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]

#5: how to get a true random sampling.

Christ, I don't know :) Eidheann had an idea below about just looking at the stats for one fest over several years, and that could be interesting, but it still mostly limits you to people familiar with LJ. And also it would mean me having to go a read a bunch more fics that I hadn't planned to :)

Ultimately, unless there is a magical way to create a database of every HD fic ever written by anyone on any platform, there's always going to be some inherent bias in any given subset. We just have to do the best we can with what we have.

I readily admit that the data I presented is not the definitive word on the subject, and in fact there could well be a few errors in my database. Indeed I already suspect that some of my judgment calls as to which fics are one-on-bottom and which are switching could be debatable, but I think that would only be for a small handful of fics and not really affect the big picture in the end.

And it's ALSO possible that I have some of the dates wrong. I spent A LOT of time going through and trying to find the first instance of a fic, but I might not have always gotten it right. For example, if a fic was posted to AO3 in 2013, say, but was really posted originally to some other blog/archive in like 2010, it's possible I didn't find that and so still have it (incorrectly) listed as 2013. I did my very best, but I'm only human. Whenever I find an error I go back and fix it, so my database is always a work in progress.

This makes me think it will be fun to revisit this question again in like 6 months or a year, when I will have read even more fics, and probably fixed more errors, and we can see if anything has changed :)

[dicta-contrion.livejournal.com]

So, I happen to be sitting here with an HP fan who is formally trained in stats and related methodology. Her supposition is that constructing a good sample would have to involve a lot more randomness. So, for instance, going on all the major archives and taking 5% of all NC-17/M H/D fics and analyzing content.

(Statistician friend also adds that she would be interested to see if there's a difference by venue. She reads primarily on ff.net and in her experience they either switch or Harry tops. I read on AO3 and would say they mostly switch or do other stuff (but I also dgaf and can't be arsed to remember most of the time))
(Also re: the time involved in actual reading, I wonder if one could use python or other content analysis software, though that's sadly just above my methodological paygrade. Who knew this is why I'd want to have made the investment? Hmph.)

But - doing that would take a tremendous amount of time, and it would be incredibly difficult to parse by year and establish chronological trends, so. That.

Also, so important to say, and I realize I haven't said it - this data is tremendously impressive!! Especially where dating is concerned. Avoid errors would be impossible given the information you have to work with, and the time you've put into the dating is a gift. Seeing the chronological shift is among the most fascinating pieces of this to me. I could spend aaaaaagggggeeeees speculating about why that is. Among other things. Kind of like I'm doing. So, this data is a goldmine and I'm all for you doing anything you feel like doing with it and think it's really really wonderful to have! Whatever the methodological whatever, it's still scads more than we had, you know?

[snowgall]

I think this is my favorite comment ever ♥♥♥

I sometimes feel like I'm the only person who gives a &%#@ when things were actually first written, and that I'm spending so much time on this endeavor for ridiculous reasons and no one will ever understand or appreciate why I care or how much time goes into it and I just want to hug you and cry over your comment and bask in the fact that somebody else gets it praise jesus and vishnu and the flying spaghetti monster

And it's awesome that you can consult with your own side-by-side statistician :) I also sometimes feel like a huge stats fraud. Like people will post comments like "oh this is cool I love stats" and I'm like, "dude, these are averages and counts and percentages. These hardly count as stats." If anybody asked me to do a chi-squared distribution analysis I'd duck and run for cover :)

[dicta-contrion.livejournal.com]

This is all awesome. Very awesome. I love both orderliness and history, so yeah, kind of really all about this.

My statistician is just traveling through, sadly, but always available for phone consults. I, too, often feel like a stats fraud, all “Your test has two tails? Transfiguration gone wrong?” “I heard he came down with a bad case of kurtosis.” So, very handy to have one around!

[vaysh]

I love the idea of taking random samples from various (still functionable) archives of NC-17 rated H/D, and checking the top/bottoming preferences (Archived would be, I think: ff.net, AO3, Hex Files, Skyehawke). I may have to do it, for my own curiosity's sake.

She reads primarily on ff.net and in her experience they either switch or Harry tops.
That is my impression as well.

I read on AO3 and would say they mostly switch or do other stuff ...
I am wholly intrigued by your impression that anal penetration has gone down over all. My impression is rather the opposite: it feels like every fic now needs to have anal penetration, and everything else is just foreplay. (*envisions statistical scenarios for that question* ;))

[dicta-contrion.livejournal.com]

The more I think on it, the more I love this idea too. The problem is scope. A decent sample from each archive would have to cover a lot of fics. ff.net has 7.3k fics that are complete, M-rated, and involve H and D as main characters, so even a 5% sample would be 365 fics.

I wonder if it could be crowd sourced? One person (or group of people) would have to determine the initial sample to make sure it was sound – no duplicates among fics that were posted in more than one archive, removing/replacing fics where H/D are a side pairing and don’t have sex, etc. And there would have to be a clear definition of what constituted topping, bottoming, switching, or other (I think this is doable, but others on this thread seem to think it would be difficult). But then, if we opened it up to the fandom and anyone who wanted to contribute could read as many of the randomly selected fics as they wanted and enter the data themselves…that might be markedly more feasible.

And if we also asked people to collect other data – length, warnings, tags, use of tropes, etc. – I mean, imagine how much analysis would be possible?

(Date would, I think, be trickiest, for reasons snowgall mentions elsewhere, and date is necessary to really chart trends that are more than a couple of years old, but still…still.)

As for impression: I very much wonder how much this has to do with the kind of fic I seek out. I don’t have a preference for who tops and bottoms 90-95% of the time when I’m picking fic to read, but do try to avoid fics that represent H and D in certain (heteronormative) ways, and have a preference for fics that explore the psychological aspects of sex, or that handle sex in novel ways, and also have some preference for short fics, and I wonder if all of that amounts to reading fewer fics with penetration. So I’m completely open to the idea that this observation reflects a personal preference rather than an absolute trend.
(This relates to my concern about sampling from rec lists. Reccers may not have overt preferences for who tops or bottoms, but may have other preferences that correlate with topping/bottoming or the presence/absence of penetrative sex.)

[snowgall]

Just on the crowd-sourcing, we could easily do this for the fan-fair idea. Like if I set up a Google spreadsheet with the outline of data and share it with anyone who is interested in helping (maybe you, vaysh, and eidheann, and possibly others) then anyone who has info on a fic can add it. And if anyone disagreed for any reason on the classification of a fic as top/bottom, they could make a note of it. The data would be public so people would know if they felt they could trust it.

And the nice thing about limiting it to a given fest or fests is that the date issue will not be a problem. Fics for fests are required to be original, so the fest date will be the earliest publication date and everything is simple.