I promised you facts so here are the facts!
Red are series already in Smash and purples are not. Yes, I did this for fun, so don't get your knickers in too much of a twist over it, however, since I provide HARD NUMBERS, this chart is technically the most factual chart ever posted in the Smash community!
Now for some fun observations:
- You have really can stop denying that Touhou is a monster. It has THREE times as many entries as Pokémon in second place! That's just crazy.
- Persona clearly isn't as niche as some people liked to make it out as.
- Fire Emblem has earned its keep and deserves its reps.
- You can stop pretending The iDOLM@STER isn't popular now.
Now this is just the top 20, but I did collect data for a lot more series and it can all be found here:
As you can see I even included the tag I used for each search you can double check my numbers (note that popular series have likely gone up already). Oh and since this is all fan art, I did have to turn off all the filters (and scrub my eyes out*). I tried to do most of the commonly mentioned series. If you feel I missed anything major please do tell. Should note I scrapped ARMS and Halo cos they turned up a lot of unrelated art featurings arms and halos. Partly got around the Mother issue by simply looking up Mother2 and Mother3 tags and adding them together.
So outside of the image, some more notes:
- Poor ROB at the bottom. However note in Japan he's known as Robot, so I couldn't exactly search for that, and thus had to use a much more specific tag of 'Family Computer Robot'.
- Guily Gear looks to be next most popular fighting series!
- Also just because you're super well known doesn't mean you're gonna get the fan art. Mario is pretty far down. And Pac-Man is really far down.
- For a series apparantly banned in Japan, that's quite a decent number for Mortal Kombat (note, not all submissions are from Japan)
- Fatal Fury is more popular than Metal Gear and Castlevania, two series no one really questioned when they got added to Smash.
- Apparently no one cares about Ninja Gaiden's Ryu Hayabusa. However Dead or Alive's Ryu Hayabusa has a bit of a fanbase.
- RIP Twinbee :(
*Heaven forbid I do one for Deviant Art…