Ranked by the number of demand signals that mention each trope across Goodreads reviews, Amazon reviews, BookTok comments and captions, Reddit posts and Amazon Q&A, among the live tropes in Tropesmith's fantasy taxonomy. A demand signal is one specific thing a reader asked for or praised in a review, comment or post, picked out by Tropesmith's classifier. One review can give several. Each signal gets a rarity tag (common, underserved or novel) from the text of that review or post alone; the classifier is never shown what is on the shelf. A tag points at where to look. It does not prove that no book answers the signal. Genre labels, story-structure tags and tags outside the taxonomy (for example Second Chance Romance, 74,220 signals, which the taxonomy does not list) are not ranked. How we count.
Protective Hero leads the fantasy board at 33,899 demand signals. Vampire closes out this ranking at 1,775 — still enough to track, just a smaller slice of a corpus this size. The median across these 8 tropes is 4,358, with 4 of 8 at or above it: the list is front-loaded toward a handful of high-volume tropes with a longer tail behind them.
The tagged share runs from 29% (Possessive Hero) to 69% (Morally Grey Villain). It is the classifier's judgement of each mention, made without seeing the shelf, so a high share is a reason to look at comp titles for that trope, and a low share means the classifier tagged fewer of its signals that way.
One caveat worth stating plainly: the index holds many more romance signals than fantasy ones, so compare these fantasy tropes with each other rather than with romance tropes. The ranking order is meaningful within fantasy; the absolute counts are not comparable across genres.
By the number of demand signals that mention them, the top three fantasy tropes Tropesmith tracks are Protective Hero, Hard Magic System, Possessive Hero (counted 21 October 2026). Full ranked list above.
82,544 trope mentions across the 8 tropes on this page; a signal that mentions several of them counts toward each. Protective Hero alone accounts for 33,899 of those.
Morally Grey Villain, at 69% of its demand signals; the lowest is Possessive Hero at 29%. The tag is Tropesmith's classifier reading each review or post on its own, without a view of the shelf, so use it to decide what to check against comp titles.
A Tropesmith Map scores your exact trope stack against demand and supply data — and shows where to look next.
Build my Map → See a real sample Map first →Individual trope pages with full demand + rejection breakdowns: Found Family, Hard Magic System, and more in the market intelligence hub.