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!

 

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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

[dicta-contrion.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, Congress metaphors. I can so work with that.

The thing is, I (in spite of having grown up in a populous state) think the Senate is fair – it just depends on what you’re representing. If the goal is to represent number of people, no, it isn’t fair. But that explicitly isn’t the goal of the Senate. But the Senate still provides useful representation if we consider each state as a whole, with its own compelling interests. So, take states like VT or MT, which each have one at-large Congressional district but two Senators. Without the Senate, those constituencies would be functionally underrepresented, because their Members of Congress wouldn’t have enough sway to do things that we still care about – like protect their natural resources and industries, which are shared collective goods, or ensure that people in those cold-weather states have energy assistance, which speaks to a normative commitment we purport to want to uphold as a collective. Which matters not only because there are tangible interests at stake, but because both states have some significance in national mythology – the idea of wide-open farmland or quaint New England dairy farming offering some contribution to how we *think* of the U.S., even if there aren’t that many people actually engaged in those things.

So, for fandom purposes, maybe big-name, widely-read authors are California, or popular tropes are California. And authors or tropes that are less popular are Vermont.

Only, this situation is different, because there are many many more VTs and MTs than there are CAs. So it’s more akin to a country with 100 states, many of which would only get one at-large Congressional district, and a few of which would have dozens of districts. And, as with the U.S., those seemingly unpopulated areas of fandom still contribute to our idea of what fandom is. So, even if there weren’t a lot of Veela fics, or rentboy fics, or muggle living fics, or whatever else, if the existence of those tropes still shapes our idea of what fandom is, is it worth making an effort to measure within those “states”? And to try to balance out the influence of those fics against the influence of authors who are very popular and would appear multiple times on rec lists or in rec comms?

[snowgall]

Well to keep the congress metaphor going, you'd still want to balance the "senate" out with a metaphorical "house" which should be more representative of prolificness.

But I think that while there may well be some perfect ideal formula to use to construct a dataset, that it would ultimately be too time consuming to actually use it. I mean, it would not be as easy as using the population of each state (which, now that I think of it, isn't even all that easy as it requires us to conduct a census every 10 years).

If we held ourselves to exacting standards, before you could do any analysis, you'd have to determine if you had the right number of fics by the right sorts of authors, which means you would have had to independently calculate some "popularity index" for each author that might ever appear in a database (of which there are likely thousands). And that's BEFORE you even get to the point where you can collect the data and analyze it. You'd be creating new problems to solve old ones.

And it could be that you would do all this work and make everything as fair as humanly possible, only to find that your results don't vary significantly from the results you get from a less fair sample.

BUT! I do like the idea of crowd-sourcing (which you discuss in a later post) and I think I can work with that :)