Posts about AO3
I feel like Louis sometimes, observing people from a distance, but in this case it’s fandoms.
So it’s been 2 months since Engage has been released and between all the gameplay discussions and story discourse which literally boils down to “is it good or bad tho”, some of you may be wondering, how is the content-creating side of the fan base these days? New characters, new stories, new ships, and of course new fanfiction. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I adore fanfics, they can be angsty, fluffy, or even just plain fascinating in how they interpret different characters. So of course I was excited about what sort of fanfics would be cooked up for this game. One problem with that though:
The numbers are moving really slowly, and there isn’t much variety with them either.
Now, I need to preface this, fanfiction is a labor of love and no one should feel obligated to write for something they aren’t interested in. Also, what Engage fics are already out there are very good and this post isn’t to take away from their writing quality at all. I encourage people to read some fics on Ao3 and see what they like, please support fanfiction writers.
I’d also like to say that I’ll try my best to keep 3H comparisons to a minimum in this post. 3H was a huge outlier in terms of fan content for the series, literally more than half of Fire Emblem’s Ao3 tag is 3H related (42,743 out of 71,751 as of this time of writing). So I don’t think 3H would be helpful in this discussion, instead I’ll mostly stick to two other games for comparison: Fates and Awakening
What are the numbers?
Engage currently has 768 fics under its page on Ao3. The ship with the most fics is Alfred/Alear at 73 while the cutoff for entering the top 10 ships is 12 fics. Already we can see that fics concerning ships are low in number considering it’s fairly easy to make a ship enter the top 10 as long as you’re dedicated enough. Here’s the full list:
Alfred/Alear (73)
Alear/Ivy (54)
Diamant/Griss (25, mostly written by two people showing how dedicated fans can boost a ship’s numbers)
Diamant/Alear (25)
Marth/Alear (24)
Diamant/Ivy (20)
Diamant/Alcryst (19, yes you read this correctly)
Alcryst/Alear (18)
Diamant & Alcryst (17, note that the ‘&’ denotes this as platonic/familial)
Gris/Alear (12)
From this list, we can see that only the top two are notably ahead of the rest while all the other ships go up and down on a regular basis due to low fic numbers.
In terms of overall growth, I don’t have the exact numbers sadly, but this twitter user made a great graph last month showing overall activity for the fire emblem tag. Tldr, Engage’s fic numbers were steady but more 3H fics were still being written a month into Engage’s release.
How do they compare to Fates/Awakening?
It’s also interesting how Awakening (9,064) and Fates (9,077) have almost the exact same number of fics, which makes the side by side comparison all the more fascinating because it really shows the difference between each fanbase’s shipping habits.
I decided to screenshot them because I don’t have much to say on individual ships like Engage’s case. Overall, I’d say Engage is trending much closer to how Fates’ list looks given how the numbers are much more closely packed into each other. Between the 1st and 2nd place ships, approximately there’s a 3:2 ratio of fics, while the rest follow in similar numbers to each other. Both Fates and Engage show this trend, while Awakening has a huge ratio difference of around 6:1 between the 1st and 2nd place ships (or 7:1 for the franchise wide tag, as Chrom/Robin recently surpassed 2k fics under it).
I think by this point we can conclude that Engage isn’t gonna introduce any new pairings into the overall top 10 for the franchise, and it will continue to follow the Fates trend of having a wide variety of ships instead of having 1 ship almost completely dominate the game-specific tag.
Most fanfics are made when the piece of media is at it’s peak hype moment, and unless the DLC story does some crazy shit with it’s plot and characters, then most people would likely fall off by the time this year ends. And if the Geneaology remake rumors are true, then Engage would no longer be at the forefront of the fandom’s mind sooner than later. At the rate we’re going, Engage would be lucky to catch up to Fates and Awakening in terms of fanfiction numbers.
I’m gonna post a second part to this after clearing up some info, also I find that this makes the discussion more focused on certain aspects, so stay tuned! It’s gonna be more focused on why I think the fanfiction numbers have been low for the game
Froyo is a small graphical application for downloading works from Archive Of Our Own (AO3). It supports batch downloading of works to supported formats (AZW3, EPUB, HTML, MOBI, PDF). The app is small, fast and functional, a perfect fit for Dear PyGui. Not every app has to be complex. Sometimes a tool just needs to get the job done.