It's a little crazy to watch the dungeon meshi fandom explode. As I say this, at the start of april 2024, there are 694 dungeon meshi fics on ao3 which looks like a modest number especially if you consider that the earliest fic in the tag is from 2017. But that's not taking into account that 544 of those 694 were posted 2024 and a whopping 299 were in march 2024 alone. And considering that the average lifetime of a fic from initial idea to writing and editing to publication is months we are actually at a very early point on the exponential curve, the real explosion is yet to come.

To illustrate my point, if you look a little more closely at the fics you'll realize the vast majority of them are oneshots, not multichaptered fics. Like. Much more compared to more established fandoms.

(If you want hard numbers for proof: the number of fics updated, not posted, in march 2024 was 326. That means that of all the fics updated in march ONLY 27 were fics posted earlier than march. And of the 299 posted, only 64 weren't oneshots. For all fics updated in march 72.1% were oneshots, 27.9% not. Compare that to a randomly chosen other fandom I'm in, Deltarune, where only 35.5% of the fics updated in march 2024 were oneshots, and 64.5% were not. The difference is staggering dunmeshi literally has twice as many oneshots comparetively)

And that's because oneshots are quicker to write, while a multichaptered fic takes much more planning. The longest fic in the dunmeshi fandom tag is currently only 67K words which is impressive but nothing compared to the behemoths you usually see occupying that spot. All those longfics? Those are still coming.