Which fanfic titles are most common?

[snowgall]

In a recent tumblr post, eidheann_writes mentioned that duplicate titles of fanfics are quite common, so when reccing a fic you really need to give the author's name and not just the title. (Actually, there are many reasons why you should always credit the author of a work when you rec it, but that's not the point of this post

Comments

[susannah_wilde]

Oh, that's very interesting; I never noticed that. And cconsidering who's on the list, then great minds think alike, maybe? :)

[snowgall]

Indeed. I think you see the same effect in mainstream publishing and movie titles too, but I don't have a database of those I can easily check :)

[birdsofshore]

Wow, that's a great list! I'm impressed by your examples and I will definitely remember to give the author as well as the title in future when I am referring to a fic.

[snowgall]

♥

The tricky thing is when an author has different aliases, so you might see the same title recced with what seem like two different author names but come to find out it's the same story and same author after all. Don't really know what to do about that though :)

[vaysh]

Wow. That is an awesome post. "The Ties That Bind (Us)" is a surprise to me.

[snowgall]

I know! I thought that the duplicate titles would mostly be the one-word ones like "Home" and "Resistance" and that more words would make the title less common, but turns out some phrases are themselves so common as to act like single words.

But I shouldn't be surprised; that's pretty much how linguists treat idioms anyway. As phrase chunks that basically act like single words and aren't broken down.

[vaysh]

A quick search at the Pit reveals that "The Ties That Bind" is immensely popular not only in H/D fandom.

[eidheann_writes]

This bit is part of the reasoning behind my post. Doing tumblr search for fic title leads to dozens (or hundreds/thousands) across fandom. Really impractical to search or track.

[snowgall]

Interesting. But I bet "The Wand Chooses the Wizard" is fairly unique to HP :)

It would be cool to see which titles are widely popular across fandoms and which ones are only popular within certain ones, but I don't have the data to do this myself :)

[snowgall]

I was too quick with my first reply - I didn't look carefully enough at the link you posted!

HOLY COW. 778 "Ties That Bind" titles on ff.net alone. Maybe that's one title that should be retired? :)

[capitu]

That's super interesting! :D I've noticed, this too. That's why I make notes at the end of each fic. Total dork, but hey, you're the same. *lol*

[snowgall]

Totally the same! You gotta make notes or the all blend together, similar titles or no :)

[capitu]

You know it. ;)