R/C favourites

[igenlode]

I've just been through twenty-two pages of the top POTO fanfics (as sorted by number of favourites), and it turns out that in over five hundred stories there is not one RC fic in there. Unless you count the two where Raoul is dead and a broken Christine ends up with the Phantom.

I wasn't expecting the majority of the favourite fics in the fandom to be anything other than EC, but I did expect some to show up. (Surely "Phantoms of the Past", with 128 favourites, must have been in there? Oh, of course, it's M-rated, and I didn't adjust the filters...)

Comments

[erimia]

This is sad. :( But not very surprising, considering that there is not that much R/C in general, and there was probably very little of it written until the last ten years.

Hmm, I wonder if the percent of R/C is larger on AO3 than on FFN? The search that excludes the pairings that pair them with other people shows about 200 R/C fics. Interestingly, the first pages of the lists sorted by the most kudos and most hits don't show any exclusively R/C fics, but show some E/R ones, though it's probably due to AO3 being a slash-heavy website.

[igenlode]

Oh, there were a number of E/R fics in that first five hundred!

I was eyeballing the summaries rather than going by FFnet tags, as most of the older (and hence most popular) fics predate the tagging/pairing system. It's possible that one or two of those may have featured a non-obvious R/C outcome -- I checked the last chapters of a number of stories that didn't advertise an explicit "EC as always" -- but most of them made their preference pretty clear.

I had a look at the M-rated ones. "Phantoms of the Past" is page five. "The Good Soldier" (which is abandoned while still, surprisingly, R/C, although I've always assumed the author eventually plans for Christine to fall for her grumpy boss) is page seventeen. "Puzzle Pieces" (which, to be honest, I probably wouldn't have identified as R/C from the summary if I hadn't come across it already) is page nineteen. And ironically a number of the E/OC fics are nominally at least R/C, although the authors tend to prefer to have the married Christine still pining after her Angel even as the other woman successfully wins his heart...

Again, there are more E/R slash fics among the M-rated stories than there are R/C ones.