13A/N: I love fanfiction with a passion and OC-centered fanfics are a special favorite of mine so I thought to myself; what if I did an analysis of the most popular OC RWBY fanfics in English on FFN? I've got three works to my name with an OC as a prominent character and just from a cursory glance of the front page, original character (OC) stories tend to be quite popular.
I mean, RWBY is the nineteenth most popular show in the "Anime" section on Fanfiction dot net with anywhere from 23-24.1 thousand fanfictions and one in every five of those have OC tagged as a character, but how popular are OC stories really? And what sorts of OC stories are the most popular?
Keep reading to find out (or skip to the .-.-.-.-.- bolded sections .-.-.-.-.- for the answer).
It was a normal day at Beacon academy, except for one thing: Ruby hopelessly stuck about what sort of story to put her original character Magenta Strawberry into. She'd given her a name, a backstory, unique looks, a cool weapon, and a fun personality- but she didn't know what to do with her! She didn't want to put all this effort into her and write her into a story only for the story to flop and die of unpopularity. Ruby fretted and hemmed and hawed then stood and ran from her dorm room.
Just as Ruby turned the corner, she crashed into Penny and blacked out from the impact. Penny, of course, was fine but she bent down with concern and gave the other girl a small electric shock to wake her.
"Salutations!" She said with a smile as Ruby jerked awake with a shriek. "Why were you running, Ruby?"
"Penny!" She cried and threw her arms around her friend. "Just the girl I was looking for!"
"Oh, did you need something?" she brought her arms up to reciprocate the gesture of affection.
"I spent ages working on my OC, Magenta, and I want to write about her but I want the story to be popular too!" she tugged the ends of her red/black hair. "But I don't know what sorts of stories with OCs in them are popular."
"I see," she said despite the fact that Ruby was speaking verbally and had no written word that Penny could see. She internally applauded herself for using more 'natural' language. "I could run an analysis of the most 'popular' works on fanfiction dot net for you, if you'd like."
"Yes!" she exclaimed. "That's perfect!"
"Alright, please wait one moment as I access the internet," she closed her eyes and used her robo-brain to hook into the CCT. From there, all of her synthetic neurons fired up as she analyzed four thousand and four hundred stories posted over a span of five years on FFN in English that had "OC" tagged as a character.
"There are over three and half thousand fanfics in progress and seven hundred and fifty four fics marked as complete. Of the complete works, only seventeen appear on the first page of all three filters when ranked by most reviewed, most favorited and most followed. There are six stories that appear on two of the three filters' top works and twelve that break the top twenty five ranked in only one filter. For the in-progress works, eighteen make it to the first page every time, seven appear for two filters, and seven for only one filter's top results. Let's focus on the 'completed' works first, since there is less data to work through."
"Of course, since there is a great amount of overlap between the three filters, I will now only discuss the works which appear on the top results for all three criteria. If you would like me to talk about the most popular works for each individual filter, I would be happy to do so at another time.
Penny smiled after her little speech. Ruby was frantically scribbling down notes, so the robot girl continued.
"I have used only the information written in the summary to compile these figures, so apologies if my categorizing does not match up with what happens in the story proper. Of the 17 completed, seven have an original characters as the protagonist, though there is one with an original team as the focal point. Five have Jaune, with various types of backgrounds, as the main character- one of which is quite vague in what exactly his role is compared to the tagged OC. Two stories have the universe known as 'Earth' intersecting or interacting with our world in some way. One is about your team but set in another universe, and a different story seems to be a collection of adult literature."
"What." Ruby looked up from her notes. "What is an Ear-th?"
Penny ignored her question. "Of the seven stories specifically about an OC, two are explicitly stated to be male, four are assumed male due to either the pairings or genre, and one is explicitly female. Three of those have you, Ruby, listed as the OC's love interest while one has Blake and one has Velvet. The story about the OC team has an OC x Yang pairing, but I am unsure whether or not that is a heterosexual or not."
"PENNY WHAT DO YOU MEAN I'M A LOVE INTEREST IN THESE STORIES?"
"The smallest number of chapters is 13 while the largest is 97, with an average being roughly 55. In terms of word count, the average is 302,377 with an upper bound of 890,264 and a lower bound of 58,310. Oh, and concerning genres, of the twenty eight category tags, 'Adventure' appears nine times with 'Drama' and 'Romance' appearing six times each. Nine of the total stories have a Teen rating and eight have a Mature rating.
.-.-.-.-.-
"If you seek to emulate these completed works but do not wish to write about your friend Jaune, your best bet would be to write a three hundred thousand word Adventure AND/OR Romance AND/OR Drama fanfiction with a male OC who has a dark/deadly past or is a 'Gamer' while pursuing a romantic interest with yourself, Ruby."
.-.-.-.-.-
"YOU CAN'T JUST TELL ME THIS AND EXPECT ME TO BE OKAY!" Ruby exclaimed, nearly on the verge of a breakdown. "And isn't this a show about four girls? Why are there so many guy characters? Why is Jaune so popular if I'm the main character and the show is named after me?!"
"What show?" Penny titled her head in a cute mimicry of human expression. "Ruby, we're in school."
She growled and tugged on her hair again. "Whatever! Just keep going!"
"Just to reiterate, there are eighteen works in-progress that appear on the first page of all three filters. Of those, twelve have an original character as the protagonist and two have OCs waking up as canon characters- which I am unsure how to classify. If you include them in the OC-centered fanfics, then of the fourteen are about a male coming to in our world, usually through dying on theirs and thirty six percent of those are 'Gamer' fics. Unlike our previous category, there are only two with tagged romantic pairings. One is with your sister, Yang, and another is with 'Amber'- is she your friend?"
"Uh," she thought back to everyone she'd met but couldn't recall a girl named that. "I dunno, maybe?"
She nodded. "Very well. Out of thirty three category tags, twelve are for 'Adventure' and nine are for 'humor' with twelve stories marked as 'Mature' and six marked as 'Teen.' Ten of the twelve Mature fanfictions are OC-centered ones. The average number of chapters for a story that is still in the process of being updated is almost 38 with a word count of 255,569.
.-.-.-.-.-
"Based on this data, you should write a two hundred and fifty thousand word long Adventure AND/OR Humor fanfic that is thirty five chapters long (and counting) about a male from Ea-rth reluctantly or unexpectedly coming to Remnant upon death."
.-.-.-.-.-
"That doesn't help me at all," Ruby groaned and buried her face in her hood. "My OC is a girl and she's really happy. What am I- oh! Oh wait! Can you look at the most popular in-progress stories that have been updated in the last year? I bet those other stories are just an old trend and they never got finished despite getting so hyped!"
The red-head nodded and set the "time range" filter to "updated within 1 year." After running some quick calculations, she frowned. "I am sorry, but there is no significant shift in the types of OC-centered fanfictions that are popular. The list of stories has remained remarkably consistent."
She fell to her knees with a dramatic cry. "Noooo! Magenta Strawberry will never be popular now!"
Penny kneeled down to pat her shoulder. "There, there. You could still write about her. I'm sure you could come up with an interesting and eye-catching story about her no matter what's trending right now. As a matter of fact, I think you could start a whole new trend!"
She sobbed into her cape. "What's the point if it's not the most read story on the site?"
"I don't think only writing to have the most popular story is a good thing. You should write because it makes you happy." She nodded firmly.
Despite her sensible words, Ruby continued to cry until Weiss arrived and knocked her out with a well-placed kick. She sprinkled Gravity Dust on the passed out girl and activated it with a glyph.
"Oh, before I go," she turned to the confused (but relieved) green-eyed girl. "Your last chapter of 'Firefly Buddies' was incredibly cute and I loved the heartfelt scene between Penelope and Rosie. They have such good chemistry and no one else seems to appreciate it."
Penny beamed and waved goodbye to her two friends.
A/N: Please god leave a review I spent like, fourteen hours working the numbers by hand and even Excel's copy/paste didn't help much when it came to analyzing everything. If you would like the raw data to see how I got my numbers, let me know and I'll post it on AO3 or set up a Google Doc.
See you lovely readers later! 3