AO3 Ranking: Most Kudos for each year running.

[silveradept]

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.

• 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 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.

Comments

[bladespark]

I gave a couple of these a whirl. (Never seen Miraculous Ladybug and don't even know what Grimm is, so only two of them.) Really loved Making Exceptions. I'm afraid I bounced off of Herminone Granger and the Two Boys, I didn't actually finish it. If you're looking for critique on that I could offer some, but I know not everyone wants tips on improving old stories, and of course it'd be improving it to my taste, not necessarily to yours. :3

[silveradept]

I'm mostly okay with it standing as a Baby's First Steps kind of story and all the experienced kinksters can have a chuckle to themselves about how unrealistic it is or how far it doesn't go into "real" kink or otherwise doesn't fit what they wanted or expected.

[bladespark]

*nods* I figured as much. I didn't get far enough to know how "real" the kink is (and I mean, real kink is widely varied!) I just bounced hard off the idea of Harry going from "I don't understand any of this, what's going on, black magic, aiee!" to "cool, I'm in" in about five minutes and as many paragraphs. A line about consent mattering didn't seem to fix the problem of pushing somebody who's off-balance and has no idea what's going on into diving straight in to participating, and I just couldn't get past that point. (And in my experience even those who've spent years and years intensely fantasizing about and wanting those sorts of things still take months to be gently coaxed into their first actual participation in doing them, though admittedly if anybody were to dive into something reckless straight away it probably would be Harry.)

And I guess there's my critique anyway, though I had some thoughts about how to fix the problem without doubling the story's length, but I'll spare you them. :3

[silveradept]

Exactly. It's a handwave for plot purposes, and I can adequately explain it as "didn't know any better at the time" and hope that if the topic makes sense to go at again, I'll be better about it now that I know.

Also, thank you for providing an example of the difference between "Your mistakes make me roll my eyes" and "I have some suggestions on making it better, if you want them."