Oh, that's fascinating. I adore Father to the Man, but I don't think I would have predicted it would be your most popular. But then, kid!fic does pull in a fairly large audience, and the story allows Snape a more hopeful destiny, so maybe that attracts more readers.

Actually, since I don't think in terms of "most popular," it would never have crossed my mind to rank your stories that way.

Having said that, I suspect In Memory of Sigmund Freud is my favorite, too. It's pretty much perfect, so brilliant it hurts. It gives me a bad case of aesthetic palpitations and reccing fever.

I don't know the source material for the other fandoms, but it's interesting to see that there's no instance in which "popular" and "personal favorite" are the same.

*laughs* Well, of course none of my stories are very popular.

The results would have been very different if I'd gone by hits rather than by a combination of kudos and comments. I have several more HP fics that have a greater number of hits (all of which either have more conventional pairings or have very kinky content), but Father to the Man just eked out ahead in terms of feedback. I actually might have put it down as my personal favourite if something else had come out on top, but In Memory of Sigmund Freud is up there too, and for such different reasons.

The other fandoms had a much larger gap between most popular and my favourites. My most popular in The Magnificent Seven was written for Kink Bingo, for a popular kink, and was likely read by people outside the fandom; my favourite is a lengthy post-canon story featuring a threesome that contains two of the least-shipped characters of the main cast. In Avatar: The Last Airbender, we've got a pretty popular rare pairing versus a pretty unpopular rare pairing (featuring two older men), and in Avatar: The Legend of Korra, I'm pleased as punch that a cross-gen f/f piece is my most popular, but it's also just a drabble, and I'm much fonder of the second story, even though it features multiple pairings that no one else has written.

Well, of course none of my stories are very popular.

I am genuinely baffled by this. Yes, rarepairs, yes, "unattractive" characters, yes, cross-gen that isn't everybody's cuppa. I understand the putative reasons ("putative" - now there's a word I haven't used in ages), but it makes me want to go buttonhole readers.

Did you decide purely according to AO3 stats? On LJ, Rose & Fire got more comments than The White Road, but on AO3 the response to the former is dismal and the latter is the only fic I've written that attracts much attention at all (not a complaint - I know re-posted stories don't often pick up much response, and anyway HP isn't one of AO3's current top fandoms).

my favourite is a lengthy post-canon story featuring a threesome that contains two of the least-shipped characters of the main cast.

This makes me sorry that I'm unfamiliar with the Magnificent Seven canon.

Yes, the differences in popularity in your other fic fall in with fannish reading trends. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to write a juggernaut pairing in a hugely popular fandom (ironic, I realize, considering that HP was a megafandom and even lesser known ships received far more feedback than fic in the vast majority of other fandoms).

I did go with AO3 stats, largely because of how drastically my comment count went down when I closed off LJ comments and linked to DW instead. Otherwise, the list would probably have been weighted towards older stories.

This makes me sorry that I'm unfamiliar with the Magnificent Seven canon.

I think that one stands relatively well alone, as most of the story is told in flashback, but milage may vary. It's about two men mourning their lover, who has recently died, and trying to figure out whether they can still be in a relationship without him holding them together. It's mostly my favourite because I was revisiting the fandom of my adolescence as an adult and likewise nudging the characters a little further down the road to say goodbye.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to write a juggernaut pairing in a hugely popular fandom (ironic, I realize, considering that HP was a megafandom and even lesser known ships received far more feedback than fic in the vast majority of other fandoms).

I've wondered that myself, and I've been startled the handful of times I've wandered into juggernaut pairings or fandoms of the moment (yes, HP was hugely popular, but it was so spread out chronologically and in terms of interest that it was really more like an archipelago than a land-locked country).

However, I've largely stopped even trying to guess what makes a story popular. My most-kudos'd and clicked fic under this pseud on AO3 is actually a Tintin one, at about twice the responses of Father to the Man. And that's not even touching my Hobbit fic, which has some very odd stats.