Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2021: Week 42
The Student Prince is a popular Merlin/Arthur college and modern royal family AU, written and recorded by FayJay. It was written and posted in 35 chapters as a work in progress with a new part every day. The serial format contributed to the popularity of the novel because people were talking about it after every new part which created a lot of buzz so that more and more people checked it out. FayJay also recorded the podfic of this story.
The Student Prince was for a time the story with the second highest number of hits on fanfiction website Ao3. This occured in January 2012, when the AO3 version of this fic had more than 800 comments and over 90,000 hits. The story was also crossposted on Dreamwidth, where the final chapter received 90 comments. As of October 2021, the story has more than 2500 comments, 18500+ Kudos, 6500 bookmarks and a very impressive 715,000+ hits on AO3.
When it comes to Modern AUs, the story often gets described as "right up there with Drastically Redefining Protocol". Given the similar premises, the comparison is not particularly surprising.
It is now one of the most popular fanfictions in the Merlin fandom. Fans of this story have created fanart, gifs, vids, and other transformative works in the universe of The Student Prince. The Student Prince is widely recced and has often being referred to as a "Merlin classic".