The Most Dedicated Fans 02/10/09

Geek. Nerd. Dork. They all describe someone who has social skills bordering those of the common pencil. Usually these Geeks/Nerds/Dorks have something to concentrate their fanaticism on: a particular video game, a movie and it's "universe," or perhaps a TV Show. Often times, it's a book, something far more mobile and able to carry around in one's laptop case.

One famous fan activity is writing fanfiction. Fanfiction is just what it sounds like, stories written about the characters from a particular game/movie/book/comic series, etc.

I used to be in this category. My particular favorite was the Star Fox series of games. The greatest of which being the 1997 classic StarFox 64. To be honest, there are a lot of StarFox fanfictions I could find that are written better than a lot of books on the shelves. One could probably say the same about almost any other fanfiction category out there, but I never visited any.

The last time I wrote any sort of fanfiction was... 2006. Three years ago. I used to post my fanfiction on THE place to post it: www.fanfiction.net

I was recently browsing the site after receiving some inspiration from The Dark Knight and upcoming film Watchmen (opens in theaters March 6). Just for the hell of it. And what I noticed for the first time were numbers next to the categories. Turns out they represent the total number of writings posted in the category.

So who has the most dedicated fans? In parenthesis is the number of fictions with over 100,000 words.

Watchmen: 34 (0)
Catcher in the Rye: 57 (0)
Tetris: 66 (0)

It pleases me to know that while Watchmen may not have as dedicated a fanbase as Catcher in the Rye, they still don't beat Tetris.

Star Fox: 1,539 (29)
Bible: 2,643 (0)
Mario: 2,855 (16)

I think Star Fox still qualifies as the most dedicated fans since they have more "extremely freakin long" fictions than Mario. But Mario obviously has a much wider fan base. I find it interesting to see that the Bible has a wider base than Star Fox, and even Catcher in the Rye for that matter. Take that JD Salinger.

Batman: 3,112 (16)
Zelda: 13,145 (125)
High School Musical: 15,674 (71)

Batman scored kind of low. But Zelda jumped up there, with what surprised me to see that High School Musical beat out Zelda. I was just like, "What?" are there THAT many 13-year-olds without anything else to do?

Pirates of the Caribbean: 17,142 (107)
Star Wars: 20,970 (209)
Lord of the Rings: 41,708 (273)
Twilight: 62,774 (122)

Here are the high scorers. Star Wars has the highest fan population, but I wasn't really surprised to find that Lord of the Rings and (dear god) Twilight had higher numbers.

Harry Potter: 389,307 (1,623)

And of course, Harry Potter has 4x the amount of the 2nd place winner. Not only do they have breadth (largest amount of fictions) but depth (LONG fictions). Hats off to Harry Potter fanatics for being the most dedicated fans!

02/10/09