The enhanced search now available on Fimfiction has finally allowed me to confine results to any range of dates I pick, rather than being stuck with the highly limited options previously available. One thing that occurred to me to try recently was to see what sort of fics were popular as Fimfiction evolved. The first thing I checked was how many of the top ten most viewed fics were Mature-rated:
2011: 4
2012: 4
2013: 2
2014: 6
2015: 7
2016: 9
2017: 9
Some thoughts on this past the break.
Those numbers are quite striking. They fit in with the fact that, as the site stats page shows, M-rated fics have risen from about 15% of the monthly total five years ago to close on 30% of the monthly total now. In absolute terms, their submission numbers have hardly changed since 2013 whereas E- and T-rated fics are considerably less common than they were back then. Fimfiction isn't quite becoming Clopfiction, but if the trend continues it could one day do so.
But back to the numbers above. There's clearly been a shift in the types of stories that get the greatest number of views since about 2014. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was also when the number of Fimf submissions really started to decline, during the seemingly interminable S4–S5 hiatus. It's another small piece of evidence that that long break did have an effect on how many people were active in the fandom.
The figure for 2013 is interesting, because none of the top ten fics that year were out-and-out clopfics. The two M-rated stories in the list were Spacecowboy's A [Fe]Male Perspective of Equestria, which the author says can be read without the explicit chapters – and Kkat's Fallout: Equestria, which had been available elsewhere for some time by the time it appeared on Fimfiction. You could get hugely popular in 2013 with an E-rated fic: MerlosTheMad's still-incomplete Thunder Struck has over a quarter of a million views.
Compare that with the situation in 2017. The most-viewed fic has 18k views and contains both incest and foalcon. The next one is described as "a bestiality fic" and the third as "shameless clop". It goes on like this. The first fic that has an actual story is seventh: the M-rated version of TwistedSpectrum's Five Score, Divided by Four – and even that was written several years earlier and only waited to be published until 2017 because Fimf rules would have prevented both it and the SFW version being up at once until then.
This isn't a state of affairs I'm all that happy about. While I don't have any rooted objection to (most) clop, it's not the reason I enjoy ponyfic and being part of the Fimfiction community. It's odd: at least here in the UK, I think the MLP fandom is actually less into NSFW stuff than it was five years ago, and more inclined to the all-ages side of things. Probably the success of the strongly family-friendly UK PonyCon has something to do with that. But on Fimfiction nowadays, clop really is king.
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