Who is the most popular TF2 character?
Off the top of my head I would think Medic is the most popular. His personality is very dynamic, ranging from canon Meet the Medic’s cheerful ‘hahaha isn’t surgery just fun?’ attitude over fanon traumatised/cuddly!Medic to the guro mad doctor, which makes him pairable with most other characters—Heavy/Medic is arguably the most popular pairing in the fandom, Medic/Scout is a guro stable, but recently Medic has been appearing more consistently in other pairings as well; Medic/Sniper, Medic/Engineer, and Medic/Soldier seem to be on the fast-track to popularity, and he has also been paired with fem!Pyro and Miss Pauling on occasion.
However, I decided to look into the actual statistics where available and easy to collect—the exact counts are listed under the Read More link at the bottom of the page.
(Please note that numbers and percentages add up to more than 100% because art/stories may have more than one focus character, e.g. a Heavy/Medic story is counted once each for both Heavy and Medic. Disclaimer: This is a rough estimate with significant reporting and research biases, do not use for actual science and/or gloating.)
It seems my initial gut feeling about Medic’s popularity was wrong (which is why modern science is based on empirical evidence—get your vaccines, kids!). Even so, I’m not surprised; the results no doubt reflect the age demographic of each website: FF.net and DA are frequented by the youngest fans who tend to prefer Scout (and the perverts on Paheal fem!Scout) whereas TF2chan and AO3 are frequented by a much smaller and slightly older population group which favours the Sniper/Spy and Heavy/Medic pairings. If I had ventured into TF2chan.net/fanfic or backtracked more than a year on /afanfic I assume I would have found enough Heavy/Medic stories to shift their weighted average upwards. Feel free to grind the numbers yourselves.
What I find most disheartening, though, are the numbers for Demoman. I wonder if anything can be done to make him more appealing to the fandom?
First, thanks for going into such detail with your response… I wasn’t expecting that, and admittedly, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that such stats were actually available.
I’m sorry I can’t put this under a cut, but it doesn’t seem available as an option and I’m crap with html, so if someone can let me know if what I’ve done hasn’t worked and how I can fix it that’d be great
This makes me mad and also kind of sick.
See why Scout is my least favorite, you guys?
Do you understand this now?
Demoman you poor gorgeous alcoholic babby.
demo’s a wonderful character he deserve more love
This is why I reblog every piece of Demo I find. Precious babe needs more love.
just let me love you demo…
