Stats from HP_PrisonerFest

[swissmarg]

The hp_prisonerfest mods have kindly made their own statistics for their 2010 Exchange here, but I thought I'd go ahead and add to them anyway. :-) The master list is here.

Fest: hp_prisonerfest 
Fest type: Anonymous exchange
Premise: HP characters in a non consent, prisoner style situation
Minimum fic length: 1000 words
Rating limit: None
Writing period: 2 months

Brief summary of pertinent stats from the mods (see link above):

25 fics
4 artworks

There were 13 het fics, 11 slash fics, 1 threesome fic, 1 femmeslash fic and 0 gen fics. There was 1 het artwork, 1 slash artworks, 1 femmeslash artwork, 1 threesome artwork and 0 gen artworks (one piece is counted twice).

Draco, Hermione and Harry were our most popular characters, with Harry/Draco being our most popular pairing.

And now my stats:

By rating:

FICS
PG-13 - 1
R - 4
NC-17 - 20

ART
G - 1
R - 3

By fic length:

Shortest fic: 1,448 words
Longest fic: ~29,000 words

1-2K- ii
2-3K - iiiii ii
3-4K - ii
4-5K - ii
5-6K - ii
6-7K - iii
7-8K - 0
8-9K - iiii
9-10K - 0
15-20K - ii
20-30K - i

By House pairing:

G/S (including G/S/S) - iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii ii
S/S - iiiii
G/G (including G/G/G) - iii
S/H - i
S/R - i
S/G/R - i

By generation of pairing:

Cross gen - 14
Harry's gen - 12
Marauders gen - 7

Some thoughts: This was not advertised as a smutfest, yet that's exactly what it ended up being. All but 2 of the gifts were rated R or higher, for sexual content. I'm not sure exactly why prisoner situation = opportunity for sexual exploitation, but in the vast majority of the cases, that's how the prompt was interpreted.

The gifts, both fics and art, were evenly split between het and slash, with femmeslash, the perennial poor cousin, also represented in both one fic and one artwork.

As with another recent fest involving power play (hp_ssc_fest), this one was also heavily Gryffindor/Slytherin. There were only two characters from other Houses represented, both in artwork. In other words, 100% of the fics involved only Gryffindors and Slytherins as their main characters, and the vast majority of those were Gryffindor/Slytherin pairings. I think the reasons are the same as for the hp_ssc_fest, which is that there is already an inherent power struggle between Gryffindors and Slytherins, so that makes it easy to put two characters from these opposing Houses into the role of captor and prisoner. Slytherins are also easy to cast as captors who will take advantage of their prisoners, no matter their House loyalty, leading to several Slytherin/Slytherin constellations.

This exchange displayed the typical distribution of fic lengths that I have found so far in exchanges of this type, with the largest bunch at the low end and the rest scattered fairly evenly up the scale to about 8-9K words, with one fic being much longer than all the rest. This exchange deviated slightly from this classic pattern in that there were fewer fics in the 1-2K word range than I would have expected, and there were actually 3 fics that were quite a bit longer than the bulk of the pack. However, the one 29,000-word fic still trumped the two in the 15-20K range by far.

I found the generational distribution interesting as well. Of course it is not surprising that cross gen was the most prevalent pairing type, given that there is an inherent power discrepancy between the older and younger generations. However, the fact that there were no Next Gen characters at all was unexpected. There were characters from the generation older than the Marauders, but they were all in Cross Gen pairings (Tom/Hermione, Fenrir/Draco, and even Tom/Bellatrix).