What Are The Most Popular ASSTR Stories?

There’s something thrillingly ephemeral about online stories – you never know when they’re going to vanish into thin air. Perhaps the author will delete the work, or the whole site will collapse in on itself and shut down forever. Either way, there’s a sense of reading-by-timemachine that’s opposite to the current model of permanently storing stuff online in virtual clouds. It’s all so fragile, and therefore all the more special when you do come across a good ‘un – rather like stumbling upon a rare and dusty book in a second-hand shop. And it’s a salutary reminder that not everything on the net is here to stay.

ASSTR vaults. Ah, nostalgia. I don’t have any perfect one-to-one equivalents, but there are a lot of sites around nowadays that host pretty much identical material to what you’d find on the above sites for free: LitErotica and StoriesOnline for a start, which have been around nearly as long and host a vast amount of written material by users. Of course, the biggest exception to this is probably the Archive of Our Own (AO3), which is, for better or worse, the giant of the fanfiction space – their tagging is light-years ahead of ASSTR’s ever having been. For original content, Wattpad and Royal Road are probably now the places where most of the action of web-based serials happens. What I’m missing is the old-school archive-by-folder approach to hosting stories. While there are certainly many niche forums, independent author sites, etc., that offer this kind of experience, they’re scattered about the internet, and you really need to know what you’re looking for in terms of specific communities or tags.

There are certain tropes that get told very well on this site, and so therefore get referenced a lot. These are typically stories about a character’s voluntary or involuntary change of identity (spririt transfer, aliens in their heads, download into computer), with lots of internal monologuing and an intense focus on their senses as they explore their new body. Corrupting a character, so that they slowly and surely come to accept and even relish what at first they abhor, is also pretty popular. A lot of these ‘most referenced’ stories are just really well done examples of their given trope(s), and stand out from the typical fare of the site. The ‘Locket’ story, for example, is a really beautiful and moving tale of an heirloom granting its owner a new life. The series of stories centered around a ‘Virtual Reality Game’ that is slowly rewriting a player’s personality to better suit the game is also really popular, and I can see why – it’s a really compelling idea, and I think that even in this site of primarily one genre, it’s been handled with a lot of skill and brought to life in a way that really realizes and fulfills the given reader’s narrative fantasy.

The largest overarching trope in romance fiction is, without a doubt, the “Happily Ever After” (or at least “Happy For Now”) trope. Most romance books follow a fairly similar arc, no matter how dark, risk-filled or taboo the heroine’s journey is. The billionaire hero is not just rich, he is also devoted. The mafia boss hero is not just dangerous to everyone, he is also specially reserved for the heroine. Alien heroes choose humanity over their own kind to be with the heroine. This trope guarantees a safe, validating and exclusive journey for the heroine, culminating in a rollercoaster ride that ends in her ultimate safety. Other popular tropes, such as enemies-to-lovers, marriage-of-convenience and fated mates, are all just different routes to the same guarantee.

Reading an author's notes on a high-kudos fic is really cool. Sometimes the author will even admit that they were surprised by how the story received, or thank specific early commenters for encouraging them to keep writing. It's really impressive to read, because it really humanizes the number and makes you realize that every fic starts with one person posting a chapter into the void, hopefully to get some sort of reaction from someone. The journey to get to that final number is way more interesting than the number itself.

I've come to associate really popular things on KristenArchives with comments sections that go absolutely haywire for new chapters. When I click on to a new chapter and there are multiple pages of reactions ranging from adoration to wild speculation to "PLEASE UPDATE SOON", I know that author is currently riding a wave. And most often that wave is the result of one of several things: a really long and very addictive series; an author who consistently updates at the same time every week or so; and an author who is extremely friendly and very interactive with his or her readers. Use of relevant tags, and quality story descriptions that actually fill out all of the applicable fields, are also very important because people searching for stories of a certain mood or a specific trope will most frequently follow authors who have hitting all of those notes especially well. Also the ones that cross over into pure romance, really intense emotional fiction, and some kind of kink/touching seem to get the biggest readership. Because when someone finds an author that has a lot of hits already, they read their back catalog too. I have a few bookmarked and I wait impatiently for their next post. It’s so hard to find writers that just have a style that you really like.

It’s the modern day version of the Byronic hero: brooding, mysterious, scarred, rebellious against society. We’ve had versions of this sort of character for centuries – Heathcliff, Mr. Rochester, Dracula, to name but a few. BookTok have updated this sort of character to suit the short-form, video nature of the platform, adding in lots of muscle and magic along the way. But his timeless popularity is not new – it’s just how he’s being distributed that’s changed. The communal nature of TikTok is what makes this all seem so new and current, but really the core of his appeal is Gothic romance and that’s been around for ages.

Will it be considered as smut or as romance on Wattpad? There are readers who want closed-door/fade-to-black scenes and there are those who want extremely explicit detailed scenes. Most top-rated stories are in between – they are extremely steamy to satisfy the heat-seekers but not so graphic that others who like to read while feeling the tension instead of reading detailed scenes would be put off. In order to achieve this a writer would have to be extremely good at writing sensually charged scenes and then leave the rest to the reader’s imagination. Anticipation and emotions are more important than details. Meeshawrites is a great example of this kind of writer. She writes extremely sensually charged scenes but they are never graphic. Her scenes are just extremely sensual and therefore very satisfying for readers who are looking for good smut but are also not off-putting for those who prefer to read while feeling the tension instead of reading detailed scenes. The stories that have smut in them and are rated high are likely to have this kind of approach to writing scenes with smut in them. Staying too much in the explicit territory may exclude some readers due to their age or because of their personal preferences while not enough smut may have led readers to expect more smut than what was delivered by the writer under the smut tag.

Each of the factors that make up an idol (i.e., how they look, who they are, how they grow, synergy with group members) can be found in another idol. However, the specific mixture of factors that comprises Shuhua is unique. The elegance of a woman on stage plus the couch potato/meme character she is off stage is special. And whereas most idols sing with soft vocals but communicate sharp lyrics, her songs come together powerfully just as they are. She looks great for both an innocent concept as well as a mature one. And how refreshing that the foreign member of the group is also the core of the group’s identity. It is all these contrasts which make her so fascinating to look at and to follow as an idol. Shuhua is a multi-dimensional idol and fans can constantly discover new things about her. How she has improved as a dancer. The many hidden artistic talents that she possesses. The sense of continued discovery that fans of an idol with many hidden depths and with traits that are totally unexpected is very powerful and leads to continued high levels of popularity and interaction with the fan.

Trigger warnings are one of those things that I kind of love and hate at the same time. The top dark romance authors are very particular about their trigger warnings and I think that’s really great because it gives readers some idea of what to expect and enables them to read accordingly. At the same time, it does create a kind of menu effect where people read dark romance because they want to read a particular dark trope and authors who are really clear about their content notes, who are really up front about the things that are going to happen in the book, earn a huge amount of trust with their readers.