This has been going around for a bit, and I thought it interesting to try, although it shows that I haven't been at the practice of making and posting transformative works all that long. The suggestion is just this: On your preferred posting platform, sort your works by kudos (or equivalent) received and post the winner from each of the years you've got stats for. So.
Well, it shows that for most of these years, I ended up writing something for a big fandom and it did okay. The long tail in my works are not nearly as kudoed, but they did really well in their exchanges in that they gave the recipient a story they wanted and enjoyed. And that was the important part of most of the things that have been written in my AO3 collection of works.
- 2016:
The Many Proposals of Nick Burkhardt. (Grimm, Nick/Adalind, Teen-rated, 118 kudos)
It was a pinch hit. No, really, and a sort of "Five Times"-style fic at that. But Grimm was big then, and nearly 3500 hits later, it's also my most-hit work of all time. Audiences are weird, okay?
Although it's taken several years to get to that point of kjudos and hits. I don't know if it would be possible to go "only kudos received in that year" and re-sort that way. - 2017:
Hermione Granger and the Two Boys. (Harry Potter, Hermione/Harry/Ron, Explicit-rated, 43 kudos)
Here's another megafandom work. About 2500 hits, too, but not quite as many kudos to go with it. It's not that far above the other works of that year. But I had an idea about what it might be like if Hermione took Harry to a kinky club and Ron demonstrated why she kept him around all the same. - 2018:
Making Exceptions. (Calvin & Hobbes, Calvin/Susie, Calvin/Susie/Original Characters, Susie/Original Characters, General Audiences-rated, 59 kudos)
That was Yuletide for 2018, so it went all the way to the end of the year before I hit the work with the most kudos for that year. I think I tapped into some amount of nostalgia for the strip with the work and spun a good tale of the one challenge that Calvin would not necessarily meet with his usual enthusiasm: parenting. But I couldn't imagine Calvin in any sort of traditional parenting exercise, so that meant there was a whole polycule to help out. - 2019:
Chat Noir's Convention Cosplay Crisis (Miraculous Ladybug, Gen, General Audiences-related, 221 kudos as of posting)
I feel pretty confident calling this one as the runaway favorite of 2019, because it's nearly doubled the other one that got above 100 kudos from my past, and the next-closest one is currently just over 80 kudos as the steam on it is running out.
So it's another big fandom currently going on, and apparently I got it just right (and maybe a recommendation or two to keep it going). I seem to have dipped into Miraculous Ladybug as a thing for short stories in different contexts, and many of them have collected a significant amount of kudoes. I'm not nearly as deep in or as talented at writing it as![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alexseanchai, but I seem to be doing okay.
Plus, 2019 is shaping up to be a year where I had multiple works in different fandoms get above 50 kudos, as a Spider-Verse fic I wrote for an exchange is over 60 right now and a Pern fic I wrote for a different exchange got over 50 as well. Which says either that my targeting is better or my writing is. Possibly both.
Well, it shows that for most of these years, I ended up writing something for a big fandom and it did okay. The long tail in my works are not nearly as kudoed, but they did really well in their exchanges in that they gave the recipient a story they wanted and enjoyed. And that was the important part of most of the things that have been written in my AO3 collection of works.
