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Who tops more, Draco or Harry?
Yesterday I was having a discussion with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
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 (pointvaysh) - Has the proportion of bottom!Draco to bottom!Harry begun to balance out more in recent years?
Answer: Yes, clearly (pointsnowgall)
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 ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
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!
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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
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 :)
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On popularity - agree that kudos are an imperfect measure of popularity, but would be surprised if what happened with "Bond" is a common story, vs. new works being uploaded. And other measures of popularity - how many times a story is recced, for instance - are hard to keep track of, especially once we get into what does or doesn't count as a rec (reblogs? retweets? it would be nigh-impossible to settle it, let along count). But if a majority or strong plurality of fics have less than 5 kudos and your sample has 3, that doesn't sound representative to me.
What makes me curious about popularity, though, isn't representatitiveness qua represntativeness, but whether the stories that are unpopular have anything in common. Are they unpopular because they have loads of SPaG issues or poor characterization or are unusual in some ways? Possible. But I wonder - don't hypothesize, but wonder - whether there's something content-related at work. So, is it possible that some stories are unpopular because of their content? Such that excluding unpopular stories would also exclude content that would be represented by a random sample?
(more subsequently!)
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a) if a fic has loads of SPaG issues and problems of that sort, then I really can't find it in myself to care very much if it gets counted in these stats. Basically, if an author can't be bothered to run a basic spell check, then I'm not going to make the effort of entering its data into my database. Entering data takes time. I'm willing to do it even for fics I haven't read - and even for fics I've read but not liked - because I like charts and tables and stats, but there has to be some baseline of *objective* quality, even if it's low. Not all data is created equal, in my opinion :)
b) the content issue is more interesting, but also extremely difficult to assess, if it's even possible at all. I just know that from my viewpoint, content varies widely among even popular fics. There are people who like mpreg, and people who don't, people who love poetic, dream-like writing styles and people who don't, people who like experimental styles like non-linear storytelling and those that don't, etc. etc. If there's actually something that somehow bonds all HD readers together in a collective mutual opinion of "we don't like that!" then maybe those fics don't need to be counted, you know?
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Popularity re: content – I don’t wholly agree that unpopular fics don’t need to be counted, or that their unpopularity is fair cause for excluding them, even if it’s because HD readers don’t, in some collective way, appear to like the content. A few reasons for that:
(1) People may not like the content at the time or in that place, but it could be that a fic never got readership because it was before or after its time in some way, or didn’t find the right venue. So, a fic that took some avant garde literary risks and was published on ff.net. Or fic that dealt with X trope in a moment when X trope was overdone or uncool for whatever reason.
(2) People are not always willing to admit to reading certain types of things that they really like. For instance (and this is anecdotal, but I’ve heard similar other things from other people), I have a fic that’s a rarepair involving menstruation kink, bloodplay, dubcon, noncon, and werewolves, and it looks relatively unpopular. But it’s my third most-read fic, on fanlore as an example of menstrual kink, and has more secret, only-viewable-to-the-author-and-then-only-anonymously bookmarks than a much more conventional fic with 2x+ the kudos, and 8x the bookmarks of my H/D fic with the next closest number of kudos. So clearly there’s an audience for it – it’s just not an audience that will (for reasons I completely understand and sympathize with) own that publicly. But assuming that this was unpopular would, I think, be a mistake. Something can appear unpopular or not especially well-liked but still have quite a readership, albeit a silent one.
Which brings me to another point re: popularity: how would we quantify it? Because I agree that it matters, but don’t think there’s one metric that can capture it, both for the reasons above and for the reasons you give re: kudos for Bond.
So, what if we created a scale?
1 – In the bottom 20% for views and/or less than [a number determined by the norms at each database] kudos/favorites, and/or never recced
2 – In the second quintile for page views, and/or in the second quintile for kudos/favorites, and/or recced 0-1 times
3 – In the third quintile for page views and/or the third quintile for kudos/favorites and/or recced 1-2 times
4 – In the fourth quintile for page views and/or fourth quintile for kudos/favorites andor recced 2-3 times (or, recced enough to have earned a hot rec in the daily snitch, which could well increase readership)
5 – In the top quintile for page views and/or kudos/favorites and/or considered a classic (included in lists of classics)
Not all stories would fall neatly into one of these categories, such that a discussion of whether pageviews or kudos or recs was the better measure of popularity. Or we could assign scores that aggregate these factors, such that a fic’s score could be between 1 and 15.
Granted, I’m not sure if this is totally germane to the question, but in terms of how to account for popularity, it’s a thought. It also might add some nuance to the data – for instance, could distinguish between whether there are a lot of bottom!Draco fics and whether there are a lot of bottom!Draco fics being read.
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As to quantifying popularity, I think I might have finally met somebody nerdier than me :) Your scale might well work in theory, but I can imagine that it would be very difficult to figure out a way to calculate it in practice. You'd have to know first of all how many views/kudos/faves/etc. constitute the various quintiles, and this would necessarily change depending on how long the fic has been available to read (and the expected number of kudos et al would be lower if the fic had fewer hits too). Devising a formula that accounts for all these variables is beyond my capabilities at present :)
This is actually the kind of thing that the powers that be at AO3 would have more ability to figure out if they wanted to, since they have buckets of actual data to base such calculations on. But I sense that they don't want to provide any more measures of popularity than they already do, probably to avoid controversy :(
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So yeah, just because a fic hasn't gotten many kudos doesn't necessarily mean it's not good. Indeed, capitu recced all three of these, so they must be reasonably good :)
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I've been doing some (quiet!) experiments on Ao3 -- mostly tagging fics differently; also, I realise this makes me sound a bit crazy, but I really just find this interesting xD -- but I obviously don't have enough data to conclude anything, specially considering that I'm only counting my fics, and I rarely participate in fests, etc. which also means I'm not particularly known in the fandom :)
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XD
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So then I kept editing the tags in all of my stories. And accomplished nothing x'D