Or Cauterize.

Still, the point stands, I think. Those ones are always starting at a substantial disadvantage, and i doubt they would work in less popular fandoms. HPs recognizable characters generate enough fan fiction that fics without them are allowed to form a niche.

 

I'd say that the size of the fandom is what allows for OC fics to get big. There's just enough people writing them that you both get a good idea of what to avoid and there's enough people writing that something decent emerges by chance alone

 

Are OC fics that big? Alexandra Quick has 300ish reviews. The biggest one with an OC and without HP is In Bad Faith, which does have 960, but there's only a few more in that range, most of which are Marauders-era. Generally, I would say OC fics are very niche.

 

List of Fandoms off the top of my head that have great potential but as far as I'm aware don't have a bunch of 'great' stories

Shin Megami Tensei, Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl, Mass Effect (Not so much it doesn't have great fics, but it still has a ton of untapped potential) and maybe Uncharted, but Uncharted isn't really conducive to the type of authors that generally dominate fanfiction.

 

In the old days you had a pretty strong narrative to tie everything together with The Brother's war, Weatherlight saga and Phyrexian Invasion.

In modern MTG each plane is a self contained setting - more like a mini-universe, stuff that happens on Ravinica means bugger all to Kamigawa etc. The lack of an underlying narrative probably hurts fanfiction potential because without strong characters and events to base a fanfic around you end up with D&D (another WOTC product) - strong mechanics and lore but absolutely nothing to frame a narrative around. When was last time you read a good D&D fanfic?

With Origins I think they finally realised this and attempted to bring the five planeswalkers more up front. If I'm personally honest though the only character with a remotely interesting hook is Liliana. The last thing I want to do is read a story about someone fan-girling over Jace - the Draco Malfoy of MtG.

Crossovers are really awkward mechanically because the idea of mana and colour identity is so integral to MtG. I'm not saying it couldn't be done but I've never seen it done convincingly.

Edit: the other thing worth mentioning is most people that play MTG don't really care about the lore at all. Not to mention the infamous Squadran hawk carrying a sword problem http://placebocomics.com/images/equipment.png

 

No one has mentioned BBC's Merlin yet, and it absolutely bubbles over with fanfic potential.

The characters, and their interactions were absolutely amazing in that TV series. There have been very few times I've cared about TV show chracters that much. The interaction and banter between Arthur and Merlin are probably the best part of the show. Not only was the acting great, but with so many of the characters there were highly emotional moments that were executed perfectly. It’s really hard to not to like the main characters. Personally, the only other time have I felt a similar natural likability TV show characters, and that the anime FMA:B. I’m not completely sure why, it’s a bit of an odd comparison, haha.

The worst part of Merlin for most people is definitely the plotting. A well plotted show it is not. It has multiple story arcs, and a direction, but for the most part it took more of a “Monster of the Week” tone. Multiple times they introduced a villain or a concept that I was sure was going to change everything for a while, only for it to be dealt with in one or two episodes.

I guess it isn’t *that* bad, because it doesn’t suffer from major plot holes (I can’t think of any), but it does leave you with an overwhelming sense of *what could have been*, if you start thinking about it at all. It’s such a great premise with a ton of great concepts.

In other words, a perfect moist atmosphere for little fanfiction spores to grow in.

It also benefits from having a large amount of named locations you can quickly picture in the minds eye, and throw into your fanfic. There’s a bunch of named small kingdoms with named kings that have not been highly elaborated on, or shown more than once or twice that are great to throw around too.

The fandom sized is what you would call medium, I reckon. It’s also a bit on the high quality side for a fandom that isn’t large... I feel nervous making such a bold statement, but I think it’s true. I’ve visited other larger fandoms for things I liked more than Merlin, and found not much good to read, yet with Merlin and my picky fanfiction taste (I don’t like any romance fics generally), it took a year to run out of reading.

Crossover fics between HP and Merlin have a few hidden gems as well. There’s about 400 of them on FF.net I think. It really is crossover that goes well together. I’ve seen a Merlin references several times in a long HP fics when I wasn’t expecting it, and the authors were always thrilled someone recognized it. I wish I could remember which ones, but there is a whole lot of HP fanfic out there...

 

I don't know who "Sutherland" is, and I've not noticed an amount of slash that high. MerlinXArthur is common, but there's not as much of it as there could be, at least on FF.net.... unlike some anime fanfiction that I have tried to read, where you feel like you are sifting through a sea of slash.

I do tend to filter out the Romance tag. That probably makes a huge (and positive) difference, and has skewed my view. I don't have a very good estimate of what the slash/nonslash ratio is for Merlin fanfic, because I don't really care about slash. However, I do know it's a lot lower than 80%, lol