#i've been nice about not bitching about the linked universe fandom and its portrayal of marin before

[arosnowflake]

HEY so in case you were WONDERING I crunched the numbers and 44.37% of the Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening tag on AO3 is Linked Universe fic.

And hey. Hey. In case you were wondering. Guess what the percentage of Linked Universe fic in the Marin tag is. Guess.

65.64%

Roughly two thirds of the Marin (Legend of Zelda) tag on AO3 is Linked Universe.

So anyway. I'm gonna need Linked Universe fans to either start treating Marin as an actual character in her own right rather than Legend's dead girlfriend who he's sad about or I'm gonna need them to stop tagging her in their fic.

Number crunching method under the cut

Alright, so. The thing that actually makes it difficult to figure out how many Linked Universe fics there are on AO3 is that AO3, as of writing (ninth of march 2024) does not have a Linked Universe fandom tag. (Even though at this point it really should because this is ridiculous.) There is an additional tag, "Linked Universe (Legend of Zelda)", but usage of this within the Linked Universe fandom is unreliable. There's a lot of fics that are Linked Universe, and are tagged with the characters, but are not tagged with the additional tag.

So what I did was this: try to figure out how many fics are tagged with the characters, but not with 'Linked Universe (Legend of Zelda)'. For this, I couldn't just filter on all the characters, because not all Linked Universe fics are going to have every single Linked Universe character. So I systemically eliminated the characters one by one, and tallied up all the fics they had as I did.

That looked like this:

Step 1: Find out how many fics there are in the 'Linked Universe (Legend of Zelda)' additional tag.

Step 2: Find out how many fics there are in the 'Legend (Linked Universe)' character tag if you exclude 'Linked Universe (Legend of Zelda)' from the search.

Step 3: Find out how many fics there are in the next most numerous character tag, if you exclude Legend and the Linked Universe additional tag from the search.

Etc. until all the characters had been eliminated, then tally up all the fics.

The numbers looked like this:

For Link's Awakening:

Total fics in the tag: 311

Total fics in the 'Linked Universe (Legend of Zelda)' tag: 86

Fics including the tag 'Legend (Linked Universe)', excluding those tagged 'Linked Universe (Legend of Zelda)': 48

Fics including 'Warriors (Legend of Zelda)', excluding Legend, Linked Universe: 2

Fics including Time, excluding Warriors, Legend, and Linked Universe: none

Fics including Twilight, excluding Time, Warriors, Legend, and Linked Universe: none

Fics including Hyrule, excluding Time, Warriors, Legend, and Linked Universe: 1

Fics including Wild, excluding Hyrule, Time, Warriors, Legend, and Linked Universe: 1

There were no fics for any of the other characters with the remaining filters applied.

Total number of Linked Universe fics: 86 + 48 + 2 + 1 + 1 = 138

44.37% of the fics in the Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening tag on AO3 are Linked Universe.

For Marin (Legend of Zelda):

Total fics in the tag: 358

Total fics in the 'Linked Universe' additional tag: 152

Fics including the 'Legend (Linked Universe)' tag, excluding Linked Universe: 76

Fics including Warriors, excluding Legend and Linked Universe: 4

Fics including Twilight, excluding Warriors, Legend, and Linked Universe: none

Fics including Hyrule, excluding Twilight, Warriors, Legend, and Linked Universe: 1

Fics including Time, excluding Hyrule, Warriors, Legend, and Linked Universe: none

Fics including Wind, excluding Time, Hyrule, Warriors, Legend, and Linked Universe: 2

There were no fics for any of the other characters with the remaining filters applied.

Total number of Linked Universe fics: 152 + 76 + 4 + 1 + 2 = 235

65.64% of fics in the Marin (Legend of Zelda) AO3 tag are Linked Universe.