Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hogwarts Legacy was announced by Sony in September 2020. It was released in February 2023. By the end of March 2025, the game had reached 34 million sales.

Currently, Ao3 hosts around 7.8k Hogwarts Legacy fanfiction works. For the majority of this study, we will look only at the English 5.3k fics which do not have crossovers. Regardless, both of these numbers are in the top 0.7% of fandoms, according to toastystats’ Size of Fandoms 2024 .

Interestingly enough, 2 people created 7 fanfics before the official release of Hogwarts Legacy. The very first fic registered within Ao3 is a multi-chaptered story that has not been updated since 2022, five months before the official release of Hogwarts Legacy (HL). Two days before release, within the time frame of early access, a Reader/Sebastian fic was published. I would say that this is the first actual HL fanfiction. The fact that it’s a 2k word Reader/Sebastian story is quite indicative of what the fandom has latched onto.

We see that within the first month, 494 people had played enough of the game that they became inspired to write fanfic. Within 4 months, the fandom had decreased to half its size, which is a notable achievement, considering how quickly media passes through the cultural zeitgeist.

Holiday seasons create an influx of creations with diminishing returns. The announcement of a sequel also increases fandom activity, but not game updates like photo mode or releases like the switch. You may think that the Switch 2 release caused that bump in 2025 June, but that’s actually due to an LGBT fandom event. We’ll get into the specifics of that in our ‘ Relationship Categories and Popular Ships ’ chapter.

Is this fandom cycle normal?

Let’s look at some other fandoms and compare. We will start with another Harry Potter video game– Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery.

...Okay, maybe using a live-service mobile game isn’t the best example. I’m guessing that these spikes correlate to major story updates.

Looking outside of Harry Potter, let’s consider action role-playing games that were released in 2023. We will consider 3 games: Final Fantasy XVI , Lies of P , and Greedfall .

Final Fantasy XVI (FFXVI) is a Japanese action role-playing game released in June 2023. It’s part of an existing larger IP and was released for PS5 and Windows at separate times. Since this year, it has sold over 3.5 million units.

The fandom’s peak number of 475 is close to HL’s 494. Its half-life and rate of decay is similar as well. Notably, the fandom’s high was reached when FFXVI was a playstation exclusive. If both versions had been released at the same time, its peak would have doubtlessly been higher, but would it have affected its rate of decay and lowest point? 

The release for Windows opened up the game to an entire new market, yet fandom activity still did not surpass its initial release date high.

Lies of P is a South Korean action role-playing game based off of Pinocchio . It was released in September 2023 and released a DLC in June 2025. In that same month, it had sold over 3 million units.

We see that again, there’s early bird creators, although I haven’t checked to see if those fics are relevant to the game’s plot or characters. Fandom peak in Lies of P is a few months after its release, when plans for a sequel were announced. Then activity falls to 50% within 2 months.

I’m not part of the fandom, so I can’t explain why the fandom sometimes increases in the months that it does. But at the end we see clearly that the release of its DLC explodes fic creation up to 70% of its peak. 

If we expand our search outside of 2023, we can find a suitable example of the fandom lifecycle in Greedfall , which was released in 2019. This is an action role-playing game of an original IP and has sold over 2 million copies.

We see again that fandom activity falls by 50% within 2 months. Greedfall , with a primarily western audience, follows the seasonal sales and thus its fandom is boosted every winter for about 4 years until numbers reach what I would call ‘baseline’. Due to the lacklustre sequel, it’s unlikely there will be any significant increases in fandom. Importantly , however, is that the fandom is still alive even after 6 years and underwhelming follow-up content.

If you’re wondering why the other, bigger, better RPG of 2023 isn’t here, it’s because Ao3 does not organise Baldur’s Gate 3 to be a distinct fandom from its franchise: Baldur’s Gate. There’s no way for me to confirm that the works I pull are for BG3 or BG2 and BG1. Also, the dataset is 7 times larger than Hogwarts Legacy and it would take me a week to gather just the basic stats.

HL Fandom is doing well, comparatively

Not every fandom gets to be, well, Harry Potter , but being a Harry Potter spin-off has given HL leverage from the start, from which it has managed to settle down at a much slower pace compared to its contemporaries and other big names in its genre.

If the HL DLC had been released, we likely would have seen a boost in fandom of 50% or more. HL2 will probably increase fandom to some degree, but it’s uncertain how much of the plot will tie into HL.

The data suggests that the HL is far from being dead and likely won’t die even with the sabotaging actions of its troubled creator. The new Harry Potter series (and subsequent media) will give the chance to lead new Harry Potter fans into checking out this game, adding new blood into the fandom.

I’m going to make a prediction that HL’s baseline will be 10-20% of its peak, giving 50 new fics per month. If you think otherwise, feel free to comment.

General Statistics

Let’s look at some data that we all already have an idea of.

Sebastian and Ominis hold a heavy majority in the fandom, with Ominis being named twice as much as 3rd place Poppy, and holding over four times relationship tags as her. We’ll discuss this further in the second chapter, but I do want to reveal that I currently have a tumblr poll going on for which character is the fandom bicycle (they get shipped with everybody).

These stats don’t necessarily determine popularity. While Sebastian and Ominis are popular, they also tend to be a pair (whether platonically or otherwise) and thus any fic which has one will end up having the other, regardless if they’re the focus.

We can see the same phenomenon with Eleazar Fig. He’s often tagged because he’s within the orbit of the Player Character. But anyone who wants to find a fic centred on Eleazar Fig will have a hard time shifting through the tag.

Garreth Weasley, Aesop Sharp, and Imelda Reyes, however, are characters with little relevance to the plot/quests whatsoever. The fact they’ve earned significant spots in the tags, along with a noticeable amount of relationships, does indicate a degree of fandom affection.

Because this is a ship heavy fandom, where 64% of fics have some romantic/sexual tag besides the relationship tag, I do think that ranking by amount of relationship tags would give some degree of insight on popularity. If that were the case, Natsai Onai, Matilda Weasley, and Eleazar Fig would be booted off.

There is a certain group that rivals Sebastian Sallow in how often they are mentioned: Original Character(s) . Part of this is due to the nature of the game necessitating the creation of OCs, but toastystats’ Fandom Stats 2024 reveals that Original Character(s) and Reader tags are the most popular character tags out of all fandoms. For the HL fandom, Reader fics take on 30.8%, which is 6% more than how often Poppy Sweeting is tagged.

The Issue with Tagging

If we were to look at the raw tags in order to decide most popular genre, we would get a graph like this:

However , Ao3 has meta-tags and tag wrangling for a reason. Their FAQ explains: “ A metatag is a canonical tag with subtags under it, used to group together semi-related tags by their similarities to make browsing easier. ”

If you look at ‘Additional Tags’ under HL’s filter, you won’t see ‘Oral Sex’ because it’s likely under the meta-tag ‘Smut’. Now, Ao3’s top tags calculation is simplistic and can have some problems. In HL’s case, it offers to filter by the ‘Not Beta Read’ tag, but I doubt many people want to. Nor would they want to exclude the ‘Not Beta Read’ tag, because the vast majority of works are not beta read. Most works just don’t mention it.

So I did my own version of tag-wrangling. Here are the genre tags which are in 10% or more HL fics:

With this method, ‘Romance’ overtakes ‘Fluff’ and the archetypical version of ‘Smut’ rises to over 30% of fics. Of course, this is entirely beholden to my idea of what tags belong in what category and while it is excellent for data analysis, these archetypes may be insufficient for filtering.

In general we see that HL is a very relationship-heavy fandom. It likes ‘Fluff’ only a bit more than it likes ‘Detailed Sex’, and it doesn’t shy away from ‘Dark’, ‘Violen(t)’ topics.

What types of fics are there?

We’ll go into more detail in What Writers Write , but the broad categories are:

Fics with Explicit rating are the most common, while General Audiences and Teen And Up Audiences take up a combined 45.1%. If we compare with toastystats’ Smutty Fandom Stats 2022 , HL’s Explicit works are at a higher percentage than The Walking Dead (TV) , which has the 5th highest amount of adult content in big fandoms. HL loses out on making the rankings however by its relatively low percentage of Mature works.

Here's a condensed format of warnings in HL fanfic:

Example on how to read the chart:

• In blue we see the total amount of fics with the warning ‘Major Character Death’ is 6.27%
• In purple, the number of fics that only use this warning is 2.11%
• But in red, we see the percentage of fics which use both ‘Major Character Death’ AND  ‘Graphic Depictions of Violence’ (and possible other tags) is greater than its exclusive use and comparative tags
• Thus we conclude that while many fics can exclusively have ‘Major Character Death’, there is some correlation between ‘Major Character Death’ and ‘Graphic Depictions of Violence’ in the fandom.

We can also see that there is a small percentage of authors who click the ‘No Archive Warnings Apply’ button… and then apply an archive warning.

Fics which have no specific relationship category pairing make up less than 13% of works. The rest are:

The HL fandom has a higher ratio of F/M:M/M:F/F compared to overall Ao3 fandoms. I would say that this is usually the case for media where the audience is able to pick their preferred gender as the main character.

There’s something to be said about how the constraints of a media will shape shipping culture. We can see it in fandoms where the media has a sparse selection of developed female characters with narrative focus (Sherlock fandom), where media centres only two main characters (early Supernatural fandom), and where media centres only one character (Onceler fandom).

Fic completion:

A little less than 75% of HL works are complete. Of the incomplete works, over 350 of them are ongoing. This brings us to our last point, the data considered so far has encompassed all works, from the very first work created in June 2021 up to some works created in August 2025. But we know from the history graph that the fandom size has varied widely.

Early Fandom and Current Fandom

The difference in data depending on time frame can be shown in the kudos:

If we were to take the mean average of all fics, our number would be disproportionately high and in favour of older works. A ‘popular’ HL work created in 2023 and a ‘popular’ HL work created in 2025 operate on two entirely different scales. The reality is that 99% of works created after the first year and a half of HL’s release do not have more than 200 kudos.

(Note that we are talking about percentiles . The 99th percentile of works will have at minimum [730, 846, 167, 129] kudos. It does not determine the most kudos a fic has.)

Another factor to take into consideration for kudos evaluation is Explicit rating. If we were to remove the nearly 30% of Explicit fics from our data set, the top 10% of fics created after June 2024 would be works that had 47 kudos or more. We can parse this data even more, which will be covered in Kudos, Hits, Popularity .

So what’s the reason for this chasm of 80 kudos between the average work created in 2023 and the average work created after June 2024?

One reason is the shrinking fandom. If fanfiction creation were an accurate representation of fandom size, then post-June 2024 fandom size would be 15%-30% of its highest peak. However, one creator can create many fics at various points in time. In order to get the number of active writers in this fandom, we can filter the data by unique authors who have updated their most recent work:

This graph mirrors the fanfiction creation history pretty well, with a growth in recent months due to how we favour most recent updates. Of the total 1695 authors in the HL fandom, 498 of them have updated a fic within 2025. So 29% of the writing side of the fandom is active.

If our 2025 kudos stats are 29% of the total kudos stats, then this 80 kudos gap in average fic can be explained by the naturally shrinking fandom.

Okay, up to the 70th percentile this hypothesis is accurate, but reality lags behind predicted results for the top 30%. Why do you think that is?

I have a feeling that this might be due to how a certain type of reader will only read the most popular fics, of which the majority of them are before 2025. Thus the popularity of new fics continues to have an uneven ratio to old fics, which take on a disproportionate amount of new readers.

That is to say, there will always be a vital group of readers who will ‘take a chance’ on fics with no kudos and thus we get the [22.91, 2.32, 9.28, 19.72] numbers. But in order to have ‘popularity’ (top 10% of fics), readers who read popular fics must be attracted. And those readers are most attracted to old fics, which have already been established as popular.

How will we investigate this theory? In What Readers Read .

Also if you noticed I judged expected kudos by the percentage of active writers, when it's the readers who give kudos, then kudos for you! You get a cookie for being so diligent.

I’m assuming that the growth and shrinkage of fandom creators is proportionate to the growth and shrinkage in readership. And we’ll have to lead with that assumption until the data of future chapters prove us wrong.

So how big is the fandom anyways?

Given that we know the number of HL Ao3 creators, we can follow a modified formula of the 1% rule, which states that “only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content”.

(The reasons why we follow a modified version will be discussed in What Writers Write .)

With the modified version, we posit that general writers make up 10% of the fandom.

1,695 authors → 16,950 readers (if all authors are also readers)

498 current authors → 4,980 current readers

Is this number accurate? No idea. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m hoping that once I get access to reader stats, we’ll find a more definitive answer. ( Or every single reader in the fandom could announce their presence to me in the comments (¬‿¬ ) )

Finally, I leave you with this:

No Beta, We Die Like–

Deaths in the Hogwarts Legacy Fandom (RIP)

34 - No beta, we die like Solomon Sallow

24 - No beta, we die like Professor Fig

09 - No beta, we die like Tobbs

06 - No beta, we die like the Poachers

05 - No beta, we die like George Osric

04 - No beta, we die like Miriam Fig

04 - No beta, we die like the Ashwinders

03 - No beta, we die like Victor Rookwood

01 - No beta, we die like Ranrok's loyalists

01 - No beta, we die like Ranrok

01 - No beta, we die like Lodgok

01 - No beta, we die like the goblin banker

01 - No beta, we die like Sebastian’s parents

01 - No beta, we die like Ominis and Sebastian’s singed eyebrows

01 - No beta, we die like Ominis and Sebastian’s friendship

01 - No beta, we die like Ominis’s love for his family

01 - No beta, we die like Garreth's experimental potions

01 - No beta, we die like Professor Sharp's partner

01 - No beta, we die like dementors at a rave

01 - No beta, we die like treacle tarts

01 - No beta, we die like the troll in hogsmeade

01 - No beta, we die like the OC

01 - No beta, we die like Nettie's parents

01 - No beta, we die like the inferi

01 - No beta, we die like Sirius

01 - No beta, we die like Jackdaw

01 - No beta, we die like Wilson

01 - No beta, we die like the Romanovs

01 - No beta, we die like Padme

01 - No beta, we die like Christina's shame

01 - No beta, we die like everyone's mental health in this fic

01 - No beta, we die like the metric shitton of enemy NPCs the MC straight up murders at 15 years of age

01 - No beta, we die like Ao3 during the DDoS attack

Chapter Text

Today, we'll focus on categories:

Over 49% of fics have an exclusively straight category with around 11% of straight fics being mixed with other category tags like ‘Gen’, ‘M/M’, ‘Multi’, etc. A little over a quarter of fics have M/M representation. Nearly half of F/F fics are additionally tagged with other pairing categories.

Time period affects the creation of certain categories:

This chart goes over 100% because a fic can have multiple categories (eg, F/M and M/M).

Interestingly, there’s a dip in M/M creation from November 2023 to March 2024. I’m not sure what prompted this momentary dip in M/M, besides a possible reaction to Rowling’s anti-LGBT views. If you have an idea, please let me know in the comments.

By July 2024, the M/M ratio had increased and consistently been at a 30-50% ratio up to August 2025 except for June 2025, in which a community-wide Pride event was hosted. During this month, the F/M ratio dropped to its lowest 30% as LGBT fics took precedence.

F/F fics seem to be increasing in creation, although that could be due to the season. We see that Femslash February and the aforementioned Pride event made a noticeable impact on fic creations, both times taking an over 20% ratio.

Do categories affect what type of fics are created?

For an overview of category trends in all major fandoms, refer to toastystat’s How do fanworks vary by ship category?

For the rest of this category data, we’re going to be looking at exclusive ships, which notably reduces the number of F/F works from 264 to 144. I do this to ensure we are talking about F/F fics instead of, say, F/M fics with background F/F pairings.

Warnings

Additionally, works that background tag F/F in addition to their main F/M or M/M relationships are 10x more likely to include the Rape/Non-Con warning and I felt like adding those points of data into the analysis of F/F works would not truly be representative of sapphic and lesbian works.

Inversely, exclusive M/M works were around 3x more likely to use the Rape/Non-Con than non-exclusive M/M works and exclusive F/M works were a little over 2x more likely to use that warning than non-exclusive F/M works. In other words, for works with gay or straight pairings, the chance of Rape/Non-Con themes decreases if additional categories are added. But for F/F works, those themes increase if there are additional relationship categories.

Overall, exclusive F/F works are least likely to have warnings, while exclusive M/M works have the greatest percentage of all serious warnings within their set, with the exception of F/M works having a higher ratio of Graphic Depictions of Violence. Keep in mind that one fic can have multiple warnings.

Ratings

Of the three main relationship categories, F/F has the least adult content while M/M and F/M have similar percentages of adult content. The Other category also has a reduced amount of Explicit work, which goes against the notion that works tagged with Other centre on explicit actions with ambiguously gendered beings.

Completion Status

F/F works are prone to oneshots while F/M, Multi, and Other works have a tendency towards multi-chaptered works. This increase in incomplete works could be due to how many older works are… on hiatus and thus have very little chance of being incomplete in the future. F/F works do not have this significant issue because:

2025 is the year of lesbians in the Hogwarts Legacy fandom.

Over half of F/F writers have active works. We know from the previous chapter that typically around 70% of incomplete works have been on hiatus since the end of 2024.

Word Count

For oneshots, it’s true that F/F works tend to be shorter than its male-centred counterparts. However, F/F multi-chaptered works are of equal or higher word count than M/M multi-chaptered works except for the top 1% of longfics.

F/M and M/M are somewhat of equal length in oneshots, but the top 10% of F/M longfics are significantly longer than other categories.

Tags & Archetypes

F/F works tag significantly less than other works. This is largely affected by how a majority of those works are short oneshots. If we were to take the tag mean of only oneshots of M/M and F/M works, we would get mean: 14 and mean: 15, which are close or the same as F/F’s mean: 14.

The cells in purple are unique to the table, but not to all the categories as a whole. The admiration for Leander Prewett seems to be a F/M phenomenon, Marvolo Gaunt is popular for M/M dark fics, and F/F writers love older women.

Because there’s about 50 ways to tag ‘Original Character(s)’ and 5,000 ways to tag ‘Sebastian Sallow/Original Character(s)’, I consolidated those variations into meta-tag archetypes and ended up with these results.

Technically, every category has their own villain pairing (Isidora Morganach, Marvolo Gaunt, Victor Rookwood) although if you ask me Isidora is a tragic anti-hero. The Isidora ship is tied for last place with Satyavati Shah/Mudiwa Onai, Chiyo Kogawa/Matilda Weasley, Natsai Onai/Imelda Reyes, Adelaide Oakes/Imelda Reyes, Anne Sallow/Poppy Sweeting, Mirabel Garlick/Sirona Ryan, Samantha Dale/Adelaide Oakes, Charlotte Morrison/Violet Mcdowell, Nerida Roberts/Grace Pinch-Smedley.

I find it interesting that Sebastian barely holds a majority share in F/M works. Nonetheless, he’s still twice as mentioned as the second largest straight ship: Ominis Gaunt/Original Character(s). Within M/M works, he has over 80% of mentioned relationships. For F/F works, fem!Sebastian does not have the same magnetic pull. Poppy Sweeting is the IT Girl of F/F writers.

Here we see that the number of F/F writers is small, but they are very dedicated to their art. Two creators have written about their OCs so much that their names are in the top 10 unique tags for their exclusive category.

It’s curious that M/M works will have the tag ‘Period-Typical Homophobia’, but no exclusive F/F tag does. Perhaps because F/F works rarely dip into darker topics that would address homophobia? It could also be because F/F tags are rather minimal. (@legowhiskey has also made a good point that the Hogwarts Legacy world is canonically and explicitly accepting of lesbians. Lesbophobia does not exist in the magical world.

F/M works love the ‘/Reader’ genre, as 3 of their top 10 unique tags refer to it.

What Determines a Category’s Popularity?

There’s some conversation to be had about what determines ‘popularity’, if it’s an indicator of quality (spoiler: it’s not), and if we should even judge works by that metric instead of, say, whether it contains the tags we like. We’ll discuss that more in Kudos, Hits, Popularity, but for now let’s take the kudos/hit ratio as a soft metric to determine positive reader response.

The way to read this graph is that a bigger bubble means more words and the top bubbles have a higher average ratio of kudos per view. A low ratio means that a user clicked on the work and did not leave kudos OR they are re-reading the fic/reading the newest chapter and already left kudos. There’s some discussion about how the kudos/hits ratio isn’t mathematically indicative of anything, which I talk about here.

The reason why we still consider this metric is that the readership audiences for F/F, M/M, and F/M works are so disproportionate that we do need to consider hits when judging their base ‘popularity’.

Generally, the longer works are → the more chapters they have → the lower the kudos/hits ratio. F/M works have a higher percentage of multi-chaptered works, and so the large green bubbles tend to draw towards the bottom. However, the ratio for F/M and M/M longfics goes up the more mature the rating. This is inversely true for explicit F/F and Gen works.

As this ratio favours oneshots, we see that works with smaller word counts will bubble towards the top. Both Gen and M/M works have a high kudos/hits ratio within the ranges General Audiences - Teen and Up Audiences - Mature range.

Do Certain Categories Receive More Comments?

Again, we divide by hits to account for different audience sizes. It appears that F/F readers do have a general distaste for interacting with the currently offered Explicit F/F works. However they are very enthusiastic over Teen and Up works.

Through visual observation, most works will be within the 0.005-0.05 comments/hits range. So, 1 comment every 200 views or 5 comments every 100 views. Works with the rating of General Audiences, Mature, and Explicit rating gain slightly more comments by M/M readers.

While the HL fandom does have a majority of F/M works, there seems to be slightly greater enthusiasm towards M/M works. I wonder if that is because M/M works usually include two beloved canon characters, instead of F/M works which gravitate towards OC/Canon?

In the next chapter, we’ll investigate just what sort of relationships are popular and what sort of themes they gravitate towards. You can probably guess the biggest pairing we will be looking at is, but if you would like to investigate any niche pairings, let me know!