I got curious, so I did a bit of “research”
The most popular fic in English is an NSFW (incredibly raunchy, wow) Guardians of the Galaxy fic with 128.179 kudos.
In Mandarin, it is a mature RPF fic of the actors from The Untamed that resulted in AO3 being blocked in Mainland China. It currently has 26.916 kudos
For Spanish, the prize goes to an explicit omegaverse & mpreg The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System fic with 3.245 kudos
Indonesian gives us a BTS college AU with 1.569 kudos and French stays on the bandom vibes by giving us an explicit One Direction dystopian story. But the band rpf award goes to Filipino, with their first page (sorted by kudos) being all Kpop (ENHYPEN, EXO & SEVENTEEN) and no-fandom.
(For those curious, Korean has a low amount of Kpop rpf on their first page. I assume they publish it somewhere else)
Egyptian Hieroglyphics (which, yes, is an option on AO3) gives us a beautiful song translation with an impressive 495 kudos. I really recommend everyone check it out; it is incredible. Welsh (160) and Old English (222) also had their most popular work have an English translation. Latin (124), on the other hand, is just fully in Latin. There are a few translations, but they are provided by other people and not the original author.
Greek has a lot of Greek political RPF. Like, a lot.
I was incredibly surprised by the fact that you can write fanfiction in Quebecois sign language. I was not surprised at all by the fact that Sindarin was an option.
A few of the languages had their most popular stories not be in that language and just be a case of mislabelling (or, in some cases, people using less-used languages on AO3 as dumping grounds for tests or personal notes.) Also, there were a couple of languages with no stories at all.
If you have been thinking about writing fic in a language other than English, take this as a call for action. There are a lot of people out there reading in all sorts of languages. Even in languages with only a couple kudos, those are a couple of people who are incredibly happy to find a story of a media they love in a language they love too.
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
origamiaround
2087
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
