Maybe call this a half-tilt at that AO3 meme the rest of the world did months ago?

The AO3 ranking for my stories is fascinatingly bizarre. I mean, to me. Currently my most popular story is this Thor/Loki ficlet. Nobody in Thor or Avengers fandom knows my name, which is appropriate because I'm not a social or even really a reading member of the fandom/s, and my total contribution is 1200 words of Thor/Loki kidfic written off the cuff for a prompt. But Avengers is huge and AO3-focused, so my ficlet randomly has over 2000 hits.

The most popular thing I have ever written, still, is The If Sieve, and that's ranking 3rd now, and steadily falling away.

Bandom is the fandom I had most actual profile in, as an active member of fandom, but the only bandom fic to make my top ten most popular at AO3 is the Disney-themed collaboration with oddishly. (♥)

My Mitford sisters RPF Hogwarts AU, inspired by the fact that the Black sisters were based on the Mitfords, has twice as many hits as my actual Black sisters fic, despite the fact that the number of people interested in reading fic about the Mitfords must be vanishingly small compared to the number of people interested in reading fic about actual Harry Potter characters. (Although, OK, both hit counts are pretty small, I should probably not spin too many theories. I'm just really fond of both those fics *g*)

Scourge Sisters rewrite for voice practice

I thought I would practice Scourge Sisters voices for the HSO by rewriting some pesterlogs as direct dialogue.

It turns out Terezi and Vriska's voices are actually much easier to translate to the real world than I'd thought they would be! Writing Kanaya and Rose was really challenging, partly because Kanaya's voice looks so wrong with commas in it, even if you're as sparing with them as you can be, but mostly because both she and Rose are so careful and wordy that when you add in all the extra bits around dialogue, the speech tags and real world fidgets and above all the internal POV, it slows the pacing down almost unworkably. Roxy was unexpectedly really hard too, partly because so much of her voice depends on typoes but mostly because she breaks her sentences up in really appealing and effective ways that you can't mimic in spoken dialogue.

I thought Terezi would be just as hard, because she doesn't punctuate. Only it turns out that she does use exclamation marks when she wants them, and she breaks up her lines really neatly into clauses, these short sharp sentences, so unlike with Kanaya, there's usually no need to add commas that aren't there in the pesterlog. And there's so much energy in her dynamic with Vriska that slowing it down a little doesn't hurt it at all.

Anyway, here is Terezi and Vriska's immediately-pre-SGRUB conversation rewritten for real life, if that's a thing anybody else would find interesting ♥


( Terezi was tapping away at her husktop and cackling when Vriska flopped down beside her )