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Considering the social origin of fanfictions and the fact that these pieces of literature are under the direct influence of society’s line of thought, they can be a valuable resource for studying what the common audience finds attractive and what captures their attention. The aim of this study is to find properties of the fanfictions that may contribute to their popularity among community members, including properties that are in contrast to their original stories and those that exclusively belong to the fanfictions themselves. For this purpose, we investigated different features of fanfictions, including their emotional arc and character graphs representing the characters’ interactions in the story. Our results show that the similarity between fanfictions and their associated original story in terms of emotional arcs and character graphs significantly relates to fanfictions’ popularity.