I took a look at TV fandoms* that have a lot of fix-it fanworks on AO3. Tagging varies a bunch by fandom and the type of event fans are responding to, so I looked at a bunch of different types of tags. I'll be doing deeper dives into some specific fandoms in future chapters.
Click through to AO3 for more explanations, more graphs, and any corrections/clarifications. Also note that some of these analyses and the explanations of them contain spoilers for various TV fandoms.
*The character death analysis also includes non-TV fandoms, but these analyses are mostly TV-focused.
I don’t think you’re getting it guys, there are two types of found family: the organized type, with “I chose you and I choose us’, healing together, and nurturing vibes, and the chaotic type, which mainly falls into the “good luck getting rid of me now” category like bringing home stray cats does.
Sometimes it’s just one, other times it’s both combined in some way. And both options are so fucking amazing.
“Steve,” Robin calls right as he’s preparing to jump. He turns and looks at her, head tilted, and she taps her ear. Eddie watches as Steve’s face goes through several emotions, annoyance, trepidation, resignation, before reaching up and pulling something from his ear. He drops it in her hand with a sigh, and Robin makes some kind of motion with her hands.
He gives her a reluctant thumbs up back, and dives.
“So, what was that?” Eddie asks after a few seconds, while they all peer into the water.
“What’s what?”
“The…“ he pokes his own ear, “the thing he gave you.”
“Oh, it’s—“ she starts, but then Steve comes up for air and everything is forgotten.
“—unambiguous a sign of true love as these cynical eyes have ever seen,” Eddie finishes with a flourish. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this, except that Steve seems like he’s actually a good guy, and deserves to be happy. Eddie knows it will never be him that does that. So matchmaking it is.
Steve doesn’t say anything, just stares blankly at his lips, brow furrowed. He looks up at the girls, and Eddie assumes he’s looking at Nancy, contemplating their future together.
“Hey Robin?” Steve calls out a little too loud, dashing all of Eddie’s assumptions on the rocks.
She turns around, tilting her head and jogging back to them. Nancy keeps going on, because she’s got the biggest balls of anyone Eddie’s ever met and will not be stopped by man nor hellbeast.
Steve points to his left ear, the one Eddie’s on the side of. “Do you have it?”
Robin moves closer to his right, hitching her voice a little louder. “I couldn’t exactly take it into the lake with me, Dingus.”
“Great,” he groans, “lost my hearing aid and my favorite sweater. Fuck this place, seriously.”
Eddie’s eyes widen. Hearing aid? He would have noticed a hearing aid, right?
Steve turns to him with a grimace. “Sorry man,” he says, “I caught, like, maybe half of what you were saying. Something about trying to fix my friendship with Nancy?”
It’s actually so wild that a lot of random interactions/anon hate/whatever on the Internet boil down to “prove to me that you’re a good person” like lmao no I know who I am, I don’t know you, and I don’t owe you shit, blocked goodbye
TOP 10 TV SHOW FANDOMS ON AO3 BASED ON NUMBER OF FANWORKS, SINGLE CATEGORY VERSION (2009-2022)
If you want to see the TV Show bar chart with the multi-category fandom tags included, please check this post.
To make these bar chart race, all series titles in the TV Show Category on November 29 (or the closest date to it) of every year were copy-pasted from Wayback Machine to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, manually filtered for fandoms belonging in only one category and then inputted to Flourish to turn into a bar chart race.
Locked fanworks aren't included in the count because Wayback Machine can’t view those, only Ao3 users can.
Jossverse was in the top 10 from 2010-2017 (Top 2 in 2010 and 2011). In 2018, it was removed from the TV Show fandom list and works tagged with it show up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV) instead so I’ve excluded it from the bar chart.
Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏
ETA: About Doctor Who: Doctor Who actually has 2 tags with ranked higher (Higher than Doctor Who (2005) even) on the list. Unfortunately, they were both multi-category tags: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms was also in the Other Media category thanks to the Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), and the other tag Doctor Who was also in Books & Literature thanks to Doctor Who - Various Authors. You can see them rank in the top 10 TV Shows multi-category bar chart race linked above.
About Stargate: The Stargate - All Media Types tag is actually interesting because unlike most All Media Types tags, it’s only listed in the TV Show category. That’s why it still turned up in this list. This might just be a lack of tagging its other categories (like Books & Literature) on AO3, however. Now that I checked its subtags, it actually had at least 2 Book & Literature only subtags: Stargate Atlantis: Legacy Series - Various Authors and Stargate SG-1 - Various Authors. So it probably should not have been in this bar chart race. Apologies for the oversight.🙏
Steve walking around with a hair tie on his wrist all the time. He has no use for it and Robin doesn’t either since she cut her hair, but he’s picked up on the fact that 99% of the time Eddie doesn’t have one so he knows sooner or later, he’ll end up handing it over and replacing it with a new one on his wrist the next time he leaves his house
Eddie has the neurodivergent thing where one minute he’s fine with his hair down but then when he gets stressed and overstimulated suddenly all it’s going to take to push him over the edge into a sensory overload meltdown is one more piece of hair touching his neck at the wrong moment. But he also forgets to bring hair ties and even when he remembers, he can’t find where he left them and even when he can, he hates the feel of them squeezing his wrist all day so they don’t last that long there
It takes a while before Eddie even realizes that Steve’s specifically stocking them for him. At first, Steve just holds them out when Eddie gets overwhelmed to the point of holding his hair off his neck with both hands because he once again doesn’t have anything to tie it up with. And at first Eddie just figures Steve has them lying around from the girls he hooks up with or something, but he doesn’t really think about it much. It isn’t until Eddie’s stressed instinct is to turn to Steve and find him already holding a hair tie out like he can somehow sense that he’s going to need it that Eddie starts to question why he always has one, no matter how many Eddie takes and wears once before losing them to the void in his van or locker or bedroom never to be seen again
"Back when I thought I was straight I would go on dates with boys. The boys would usually want to kiss me. I disliked kissing, but I thought that their preferences deserved to count as much as mine, and I reasoned that they probably liked kissing more than I disliked kissing. So kissing was a morally good thing to do. I also reasoned that if I told them I disliked the kissing then they’d feel guilty and enjoy it less. So I did not tell them.
I am certain I was making some kind of critical error but it has taken me a long time to figure out what it might be." (x)