Kudos Meme

[tangeriner]

Stolen from various people:

List your top fanfic on AO3 for every year, sorted by kudos.

I got an AO3 account in December 2009, so I will start in 2009.

2009

Redefining Normal (Young Avengers, Teddy/Billy, 3510 words, 217 kudos)
Written for Yuletide. I kinda got ahead of the curve with this fandom. This is my only YA story.

2010

The New Man (X-Force, Rictor/Shatterstar, 6482 words, 226 kudos)
This story is probably in my top five personal favourites of mine. Self-indulgent trope, fun af to write Star, a no-filter Ric. I feel nothing but fondness towards this fic.

2011

Seven Minutes (X-Force, Rictor/Shatterstar, 2918 words, 293 kudos)
This is one of my steady-trickle-kudos stories. It's actually what it says on the tin. I do love countdown stories, so you know. This was nice and easy to write, iirc.

2012

Heartlines (X-Factor, M/Siryn, 10373 words, 91 kudos)
I low-key ship Monet and Terry at all times, but this is the only time I've written them. Written for Yuletide. I re-read this one often. My love of sweaters shows up here.

2013

Catch You Unaware (Samurai Champloo, Mugen/Jin, 3976 words, 540 kudos)
This my kudos behemoth. It leaves every other story far in the dust, and I still have no idea why. I mean, I love the story, I think it's great, and these guys are a perpetual OTP for me, but... surprising. Kudos come in steadily for this one, without fail.

2014-2016

Nothing. This was my "welp, I guess I am never writing again, my fannish love is dead, I will never do fandom again, woe is me, weep" period. Spoiler alert: none of that was true. I just wasn't feeling it, for whatever reason, and then one day (while in Iceland), I was again.

2017

Rites of Passage (X-Force, Rictor/Shatterstar, 45031 words, 145 kudos)
I was so self-indulgent with this one. I just wanted Rictor to be happy and get to experience All The Things. Especially all the smut. With his BFF Shatterstar. May they be in love forever.

2018

Exit Music (X-Men, Rictor/Shatterstar, 9472 words, 105 kudos)
There is a lot of me in this story, probably more than any of the other ones I've written. It seems to have resonated well. I was also extremely angry about Iceman (Vol. 1) #9. I am still extremely angry about that issue tbh.

2019

The Wildways (X-Men, Rictor/Shatterstar, 45540 words, 42 kudos)
I just posted this last month. I already have a sequel in the works, because pirate!Star turned out to be one of my favourite Stars, and there's an entire major plot point I never resolved.

Comments

[enemytosleep]

If it helps you feel better, I was on fannish hiatus from 2013-2018. I think there were a lot of big shifts in fannish spaces around those times because it seems a lot of folks were not as active (or active at all) in the 2013-2015 era. I remember LJ was on the decline, FF.net was losing ground, and AO3 was still catching on as the place to be. I had imported my existing stuff, but tagging systems had not been established and interactions were minimal there. I was so surprised when I cam back online and saw what a behemoth AO3 had become in my time away. Ramble, ramble, ramble don't feel too bad about stepping away. The mojo was zapped for a lot of us for a lot of reasons!

[tangeriner]

Oh, wow, you've really put into perspective something I had been noticing-- because it really did seem like a lot of people (who, to that point, had been active in fandom) went on a break around then. I know a lot of my issue was I had no interest in Tumblr. I mean, I have one, but it's almost entirely to lurk and read meta. Thanks!

[enemytosleep]

Yeah, I made a Tumblr at that time, but I've only really been using it in recent months for art reblogs and to consume meta posts. Fannish cliques were breaking up left and right (now my old peeps are split between Tumblr, Twitter, DW, or FB ... and I only have a Tumblr and DW account). It was the end of an era, and while we've built new spaces over the years, there definitely seemed to be a gap in many people's history. It's hard to wan to create new content when all the contest groups are dying, your friends are swearing to never use Tumblr ever...

[tangeriner]

Yeah, things are very scattered right now. I'm interested to see what the future holds. I have been enjoying Discord quite a bit, and I never got into FB or Twitter for fannish purposes either.