Crown Prince Adrien Agreste stumbled backwards as the blade struck his chest. He hit the pommel horse and grunted as it knocked the wind out of him. With a deep breath, he lifted his helmet in surrender.
“I can only take so much of a beating from you, Félix,” Adrien laughed. He ran his fingers through his hair to restore its natural bounce after hours of being buried beneath his practice helm.
On the other side of the mat, Félix sheathed the dull practice sword and also removed his helmet. He shrugged off his cousin’s compliment and began to divest his practice gear.
The princes were not twins, though many presumed so when meeting them for the first time. They shared the same shimmering blonde hair, were of identically fit builds, and had hit their growth spurt at the same time after their sixteenth birthdays—which coincidentally fell on the same day. It was hard for anyone, even their parents to tell them apart, but those who knew them well learned that Adrien’s smile came easier, and Félix’s steely gray eyes were often a few degrees colder than Adrien’s gentle green ones.
Though Adrien and Félix were not twins, their mothers had been twins, which was why the two boys looked so very alike. Neither of them took after their fathers.
Life and death roamed freely, drowning the world in their power. Humans could touch a tendril of life and bring forth the wonders of creation: food, art, medicine, and more. Others might grasp a line of death and raze armies and towers to the ground with the power of destruction.
But wild magic was not enough for humans. What a human seeks, above all, above even life itself, is control. Humans desire power over others, over themselves, and especially over magic.
So the fay hid the world’s magic away. They made rules. They set bargains. Nothing could be gained without sacrifice. Nothing could be created unless something was destroyed. It was the only way to ensure that power could be balanced, that humans would not destroy each other or themselves in their quest for control.
Without magic to ease their lives, humans crafted cities and farms and walls to control what they could of their thin, short existence. The few humans who remembered magic sought it beyond the borders of their cities. They pressed into forests where wildness could still be found, where danger lurked and magic hid. They sacrificed gold. They sacrificed children. They sacrificed themselves.
For no fay could resist the sacrifice of blood. No fay could turn down an offer of life and death, the oldest magic in the world, in exchange for power.
TOP 10 CARTOONS ON FANFICTION.NET BASED ON NUMBER OF FANFICTION (1999-2022)
To make this bar chart race, all series titles in the Cartoons Section on November 29 (or the closest date to it) of every year were copy-pasted from Wayback Machine to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, and then inputted to Flourish to turn into a bar chart race.
In 2000-2006, FFN used Miscellaneous Cartoons as a catch-all tag for all cartoons that didn’t have their own category yet. It was then renamed to Misc. Cartoons in 2007 before it was moved to the Misc. section in 2008.
Code Lyoko and Avatar: The Last Airbender were actually miscategorized at first and were found in the Anime section from 2004-2007 (2005-2007 for ATLA). I used their data from that section for those years.
In 1999, fanfiction weren’t divided into sections like Anime/Manga, TV, Books, etc. yet. It was just a small list of mixed fandoms.
Originally, the fanfiction list was sorted alphabetically too, but was changed to number of fics at around early 2013.
By November 2013, FFN started abbreviating numbers above 1,000 to K, so exact numbers aren’t available for series with more than 1,000 fanfiction.
This bar chart was made with the assumption that the numbers listed in the Cartoons section are correct. I can’t seem to get the same numbers for some of these categories when I go to the specific categories’ page and toggle ratings, other filters, and language to All though… I’m not sure where the discrepancy is coming from. (And it’s not the crossover fic numbers that need to be added to serie’s total fics from what I’ve observed.)
Please refer to this post for more bar chart races.
Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏
