snowgall | Who tops more, Draco or Harry?

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 :)

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

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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Maya and Calanthe are interesting authors to talk about, I think, because while their work is "no longer available on the internet" it's among the most sought-after in my experience. I get requests on tumblr to share works by both authors with some regularity, and while I don't share it, (a) I do have it and went out of my way to find/save it; (b) I think it's telling that there's such tenacious demand for it. And telling, even, that they came up so readily as for-instances.

Does it matter and if so, why? I think yes, but not because they would have made much of a difference in the results. Rather, it's because they probably make a difference in readers' perceptions of fandom - because they're classics, because they're in demand, because they're held up as some not-quite-platonic-ideal of what H/D fic was before canon was closed. And, when those readers become writers, it may also have an effect on how they write the dynamic or how they think the dynamic *should* be written.

So perhaps another metric is relevant: not just the number of authors or number of fics, but the number of views. In terms of our perception of what is/was going on in fandom, and what is/was in demand in fandom, how much of it really is influenced by a few classics? How significant is it to talk about how many top!Harry fics there are, vs how many times top!Harry fics were read?

(In the broader category of "thoughts on this," older fic reads differently to me in so many ways that topping/bottoming is kind of the least of it. But that's a whole other story.)

When you talk about number of views, you're hitting on the point I was just making (in response to another of your responses, oy!) that popularity does in fact matter, at least in terms of reader experience :)

Who tops more, Draco or Harry?

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