics across all of ao3! at least according to my particular scope of analysis.

Fics in 3 categories:

Displaced - socksock

Drown In Me - bacchanalia

Alone We Fight - SilvermistAnimeLover

Blood Moon Rising - MarquesGillette

Popular authors (people who show up more than once in multiple categories sorry comments georg)

MarquesGillette

MaryDragon

SilvermistAnimeLover

ObakeAri

Hits:

Top 5 most popular fics by hit count:

Displaced - socksock

Interim - starkraving

To Save Hyrule - orphan_account

Sands of time - tirsynni

Drown In Me - bacchanalia

First page by hits:

Min: 117,917 – Sidon’s Epic Pining Adventure (ObakeAri)  

Max:  189,622 – Displaced (socksock)

Average: 145,385

Average wordcount for fics with the most hits:

140,909

Kudos:

Top 5 most popular fics by kudos count:

Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy - Icka M Chif

Interim - starkraving

To My Dearest Friend - surveycorpsjean

26 Minutes and 42 Seconds - T_5Seconds

Blood Moon Rising - MarquesGillette

First page by kudos:

Min: 4917 – Finding Link (Umbreonix)

Max:  10321 – Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy (Icka M Chif)

Average: 6981

Average wordcount for fics with the most kudos:

41,136

Comments:

Top 5 most popular fics by comment count:

Carlos from MarvelandZeldaFan's Children of the Heroes - KR5

This is an Adjuration - notfreyja

My Art - KR5

Sidon's Epic Pining Adventure - ObakeAri

Priestess of War - KR5

Woohoo! You all get to meet KR5 aka Comments Georg. Comments Georg has long conversations and RPs in the comments of their ao3 posts, which are usually fanart. TO BE CLEAR, THIS IS TOTALLY FINE AND COOL! I think it’s quite delightful! However, it does completely bork my ranking system because outside of comments, these posts do not have a lot of engagement (like, less than 100 hits and less than 20 kudos) and I don’t think they count towards my analysis of “what is popular in the Zelda fandom writ large”. But they qualified based on my criteria. Which I think speaks to the weakness of my criteria more than anything else tbh…

Anyways, shoutout to Comments Georg for truly showing off what it means to be a statistical outlier.

First page by comments:

Min: 1568 – The Quiet River Rages (MaryDragon)

Max:  43808 - Carlos from MarvelandZeldaFan's Children of the Heroes (KR5)

Average: 4131 (which goes down to 2042 if we exclude KR5’s impressive max, which is a full order of magnitude more than notfreyja in second place with 3470 comments. Very much demonstrating the power of a statistical outlier!)

Average wordcount for fics with the most comments:

275,593

Bookmarks:

Top 5 most popular fics by bookmarks count:

Interim - starkraving

Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy - Icka M Chif

Sands of time - tirsynni

To My Dearest Friend - surveycorpsjean

Alone We Fight - SilvermistAnimeLover

First page by bookmarks:

Min: 973 – Expatriate (thehoyden)

Max:  2984 – Interim (starkraving)

Average: 1468

Average wordcount for fics with the most bookmarks:

70,027

Fic Ratings:

G: 3 (literally all fanart from KR5)

T: 22

M: 8

E: 17

Unrated: 1

Observations:

I ran this twice. Once including crossovers, and once excluding crossovers. This filtered out a lot of large drabbles and things like “flash fiction fuckings” which, no judgment, you do you, they just weren’t super relevant for what I was looking for. If you wanna see these stats including all the multifandom stuff that shows up, here’s the link for that:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DXDKXutIzVC-Iac93fFSDohAkphrn67yV-DmRt9xXmU/edit?usp=sharing

(I’m going to break academic professional analysis here and get on my soapbox for a sec – please don’t post big multifandom one shots where you tag like 20 different fandoms and every single kink that gets written about across 103 different chapters. This is literally what series are for. These kinds of things just clog up the tags, and it also makes it harder for people to find the things you’ve written that they want to read! I know this was a convention on ff.net, but this is not ff.net! We can make authors' lives and readers' lives easier!)

There were 38,427 fics in the tag “Legend of Zelda and Related Fandoms” (including crossovers, that goes up to 41,634). I manually added one back in though because it was entirely a botw story, just loosely inspired by another game.

Linked Universe fans comment a LOT. Strong correlation between high comment and Linked Universe fandom subsection. Y’all are very involved and active, and you show support to your authors. I salute you!

Sidlinkers, y'all are horny and I respect it.

Zelinkers, dear god we do love a slowburn.

All the most highly kudos’d fics are very low in the comment count. It’s almost an inverse correlation.

Excluding crossovers increased the correlation between hits and kudos quite dramatically.

There were not very many au’s other than canon divergence. Only one modern au as far as I could tell from a cursory examination of tags.

Lots more clustering, far less disparity between min and max numbers than when I ran this with A:TLA numbers.

Far less consensus on a vibe. Way fewer big writers, but lots of little writers doing their own thing.

Truly a lot of E fics. We are horny bastards.

We need more stuff written for games other than BOTW!!

There aren’t as many fics that are like “oh everyone in the fandom has read these fics”. There are probably those fics in each subcategory of the fandom, or within the specific ships, but there aren’t as many general fics that have entire fandom-wide appeal.

Thank you for reading! This was a lot of fun, and I hope you found it interesting. Shoutout to the Hateno Hangout discord for helping me refine this mess :P

Further shoutout to my partner who helped with writing some SQL to help with tag analysis. Truly partner of the year.

If you want more of this kind of egregious nerdiness, I did this with the top fics in the A:TLA fandom a couple weeks ago: https://www.tumblr.com/cooking-with-hailstones/751749202663669760/statistical-analysis-of-the-most-popular-atla

[sarcastic-sketches]

Hey. I haven't checked in a while, so I may be a bit out of date, but i was wondering if we were ever gonna get another miphzelink fic? Or a sequel to the dragon knight?

It's among my favorite fics of all time, definitely top 5. And I would love to see more of it, if only cause I love miphzelink

I'm afraid not, I haven't been that invested in the BotW/TotK story for a few years now.

I'm still trying to find the motivation to finish my latest Star Wars fic orz.

[transskywardsword]

and miphzel if you’re not sick of me!!

im never sick of you!!!! and oooooooh my god, miphzel.

they are genuinely one of my favorite otps of all time, i absolutely adore these two princesses supporting and loving each other. personally, im also a big fan of miphzelink, just a big lovely triad of fluff and tragedy alike, but either way im a total slut for some miphzel post-calamity angst. lovers separated by death and time? yes please!

[performapals]

btw. totk dropped. follow my liveblog blog if u want @miphzelink

[lunian]

"What's better than dating one princess? Dating TWO princesses!" -Link, at some point

Idk if it’s supposed to be drawing prompt or not, i’m just happy to find a reason to draw Miphzelink again

[kora-kat]

Botw, but the champions are not familiar with Hylians and spend half of their time confusing Link and Zelda.

Mipha has has no idea who she is dating at this point.

[evergreen-artblog]

cuddles of the wild

[flomp-void]

I should be sleeping or at least studying for the test I have tomorrow but.....Miphzelink AU where Zelda was lost in an accident on the road and was raised by a Lynel. She gets saved by a Zora at the age of ten and brought into the Domain as a Feral child who quickly becomes friends with Link and Mipha.

Or

Highschool AU! Champion shenanigans

[demiboydemon]

[diamondpython00]

Opinion #12

Ship wars are ridiculous to me. The whole reason I ship is because it’s fun to imagine, especially when the creator would never consider it. I can certainly get being ticked off by someone else’s ship, but there’s no need to go out of your way to attack them when all they want to do is have fun imagining ships. Really, we’re all in the ship tags for the same reason: we enjoy shipping. Also, the claim that one ship is better than another because it’s canon is ridiculous. Shipping is about speculation, canon doesn’t really matter. Let’s all just bond over crying about the latest angst fic from our favorite fic author and complaining about how our ships haven’t had more than a few moment’s interaction in canon.

tl;dr we’re all shippers, stop fighting over ships.

[bookwyrmonastring]

Also additional bonding moments with either one would be really helpful. Scene ideas are hard

[michpat6]

Hii, how about the ‘link has two hands’ wip ☺️

hiiii @bellecream, thanks for asking!

basically, the “link has two hands” one-shot is a miphzelink story. I have nothing written for it yet, just the idea of it because I love zelink and I love miphzel so why not combine the two? the focus on link being in the “middle” when zelda is the common denominator for the two ships is that zelink and miphlink people are always arguing (especially on twitter, it’s a war zone 😅) and like…link has two hands!

[aurathian]

why must it be miphlink vs zelink when it could simply be miphzelink

[performapals]

@miphzelink :)