Severus Sighs Anti-Valentine's Day Mini-Fest Statistics

[swissmarg]

The first of the Valentine's Fests has completed posting and put up their Master List. So let's see what severus_sighs' Anti-Valentine's Day Mini-Fest had in store, with statistics under the cut...

Fest community: severus_sighs
Fest type: Choose-a-prompt
Premise: Snape-centric, 'unromantic, dark, or farcical'
Ratings restrictions: All ratings allowed
Length restrictions: Minimum 500 words, no maximum
Creation period: 30 days

There were 18 fanworks created for this fest by 14 participants: 15 fics, 2 artworks, and one fic/art combo. starduchess, atypicalsnowman,  roozetter, and lemondropseven each made two contributions.

Art to fic ratio: 18.75%

By rating:

G - 3
PG - 5
PG-13 - 5
R - 0
NC-17 - 6
 

By word count: 
The shortest fic was 500 words long. The longest fic was 6,333 words long.

500-1000 - 3
1-2K - 5
2-3K - 4
3-4K - 3
6K+ - 1

Total words written: 33,640 words
Mean (average fic length): 2,102 words
Median (half the fics shorter, half the fics longer): 1,650 words
Mode (most frequent fic length): 1-2K


By prompt:
The prompts can be seen here. One fic used two prompts.

Prompt 1 - 1
Prompt 2 - 4
Prompt 3 - 4
Prompt 4 - 3
Prompt 5 - 2
Prompt 6 - 0
Prompt 7 - 1
Prompt 8 - 2
Prompt unknown - 2

By pairing:

Snape/Harry - 13
Snape/Lily - 3
Snape/Harry/Luna - 1
Snape/multiple (not Harry or Lily) - 1

Some thoughts: For a fairly last-minute fest (the announcement was posted exactly 30 days before the due date for posting), this had a nice turnout and some very nice pieces produced. The amount of art was a bit on the low side, but the artworks themselves were lovely and showed a lot of time, effort, and talent. I assume the same can be said for the fics, although I did not read them all.

The ratings tended to be lower than I would have predicted, given that most of the prompts had romantic aspects to them and fans are usually not shy about putting Snape in compromising positions. Still, just about 70% of the submissions were rated PG-13 or less. Interestingly, there were no R-rated contributions at all.

The word counts were right in line with the short deadline, although I might actually have expected a slightly greater percentage in the lowest range. I guess once Snape's fans start writing about him, they want to do the thing justice.

Interesting side statistic: If you divide the total words written by the number of days in the creation period, that makes for 1,121 words per day written by the participants.

There were some clear favorites among the prompts, with 2 (Love philtres, chocolates, perfume ... Yes, for a potion master, there were many ways to exact revenge on Valentine's Day) and 3 (Severus looked in the mirror, but he just couldn't see the image of a lover) being the most popular.

There were also some very clear favorites for Snape's romantic partners, with Harry dominating and Lily showing a strong second. No one else really even made a showing, which personally I found a bit disappointing, especially given the strong fandom support for such ships as Snape/Lucius, Snape/Lupin, and Snape/Hermione. It could be that the severus_sighs community is just that heavily Snarry based (although a quick click through their tags shows plenty of other ships).