Regulus Fest stats

[swissmarg]

regulus_fest has posted their master list, paving the way for some more juicy statistics. And here they are!

Fest community: regulus_fest 
Fest type: Open anonymous prompting
Premise: Regulus Black-centric
Rating restriction: None, all ratings allowed
Length restriction: Minimum 500 words, no maximum
Creation period: 5 months

There were 3 artworks and 15 fics created for this fest.

By rating:

ART
G - 3

FIC
G - 1
PG - 0
PG-13 - 8
R - 4
NC-17 - 2

By pairing:

Gen - 7

Barty/Regulus - 4
James/Regulus - 3
Sirius/Regulus - 2
Lucius/Regulus - 1
Remus/Regulus - 1

By word count:

The shortest fic was 960 words long. The longest fic was 4,900 words long.

<1K - ii
1-2K - iii
2-3K - iiii
3-4K - iii
4-5K - iii

Total words written: 40,340 words
Mean (average fic length): 2,689 words
Median (half the fics shorter, half longer): 2,500 words
Mode (most frequent length): 2-3K

Some thoughts: Nice turnout for a minor character fest. As usual, the ratings for the art were lower than for the fics. This didn't turn out all that much smut though, with only 13% of the fics rated NC-17, and over half being PG-13.

I was surprised at the amount of Genfic (and art), with nearly half of the submissions not featuring any pairing. Of those that did feature a pairing, however, all were slash. Of those that featured a pairing, over half paired Regulus with one of the Marauders (but interestingly never Peter), and the rest with either Barty, Jr. or Lucius, both Death Eaters. I suppose one limitation is that we don't know that many characters who would have been of an age with Regulus and whom he would have interacted with. Still, there would have been plenty of female characters (Lily, Emmeline, Hestia, Narcissa, Bellatrix) to choose from. I'm not sure what it is about Regulus that makes people see him as gay more often than straight (or in the case of the participants of this fest, exclusively so).

The word counts were also very interesting. At first, in tallying up the word counts, I assumed that there must have been a 5,000 word cap on submissions, because they lined up so nicely with that amount, and given the length of the creation period, I would have expected at least one or two much longer fics otherwise. But in looking over the rules, it turns out there was no maximum. I'm not sure why there were no longer fics, then. Maybe Regulus is just a character that most people don't know that well, or feel that strongly about.

There's also probably a word in statistics to describe the fact that the mean, median, and mode were basically the same.

Comments

Cool

[brighty18.livejournal.com]

This was interesting. Thank you for compiling all this and for sharing your thoughts.

I was one of the people who wrote Gen!fic here - rated G, in fact - and I think that you are very correct about Regulus is a character that most people do not know much about. Personally, I've always seen his sexuality as being somewhat ambiguous, although I generally pair him with Snape in my universe. Still, it's a pretty vague pairing. I think that part of the reason that people are unsure is that, frankly, he does not seem to be a character who really gives off any sexuality. Whilst Regulus may be one of the post popular peripheral characters, there doesn't seem to be an obvious pairing (like Ron/Hermione or even Remus/Sirius) nor does there seem to be any underlying sexual tension that could be channeled into a pairing (as there is for Harry/Draco or Harry/Snape.)I've mostly read him paired with James, Snape, or Barty Crouch, but have occasionally encountered a Regulus/Lucius. I think that Regulus/Sirius is perhaps the most common, but that might have more to do with the angst and tragedy of it than any actual pairing-type attraction. After all, Sirius is the only character with whom we really know that Regulus had any sort-of relationship at all. The only het pairing I've really noticed much is the rare Regulus/Narcissa.

Your comments on length were interesting, too. My story was fairly short (2,100 words), but I tend toward stories under 8,000 words, anyway, even for my main pairing (R/S). (Okay, there are exceptions to that, but it is mostly for Big Bangs.) Honestly, though, I think that part of it was that people were busy and perhaps did not have the time/energy to give this fest it's due. That happens often with first-time fests. We write HUGE things for big bangs and sometimes even for competitive games, but this fest struck me as low-key and oriented toward shorter works. In other words, I think it was the structure of the fest rather than the character. I could be wrong there, though.

Just out of curiosity, how do you see Regulus' sexuality?