Some days ago, this post by @triforce-of-mischief circulated about the most and least popular platonic Ao3 fanfic pairings of each Link in the chain.
I got curious so I decided to make some ugly excel plots furthering it. The numbers have changed since then, but the general patterns did not.
As time of this post (sep 23, 2025) these are the numbers for the different platonic pairings in the Linked Universe - jojo56830 (Webcomic) fandom tag. Probably as I redact this post, they will change, but oh well.
The matrix is symmetric because I took Legend & Hyrule to be the same as Hyrule & Legend. In fact there is only one tag for this pairing (Hyrule & Legend). This means you don't need to look at the whole matrix, just take the upper or lower side of the diagonal, and that's all the information you need.
And talking about diagonal, I decided to use the Character & Character pair to mean Character-centric (if I used the character tag as it is, the numbers would have sky-rocketed). So, in this case if you look Sky and Sky, you get 266 Sky-centric fanfics.
That said, let's look at the numbers! In green we have the pairs with more fanfics written, and in red the less. Twilight and Wild are the most popular with 717, and Warriors and Four the least with 61. Write more about these two, people!!
Something we already knew was that in general Four is in urgent need of more fanfics in which he talks to other people other than himself. Look at the poor little guy, his row and column are basically red. Hyrule is really close behind, his strong interactions with Legend is the only thing that is helping him, but he probably needs more friends.
Unsurprisingly, Legend and Wild are the two most popular, full of white and green. Legend is slightly greener because he has canonicaly wore more green than Wild, he has a lot of character-centric fanfics in which I assume people love to make him suffer, either for giggles and kicks, or for angst. But that's Legend's fault, he is so whumpable and his ridiculous curriculum and playful, arrogant personality makes him an easy target.
I also made this bar char, because I can:
Nothing remarkable except that it's a bit more obvious how much people love the Wild & Twilight pair.
I also like this visualization because in almost every pairing, Four is the shortest bar, and I find that poetic.
And that's all, hope anyone finds this inspiring enough to write more Four :) I really need to get back to work.
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Edit: I made a mistake. Wild has much more Wild-centric fanfics that I originally counted (I mixed it with Wind's count). Both Legend and Wild are closer in numbers, and the only reason Legend wins is because he gets along better with Four and Hyrule.
