#heartbreak is one thing / fanfiction's another / i beg you to tag your works right motherfucker

[mikuchan]

Notes and thoughts from the Jaheira deep dive

Jaheira's whole tag is a mess. She has the worst main : everything else ratio out of the tags we've looked at so far:

For reference (& reminder that these are as of the dates I did each dive, so give or take a few percentage points)

Raphael: 63% main works

Minthara: 49% main works

Aylin/Isobel: 46% main works

Alfira: 27% main works

Jaheira is number 10 in the top 10 of all non-player BG3 characters (as of October), but it's entirely due to proximity tagging. She doesn't appear in any of the top 10 ships in her own tag! There are more m/m works tagging Jaheira than f/f. What's fascinating(?!) is that so many works have additional tags like 'i love Jaheira' or 'mama bear Jaheira,' 'camp mom Jaheira,' etc but don't actually include her - or give her one or two lines in a multi-thousands word fic. Like the inverse of a thought crime, great vibes happening inside these people's heads but that's all it is. vibes. She's definitely a victim of her own success: a cool and engaging character who's easy to recruit and easy to like, so of course she's right in the crosshairs for fandom issues.

I still have Orin sitting at like 1/4 finished, but I'm going to look at a Dragon Age character next so I can compare a character who is similarly cross-era like Jaheira is, with older games + a recent new game, but who is outside of the Baldur's Gate fandom/franchise entirely. That will give us an interesting comparison both in terms of timeline and fandom.

While Jaheira doesn't buck the pattern of predominantly explicit fics making up the majority of her main-character works, she has a pretty high number of G and T works too. Lots of works with her actually acting as Camp Mom, whether to Dark Urge, Tav, or Imoen(?) and Ward char of BG 1 & 2.

As an aside, this was the first character-specific dive I did with Google Sheets (+ an XRL scraper formula) versus shorthand on a Notepad file, so more evergreen, a quicker process (allowing me to tackle tags with more works), and easier to double check for errors etc. 😊