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 :)

She gave as examples her own fic Twelve Hours and dysonrules's Twelve Months, both from last year's hd_erised fest. And while these titles are certainly similar, I was intrigued enough by her observation that I wanted to see how many true duplicates I could find (because I'm crazy like that). Duplicate pairs are too numerous to list, so I decided stick with titles that came up at least three or more times in my database.

Common Drarry fanfic titles:

Home by alovelycupoftea
Home by shine_alive
Home by sesheta_66
Home by starpleiades
Home by bloodisshrp

The Ties That Bind by phoenix_writing
The Ties That Bind by killerangels13
The Ties That Bind by alisanne
The Ties That Bind by cathouse_mary
The Ties That Bind Us by faithwood
The Ties That Bind Us by dracoxlovesxharry

The List by lucilla_darkate
The List by tari_sue
The List by badcook
The List by lamerezouille

Resistance by silentauror
Resistance by diagonfloo
Resistance by all_not_well
Resistance by lamerezouille (added 9 May 2015)

The Wand Chooses the Wizard by treacle_tartlet
The Wand Chooses the Wizard by ravenna_c_tan
The Wand Chooses the Wizard by writcraft


And here are some that are just eerily similar:

Burn by EliraWinter
Burn by hdwriter
Burn, Burn by marguerite_26
Burn, Burn, Burn by josephinestone

Hidden in Plain Sight by momatu
Hiding in Plain Sight by okydoky
Hiding In Plain Sight by beren
Hiding in Plain Sight by gestaltrose
Hiding in Plain View by autumn_veela
In Plain Sight by taradiane
In Plain Sight by oldenuf2nb

I hope it's clear that I'm not making a criticism - these titles are all great, and I don't think the fics should have been called anything else. I'm merely supporting eidheann's point that giving the title alone is not enough to conclusively identify a fanfic.

---

Edit: amorette just pointed out another one to me in the comments:

Best Laid Plans by 6shotamericano
Best-Laid Plans by leo_draconis
The Best Laid Plans by winterstorrm
The Best Laid Plans by cassie_black12
The Best Laid Plans of Lucius Malfoy by erised_dreams
The Best Laid Plans of Scorpius Malfoy by amorette
The Best Laid Plans of Hufflepuffs by birdsofshore

 

Edit 2: found another set 4/26/2015:

Rumours by silentauror
Rumours by winterstorrm
Rumours by gatewaygirl
Rumor Has It by emmagrant01
Rumour Has It by patientiapudor
Rumour Has It by roelliej

Comments

[susannah-wilde.livejournal.com]

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 :)

[ravenna-c-tan.livejournal.com]

Oooh cool. Another one that seems to come up often is "Burning Day" variations. I have a fic called "Burning Day," but there are probably at least 2 others called that, plus "Burning Days," "The Last Burning Day," etc.

[snowgall]

Ah, good one. It seems like "burn" and variations thereof is definitely a popular word in titles.

Looking for the most popular words (that aren't 'the' or 'a' and such) in titles would be an interesting thing to track, but it would take a lot more work too :)

[amorette.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting. I love your inquisitive mind :) I am always fascinated by the outcome of all your data collection projects.

I also suspect "Best Laid Plans" is a popular one. I titled one of my fics that before I realized I probably subconsciously stole it from someone else.

[snowgall]

Good one!

I just checked, and yup, I have 4 variations of that one in my database as well:

Best Laid Plans by 6shotamericano
Best-Laid Plans by leo_draconis
The Best Laid Plans by winterstorrm
The Best Laid Plans by cassie_black12
The Best Laid Plans of Lucius Malfoy by erised_dreams
The Best Laid Plans of Scorpius Malfoy by you :)

[gracerene]

So interesting! I love this posts of yours, looking into fandom stats/behaviors. :D

[snowgall]

Thank you! ♥

[cagnurit.livejournal.com]

I think the titles 'Unexpected/Unexpectedly/Unexpected Consequences' are also popular <3

[snowgall]

I think you're right. I know of two fics called "Unexpected Consequences" and one called "Unintended Consequences". And there are various other fics with 'Unintended' or 'Unexpected' in the title. If I had a few more that were paired with 'Consequences' then I would include them. I don't have quite enough yet :)

[dicta-contrion.livejournal.com]

So interesting!! And useful! Several titles to strike from the list.

I'll admit that I've taken to googling before I title to avoid this/to have any hope of finding recs and such, because otherwise it would be (even more) impossible (than it already is). It's really helpful to know not just what titles to cross off, but some obvious patterns ("...that bind," "wand chooses," probably a good number of one word titles) to avoid. Thank you!

[snowgall]

:)

That's a good point (and related to the one eidheann was making): that if an author wants to google for recs of her work, it helps to have a unique title to google for! I hadn't really thought of it from that angle, since I'm a reader not a writer. I was mostly thinking about readers trying to find fics that have been recced but maybe have broken links or whatnot. But of course it would be beneficial to authors too!

And of course, some titles are just inherently unique. I don't think any other fic could ever be titled Potter’s Parselprostate (and the Chamber of Secrets)! (which is an excellent title, BTW :)

The Daily Snitch - Weekend Edition, April 26, 2015

[livejournal.livejournal.com]

User vaysh referenced to your post from The Daily Snitch - Weekend Edition, April 26, 2015 (http://daily-snitch.livejournal.com/858045.html) saying: [...] (Associated Press). Nifty: • posted a list of common fanfic titles (Harry/Draco) [...]

[germankitty]

Do the eponymous "Harry Potter and the _______" count, too? If I sort my Kindle content by title, it's 10 fics in the gen category, 12 in series, and 16 fics in my Twoshot collection. And that's not even counting all the fest fics, one-shots and multi-chaptered stories I've collected.

[snowgall]

Oh, you're absolutely right that there are a ton of those. I've got 18 such fics in my list. I guess I figured that since each ____ was unique, that it didn't quite count as a duplicate, even though the "framework" of the title is highly repetitive.

There are also many fics that start "Draco Malfoy and the ___" as well as "Draco Malfoy: ____" and such. Starting the title of a fic with either Harry's name or Draco's name is extremely common.

Maybe I'll do another post on "framework" titles at some point. Thanks for the suggestion!

[themightyflynn]

Yeah, I tend to google my titles before settling on them as well. On Ao3 there's also a lot of "The Art of..." or a variation of that in the HP fandom as well.

[snowgall]

Oh yes, another common frame for the title, and probably common across other fandoms as well, and even mainstream publications. I feel like I've seem many books with that beginning. Publishers must think it sells or something :)

[vociferandum.livejournal.com]

This was rather interesting, thanks for sharing! (:
I had actually noticed there were a bunch of "The ties that bind" in existence, but the others were a complete surprise.

[snowgall]

Yeah, I didn't have any preconceived notions about what I would find, other than a slew of "Five Times someone did something and one time they didn't" titles, but some of these did surprise me :)

One interesting thing about "Ties that Bind" as a title is how very differently it is interpreted in different stories. Faithwood's story by that title is about literal bindings that trap Harry and Draco together, while the dracoxlovesxharry story is about them outing themselves by swapping school ties, and phoenix_writing's is a kid!fic story about family "ties", etc.

So it's easily a title that can work for lots of different stories and across fandoms, which is probably why it's so popular :)

[digthewriter]

Whenever I want to title a fic, I google the title with the words "Harry Potter fanfiction" next to it - if I find something w/ the same title - I don't call it that.

[snowgall]

Good plan :) Unfortunately, you can't stop some other author from titling one of their new fics the same as one of your earlier ones. So there could still be duplicates, not of your making.

Not that duplicates are necessarily the worst thing. Just for fun I googled "duplicate movie titles" and found that there are two movies named "Speed": the 1994 Keanu Reeves/Sandra Bullock one and a 1936 one with Jimmy Stewart. But I really can't think of a better title for the Reeves/Bullock film than "Speed" so it's not like I think they should have called it something else. Sometimes a title just works, you know?

[kitty_fic]

this is really interesting!
I'm completely impressed that you found so many examples

[snowgall]

I mostly just sorted my database by title and looked for what popped out :) And Amorette suggested one as well. There are probably several other examples and titles I'm missing, but this sort of thing will never be complete :)

[alpha-exodus.livejournal.com]

Oh this is super interesting! A lot of times, if I haven't thought of a title by the end of the work, I end up just picking a title out of mid-air, so I'll definitely have to remember to start googling just in case (: