Stats from Bring Back the Porn on InsaneJournal

[swissmarg]

The annual Bring Back the Porn fest (bbtp_challenge* on IJ) is completed, and it's time for some fun stats! You can find their master list here. I will only be looking at the Harry Potter fics.

There were 25 HP fics posted for the fest. At least one of them was a repost of a fic made for another challenge back in 2009. This actually seems to be against the rules of the comm, as the profile states "One post for each fic/art/set of icons you create in response to the challenge." (italics mine) However, the mods did allow it so maybe they don't care. *shrug*

All but 2 of the fics were rated NC-17, as was sort of the whole point of the fest. Those other 2 were rated R.

In the following statistics, the numbers will not always add up to 25 because some fics had more than one main pairing/threesome.

In order of popularity, the characters represented in the main pairing/threesome were:

Snape - 15
Harry - 12
Remus - 6
Draco - 5
Sirius - 3
Charlie, Hermione, Lucius - 2
James, Kingsley, Lily, Narcissa, Neville, Pansy, Poppy, Rodolphus, Ron, Scorpius, Sinistra - 1

Male main characters: 13
Female main characters: 6

The House popularity was:

Gryffindor - 27
Slytherin - 24
Hufflepuff - 1 (Kingsley)
Ravenclaw - 0
Unknown - 4 (Poppy, Rodolphus, Scorpius, Sinistra)

The most popular pairings were:

Harry/Snape - 7
Lupin/Snape - 4
Harry/Draco - 3

And with one fic each:

Draco/Harry/Scorpius
Sirius/Severus/Remus
Charlie/Kingsley
Sinistra/Snape
Hermione/Lupin
Charlie/Snape
Rodolphus/Poppy
Snape/Lucius
Snape/James
Lily/Sirius
Narcissa/Lucius
Sirius/Draco
Neville/Pansy
Ron/Hermione

By House affiliation, the most popular pairings were:

G/S, including one threesome G/S/U - 20
G/G - 3
S/S - 2

And with one fic each:

G/H
S/U
U/U

By pairing alignment:

SLASH - 19
HET - 7
SLASH 3-some - 2
FEMMESLASH - 0

By generation:

Cross gen - 11
Marauders gen - 11 (includes Poppy/Rodolphus, although we don't know Poppy's age)
Harry's gen - 5
'Middle' gen - 1 (Charlie/Kingsley; this might also be cross-gen, but we don't know their ages, so I assumed they were about the same age, older than Harry but younger than Snape and Remus)
Next gen - 0 (although there was 1 Next gen character involved in a cross-gen threesome)

The fics ranged in length from 100 words to 12,700 words, with the distribution as follows:

<500 - iii
500-1K - iiiii i
1-2K - iiiii iii
2-3K - ii
3-4K - iiii
7-8K - i
12K+ - i

Thoughts: This was a very male-dominated fest. There were twice as many male as female characters, and of the top 8 characters featured in more than one fic, only one was female (Hermione -- and she was only featured in 2 fics). Four characters -- Snape, Harry, Remus, and Draco -- accounted for over half of the fics. This is also reflected in the fact that slash was the heavy favorite, with three-quarters of the fics. I'm not quite sure why this should be, as there are plenty of het (and femmeslash) porn lovers, which one need look no further to see than the recent hp_ssc_fest or hp_porninthesun, both of which had more het than slash. I guess that each fest has their own core supporters, and the pairing alignments will tend to gravitate together at one or the other fest. It would be interesting to see how the other fandoms in this fest measured up in terms of maleness or slash, but someone else will have to do that. ;-)

This was also a very Gryff/Slyth fest, with hardly any characters from other Houses represented at all. There was only one character (Kingsley) who has been confirmed to be in another House, and 4 whose Houses are unknown, although even of those 4, at least 2 are probably considered Slytherin by most (Scorpius and Rodolphus), and possibly Sinistra as well. Again, slightly unusual compared to other comparable fests, where there are usually at least a couple more token Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs. I will merely venture to say that this could be a random fluke. I don't think that people were specifically choosing Gryffindors and Slytherins, but their own personal favorite characters, and let's face it, the most prominent canon characters are Gryffindors and Slytherins.

Also unusual was the amount of Marauders generation fic, at the expense of Harry's generation and Next Generation. There was in fact only 1 Next Gen character, Scorpius, and he was involved in a cross gen threesome. Again, I have no explanation for this other than the personal preferences of the fest participants.

Finally, the fic lengths seem to bear out the pattern that we've been seeing in all the recent fests. A big bunch at the low end, then a few spread out up to about 8,000 words, and that one star *ding* with the big long fic. I think the reason there weren't more drabbles under 500 words is that most people probably feel that if they are going to make the effort to participate in a fest, they might as well write more than 500 words. It's also actually kind of hard to write a full scene in less than 500 words. ;-)

* Can someone please tell me what the code is to link to a comm on IJ? The LJ user code doesn't work.

Comments

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

To link outside of LJ, you'll just have to use the usual <a href=""></a> link code, e.g. bbtp_challenge.

[swissmarg]

Then how does the Quibbler, for example, get the links to have the IJ symbols in front of them like in this post: http://community.livejournal.com/quibbler_report/435913.html

See how someoldcat has the IJ smiley and daily_deviant has the IJ community symbol? I think there is a code that puts those in automatically, like the lj user code does.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Well, I guess you can use the raw HTML code from that page as a template, but they probably generate it with some custom CSS or JavaScript.