Talk:Gamer Fic
"Particularly prominent in MHA fandom""???
Is it "particularly popular" in MHA, or is MHA just an enormous tag-happy fandom? 63 works out of 270k isn't that high. (For comparison, theres over twice as many "flower shop next to tattoo parlor au" bnha fics, and I wouldn't say that au has any particularly close association with the fandom.) I don't really read gamerfic and it's hard to do stats outside of ao3 but I have the impression gamerfic is more popular in video game fandoms and Spacebattles/SV (this is probably a bias of what fandom discussion places I hang out in -- e.g. Worm gamerfic gets a lot of discussion in the Cauldron discord server, which is for Worm). -- Quaelegit (talk) 19:10, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
Yeah, so I meant that in terms of the fics on AO3 that i could positively identify as "Gamer fic," either because they used a tag that mentioned "gamer au," mentioned "gamer AU" in their summary, or were listed as a crossover with "The Gamer" and had a summary indicating "gamer-fic" content, the majority of fics were BnHA. Other fandoms, including Worm, HP, and Naruto, also used the trope but were much less common among the whole set of fics that fall into the category of Gamer fics based on what I could find on AO3. Among the whole category of BnHA fics, Gamer fics were much less common as compared to other tropes, because you're right, it is a massive fandom. If you could add some data about how common the trope is in Worm fandom and fics on Spacebattles, that would be useful, because although I've also heard it's popular in Worm fandom, I was not able to find very good evidence of that on AO3 and I'm not good enough at navigating Spacebattles to get evidence from there.
I'd like to add that I don't really think I'm the most qualified to be discussing this, full stop--I don't enjoy a lot of the tropes that tend to co-occur with Gamer fic and so I don't run into them much in the wild. Most of what I did for this page was based on research and like one or two stories I've read. Anyhow, if you have more comfort with the topic, feel free to fix the article up to the best of your ability! Thank you! NinthFeather (talk) 20:20, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
- Late response, but thank you for explaining your reasoning on this! To be clear, I'm also very much not an expert on this corner of fandom. I think we're looking at the same data and drawing different conclusions from it, and I'm not all that confident in my conclusions. I do think all of this discussion would be useful on the page (both in giving people a sense in how the trope gets used, and advice for how to find fics like this on AO3!)
- Can I asked which "gamer fic" tag you were looking at? They don't seem to be consolidated together. Here's some data I pulled up quickly:
| Tag (freeform unless noted otherwise) | # works (all fandoms) | # works (BNHA) | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Gamer Ability (The Gamer Webcomic) as a Quirk (My Hero Academia) | 65 works | 65 | Other fandoms include Minecraft (2), Solo Leveling (1), Guilty Gear (1) |
| Inspired by The Gamer (Webcomic) | 11 works | 1 | Other fandoms include Naruto (1), Star Wars (1), MCU (1), Merlin (1), KHR (1) |
| The Gamer Ability (The Gamer Webcomic) | 91 works | 10 | excluding all previously mentioned tags to avoid double counting works. Other fandoms include Naruto (17), RWBY (11), Harry Potter (7), Original Work (6), MCU (4), Pokemon (4), and more |
| The Gamer (Webcomic) | 165 | 13 | Note: some of these may not be game fic but rather non-gamer AUs that use the characters from the webcomic. I'm betting most are gamer fic though excluding all previously mentioned tags to avoid double counting works. Other fanodms include Naruto (22), Harry Potter (16), RWBY (15), High School DxD (13), Solo Leveling (7), Original Work (6), Bleach (6), Fate/etc. (5), and more |
Okay there's definitely more to investigate but I should probably get a proper spreadsheet for that. Leaving my notes here for now. Also, just searching "gamer powers" and "gamer fic" (with the quotes) in the search bar gives about 100 results each. I have not checked those for duplicates but that seems to put an upper bound of maybe a few hundred gamerfics on AO3? Like, i'd estimate 500 at most.
Parahumans on Various Sites:Right now Worm Story Search finds 159 fics with the keyword "gamer", but some of those are because the author's username contains the string "gamer" or the title is using "gamer in a different context than "gamer fic". Spot checking suggests that around 80% are gamerfic, so call that 120 for the worm fandom. (I think all of the on-AO3 fics that show up in the tags are also getting found by this search tool, btw).
SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity:Checking other fandoms on SB and questing sites will be much more difficult to check but I'll try to keep looking into it.
FFN: I found several "Communities" that seem to be for collecting gamerfic (ex1, ex2, ex3, ex4. All together there's about a thousand stories in them, but I haven't checked them for duplicates, whether the curators are using the a similar definition of "gamer fic" as we are. It's another "more research needed" thing. But *if* these check out, looks like FFN has a lot more gamer fic than AO3.
'Other:I don't know how to look into Wattpad, but there and tumblr would also be good places to check. -- Quaelegit (talk) 02:53, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
Okay, so my search was focused on AO3 because FFN's search function is so so bad and I don't even know *how* to search SV or SB. When I went through AO3, I noticed the same thing--there isn't really a unified tag for "Gamer fic." So my approach was actually pretty similar to yours--I looked for tags that included the phrase "the gamer" and then looked for fics tagged as being crossovers with "The Gamer." I did do a little more looking at specific summaries than you did, so I discounted a few fics that had summaries that stated they were something other than Gamer fic. As for FFN, your approach of using FFN's communities is probably the best way to actually determine how many gamer fics are on the site, though, again, it'll be necessary to check that the meaning they're using for "Gamer fic" is the same as the one we're using.
I really think the main difference in our approaches is how we're conceptualizing the numbers. Because I was able to establish that there were a lot of Gamer fics for the BnHA fandom specifically, I said that they were most common there. But you looked at the fact that compared to other tropes in certain specific fandoms, the gamer fic trope is more common. I don't think either approach is flawed; actually, the article might benefit from an approach that acknowledges both aspects. NinthFeather (talk) 14:02, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
- I tried rewording the section based on your approach. I think Quaelegit interpreted how it was written previously as "this type of fic is popular in an absolute sense within the MHA fandom" whereas it was meant as "out of fandoms that make up Gamer fic, MHA is one of the largest". --DivinerSpirit (talk) 07:22, 12 May 2023 (UTC)