Fimfiction at scale: Visualizing the longest stories · 6:18pm April 4th
"Circles," Daring Do harrumphed. "Why did it have to be circles?"
It was noted that some authors have contributed enormously to Fimfiction not through number of stories, but sheer quantity of words. These writers produce verbiage with their actual human brains at a rate that makes even Robert Jordan be all like "whoa, cool your jets folks"
To celebrate these literary leviathans, I made a visualization of the 56 most longest stories on Fimfiction in order and to scale, starting with the absolute monster that is My Little Pokémon - a story that only finished because the Fimfiction chapter limit forced it to (the author, Amarvax, immediately continued into another one which is currently holding the fifth position on the list, I'm not even joking). Second place is held by SAPR, Scipio Smith's story that I see all the time in the Featured box but haven't read because I've never seen RWBY. And third place is Humanity's The Lost Element, which has been rolling along for 13 years with a steady stream of chonky chapters.
I aimed for more of a wall poster style with this visualization, and since circles are boring I added a spiral of words from the beginning of each story. Don't try to read them, you'll hurt your neck.
Unless you're a kirin.
Crossovers seem well-represented in this collection, with Fallout: Equestria alone fuelling eight of the juggernauts. Also someone wrote a 1.5 million word second-person clopfic, who knew? I do. Know that. Now.
This is actually a rather interesting point: Crossovers account for only about 14.4% of stories on the site, but 41.8% of stories over 1 million words. (The percentage remains quite high at larger word counts - 38.2% of stories over 500k, 36.9% of stories over 250k, and 31% of stories over 100k.)
Hey look, it me!
-GM, master of the long ones.
5839477
Maybe the popularity of Fallout: Equestria for long sidefics is relevant there? Those are crossovers by definition, after all.
Also, apparently there's a Loud House crossover fic on Fanfiction.net that has over 34 million words. I couldn't check this since its Fanfic listing has topped out at 16,777,215, ie #FFFFFF. I don't know whether that is the longest in any fandom, but it's the longest I know of. It contains ponies, too!
5839494
I considered that, since they make up such a large section of the 1m+ fics. That's why I looked a bit further down: if you go to, say, the 100k mark? They're still a significant chunk (224) but at that level crossovers account for 1,480 of 4,774 stories. Fallout: Equestria is absolutely a major part of why, but not the whole reason.
Which itself is not only at 3.5m words, but also 824 chapters, so unless his daily updates breaks, we'll be looking at a third fic in 6 months time, and unquestionably the new second longest story on the site too (the average chapter length is about 300 words shorter, so it won't be taking the podium, at least). Makes the unending length of the A Song of Ice and Fire series look restrained, doesn't it?
There is no escaping the "crossover with x property that is fuelling the author's personal itch and doing basically nothing else of qualitative interest" that are always omnipresent in the Update Box, so I'm not too surprised to see how much they dominate the upper echelons of wordcount myself.
Also, shows how much I lie outside the fingers of those fics On Fimfiction: not only have I not read any of those fics, I recognise only about 8 of them, mostly from Update Box hogging (like the two Pokémon ones), a few appearing in PaulAsaran's Thursday reviews (Prey of a Lamb, Starlight Over Detroit), and the odd one I've actually heard by reputation (Project Horizons). Meanwhile, the rest are… they surely are some of the fics of our time.
Brandon Sanderson, known shard of a higher-dimensional being, simply wonders why the rest of us can't live up to their example.
That seems well past the point where you should consult a physician...
In any case, definitely neat to see the long-runners presented like this. The coiled openings are an especially nice touch.
5839494
I've actually skimmed through that one. Past a certain point, much of the bulk is simply listing all of the characters in the scene. (And also them shouting their special attacks. Which they have.) Bit of a cheat at that point.
5839477
Some years ago, I used the search box with the search term "-complete" to prove that crossovers were also the most ABANDONED genre here.
I dunno if that's still true, or if the entire memory is a hallucination that feels correct.
5839523
5839477
I guess people who are fluent in two fandoms enough to write a crossover are also rather... passionate. Enough to write millions of words about their favourite fandoms.
As for the abandoned ones, a lot of crossovers start like, "I want to put Care Bears/Barney/Mao Zedong/whatever in Equestria" and end like, "oh shit, I need to actually come up with the plot", so there's that.
It's always amused me how so many of the FoE spinoffs are double the length of the original (or more). The original is hardly short at 620k (about 140k more than The Lord of the Rings), but if you take it as the five books it is presented as, the length feels much more appropriate. I have doubts the spinoffs manage the same feat.
The longest fic I've bothered with was Myetel's The Spirit of Redemption, a 3.4 million word Mass Effect epic, but one that rarely felt like it was wasting my time. It was also finished in just 18 months (the last updated date on FF.net is thrown off because she re-uploaded the last chapter to notify everyone she'd begun to publish original fiction for purchase).
These days? I'd be suspicious of particularly long stories having their authors relying on computer assistance to churn out content. Given the quality of some of the 'long for the sake of being long' stories, I'm not sure the readers would notice much difference.
5839505
Fun fact: seven of these fifty-six stories never hit the Featured box.
5839523
Oh you are going to love the deep dive I'm currently doing.
Is that what they call a digital imprint
Dammit, just missed this list. Gotta step up my game :P
Have you considered doing a tag graph? I'd be curious to see how tags are used together, what tags are closest and most distant, what kind of super- and sub-genres could be inferred from tag clusters, etc...
5845888
I did do a couple of character tag graphs a few years ago [1] [2], but they were somewhat lacking in the readability department. I have wanted to do some kind of clustering analysis on tags, but I haven't come up with a useful metric for relating tags to each other.
5845946
I think a "simple" elastic connection would make the most sense for a first pass. Every story where two tags appear together, strengthens the connection so those tags pull closer together. So Dark and Horror would likely cluster near each other, while Comedy's connection to those would be weaker and thus other connections would probably pull it farther away from the Dark/Horror cluster.
Edit: something like this maybe https://redditstuff.github.io/sna/selfposts.html