#stats of the kingdom

[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

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 3 - Le Grand Bristot

[englishotomegames]

Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem

Release date (Windows, Mac OS, Linux) English (Early Access): June 28th, 2024

"You are one of the delegates.

In this world of politics, intrigue and danger, will you find love? Make friends? Alliances? Or will you fail and be forced to watch as the world once again crumbles into destruction and despair?

It is your story and it is not yet written.

Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem (or 7KPP for short) focuses on player choice, customization and consequences. Politics and people are the core challenge of the game. (And it is challenging. So much so a story mode has been created for those who prefer their failures to end up less game-endy.)

Spanning seven weeks of gameplay, almost a million words of content, 12 different romance/marriage routes (3 of which are with female characters) hundreds and hundreds of choices, a detailed character creation that has has over 40 stats to master, including personality traits, a choice from six separate backgrounds (all with their own storylines and unique reactions, choices and dialogue) and world-changing outcomes that vary with every choice you make, 7KPP is massively replayable.

This is the early access version.  Expect bugs, errors and typos. Many things are subject to change for the final version. The GUI, information pages, extras and gallerys are not in their final version. Three unlockable romance routes (two full GxG and one secret GxB) and three special unlockable backgrounds will be added for the final version."

The early access version of Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem has been released by Azalyne Studios! You can try the demo or buy it from itch.io here.

[ao3-anonymous]

Fastest Growing Fandoms on AO3 This Week (05/23/2023)

Every week I pull data on how many fics are in each fandom and compare to the previous week, then calculate the percentage increase to determine fastest growing fandoms.  Since this naturally skews towards smaller fandoms, I have included the same data filtered to Over 1k, 5k, & 10k fics.

Overall:

Over 1,000 Fics:

Over 5,000 Fics:

Over 10,000 Fics:

Source: AO3 Fandom Dashboard

[anragaire]

There should be an EGOT for actors who manage to complete the Big Fantasy Pipeline (Got/hotd, The Last Kingdom, Rings of Power/Lotr)

[theygender]

This is your sign to get back into playing that video game that you love but put down a long time ago and never picked back up again for no discernable reason

[chimpukampu]

If Link wears that green toga at the start of the game, then that means along his journey he'll find his Champion Tunic with a charred sleeve, and will still wear it

[scarapanna]

Spoilers for the city of wizards episode ahead!

So uh

I was finishing the city of wizards episode and defeated stardust with only PV left in my team

This grandpa is a menace

Also I find it really amusing how he just casually fell asleep right after the bossfight was over

[Btw here's his setup for anyone curious]

[disneyparksattractionstournament]

Round 3 Stats

Things are heating up my dudes!

Biggest Sweeps:

Haunted Mansion 95.3% vs The Barnstormer 4.7%

Pirates of the Caribbean 86.8% vs Buzz Lightyear(any version) rides 13.2%

Spaceship Earth 75% vs Snow White's Scary Adventures 25%

Closest/almost ties:

Journey into Imagination with Figment 50.5% vs Gran Fiesta Tour Starring the Three Caballeros 49.5%

Peter Pan’s Flight 51.4% vs Living with the Land 48.6%

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh 52.3% vs Kilimanjaro Safaris 47.7%

Highest Participation:

347: MuppetVision 3D vs It's a Small World 

337: Haunted Mansion vs The Barnstormer

287: Journey into Imagination with Figment vs Gran Fiesta Tour Starring the Three Caballeros

Lowest Participation:

192: Peoplemover vs Expedition Everest

200: Snow White's Scary Adventures vs Spaceship Earth

209: Enchanted Tale of Beauty and the Beast vs Pirates the of Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure(Shanghai Disneyland)

Parks by winners:

Disneyland:  8(/15)

Magic kingdom: 6 (/13)

Tokyo Disneyland: 5 (/12)

Hollywood studios: 4 (/6)

Disneyland Paris: 3 (/6)

Shanghai disneyland: 3 (/5)

Hong Kong Disneyland: 3 (/5)

Epcot:  2 (/5)

DCA: 2 (/3)

Tokyo Disneysea: 2 (/4)

DAK: 1 (/3)

Walt Disney Studios Paris: 1 (/2)

Parks by winners by percentages:

Hollywood studios: 4 (/6) 66.67%

DCA: 2 (/3) 66.67%

Shanghai disneyland: 3 (/5) 60%

Hong Kong Disneyland: 3 (/5) 60%

Disneyland:  8(/15) 53.33%

Disneyland Paris: 3 (/6) 50%

Tokyo Disneysea: 2 (/4) 50%

Walt Disney Studios Paris: 1 (/2) 50%

Magic kingdom: 6 (/13) 46.51%

Tokyo Disneyland: 5 (/12) 41.67%

Epcot:  2 (/5) 40%

DAK: 1 (/3) 33.33%

[reasonsforhope]

“In an effort to combat flooding, a Yorkshire woman realized that thousands of wasted Christmas trees every year could be used as natural flood protection, and started a unique business to do just that.

The Rooted Christmas tree rental delivers a potted Christmas fir, pine, or spruce to a family for the festive season. When the lights are taken down, the company then collects their rentals and replants them to enjoy another growing season.

When the trees get too tall, they are placed on the slopes of the nearby Calder Valley as natural floodwater breaks.

The Sunday Times reports that the towns of Mytholmroyd and Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire have been inundated by serious floods 4 times in the last 15 years, with the most-recent one causing $180 million (£150 million) in damages.

Rooted founder Sara Tomkins established a Christmas tree plantation in the spring of 2020 with 400 trees. Dozens of those original 400 have now become too large for the average living room, and have been hauled off for planting in the upper parts of the Calder Valley to stop floodwaters running down into the two towns below.

What started as a sustainability project turned into a flourishing commercial enterprise. When residents learned how their Christmas tree purchases could be used to protect their towns from floods and reduce waste from rotting trees, all of Tomkins’ original trees were rented out.

According to Tomkins, people pretend the trees are members of the family, and like to rent the same one over and over again to “watch them grow up with their kids...”

Tomkins feels that demand might be 3x her current supply, but as a music venue director, she does the job only in her off hours.

“I do this in my spare time so I don’t have the capacity or the physical space to make it any bigger,” she told The Times. “But the demand being there is such a positive thing because, if we can reduce how many Christmas trees we cut down, that is a massive environmental win.” -via Good News Network, 1/11/23

[cooking-with-hailstones]

Legend of Zelda: stats of the kingdom

Analysis coming soon! I've compiled all the data for the top fics under the tag "legend of Zelda and related fandoms" and hopefully I'll have the report done sometime this week!

Place your bets now whether Sidlink or Zelink has more fics because I am genuinely not sure who's gonna win this one

[hummbirds]

Who needs a fully upgraded Champion’s Tunic when you can look so much snazzier?

and who would bother farming the mats to fully upgrade the Champion’s Tunic, fully knowing they won’t be wearing it? Totally not meeeeee…

Side note whomever decided the Royal Guard set needed Gleeok guts to finish upgrading…screw you.

[slime-crafters]

THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I'VE EVER HAD A HORSE DIE. I'VE HAD THIS GIRL SINCE BOTW 😭😭😭😭😭

[ao3-anonymous]

Fastest Growing Fandoms on AO3 This Week (05/01/2023)

Every week I pull data on how many fics are in each fandom and compare to the previous week, then calculate the percentage increase to determine fastest growing fandoms.  Since this naturally skews towards smaller fandoms, I have included the same data filtered to Over 1k, 5k, & 10k fics.

Overall:

Over 1,000 Fics:

Over 5,000 Fics:

Over 10,000 Fics:

Source: AO3 Fandom Dashboard

[your-fave-isdoomedbythenarrative]

lauriam kingdom hearts union x is soooooo doomed

Lauriam from Kingdom Hearts Union X is doomed by the narrative and trying to escape.

[quibbs126]

So if Last Cookie Standing does good, theoretically we could get a season 2 of it. Would that mean new Cookies to join the contest?

I just kind of want to see stats for a bunch of other Cookies