Who tops more, Draco or Harry?

[snowgall]

Yesterday I was having a discussion with vaysh about who tops more in fanfic, Draco or Harry (link here). I was of the opinion that it seemed fairly balanced, but that was from my perspective of mostly reading recent fic. Vaysh has been reading Drarry fanfiction for much longer than me, however, and she disagreed:

"statistical evidence is very clear: There is in no way a 50:50 balance between top and bottom!Draco fanworks. For many people, bottom!Draco remains the default."

Aha, I thought, a statistical challenge! As it turns out, I have a database of Drarry fics which I can consult, so I am in position to offer an answer to this pressing question. There are nearly 1500 Drarry fics written between 2002 and 2015 for which I have information about who tops or bottoms, and according to this data, we're both right :)

1. Who bottoms more across all fics in all years?
   Answer: Draco, clearly (point vaysh)


2. Has the proportion of bottom!Draco to bottom!Harry begun to balance out more in recent years?
   Answer: Yes, clearly (point snowgall)

Before I get to the fancy chart and graphs, let me explain a bit where my data comes from and how reliable and/or biased it could be.

My list of Drarry fics includes not just fics that I have personally read, but also every fic that capitu has ever recced, as well as every fic ever recced at hd_storyroom, whether I've read them or not. Capitu (at my_drarry_recs) helpfully includes tags indicating who bottoms in a fic (if applicable) so I have that data even for fics I haven't read. I have also included many (but not all) of the fics recced by gracerene, who also includes top/bottom info. The chart below only contains data from fics where I could determine something about who tops or bottoms.

Of course, for fics not recced by capitu or hd-storyroom, which fics get listed in my database will be skewed by my own reading preferences. However, it's important to note that I personally don't care who tops or bottoms, so I don't think that I will have unintentionally skewed the data one way or the other.

The other big issue concerns the date a fic was published. The vast majority of the fics in my database are fics written since 2007, and precious few written before 2005. But I also should point out that if I can't accurately date a fic, then I'm not including it in this dataset. The earlier a fic was written, the harder it can be to find its pub date, so part of the reason there are so few pre-2005 fics is because I can't be sure when they were actually written.

Ok, enough caveats about the data, on to the chart! I hope it is self-explanatory, because I'm not going to waste more words explaining something you can see for yourself :) Just note that I'm including fics from 2015 too, even though we're only 3 months in.

Year	bottom!Draco	bottom!Harry	switching	no penetration	Total
2015	9	8	3	27	47
2014	70	70	26	85	251
2013	97	55	16	64	232
2012	67	57	8	29	161
2011	49	33	15	42	139
2010	54	36	12	32	134
2009	58	26	11	31	126
2008	75	32	7	20	134
2007	54	22	14	16	106
2006	27	11	10	9	57
2005	26	10	14	15	65
2004	11	4	2	4	21
2003	7	3	2	2	14
2002	0	1	0	2	3
Overall	606	368	140	376	1490

 

And now for some pretty pie charts:

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, before 2010 bottom!Draco was much more common than bottom!Harry, but since then the proportion of bottom!Draco fics has gone down, to the point that of the works I've analyzed for 2014, there's a perfect balance between the two!

Is the influence of the dracotops_harry fest part of the reason for this change? It's possible. The DTH fest began in 2011, and my data seems to date the gradual shift to 2010.

It's also true that some of the disparity could be traced to a few big-name authors who tend(ed) to prefer one dynamic over another. Here's just a few examples I know of authors who seemed to prefer bottom!Draco but who haven't written as much in the last few years:

• ladyvader, active approx 2003 - 2010
• jennavere, active approx 2004 - 2006
• pir8fancier, active approx 2004 - 2013
• silentauror, active approx 2005 - 2009

There are many more bottom!Draco authors who are still actively writing HD, among them: enchanted_jae, oldenuf2nb, and samaelthekind.

But interestingly, I can only think of one long-time author who seems to prefer bottom!Harry: megyal.
(Edit: vaysh pointed out that lomonaaeren is also a bottom!Harry author. My bad!)

If you have any insights into this data, disagree about my analysis, or can think of something I missed, please leave a comment!

 

---

 

Edit: Inspired by suggestions in the comments section, I have re-run the numbers using just data from the hd_fan_fair fests. See my write-up here. The data was collected through crowd-sourcing, and we are currently working on building a second crowd-sourced spreadsheet of data from hd_smoochfest too!

Comments

[snowgall]

Oh what a good observation! I was wondering what might have caused that spike! (Other than just general data flukiness :) I'll have to go back through my list and see if I included a bunch of fics from that fest that year.

It's unfortunate that my list is idiosyncratic to me - I wish there was a way to search AO3 for this info, but while some authors will tag for top/bottom, there's still the whole "dating the fic" issue which I ranted about already. So I have to use my data to be sure, and there's always the chance it could be skewed. But your idea makes a lot of sense, so I'll look for that!

[snowgall]

I'm so glad that even a veteran like yourself is confused by the importance of it all, as I'm a newbie so the fact that I'm confused by it isn't surprising! But learning the history does help it make *some* sort of sense, maybe :)

[snowgall]

Thanks! It's so nice to be able to share them and have people enjoy them too. That way it's not just me by myself feeling like a freak with all my charts :)

[eidheann_writes]

That year, it was also a very large fest. I'm not certain of it was the theme (adaptation, which smoochfest used last year) or that it had been a few years, but there was a LOT of fics for that.

[snowgall]

Great, I'll go and add that in.

And can I just say that you are a seer of vast talent? You said that if I did a post on topping/bottoming I would get a "lively discussion" and you were so right! I mean, I think I got more comments in one night on this post than I have on any post ever before (I went to bed last night after I posted, and when I checked my page this morning I had 18 comments on this post. Boom.)

"Looking for Dark Mark Removal Fics" still gets the most *hits* according to Google Analytics, but I don't get all that many *comments* on that post. Weird. You're a genius.

[snowgall]

I think you have hit it. I just checked, and the data I used for these charts includes 15 fics from the 2013 bottom-draco fest! (There were more than 15 fics in that fest, but some of them were "PG-13" and so didn't really count, and the rest of them I don't have in my database for whatever reason). In contrast, I only have 6 fics from the 2010 fest and 4 fics from the 2009 fest in my lists.

Of course, now this makes me second-guess the fics I happen to be analyzing, but when I was collecting my database, I wasn't originally looking for bottom!Draco or bottom!Harry fics. I was just adding the fics I'd read and supplementing them with capitu's recs (for my 'to read' lists) and other people's recs as well. So which fics are listed are just a fluke of what got me interested and what got recced. But it's probably still a somewhat representative sample of what's out there.

And looking again at my lists, I've included more fics from DTH 2014 than from other years of DTH. This could just be because I was reading more Drarry in 2014 in general, though. Stats are confusing!

[snowgall]

I was just telling birdsofshore in a comment above how my reading tastes will change based on whatever fic I'm reading at the moment! If it's a really good bottom!Draco fic, I'll be convinced that that is my favorite thing, but if it's a really good bottom!Harry fic, I'll be convinced of the opposite :)

[vaysh]

*lol* That has nothing to do with my (awesome, I tell you! ;)) seer's skills. Shippers just love to talk about topping and bottoming preferences. Another few months in fandom, and you'll be able to predict that, too. :)

Btw, I did try to see if some data can be gleaned from AO3. This is what I came up with:
tag *Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter: 10864 times used
of those:

==== bottom!Draco:
*bottom Draco: 161
*top Harry: 101

==== top!Draco:
*bottom Harry: 117
*top Draco: 82

It doesn't say a lot, because there are fics that are tagged both bottom!Harry and bottom!Draco, and obviously a majority of fics is not tagged for topping/bottoming preference (which totally is a good thing in my book!).

Another point that came to my mind are nuances: I sometimes find that in so-called switching fics, there are graphic, long sex scenes where, let's say, Draco tops, and then there is one short sex scene mentioned in passing, where Harry tops. Are those really switching fics, I wonder? (No question of earth-shattering importance, I realise, but if you put together top!Draco save lists, it becomes a problem. :))

[snowgall]

I had no idea that so few fics in AO3 were tagged for top/bottom! (I have no opinion on whether or not this is a good thing, other than that I think more and better tagging is generally good and will send more readers to your fics :)

Here I was worrying that "only" having specific top/bottom data on about 1000 fics (not counting the switching fics or no penetration fics) meant that my dataset was really too small to base any generalizations off of, and now I see that AO3 doesn't even have that many! Feeling better now :)

But your point about what counts as switching bothered me too. I have a few fics in my set that I had noted were "mostly" bottom!Draco or bottom!Harry (or maybe had switching implied but never 'on screen') and I wasn't sure what to do with them. Since the few I had were pretty much balanced between the two options, I usually just counted them as either straight-up bottom!Draco or bottom!Harry. I was going to make a note about that, but the post was already getting too long, and we were only talking about a handful of fics anyway.

One example in particular is lettered's "IDK my BFF Hermione" which overall is pretty strongly bottom!Draco, but has one important bottom!Harry scene. To me, as someone who isn't bothered one way or the other, this fic seems pretty definitively bottom!Draco. But someone who is really hard-core about it would probably say it was switching. What do you think?

[eidheann_writes]

So many variables! What fests run, what fests include/allow top/bottom preferences in the prompt, what fests are popular thematically...

[eidheann_writes]

(potentially) unpopular opinion: Switching.

You say yourself, the scene is important, even if it's one vs however-many (many). That's what makes it a switching fic. If switching is glossed over, or implied, or mentioned happening sometime in the future/past, it's implied switching.

ofc this comes from my perspective of smut being hard to write, so *most of my fics tend toward one really explicit scene, and everything else is glossed. I don't say I write switch fics. I say I imply/authorial intent switching. Or, you know, stick to bj/hj/frotting if I'm given specifically requested switching as a prompt/gift request/etc.


*the main reason Harry Potter is a Dirty Exhibitionist is still one of my more out of character feeling fics, at least to me

[snowgall]

I don't think your opinion will be unpopular! I have a feeling if anything will be unpopular it will be any given decision I would make about how to classify a difficult fic. Somebody somewhere would probably disagree with me no matter what I did!

It's one of the reasons I didn't try to think overly long about where a fic belonged: I was looking at like 1500 fics overall, and of those maybe 30 or so (like 2%) had ambiguous/debatable notes about who topped or bottomed. So I just made quick executive decisions about them and moved on - many I listed as switching, but a few I thought still counted as top or bottom. I knew that if I asked for opinions about each fic that I'd get disagreement, and then I'd never get this post done :) But since it's only a few fics spread over many years, my choices really don't change the overall picture, I promise!

And funny that you find smut hard to write because you really do it so well :)

I guess the thing about IDK my BFF Hermione for me is that Draco's characterization really feels strongly bottom!Draco to me (and oh god here I go opening up a can of worms with trying to psycho-analyze what makes a character seem like a top or bottom. I told myself I wouldn't do that!) But it's not just his character, really, it's his whole history and actions too. Raitala really delved into that in her remix last year! But I do understand that since there's that one scene that most people would consider it a switching fic.

But I just double checked, and capitu lists it as switching (she's very good about that) so I've got it as switching. No worries.

[eidheann_writes]

Top/Bottom/Switching gets people really fired up. Everyone has OPINIONS.

I think a lot of the issue is people complain. If IDK my BFF was tagged bottom Draco without mentioned switching, the people who read it expecting it to be bottom Draco would have a fit. No matter his characterization, the fact that he tops at all would cause drama.

And no one wants to deal with that.

The tagging for it (on the author's part) is somewhat a branch from there. Some of it is maybe pushback about perceived reader entitlement. We've all gotten comments from people complaining about who tops or bottoms in a specific story (which just makes me want to write more of the dynamic that pisses them off, but whatever), but, again maybe just me, but the complaints I get when I *do* tag are just... weird. Like the one someone complained that I had In Flight tagged as Top Draco - because he does the penetrating, and had multiple complaints that since Harry was PHYSICALLY ON TOP OF DRACO, he was topping and my tagging was wrong. (I removed the note and tag)

And the "YOU NEED TO MAKE THIS FIC BOTTOM WHATEVER BECAUSE BOTTOM OTHER GUY IS NASTY/WRONG" comments are much easier to ignore than the sense of personal betrayal that comes with something perceived as being tagged incorrectly.

[lordhellebore]

It's probably due to the fact that I don't care much for smut (one of my kinks is asexuality, another gay relationships without anal *lol*), but I've never figured out why it would matter so much who tops/bottoms. Do I understand preferences? Definitely. Shipping Snape, I've found that I like him better as a bottom. Do I understand why to some people it seems serious business? Nope. But to each their own, I suppose.

Bottom!Draco

[samaelthekind.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the mention ;-) But I should clarify that I'm hardly exclusive on the subject. I may have started with one of the more dramatically bottom!Draco stories, but there are a few exceptions, notably The Curse and The Heat, while in a few others they happily switch places without any concern over it. Still, at the end of the day, I greatly favor bottom!Draco because I can't help it. I've known too many 'ice queens', disdainful and imperious, angry and isolated beneath a shell of nonchalance and pride. Always beneath that surface lurked someone starving for warmth, aching to surrender to someone they could trust, capable of giving their whole heart once they felt safe enough to dare risking it. Having seen that and experienced it...how could I not see the similarity in Draco?

[samaelthekind.livejournal.com]

Not by any chance a fan of Storm Constantine's Wraeththu, are you? Because I adored the character of Vaysh in the series.

Re: Bottom!Draco

[snowgall]

Thanks for the clarification! I didn't mean to imply that you (or the other authors) were *exclusively* bottom!Draco, just predominantly (although some of the other authors may indeed be exclusive). Would you like me to edit the post to make that more clear?

And thanks also for your perspective on why you like to write bottom!Draco. It's really interesting to hear from someone with experience. ♥

Wednesday 18th March, 2015.

[livejournal.livejournal.com]

User capitu referenced to your post from Wednesday 18th March, 2015. (http://hd-prophet.livejournal.com/529517.html) saying: [...] just H/D] Resources made an interesting post with Statistics about Who tops more, Draco or Harry? [...]

[dicta-contrion.livejournal.com]

Came over from hd_prophet and find this fascinating! Really, really interesting. And hope you won't mind my butting in too terribly, but I do have question, mostly about sampling bias but also about patterns in fandom. Not hypotheses or even suppositions, but questions, possibly of the insoluble variety, which can safely be taken rhetorical musings-out-loud. (Though I am genuinely interested in any and all thoughts!)(And also, these definitely are not anticipating or requesting further data analysis! I'm still amply excited about the one set of graphs.)

- What is the influence of sampling from rec lists? You, capitu, and gracerene are all very well read, and I would wager more broadly read than many, and all read both top!Harry and top!Draco, so - as you say - I don't expect that your own preferences, as such, influences the data pool. But there are many fic writers out there who don't get recced (or read, or kudo'd - there's a tumblr post out there that's escaping me atm that shows that either a plurality or majority of fics have <5 kudos and very few hits). Is it safe to assume that what ends up on rec lists is reflective of what doesn't?
- Relatedly, is the sample as large as it would seem to be? Your spreadsheet of capitu's rec list shows 1293 stories, but those are from only ("only") 444 unique authors, who may (or may not) have patterns in their writing that are less statistically significant than those of the very prolific writers you mention, but may still have some impact, especially if there's any sort of effect in the aggregate.
- Is there a bias in which older fics were preserved and/or are still read? Are people who are reading and reccing now able to capture the zeitgeist of the community as it was then, since it included many works that are no longer readily accessible?
- Would the results be different if based on a ratio instead of a percentage? As in, comparing the number of top!Harry to number of bottom!Harry stories, and number of top!Draco to bottom!Draco stories? A quick search of AO3 tags (which are not a good sample - tiny, inconsistently applied, not sorted by year - but is what's available quickly rn) shows that the ratio of top!harry to bottom harry is 1:1.2, but the ratio of top!draco to bottom!draco is 1:2.
- Because there's potential for unknown sources of bias, random sampling is generally the safest bet, but is that meaningfully possible in a community that's spread over multiple platforms?
- Is the shift over time reflective of more top!draco, or of more non-penetrative sexual activity? Is Draco topping more, or is topping increasingly irrelevant b/c of a shift towards frottage, wanking, oral, etc.?

Re: Bottom!Draco

[samaelthekind.livejournal.com]

Oh no worries on clarifying :-) I was just happy to jump in and share. I really liked the research you did, concise, accessible, and easy to understand. Plus its a favored topic among H/D old hats and new fans alike. ;-) I don't have any hard feelings on what they should or should not do or be in a fic...to me its all about the creativity and the storytelling. A new angle or a fresh idea is so much more treasured than a familiar role. I'll tackle any angle, from vanilla to kink, with either of them or both of them dominant or passive...as long as the story can support the notion. (But bottom!Draco will always rule my heart. My muse is an old flame of mine who is dangerously similar to my characterizations of Draco in Redeem Me and Big Chicago. Since I draw inspiration from him, as well a few others, my portrayals of Draco often wind up reflecting them.)

[germankitty]

"In any case, I let the story and the scene guide me through who's going to top/bottom."

THIS. So much!!!

[snowgall]

Oh my god I love your questions! I don't know if I can do justice to all of them in a comment thread! I'll do my best, but you've given me essays worth of material here :)

1) You're right that many many authors and fics don't get read a lot, and sampling from rec lists will probably be biased towards already popular fics. But! Kudos on AO3 are not always a good meter of popularity, especially for older fics. (The example I always trot out here is annafugazzi's Bond, which dates from 2006 but which the author only uploaded to AO3 in 2014. However, when she uploaded it there was a months-long gap involving technical difficulties, and she didn't add many tags or a rating, which hurts its visibility. Right now this fic has only 216 kudos on AO3, which as you and I know, is not at ALL indicative of its wider popularity in the fandom or of its true quality).

Still, 216 kudos ain't nothing :) Not like the <5 you mentioned.

So I went and looked at my data again to see if I could give you some more info. Of the 1490 fics I looked at, 911 are available on AO3 (that I know of). As it turns out, I made a note of how many kudos each of those fics had on AO3 at the time I read it or added it to my database. For really popular fics, this number will change dramatically over time. But for less popular fics that have been on AO3 for a while, their kudo numbers stay pretty stable. If we ignore fics published in 2015 (because their kudo numbers will still be highly changeable) I now have 880 fics on AO3 that I can say something about.

Of those, I have 3 fics recced by capitu on my list which have less than 5 kudos on AO3 as of today:
archiveofourown.org/works/1950570 (4 kudos, bottom!Draco)
archiveofourown.org/works/1157336 (5 kudos, bottom!Harry)
archiveofourown.org/works/0301315 (5 kudos, switching)

If you go as high as 20 kudos, I've got lots more fics on my list (and even a few more with <5 that weren't recced by capitu but that I added myself because they struck my fancy)

So while I absolutely agree with you that my list is not going to contain that many unpopular fics, it still may be true that I have a representative sample anyway. And it's also not always clear how to (objectively) determine how popular a fic is anyway.

I know that's not a complete answer, and you asked many more things, but I'll post this part and answer more of your questions subsequently :)

[snowgall]

OK, on to #2: what about having too many fics by the same pool of authors?

So this is a really good question, but I'm really interested to know how you count 444 unique authors! Because when I just went now and did a count, I only came up with 208! (I let my database program do the counting for me, so if I set up the parameters wrong, I could get a miscount, but I'm just wondering how you did it :)

Indeed, your numbers are much more generous than mine. If mine is right, then my data is even less representative than you gave me credit for!

As for the full set of 1490 fics I used for this post, Somehow my program is telling me that I have even fewer unique authors, at only 191. Wow. Some explanation is in order: even though I've got nearly 1300 fics from capitu in my database, I only used a subset of these for this analysis: the ones where she clearly indicated top/bottom (or where I had read it myself and knew what was what). So if she didn't include the info, I didn't include the fic. What this really means is that I didn't include a bunch of PG and PG-13 rated fics that don't have any topping action going on anyway. So I could have claimed a much larger sample to draw from (indeed my full unedited database has nearly 3000 HD fics) but it wouldn't have meant anything because there would have just been lots more no-sex fics that wouldn't have changed the overall percentages of top/bottom results anyway. I limited myself to 1490 because those were fics that at least had the potential for sex :)

So that's a lot of words to say that I really don't know how to answer your question :) Certainly the smaller the pool of authors, the greater the effect of any one author's preferences will be. I guess the question is how many authors are enough? And I really don't know :)

[snowgall]

#3 (accessibility of older fics) is a huge, huge, problem. While I have some info on fics by Maya and calanthe for example, I didn't include them in the dataset a) because they've pulled all their fics from the internet (with the exception of one calanthe fic which is still available at hd-holidays) and b) because if they're not on the internet then I can't accurately date them.

Those are just two authors out of many, but there must be others who aren't accessible anymore and whose fics have been lost. It's a real shame. I guess the question is, would including these authors have made much of a difference in the results? I would have to get more info on some of these fics and run an analysis to see, but it really depends on whether these authors had a strong top/bottom preference or not, and whether they had the same preference as other no-longer-available authors. I may be well read, but I honestly haven't read as many older fics as I should have, so I don't really know. Do you have any thoughts or info on this?

[snowgall]

Crap! I wrote out a whole response to #4 and LJ ate it! I think that's my cue to go to bed :) It's 2:30 am here. So I will say goodbye for now and answer the rest of your excellent questions tomorrow when I can think straight again :)