Ranked by raw request volume across Tropesmith's ~40-source reader-demand corpus (BookTok, Reddit, Goodreads, StoryGraph, AO3). The 14-day share shows how much of each trope's all-time volume landed recently — a rough momentum read, not a guarantee it keeps climbing.
Protective Hero leads the fantasy board at 30,476 requests. By contrast, Morally Grey Villain closes out this ranking at 3,365 requests — still enough real reader demand to track, just a smaller slice of a corpus this size. The gap between rank #1 and rank #8 is one reason raw request count alone is a starting point, not a verdict: a mid-ranked trope with a high 14-day share can be moving faster right now than a bigger trope that's plateaued.
The median request count across these 8 tropes is 8,344, with 4 of 8 sitting at or above it — a reminder that this list isn't evenly spread from top to bottom, it's front-loaded toward a handful of high-volume tropes with a longer tail behind them. None of the tropes on this page are currently showing an outsized 14-day spike relative to their total volume — demand here is steady rather than spiky right now.
One caveat worth stating plainly: Tropesmith's extraction spine currently prioritizes romance, so fantasy demand figures are real but under-measured relative to how they'd look with equal extraction depth across genres. Treat every number on this fantasy roundup as a floor, not a ceiling — the ranking order is still meaningful, but the absolute request counts would very likely be higher under equal-depth extraction.
Raw request count is what this page ranks by, but Tropesmith also tracks a weighted-strength score per trope that blends recency and cross-source corroboration rather than counting every mention the same. By that measure Protective Hero still comes out on top (94,630 weighted strength against its 30,476 raw requests, a 3.11x ratio). The average weighted-to-raw ratio across the 8 tropes on this page is 3.34x; Protective Hero's 3.11x sits at or below that average.
By raw reader-request volume, the top three fantasy tropes Tropesmith tracks are Protective Hero, Hard Magic System, Possessive Hero. Full ranked list above.
87,202 total requests across the 8 tropes on this page, spanning Tropesmith's full reader-demand corpus. Protective Hero alone accounts for 30,476 of those, with 11% of its own volume logged in just the last 14 days.
Epic Fantasy — 12% of its all-time request volume landed in the last 14 days, the highest recent-share on this page even though it isn't necessarily the largest by raw total. See the demand radar for the full cross-genre momentum comparison, which surfaces exactly this kind of gap between size and speed.
A Tropesmith Map scores your exact trope stack on live demand versus supply — and names the gap you can own.
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.