Baldur's Gate 3 Becomes One of the Biggest Hits Among Fanfics This Year. Ships With Astarion Conquered the Internet
With luck and patience, fandom of the hit from Larian Studios will break through to the podium. New stories are being written every day.
The driving force behind the community of virtually every game (and not only) are fanfictions. Every title with even a small fan base will sooner or later end up on platforms like Archive of Our Own, with stories focusing on the "unknown" stories of beloved characters. It's undeniable that many such stories provide an opportunity to bring a favorite romantic relationship to life.
Fans love all kinds of analysis, which is why a ranking of the most popular ships is created every year. A couple from Baldur's Gate 3 broke into the top ten of the latest list.
Everyone loves a vampire bad boy
The results of the summer analysis of stories on AO3 became the topic of the latest discussion on Baldur Reddit. According to the list below, fanfics starring Astarion and Tav (the player's default character) were in fourth place in the popularity ranking. As a new addition to the list, the ship has received 8776 individual stories over the year.
centeroftheselights
When it comes to new fanfics, Astarion/Tav easily overtook the pair from third place, defeating several other fandom giants in the process - such as the infamous Draco/Harry ship from the Harry Potter universe. The wizards fell to ninth place.
The fact that there's still thousands of people adding their entries to the corpus of 50,000 smut stories about a specific pairing of Harry Potter characters in the year of our Lord 2024 is absolutely insane to me.
As a self-absorbed (at least in the beginning) vampire, Astarion wasn't able to settle for just fourth place. On the list, we can notice two additional tags with his name, namely Astarion/Reader (place 52) and Astarion/The Dark Urge (place 56).
Let's not forget about The Dark Urges
Astarion/Tav is not the only pair from the third installment of Baldur that made it to the list. We will also find Gale in the spotlight, whose fanfics with Tav were ranked 31st place. However, that's not all, because the mage and the vampire are also popular - their pair made it to 45th place.
Another underrated pair is The Dark Urge and Gortash, occupying position number 86. Fans are especially intrigued by the protagonist's previous relationship with Bane's chosen one, a topic that Larian isn't keen on delving into in the latest patch.
