Animanga peeps, help me out!

[thuviaptarth]

Are these rare fandoms?

Gankutsuou
Legal Drug aka Gouhou Drug
Loveless
Mushishi
Nana
Tactics
Victorian Romance Emma aka Emma
Viewfinder aka Finder no Hyouteki
Vision of Escaflowne
Wish
XXXholic

I am puzzled because so many of them seem to be popular among readers, but for most of them I'm not sure where I'd go for fic.

Comments

[the_rck]

XXXholic is one I'd actually expect to find a lot of fic for, but that may be a quirk of my friends list and interests. ::ponders:: Of course, most of the stories I can think of off the top of my head are crossovers with non-CLAMP fandoms. Some of the difficulty in looking for fic for it is the way that CLAMP canons and fandoms tend to interweave and to collapse in on each other. Let's see... (Pulling from the community list of friend who's into this fandom.) doumekiwatanuki, hitsuzen_100 and xxx_holic.

There's one Legal Drug community that I know of gouhoudrug. I went looking after I wrote a Legal Drug fic for a challenge/exchange. Again, there may well be CLAMP fic communities that I just don't know about.

I would expect fics for Wish to be quite rare.

[thuviaptarth.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that's really helpful!

I am always suspicious of CLAMP fandoms as "rare," but I think it depends on where you're looking and how recent the activity is.

[shrift.livejournal.com]

Last I checked, Legal Drug and Tactics are still pretty rare. I think Legal Drug has a couple hundred stories on ff.net, and Tactics has half as many. There are some Tactics LJ comms, but they're very low traffic. I've never seen more than a handful of stories in these fandoms at major animanga archives.

[thuviaptarth.livejournal.com]

What are you counting as major animanga archives?

I'm inclined to agree with you on Legal Drug, btw, but am iffier on Tactics. I'm also hoping the fandom will get a boost with the Tpop releases, which are so much better translated than the ADV versions, ohmygod.

[shrift.livejournal.com]

Um, aside from ff.net... Mediaminer.org, I guess? AnimeSpiral? Come to think of it, most of the animanga archives I know are for single fandoms... hmm.

Unless there's a strong Tactics presence on LJ that I don't know about, and there very well could be, I would consider it rare.

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

I would say that Loveless isn't rare, since the main comm (raburesu) is pretty active. I've only ever been on the fringes of xxxHolic, but therck pointed out the main communities for it, and it has 800+ fics on ff.net.

Most of the others on the list seem to be as you said--lots of readers and not so much fic. I'm not sure about Escaflowne, though, since I have the vague memory that it was pretty popular for fic pre-LJ, but I don't know enough about the state of it these days to say if it's dead or not.

[thuviaptarth.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That's very helpful.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

There was a lot of Tactics fic in one of the last springkink rounds. I know of a few Loveless fic writers, depending on the ship.

I suspect Viewfinder is hampered by the insane difficulty of getting ahold of canon.

[thuviaptarth.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised; hasn't Viewfinder been licensed? I'm pretty sure I've seen it in my local comics shop.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

It has been liscenced, but BeBoy or whoever did super tiny print runs and refuse to print more and do random hiatuses, etc. I've been trying to collect the whole thing for over a year.

[oyceter]

I've gotten a comment or two on my Nana story bemoaning the lack of Nana stories, but that may just be because the readers don't know where to look (as I don't know where to look either). Soooo... no idea.

[thuviaptarth.livejournal.com]

It is surprisingly rare on ff.net. Not that that's always the best place to look for animanga fic, but ...

[feklar.livejournal.com]

I came via Oracne's friends list.

Compared to US media fandoms, I think all animanga (excl. GW and Naruto) is "rare." Some of the scanlation sites (Nakama, AarinFantasy, etc.) have fanfic sections, but what little I've read is generally badly written. I think some of the writing issues stem from having non-native English speakers writing in English. I know there is Viewfinder fic on Aarinfantasy. I think links to all of the translated VF stories are there too.

Some of these fandoms may also be just a little too old, so fans have moved on to other fandoms. There was a decent flow of Escaflowne fic for a while, but it's been out for years and I don't know that it's still active. Also for short or finished series, it's hard for fandoms to develop a large following (and, thus, a large library) because they don't have the continuous story renewal and fan recruitment that an on-going series has.

[http://users.livejournal.com/solo____/]

Tactics is still pretty damn rare. I know, because I've been looking.

Gouhou Drug too, I think, but I'm less sure about that because I haven't actually made an effort to seek it out. I certainly haven't come across any, and it's something I would read if I saw it.

I'd be surprised if XXXholic is rare.

[quixotic-sense.livejournal.com]

The Escaflowne category at FF.net currently has 4,079 stories, so it's definitely not rare by yuletide standards. There were a lot more around before FF.net got rid of NC-17 stories, I recall -- some of them are still scattered around the intarwebs. I wouldn't classify XXXholic, Viewfinder and Loveless as rare, either.

I'm kind of iffy on whether Legal Drug would be considered rare enough for yuletide, but the rest-- yes.

[thuviaptarth.livejournal.com]

The mods have decided to abandon ff.net as the sole metric and are letting in fandoms w/o recent activity, but I'll take a look at the dates on the ff.net stuff to check.

I don't know, at this point I think even YnM might qualify as rare, because there hasn't been much activity lately, but then possibly I just changed the views on my comms without checking.

[quixotic-sense.livejournal.com]

If it helps any, there've also been Escaflowne fic posted recently to communities like 30_kisses. It's just that most activity in that fandom recently seems to be centered around writing challenges, as far as I can see.

[thuviaptarth.livejournal.com]

That is really helpful! I have passed on a summary of the thread opinions to elyn, but emphasized yours, as you're the person most plugged-in to animanga fandom on my f'list.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Loveless definetely is not, the rest I would say are pretty rare, at least in terms of fic instead of readers.

[rilina.livejournal.com]

I don't think Holic is rare; this may simply reflect the selection of fic/rec journals that I follow, but the slash pairing in that has produced a lot of fic. And there's lots of crossovers as well.