swissmarg | Marauder Rare Pairs Statistics

Fest community:

mwpp_mischief
Master List: Here
Fest type: Anonymous prompt-and-claim
Premise: Marauders, Lily, Regulus, or Severus in a rare pairing
Ratings restrictions: All ratings allowed
Length restrictions: 1,000 words minimum; no maximum
Creation period: 2 months

There were 23 fanworks created for this fest by 23 participants:

Fic - 22
Art - 1

By rating:

G - 1
PG - 5
PG-13 - 8
R - 5
NC-17 - 4

By word count:
The shortest fic was 1,199 words long. The longest fic was 10,433 words long.

1-2K - 9
2-3K - 6
3-4K - 1
4-5K - 3
5-6K - 1
6-7K - 0
7-8K - 1
8K+ - 1

Total words written: 66,913 words
Mean: 3,041 words
Median: 2,200 words
Mode: 1-2K

Most popular characters:
By number of mentions in the main pairing in a header

Lily - 11
James - 10
Sirius - 9
Remus - 6
Regulus - 5
Alice - 3

Most promiscuous:
By number of different partners

James - 6
Lily, Regulus - 4
Remus - 3
Alice, Sirius - 2

Most popular pairings:
By number of mentions as the main pairing in a header

Lily/Sirius, James/Sirius - 4
Lily/Remus - 3
Alice/Lily, James/Regulus - 2

By alignment:
Of the main pairings in headers

Slash - 9
Het - 8
Femmeslash - 2
Threesome (M/F/M) - 1

Some thoughts: Only one artwork out of 23 submissions? Hmph. Well, it was a really nice one. :)

The ratings were spread across the entire range from G to NC-17. There was a general preference for lower-rated creations, with 61% rated PG-13 or lower, but the fest participants did not shy away from smut either, with 17% of the fanworks rated NC-17.

The word counts were bunched at the low end, but made a solid showing all the way up to 10,000 words. Still, with 65% of the fics shorter than 3,000 words, it's clear that one-shots were the genre of choice.

I was interested to see that most people did not veer away from the core characters in choosing their pairings. Only Alice, and Emeline, and Petunia were included as 'outsiders', and of those only Alice appeared more than once. No one ventured outside of the Marauders' generation, either.

I was also pretty surprised that Severus only made it into one fic, despite being one of the basic characters allowed in the fest. Maybe it was hard for participants to picture Severus in a pairing other than the popular ones in fandom such as Severus/Hermione or Severus/Remus.

And poor Peter was the only one of the central characters for this fest who was completely shut out. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, as he is the least popular of the Marauders, but it would have been nice for him to have at least one featured role.

It's not really surprising that Lily ended up being the most popular character. If most participants almost exclusively used only the core characters, and Lily is the only female of those characters, then it stands to reason that she would be in most of the het pairings, which was in fact the case, with Lily in 62% of the het fics.

James was the next most popular, and additionally the most promiscuous, being paired with everyone else except Emeline (who was only in one fic anyway) and Lily (because James/Lily was an excluded pairing). I guess it does surprise me that Sirius didn't end up being the class slut; in fact, he ended up only being paired with Lily and James, with one threesome involving Lily/Sirius/Remus. Still, those two pairings alone (Lily/Sirius and James/Sirius) accounted for 35% of the fest, so it's not that Sirius was unpopular in any way. It's just that he didn't spread himself around as much as James did.

Slash and het were almost tied in terms of popularity, and in fact if you count the threesome as het (which in fact it was), then slash and het were tied exactly. There were also two femmeslash pieces, coincidentally both with the same pairing (Alice/Lily).