Archive of Our Own ^beta

In this set of analyses, I'm going to try to get a sense of how popular each Sherlock episode has been to write about (or create other fanworks for) on AO3, and how that has changed over time. Standard caveats apply -- especially relevant are that AO3 is not representative of all of fandom, and many people post fanworks without adding the relevant episode tags, so these analyses are very prone to noise/not being representative of what fandom is writing the most about. (Also, this is only one possible meaning of "popular" -- what's popular to read and what's popular to write are often very different.)

Notably, there may be some other episode-specific tags that I've omitted that people may use in place of episode tags; those could possibly shift some of the below analyses, if there are enough such uses. Here are some such tags that I didn't include in my analyses because they didn't have a huge number of uses, but there may be others I missed:

• I Love You Scene (Sherlock: The Final Problem) - 103 uses
• The Tarmac Scene (Sherlock) - 59 uses
• Hug Scene (Sherlock: The Lying Detective) - 48 uses
• The Pool Scene (Sherlock) - 45 uses

With those caveats in mind, lets look at Sherlock episode tags. Each episode has a tag of the form "Episode: sXXeXX Title" (example: Episode: s03e02 The Sign of Three). The exception is TAB, which is simply Episode: The Abominable Bride. I started by comparing how much each of these tags got used per calendar year, starting in 2010 when the show first aired. (For these analyses, I omitted the tag for the minisode, Many Happy Returns, which was only used 43 times.)

Episode	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018	2017	2016	2015	2014	2013	2012	2011	2010	Total works on AO3
ASiP	11	28	31	26	28	38	47	72	42	78	84	56	14	0	564
TBB	5	13	5	11	7	5	12	27	8	19	20	13	7	0	156
TGG	22	26	23	20	20	17	26	59	37	51	65	61	31	6	478
ASiB	12	13	22	24	20	41	34	55	40	41	54	107	0		484
THoB	9	8	24	28	21	24	19	28	35	40	49	67	0		366
TRF	74	75	93	112	70	97	131	86	137	225	237	239	0		1633
TEH	25	44	29	48	32	44	59	48	63	225	0				642
TSoT	23	26	39	36	34	36	59	67	96	379	0				803
HLV	28	25	28	54	19	49	86	160	305	712	0				1486
TAB	5	7	13	19	13	11	23	144	15	0					254
TST	14	20	19	20	9	36	172	0							309
TLD	28	27	22	36	23	55	253	0							464
TFP	64	95	115	121	156	170	529	0							1299

I've color coded all the tags for each season to help see patterns:

• S1 is pink
• S2 is blue
• S3 is yellow
• TAB is dark gray
• S4 is orange

Also, for each season, E1 has a solid line, E2 has a dotted line, and E3 has a dashed line. So you can compare finales by looking for the dashed lines, for instance.

Note that these are not mutually exclusive; some fanworks use tags for multiple episodes.

Observations:

• I was initially somewhat surprised to see that His Last Vow, the controversial S3 finale, had the biggest spike in usage per year, given just how much was getting written about Reichenbach when I entered the fandom around the beginning of 2013. But we'll come back to Reichenbach in a minute.
• It's interesting to me to see that for S3 and S4, during the first year of those seasons, the finales got the most attention, but then the middle episode got the second most amount of attention. Whereas in S1 and S2, the middle episode definitely had the weakest showing of the season, and The Blind Banker is the least-tagged episode overall. (Another deviation for S1: A Study in Pink has been tagged somewhat more than The Great Game.)
• HLV had a sharp spike in popularity, but then it dipped down and was getting tagged less than The Reichenbach Fall as soon as S4 came out (3 years later). Meanwhile, The Final Problem (the far more controversial S4 finale) had a smaller initial spike, but it didn't start getting fewer tags than TRF until 2023 (6 years later).
• S2 was when the show first really attracted a ton of fan attention. And we can see that TRF didn't have a short spike in attention and then drop the next year, like the S3 and S4 finales did... in contrast to the other seasons, it spiked and then plateaued, staying roughly the same amount of popularity until S3 came out -- sustained fandom interest.

Okay, but I can hear some of you shouting at me, because -- plot twist? -- I've been leaving out one of the biggest episode-related tags in the fandom: "Post-Reichenbach". That tag has been used ~7,600 times on AO3 (as of June 2024), which is almost five times as much as the TRF tag's ~1,600 uses. I suspect these tags don't always get used in the same way; I would guess that the TRF episode tag often gets used for works that more closely address the events of the episode, and Post-Reichenbach gets used for a much wide variety of different imagined follow-ups to that episode. Still, I think it's reasonable to expect that people posting Post-Reichenbach fanworks are grappling with where S2 left off. So let's add that tag into the mix and see how it changes the picture:

Episode	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018	2017	2016	2015	2014	2013	2012	2011	2010	Total works on AO3
Post-Reichenbach	149	203	215	232	197	321	360	368	493	822	2,046	1,772	0		7599

...Yeah, okay, that better matches my memories of the Sherlock fandom. Viewed this way, TRF has been the biggest inspiration for Sherlock authors/fanwork creators every single year, with one exception: the year S4 came out. In 2017, TFP briefly captured more of the fandom's attention (at least according to this proxy metric of number of tags).

It's also interesting to me that you can see how the Sherlock fandom picked up momentum during the post-S2 hiatus and and posted MORE about TRF the year after it came out (2013) as opposed to the year when it aired (2012). Nowadays there's lots of discussion/meta about how fandoms move on quickly (and I'm trying to do some stats about the lifecycle of fandoms); at least according to common wisdom, this kind of sustained hiatus growth is unlikely now.

Of course, the Sherlock fandom also grew and contracted over time. It remains a reasonably active fandom even a decade after its heyday, but it's not the kind of magnet for fandom attention it once was. The combination of other shiny new fandoms, a lot of fandom drama, plus some controversial/unpopular canon episodes caused many to drift away over time. If we look at the amount of Sherlock fanworks per year, we can see those bigger patterns:

Year	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018	2017	2016	2015	2014	2013	2012	2011	2010	
Num Sherlock fanworks	4,369	5,134	5,954	6,865	6,266	8,658	12,249	11,569	13,880	20,273	18,199	14,342	4,012	964

Okay, so S3 actually dropped at the time of maximum Sherlock fandom activity. What happens when we look at the percentage of works tagged Sherlock that were tagged with each episode? Think of this as an estimate of the amount of the fandom's total attention devoted to each episode. And let's remove "Post-Reichenbach" again for the moment, since it dwarfs everything else and makes things hard to see.

Episode	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018	2017	2016	2015	2014	2013	2012	2011	2010
ASiP	0.3%	0.5%	0.5%	0.4%	0.4%	0.4%	0.4%	0.6%	0.3%	0.4%	0.5%	0.4%	0.3%	0.0%
TBB	0.1%	0.3%	0.1%	0.2%	0.1%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	0.1%	0.1%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	0.0%
TGG	0.5%	0.5%	0.4%	0.3%	0.3%	0.2%	0.2%	0.5%	0.3%	0.3%	0.4%	0.4%	0.8%	0.6%
ASiB	0.3%	0.3%	0.4%	0.3%	0.3%	0.5%	0.3%	0.5%	0.3%	0.2%	0.3%	0.7%	0.0%	0.0%
THoB	0.2%	0.2%	0.4%	0.4%	0.3%	0.3%	0.2%	0.2%	0.3%	0.2%	0.3%	0.5%	0.0%	0.0%
TRF	1.7%	1.5%	1.6%	1.6%	1.1%	1.1%	1.1%	0.7%	1.0%	1.1%	1.3%	1.7%	0.0%	0.0%
TEH	0.6%	0.9%	0.5%	0.7%	0.5%	0.5%	0.5%	0.4%	0.5%	1.1%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
TSoT	0.5%	0.5%	0.7%	0.5%	0.5%	0.4%	0.5%	0.6%	0.7%	1.9%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
HLV	0.6%	0.5%	0.5%	0.8%	0.3%	0.6%	0.7%	1.4%	2.2%	3.5%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
TAB	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	0.3%	0.2%	0.1%	0.2%	1.2%	0.1%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
TST	0.3%	0.4%	0.3%	0.3%	0.1%	0.4%	1.4%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
TLD	0.6%	0.5%	0.4%	0.5%	0.4%	0.6%	2.1%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
TFP	1.5%	1.9%	1.9%	1.8%	2.5%	2.0%	4.3%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%

Now we can see that as a percentage of the fandom's total works, TFP appears to have gotten more attention than HLV did, reaching a peak where the TFP episode tag was used on 4.3% of the fandom's works. (In fact, every episode in S4 got more attention relatively than the corresponding episode of S3 -- S04E01 > S03E01, and so on.) Note that there are many (non-mutually exclusive) possible reasons for that, including:

• Maybe S4 had more things people wanted to fix than S3 (This seems true based on my fix-it analysis so far; watch for more data soon)
• Maybe the bigger a fandom is, the most generic fanworks and/or AU fanworks get created -- things that aren't about any particular episode -- and when the fandom consists of more hardcore fans, the more canon-focused works get produced?
• Maybe the practice of tagging episodes specifically got more common over time, and this reflects tagging practices more than/as well as fanwork focus?
• ...and more; feel free to brainstorm other reasons in the comments.

Okay, now let's add "Post-Reichenbach" back in:

Episode	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018	2017	2016	2015	2014	2013	2012	2011	2010	Total works on AO3
Post-Reichenbach	3.4%	4.0%	3.6%	3.4%	3.1%	3.7%	2.9%	3.2%	3.6%	4.1%	11.2%	12.4%	0.0%	0.0%

Wow -- the Post-Reichenbach tag was used on more than 12% of fanworks in 2012, and it has settled down to a reasonably steady state of getting used on ~3.5% of Sherlock fanworks in the years following S4. That's substantially more than the ~1.9% of Sherlock works that TFP has been getting tagged on.

Also keep in mind that while you can't just add together "Post-Reichenbach" and the episode tag for TRF (because they are not mutually exclusive), there are plenty of works that use only one or the other of those tags -- which means that the total attention devoted to TRF is even higher than the "Post-Reichenbach" tag shows. For instance, out of the 4,365 Sherlock works that were posted or updated in 2023:

• 149 were tagged "Post-Reichenbach" (or a subtag)
• 66 were tagged "Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall" (or a subtag)
• 35 were tagged both of the above (we'll call this "the overlap")
• Post-Reichenbach + Episode tag - the overlap = 180 total Sherlock works using one of the biggest TRF-related tags. 180/4365 = at least 4.1% of the Sherlock fandom's attention in 2023 (and as I said, this only includes the works that used the relevant tags)

All in all, Reichenbach continues to occupy a large amount of fandom attention relative to other events/episodes in the Sherlock fandom, even after over a decade and 2 additional seasons (plus a minisode and a special episode) of canon.

For those interested, I also tried visualizing all of the above data through the lens of "how long since the episode aired?" -- i.e., all the spikes of initial activity for each episode line up, and then you can watch how they all taper off at different rates over time. I don't have much in the way of additional commentary, but the slides are available here. And this is an example of what I mean:

Thanks for reading, and for the ongoing interest in fandom data! And much love to the awesome folks I've met via Sherlock over the years. I know people tend to remember a lot of toxicity in the fandom, or to remember how the canon let down a lot of fans (I mean, I absolutely remember those things, too... [i was there gandalf.gif]). But there are nevertheless SO MANY lovely Sherlockians and former Sherlockians out there who made my initial entry into transformative fandom wonderful, and who've continued to be my friends since. <3