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?
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2015-03-18 04:20 pm (UTC)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