There are One billion words of My Little Pony fanfiction hosted on FiMfiction.net.
Well, more specifically, 1,019,229,319, but hey, who’s counting, right?
That’s a lot of fanfic.
Let’s just say that you have a friend made it his goal in life to read ALL the My Little Pony fanfiction.
He reads for 12 hours a day, every day, at the average adult pace of 300 words per minute.
It'll take him thirteen years to read all the stories written on FiMfiction
But wait, there is over a million words of fanfic uploaded each day.
That’s five times the amount of words he is even capable of reading.
Basically, unless the fandom stops producing fanfic, he will never, ever read everything.
So your friend decides to follow Sturgeon’s law.
He’s going to avoid the incomplete, on hiatus, or cancelled fics, and only read the top 10% of “good” fanfic.
But that’s still over 100,000,000 words. And if he reads at the normal pace…
that’s a year and three months that he will be reading fanfic.
So let’s not follow sturgeon’s Law.
Scratch that.
Let’s follow Sturgeon’s law… twice.
Let’s only read the top 1% of fanfic.
At max speed… about 5 days. Leisurely… about a month.
And that's good fanfic.
That's— that's
that's the good stuff
And now that we’ve decided how much is conceivable to read. Let’s get to it.
The first story will most likely be categorized as an “Adventure.”
It’s the most popular category for fanfiction.
The most "normal" story on FiMfiction would be a Dark, Romantic-Comedy Adventure
starring Twilight Sparkle, Princess Celestia and Rainbow Dash
that has 14 likes, 3 dislikes and 349 views.
Actually we’ll probably skip that story, because popularity skews to the outliers of the fanfic world.
But even by the end of the month, your friend will find that there are other stories that pique his interest
and that his "read later" list just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
These stories are just too good to stop.
It’s unreal that there are stories that could be this good coming out of nowhere.
But these words don’t just come out of nowhere.
That one billion represents the sum total of the work of over 30,000 authors.
Let’s just say for a moment that every writer on FiMfic is just a writing machine
that can churn out words at the rate of… about 2000 words a day.
So a billion words represents at least 1,400 years of work.
Anyone in the top 10% of words written has spent at least forty days slaving over keyboard
trying to figure out the right words to say.
But this is an extreme stretch when you consider that a lot of these authors are writing for fun for the first time.
This is their first foray into the world of actually creating something on their own.
And yet, enough people have gone out of their comfort zone and spent hours of their time to write stories, for us.
That’s time they were somehow able to peel themselves away from the rest of the internet,
and the distractions of life to actually write stories.
It says something for how amazing a show MLP can be that it can inspire this much creativity.
If you like spreadsheets, check out the bottom for a bunch of data you can play around with.
All the statistics in this video comes from scraping through a bunch of metadata on FiMfiction.net.
Special thanks to the fimfic archive for providing an index of all the stories.
If you want to check the source code for how I made a JSON parser in Java,
check out the Github project.