Statistics for Founders Gifts

[swissmarg]

Fest community: founders_gifts
Master List: Here
Fest type: Anonymous exchange
Premise: Founders
Ratings restrictions: All ratings allowed, but NC-17 discouraged
Length restrictions: 1,000 words minimum; no maximum
Creation period: approx. 1 month

There were 11 gifts created for this exchange by 10 participants. peskywhistpaw created 2 gifts: 1 fic and 1 artwork.
- 9 fics
- 1 fic with art
- 1 art

By rating:

G - 3
PG - 5
PG-13 - 2
R - 1

By word count:
The shortest fic was 1,399 words long. The longest fic was 5,428 words long.

1-2K - 5
2-3K - 2
3-4K - 0
4-5K - 1
5K+ - 2

Total words written: 27,499 words
Mean: 2,749 words
Median: 2,000 words
Mode: 1-2K

Most popular characters:
By mention in a header.

Salazar - 10
Helga - 8
Godric, Rowena - 6 each
Helena - 2
Bloody Baron - 1

Most popular pairings:
By mention in a header, includes unrequited. Note that some gifts contained more than one pairing.

Rowena/Salazar - 5
Helga/Salazar - 4
Godric/Helga - 3

By alignment:
Of pairings mentioned in a header. Note that some gifts contained more than one pairing.

Het - 17
Slash - 1
Femmeslash - 1

Some thoughts: The moderators specifically asked that this not turn into a smut fest, which pretty much accounts for the relatively low ratings. Still, all of the fics contained pairings of one kind or another, even if unrequited, so it wasn't a gen!fic fest by any means.

There was no upper word count limit set, but due perhaps in part to the relatively short creation period, there were no very long fics. Most of the fics were shorter than 2,000 words, although looking at the word counts of the shortest fics, it doesn't really seem that anyone struggled to come up with the minimum of 1,000 words.

Looking at the lead characters, I was quite interested to see that Salazar was mentioned as a lead character in every gift but one. This says to me that Salazar Slytherin is either considered one of the most interesting of the Founders, and/or is a good source of conflict. Helga was also quite popular, appearing in 8 out of 11 of the gifts. I find this interesting because Hufflepuff is usually the least well represented House in any fest, but here, it (she) was the second most popular.

The pairing of Rowena/Salazar ended up appearing in half of all the fics (which means just about half of all the gifts overall). The pairing of Helga/Salazar appeared in 4 out of the 11 gifts, or 37%, while the third most popular pairing, Godric/Helga, appeared in 3, or 28% of the gifts. I think that the pairings with Salazar were more popular because, as I mentioned above, Salazar seems to have a more conflicted or interesting character than Godric, and there is thus more potential for romantic chemistry. Or perhaps the participants in this fest were generally fans of Slytherin (either the character or the House), and requested fics with him more than any other character.

This was an overwhelmingly het fest, which surprises me a bit, given the great amount of slash fanworks generally created in this fandom. It's not that I haven't seen plenty of Godric/Salazar slash either, just not in this exchange (there was one fic that contained Godric/Salazar). There was also only one fic that included a femmeslash pairing, but it wasn't even Helga/Rowena; it was Helga/Helena. I can't really account for the lack of slash other than to say that there was only a small group of participants, and they must have simply all requested het. The one slash fic was written as a gift to the community.

Comments

[peskywhistpaw.livejournal.com]

It's always interested to see your statistical analyses, thank you! I was actually really shocked by all of the het this round (and the lack of gen). There's usually a lot of gen, and a lot of Rowena/Helga.