Talk:Accidental travel

Term
Is transliteration really the best way to introduce the Russian term "попаданец"? While this term may have no obvious counterpart in English as of now, it doesn't mean such a counterpart cannot be created via translation, if only to give the impression the word conveys in Russian. I personally would suggest something like endupper or even 'vegotintotler. The latter may be a little bit awkward but it also conveys the hidden connotations, even though they are insignificant. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.175.70.185 (talk) 07:42, 27 March 2016 (UTC)


 * I don't think something like that is necessary. "Displaced" works just fine. As in "temporally displaced" or "dimensionally displaced." --Sabatum (talk) 05:09, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately the term is already taken ("displaced person") and has association very different from 'popadanets'. As for making new words like 'ednupper' is against policy WP:NOR. So let's just wait when literary critics read this wikipedia article and find a genuine English term.  - üser:Altenmann >t 05:25, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
 * The issue of OR aside, how did you coin vegotintotler? It is quite opaque to me. —Tamfang (talk) 20:57, 13 December 2022 (UTC)


 * I've encountered term "timestick AU" (alternative universe) so I think "timestuck" would be the best

Amusing reference
a 2019 literary research russian article about popadantsy in non-russian cinema. This russian article has a summary in english. One can readily see it was created using "google translate" with no postprocessing whstsoever. And I was amused to see that google used the term "accidental travel" I scrambled based on expression "accidental time travel" after really long and exhausting google search. It looks like english speaking literary critics have been completely overlooking the genre. While russian ones wrote tons about it. - Altenmann >talk 06:17, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

popadan...

 * In Russian fandom, the trope is known under the term popadantsy, plural form for popadanets, female: popadanka, a person who accidentally finds himself elsewhere/elsewhen.

The page cited, as I read it, says the characters are popadantsy and the genre is popadanstvo (noun) or popadancheskoy (adjective). —Tamfang (talk) 04:12, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Merger proposal with isekai
I am proposing a merger between this article (Accidental travel) and isekai, as the isekai page in its current state is largely made up of monotonous listings of isekai genre works and contains very little information that differentiates it from other works in the accidental travel genre outside of a few recent superficial trends. Although the article could be justified to be independent if enough reliable sources demonstrated how it is its own genre rather than a closely related offshoot, the existence on this page of a description for isekai seems like a better place to hold the relevant information. As it is now, the isekai article is mostly just listings of isekai anime and light novels (some, such as the sauna one, dubiously notable) and almost all the citations are paid promotions or top ten lists rather than reliable sourcing. While some reliable sources exist in the form of scholarly articles on isekai or descriptions of the genre, none of these seem to signify anything that makes the genre unique from accidental travel outside of the country of origin. Deku link (talk) 21:04, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose per my responses given above. The term has coverage from a bunch of sources (1, 2, 3, 4) among others, enough to separate it. Plus, there is enough in the current article that a merged article would be WP:TOOLONG. Link20XX (talk)
 * My issue is that those sources are all just anime news network articles, plus a large amount of the article needs to be cut anyway so I'm not concerned about TOOLONG — Preceding unsigned comment added by Deku link (talk • contribs) 21:45, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * There is nothing wrong with using a bunch of Anime News Network articles. They are a reliable source. In addition, all of the remaining information is reliably sourced. Link20XX (talk) 21:50, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Update: I have removed most of the original research and expanded the article with additional citations. It's still not great, but it is a definite improvement. Link20XX (talk) 22:42, 29 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Oppose per Link. ~ HAL  333  04:07, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose per Link as well. Sourcing is a bit of an issue, but isn't un-improvable. Sarcataclysmal (talk) 06:49, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose - Cleanup isn't really the purpose of article mergers. One of these articles is covering a Japanese cultural phenomenon while the other is covering broader cultural tropes. HumanBodyPiloter5 (talk) 17:05, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

Original research
This article consists of three parts, which (TL;DR) I believe violate WP:SYNTH for being discussed in this article.

Least problematic is the summary of Japanese isekai concept.

Then there is the discussion of the Russian term popadanstvo. This is also salvagable as it seems used in some Russian-language studies (AGFing from a quick scan and machine translation of some soruces here and on Russian Wikiepdia, plus stuff like and ), and the term even exists, if marginally, in English academic literature (source - two paragraphs, reprint of the same); note that this term might also be discussed under variant spellings (translitration from cyryllic to English is, like all transliteration, often imperfect; I did check for popadancheskoy but I didn't found anything).

The big problem is the poorly referenced "Types" section, plus the general framing of this article. Sure, we all can see the connections between iseaki, popadanstvo, and overall what TV tropes calls https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TrappedInAnotherWorld. The problem is that I couldn't find any reliable source that makes this connection. The Types section opens with "The accidental time travel trope is specifically known as time slip. A classical example of time slip is Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), which had considerable influence on later writers." citing The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, which does mention that work, but does not mention the term "accidental travel". Twain's work is used as an example of intrusion fantasy, a term attributed to a typology by Farah Mendlesoh. Neither does the source use the term time slip. Then there is some content likewise dubiously referenced to a Russian source on popadanstvo (I say dubiously, as our wiki text mentions stuff like iseaki or RPG, which aren't in the Russian text, as far as I can make out from machine translation). The rest of this section is unreferenced.

I did find, a reliable work which could be used to reference the time slip/accidental travel, but it's from 2022 and I wouldn't be surprised if the writer used Wikipedia as a source. But there's no smoking gun, but the problem is WP:SIGCOV.

Overall, there is some salvagable content here, but how much of the article should be TNTed? Should this be moved to popadanstvo and rewritten as a term from Russian literary / sf / fantasy studies? If we want to keep it in English, we need arguably a better term than "accidental travel", and ideally some scholarly work that actually discusses popadanstvo, Yankee in King Author's Court, and iseak in the same text. For now I've tagged this article with original research, b/c it is a a problem.

Ping User:TompaDompa, User:ReaderofthePack, User:Daranios, User:Jclemens. Do ping anyone else you think could be interested in this. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 10:04, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Hmm. equates/translates popandanstvo with "accidental travel" on p. 28. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature is using time slip. [3] states that time slip=accidental time travel is a sub-case of "accidental travel". I would tend to use that even though it is younger than the Wikipedia article as long as there is not clear indication that that source was using Wikipedia.  does discuss "accidental travel" as a literary device to a degree as a sub-topic of "situationism" or situationist literature, which seems to be a notable topic separate from the current Situationism article. On a quick glance I did not see a source that links the three ideas of popadanstvo, isekai and "Western" accidental travel. But the Anime News Network links the latter two. So if no more sources show up, my idea would be to move the "Western" accidental travel to isekai or a newly-to-create situationist literature article, reorient this article to cover popadanstvo, and refer between all of those and the time slip article via the "See also"-sections or some such. Daranios (talk) 15:28, 13 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Double hmm.. The terms accidental travel and popandanstvo are also used here, but admittedly not in any way that would be useful here. This definitely needs a re-write, that's for certain. RS and such aside, the tone is very non-neutral and conversational. Back to the topics, this article could also use a better definition of what falls within this trope and why. I mean, would something be considered accidental travel if the main character wished to be part of said world/universe? Or if the person was deliberately placed there by another person or entity? Those aren't really accidental, so to speak. This is the type of thing where some clarification would help.
 * To use a specific example: SAO may not fit this trope. The characters deliberately chose to sign into the MMO, albeit unaware of what was to come, so it's not an accident that they're there. The game creator deliberately chose to trap all of the players there, so there's no accident that they were kept prisoner. Accidental implies that the travel occurred through no fault of the characters and may even have an unknown/unknowable origin. The ANN source isn't much help since they don't actually use the term "accidental travel". The source is covering the concept of travelling to other worlds, which isn't the same thing as accidental travel. Basically, some isekai may use the trope but not all of them. Parallel world is not the same thing as accidental travel. This section is one that should probably be nuked unless we had more firm sourcing linking it with this specific trope.
 * There's just too much OR for my tastes. ReaderofthePack (formerly Tokyogirl79)  (｡◕‿◕｡)  21:02, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
 * @ReaderofthePack @Daranios Some stuff was just removed by an IP editor. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 11:31, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I have restored a part of it with additional source. Not sure if we should restore the rest, or leave that to the isekai article. Also not sure if the one restored sentence best fits unter "Types" or somewhere else. Daranios (talk) 12:00, 9 March 2023 (UTC)