Meta Monday - "Fics that did better than I expected"

A while back I asked about ideas for meta/blog posts, and one of the things mentioned was fics that either did better than I expected, or didn't do as well as I expected. So today, I'm gonna talk a little about the fics I published which did way better than I thought they would!

I've mentioned some of this in passing on Twitter before, but I think this is my first time talking about it a little more in-depth.

WIthout further ado, presenting my Top-3 Surprisingly Popular Fics!

Hands Off

This is my most common answer to this question. It was written as a commission, and obviously with commissions all I really care about is that the commissioner enjoys it, but apparently everyone else loved this one, too! I didn't necessarily expect this one to do poorly, but I never really considered how it would do, so it was a shock when it skyrocketed in kudos immediately - IIRC within 3 weeks it was one of my top ten fics in kudos. At one point it was ahead of all the Little Sh*t sequels!

I think the biggest reason this one surprised me, though, was because of the jealousy aspect. As someone who doesn't do angst, the jealousy was pretty much the peak of my hurt-tolerance, and I kind of forgot that so many people love that kind of thing.

If I'd known how many people would read it, I probably would have put more effort into Tokushima's name, instead of naming her after a brand of instant noodles.

Sweetheart

This fic was ridiculously self-indulgent. I'm a huge sucker for Sugar Baby Kacchan, and when a dear friend and I went on a twitter tangent about canon-compliant plots where it would work, I just had to sit down and write one of them for us. This was very much a fic where I expected it to be for me to re-read more than anything else, but apparently ~4k other people wanted Sugar Baby Kacchan too!

I've tried to write others since then, and they always turn out very short or I kind of hit a certain point and lose track of what I'm doing, because I hate the idea of them not eventually falling in love for real, lol. Plus, a lot of my ideas end up in very kinky territory, and I'm not very good at writing those lol.

On the bright side, I'm glad so many people turned out to like this fic, because it absolutely feeds into my desire to write self-indulgent things more often lmao.

Oh right, you were a little sh*t

Okay this one is a little bit of a cop-out, but I never could have expected this fic to blow up the way it did. It was just meant to be a silly one-shot based on a random headcanon, I don't even remember anything about writing it because it felt so insignificant at the time, but now it somehow has 30k kudos and honestly I didn't even think there were that many people in the fandom?? I swear someone just bought a bunch of bots or something. I'm honestly really sad that I don't remember writing it, because I wish I could look back on that time before it blew up and think about how different it was.

When it got popular, I knew I had to write a sequel, and people just seemed to like them so much that I had to keep adding more. If I'd known how long it would get, I'd probably have done it as chapters instead of different fics in a series, but then it wouldn't have gotten as much attention lol.

This is also the fic most often reposted by people without permission and stuff like that, so sometimes it's a pain in the ass too.

That's all for today! Next week: Fics that didn't do as well as I expected them to do!