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Am I the only one surprised that the game Hades has so few fics?

prussiangrandier

prussiangrandier

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RS,brasil
It has about as perfect a characterization as you can get, almost all the characters live up to their story potential, and the writers are incredibly efficient when it comes to extracting raw stories from their characters.

The game is a treasure trove of ships with all of the characters being bisexual.

The characters have characterizations so strong/good/well done that you can easily see how they would react to alternate scenarios

so why has it received so little attention the game has gotten from the fanfic section of the internet?

I mean there is almost no popular fan fiction franchises that you can't make a crossover with

Naruto
Worm
Percy Jackson (no duh)
Avatar: Last Airbender
Teen Titans
Danny Phantom
Young Justice
Bleach
Yu-Gi-Oh
Death Note
RWBY
Yu Yu Hakusho
My Hero Academia
Hellboy
Homestuck
Undertale
Fullmetal Alchemist
God of war (again no duh)

Why is there so little done with it for such perfect fanfic material?
 
Supergiant is a relatively young company with fewer stans than you'd think their excellent work would deserve, it's not a matter of potential for spawning fanfic, but a matter of accumulating enough fans that write, and for some readers, fans that write and can overcome Sturgeon's Law.
 
There is that one God of War cross on SV. But, I think you might be overestimating Hades' popularity.
 
I think other SVers have talked about this before, but I feel often that, just because a work is popular and/or well-liked, doesn't mean it'll necessarily spawn a bunch of fanfics. For example, Citizen Kane is the cliched answer for 'best movie ever', yet you don't tend to see many Citizen Kane fics around (this could also be because it lacks 'nerd status' though, even though it's trumpeted by many a film geek). Same with Cowboy Bebop and anime (at least in the West), yet when was the last time you saw a Cowboy Bebop Quest or Fic on SV?

About Hades, 'as perfect a characterization as you can get' may be why you don't see that many fics of it (at least outside Ao3), since that can mean there's nothing left to add to their characters (though a counter-argument is that they're based on Greek myth, which has long been mined for characters, yet the game is a thing anyway).

I always assumed Hades was pretty popular though, given the Discord servers I go to constantly talk about it, plus all the glowing reviews. By contrast, a lot of popular fanfic franchises have quite questionable or criticised source material, e.g. Familiar of Zero, RWBY, or Highschool DxD, so what can make something good fanfic material and good in general can often differ.

(As an aside, I feel Kamen Rider Ghost could be perfect fanfic material if more people knew about it, given its use of historical figures similar to Fate, another fanfic-heavy series, its flawed source material, having ghost protagonists a la Danny Phantom, and so on.)
 
I think that another issue with Hades when it comes to this specific case is that it has waaay too much content. It's possible that the reason people aren't writing fics for it is that they haven't yet exhausted the ludicrous amount of dialogue in the game itself.
 
The thing about Hades is that it's really, really, really well-written, moreso than many of the other types of fiction out there, meaning that many of the driving forces that would lead to creating fanfiction (obvious power changes, different character inserts, replacing characters that people hate, blatant wank fics, etc) aren't actually there in the first place.

It's not like worm where there is an obvious point of divergence (the locker, the main character, etc) can be inserted and radical change made, nor is the setting exactly malleable to many of the common cross-over elements (sci-fi series are pretty much completely out, so are the many of the fantasy series that don't incorporate Greek Mythology) that would drive people to cross stuff over with the series. Stuff like God of War or Percy Jackson potentially, but doing so would require such massive divergence from the core character elements of Hades that it would effectively gut one of the driving parts of peoples enjoyment of the series.

Furthermore, you really can't see series like 40k or Mass Effect or Worm effectively crossing over with the series because they're so far out of thematic whack to match the vibe of Hades.
 
SneakyWalrus said:
The thing about Hades is that it's really, really, really well-written, moreso than many of the other types of fiction out there, meaning that many of the driving forces that would lead to creating fanfiction (obvious power changes, different character inserts, replacing characters that people hate, blatant wank fics, etc) aren't actually there in the first place.

It's not like worm where there is an obvious point of divergence (the locker, the main character, etc) can be inserted and radical change made, nor is the setting exactly malleable to many of the common cross-over elements (sci-fi series are pretty much completely out, so are the many of the fantasy series that don't incorporate Greek Mythology) that would drive people to cross stuff over with the series. Stuff like God of War or Percy Jackson potentially, but doing so would require such massive divergence from the core character elements of Hades that it would effectively gut one of the driving parts of peoples enjoyment of the series.

Furthermore, you really can't see series like 40k or Mass Effect or Worm effectively crossing over with the series because they're so far out of thematic whack to match the vibe of Hades.
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Yeah, I think fanfic-able franchises aren't always necessarily the most popular or critically-acclaimed ones, more ones that have enough openings in their universes for people to poke their heads into. Like, I love Ghost in the Shell to bits, but it feels so difficult to replicate the exact tone of even its 'pulpier' outings like Stand Alone Complex that I would never dream of writing something within a GITS-adjacent universe. I would make a fool of myself - at best it would be Metal Gear Rising by way of Motoko Kusanagi.

I feel like there needs to be a unified theory of the common traits a fanfic-able IP has. Lord knows some english-major marketing intern has probably tried to put something like that together to help his superiors make the most fic-tastic franchise they could come up with, to milk a nascent fandom to death for merchandising dollars...
 
STMPD said:
Yeah, I think fanfic-able franchises aren't always necessarily the most popular or critically-acclaimed ones, more ones that have enough openings in their universes for people to poke their heads into. Like, I love Ghost in the Shell to bits, but it feels so difficult to replicate the exact tone of even its 'pulpier' outings like Stand Alone Complex that I would never dream of writing something within a GITS-adjacent universe. I would make a fool of myself - at best it would be Metal Gear Rising by way of Motoko Kusanagi.

I feel like there needs to be a unified theory of the common traits a fanfic-able IP has. Lord knows some english-major marketing intern has probably tried to put something like that together to help his superiors make the most fic-tastic franchise they could come up with, to milk a nascent fandom to death for merchandising dollars...
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on that i think i can help with the common rules

1. The Franchise needs to be popular/ accessible

2 there needs to be a way to connect with other fans

3. the franchise must have some sort of magic/power system

4. the franchise must have enough separate distinctive parts that they can be removed/ replaced with others (writing modularity)
 
So, a brief look at AO3 tells me there are about 2700 fanfics there, of which 848 have explicit content and about 1800-1900 are m/m, and SV isn't exactly a hub of erotica and slashfic. 1500ish fics had less than 3k words, a further 600 with less than 6k. I guess that most people writing fanfiction of Hades aren't interested in writing several chapters on a regular basis, and would rather just write about a few select character interactions, possibly involving genitals.

Edit: Might be the Tolkien effect; naught left to write but homoeroticism, comedy and porn.
 
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"Date of release Sep 17, 2020"

I think that right there explains a lot of it. It just hasn't been out all that long.
 
I just got Hades and was wondering about this myself after trawling FFN and finding only 40 fics, so here are my thoughts:

Despite the great dialogue in Hades and ship-potential, there isn't much actual characterisation, or rather, its so granular so as to be difficult for most people to coherently consider. The dialogue is nice, but it's also super short and RNG dependent.
In essence, there's not enough straight forward narrative storytelling I think, which is something fanfic writers and readers need. It's great for the rogue-like genre, but (and remember, video games aren't generally great for fanfics in the first place compared to more story driven media like books, movies, TV, or Anime) it doesn't lend itself well to story-writing in large part because there is no ONE story to become comfortable with.

To me a big thing about Fanfiction is familiarity. Yeah, once you've read enough then you want to have it become more and more AU, but at the beggining it's all about seeing familiar characters doing familiar things through a different lens, and Hades doesn't have an overarching narrative for a Fanfiction base to meld upon because everyone's Hades experience is very very different.
Compare to a pretty fanfic popular game like Mass Effect, which is VERY story driven, has much longer coherent strings of dialogue, and has very clear narratives and plot points for a fandom to latch onto, Hades really just isn't built in such a fashion which translates well to Fanfiction I think, so I don't think there will be much Fanfiction of it going into the future either.
 
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Fanbases aren't 1 to 1. Worm is a fanbase with a thriving fanfiction community - but not an art one, for the most part. Homestuck's fanbase was heavily veered into cosplay, SI art, music, and even fan game projects, but had a lack of fiction in comparison, unless you count the fanquests. Hades is popular, but it's popularity seems to be similar to the fanbase of a game like Arknights - It's heavily veered to fanart of the characters.
 
Yeah, a lot of fanfiction would probably just be mythologically inspired fiction plus that Zagreus dude. Hades doesn't bring much more than Zag's personal story arc and Hades and Persephone separating into the greater mythology. Thanatos might have replaced someone's favourite psychopomp in their heart, of course. That would probably lead to smut rather than ambitious crossovers, though.
 
Yeah your not the only one. I can kind of get why there isn't many stories with the setting, but Zagreus strikes me as the kind of character everyone would insert into other settings as a crossover character.
 
Quite frankly I think other portrayals of Hades as a character(or more accessible

Are more appealing to others)


For example Lore Olympus has thousands of fanfics



It's good as a series able to be digested easily and for free

and there isn't a skills limit(which I think helpers a lot of fanfic material for gaming)
 
I started writing my Hades quest because I couldn't find anyone else doing one so yes, it did surprise me but I can understand why there are so few fics and quests on Hades now.

Firstly, it's really hard to write, primarily because the game focuses entirely on the story of Zagreus (which is, of course, made up.) The further you go away from the game's storyline the less there is to back it on, the game is a bizarre mishmash of greek myths and stories and also, partly, the writers' imagination. Some characters are easy to write: Hades, Charon, and Hypnos and can work well but others are far harder. Hunting down dialogue from the game is difficult making it hard to get your characters to sound accurate, I have to watch playthroughs of the game to get the quotes I need sometimes.

The game does give you small titbits of information that you can interpret and use in your story, ie before the river Phlegethen burst its banks the residents of Asphodel were all trying to move away from it. But even still, the game makes it hard to quantify the power of a god, or their capabilities, why can Zagreus be beaten by a shade but also beat Hades, a God believed to be just as powerful as Zeus. The timing is off, Achilles is dead which places it after the Iliad, yet the Odyssey makes mention of grim Persephone when he visits the Underworld. Yet neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey mentions the first ever winter Demeter is causing something which would've killed many at the time. That means the game doesn't operate on the same stories as the Greeks myths making it even more tricky to incorporate other parts of the greek myths into what you're doing.

I think when writing about Hades it's best to either add a character or a different situation into the same storyline and just knock things off course, otherwise you end up like me, desperately researching Egyptian damns at 2 am trying to figure out if there's an engineering way to sort out Asphodel which the greeks might've known about.

In the end, I think one of the reasons people may not write many chapters, if they do start writing in the first place, is the fact that there's not that much lore or many characters. Especially when compared to other big popular titles which can be easier to write about, look, for example, at Harry Potter, Naruto, or Worm where there are many nuances and characters to explore.

My hope is that with Hades 2 released this year into early access, there'll be more plot and lore that can be used to write, hopefully making it easier and more compelling for people to write.

To clarify - this isn't meant to be a hit piece on writing Hades this is simply my experience when writing and researching my quest which I felt could be pertinent to the discussion.
 
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