I wanna talk about Fandom Oversaturation.
I saw a post about stopping treating fanfics as content, there's no fic market, there's no way to "oversaturate". I agree 100% but it did get me thinking about oversaturation and I actually do think it's possible to oversaturate a fandom (but not in the way the post was suggesting hence why I'm on my post.)
I think it's possible to saturate a fandom with an idea/concept/a particular AU/characterization/etc.
And despite everyone going "TWO CAKES", the reality is, it's more like 100 cakes. Specifically a 100 chocolate cakes that made slightlyyyy different and taste amazing but you'll probably be a little sick of chocolate cakes at the end. If you're not, great! But I imagine most people are a little tired of it.
The "oversaturated" part is always a little bit different in each fandom too.
Take for example, Miraculous Ladybug fandom on ao3. It has a total of 76,508 of which 5920 are Batman crossovers. That's 8% of all ML fanfics. There are 2191 Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug/Damian Wayne fanfics. It's in the top ten of the ships of the fandom. In a series with over 20+ characters and potential ship combos, a *crossover crack ship* places in the top ten ships.
"But you can filter it out!"
Sure, but doesn't change the fact that if I was reading ML fics during that heyday and had absolutely no interest in Batman, it probably was kinda annoying to run into all the time.
Speaking of Batman, the Danny Phantom/Batman crossovers sit wildly with 5500 fics total too. And I know I've seen a post here on tumblr about how it sucks when you're a fan of one but not the other because it's like everywhere and not properly tagged so you can filter it out.
"But that's just crossovers!"
Okay, take character bashing in the Harry Potter fandom. That was a popular thing at one point. There's 575,517 fics on ao3. If you filter out the metatag character bashing, it drops to 558,524 fics. Seems like a lot options to read right? But that fandom is wide and varied. Let's just say you want to read a fic with Harry, in English, with no crossovers include. That brings the number down to 190,069. Remove character bashing meta tag? 180,318 fics.
And this is before you get into any preferences with your ship, the tags, the rating which will drop the amount available even more.
fanon!chuuya from Bungou Stray Dogs is very different than canon!chuuya, some might argue. And I've read a lot of good fanon!chuuya fics, but doesn't change the fact that someone who is sick of seeing fanon!chuuya and wants a characterization more in line with canon!chuuya is probably a hell of time finding fics because that's not something that's really tagged per se.
Think of other characters from other series who personality traits are exaggerated and thus are the most common characterization of that character. Manipulative!Dumbledore, Soft-Woobie-Always-Right!Obi-wan.
"Okay but those are huge fandoms that still have plenty of options!"
Alright, so what about smaller fandoms? Tenkuu Shinpan is a small niche manga that got a netflix anime. There's 163 fics currently. BEFORE the anime was released, there was maybe 30+ fics. Guess who wrote 19 of them? Me. Guess how many of them were crossovers? 12 of them. Guess how many of them were Katekyo Hitman Reborn/Tenkuu Shinpan crossovers? 8 of them.
Didn't like or know any of the crossovers I wrote? Sorry...that's 40% of the total fics at the time, leaving only 18 fics left and again, that's before you filter out a language requirement and you own preferences.
Even today my fics represent 11% of all fics in Tenkuu Shinpan.
Yeah most people would be like "thank you for feeding the starving fan" but on the off chance you didn't like my writing for whatever reason, you probably got a little sick of seeing me in that fandom for the 6 or so months I obsessed over it.
And like even fanon or fanworks spreading can oversaturate a little. Trying to read Legend of Zelda fics with no knowledge of Linked Universe is rough and you lose quite a good chunk of fics available. A lot of people think in KHR, Tsuna's flames being sealed is canon. It is to a degree, only in the anime. But if you're a manga-only fan, you're probably sick of "sealing" fics being so popular.
What I'm getting at is that I think an idea/concept/a particular AU/characterization/etc can oversaturate a fandom. It's like a meme going viral. Yeah it's fun to see everyone's takes but some people will tire it fast than others.
Is it possible to oversaturate a fandom? Yes
Should that stop you from writing and posting your fic? Hell no.
If everyone and their dog is posting their coffeeshop AU, you can too!
But it's interesting to note that some readers will, probably, be sick of seeing the "same chocolate cake" over and over. And other readers will have refined down to VERY SPECIFIC chocolate cake with raspberry filling ONLY that they will ignore your very delicious, super moist chocolate cake.
And as a small minor note, I would argue there are some concepts/ideas that are harder to saturate. Taking the coffeeshop AU example, it's a broad enough concept that occasionally, you'll discover a cheesecake or a strawberry cake hidden among all the chocolate cakes. Like "coffeeshop au but it's rarepair ship". Or "coffeeshop au, but surprise one of them is a secret spy we shift genre to an action movie."
Bottom line, write whatever you want. If you want to be the 101th chocolate cake at the table *do so*. But if you could also keep in mind, variety is the spice of life. So please also consider writing that weird funky niche idea that you thought no one would read and bring ice cream to the cake table instead.
