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]

Combining themes from several comments:

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.

[snowgall]

Your example is good. Yes, I can believe that a fic might appear unpopular by some public metric because its content is controversial, while actually being quite popular in secret. So I concede the point.

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 :(