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

[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.

[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]

(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.