Harry Holidays Stats

[swissmarg]

This totally slipped past me! Embarrassing, because I actually participated in this. :o But, better late than never, and I haven't seen statistics done for this by anyone else in the meantime. I am talking, of course, about harry_holidays , the master list for which was posted back in January. And I've now prepared some statistics for it.

Fest community: harry_holidays  
Fest type: Anonymous exchange
Premise: Any pairing
Ratings restrictions: All ratings allowed
Length restrictions: Minimum 1,000 words, no maximum
Creation period: About 3 months (slightly shorter for newbies, slightly longer for veterans)

There were 24 gifts created for this fest by 23 participants. kamerreon  wrote 2 fics.

Fics: 20
Art: 4

Art to fic ratio: 20%

By rating:

Fics:


Art:



All gifts:



By word count:
The shortest fic was 904 words long. The longest fic was 29,600 words long.

<1000 - 1
1-2K - 4
2-3K - 4
3-4K - 0
4-5K - 5
5-6K - 1
6-7K - 2
7-10K - 0
10-15K - 1
15-20K - 1
20-30K - 1

Mean (average fic length): 5,834 words
Median (half the fics shorter, half the fics longer): 4,000 words
Mode (most frequent fic length): 4-5K


Most popular characters:
(By number of mentions as one of the pairings in a header)

Harry - 15
Severus - 9
Draco - 7
Hermione, Remus - 3 each
Pansy, Ron, Seamus, Sirius - 2 each

Most popular pairings:
(By number of mentions in a header)

Harry/Draco, Harry/Severus - 4 each
Hermione/Severus - 2
Remus/Sirius - 2

Number of fics involving threesomes or moresomes: 3

Number of fics involving incest: 2

By alignment:

Slash - 15
Het - 5
Femmeslash - 1
Slash threesome/moresome - 3

Some thoughts:  I find the turnout a bit low, actually, for an established fest that is really very broad-based, allowing any pairing and rating at all. It ended up being on a par with the rarepair_shorts  exchange (26 gifts), hoggywartyxmas   (27 gifts), and harryronholiday  (22 gifts), all of which depend on rare pairs and niche fan bases. In comparison, the other exchanges allowing large ranges of popular pairings were much larger: smutty_claus  had 76 gifts, and hp_yule_balls had 56. Even single-pairing holiday exchanges fared better, with Snupin Santa on lupin_snape  generating 48 gifts, and hd_holidays beating out everyone with 87. The only explanation I can think of is that authors who wanted to do a more general holiday exchange tended to go for one of the smut fests, and those who don't write smut chose to support their favorite pairing.

This fest still ended up with its fair share of smut and popular pairings, though, with over half of the gifts (58%) rated R or NC-17, and only 2 G-rated gifts, both art. More on the pairings in just a sec.

The word counts were quite interesting, with most of the fics bunched up in two main groups (under 3000 words, and then 4000-7000 words), and then three longer fics at the high end. One author even managed to do a Big Bang-length fic of nearly 30,000 words (haha, that was me...) There was also one fic that was actually shorter than the minimum, by nearly 100 words.

Harry was the most popular character in this fest, as well as in both smutty_claus  and hp_yule_balls. The other most popular characters were likewise not surprising, perhaps with the exception of Seamus, who doesn't often end up in the top 10. On the other hand, he was only in 2 fics, so it wasn't a huge number. All of the most popular pairings were generally popular fandom pairings, or in other words, there were no surprising, rare pairs that made it into the top spots.

What did surprise me a bit was the balance (or rather imbalance) of slash vs. het and femmeslash. I suppose that, as has been suggested for other smaller and mid-sized fests, people signing up together with their friends tends to sway the favor toward one end or the other.