HP Zombie Fest Statistics

[swissmarg]

Fest community: hp_zombiefest
Master List: Here
Fest type: Open, theme
Premise: Zombies
Ratings restrictions: All ratings allowed
Length restrictions: 500 word minimum; no maximum
Creation period: 6 weeks

There were 21 submissions created by 17 participants. wantsunicorns wrote 3 fics. slumber wrote 2 fics and naturegirlrocks created 2 artworks.

Fic: 17
Art: 3*
Fic/art project: 1 (I counted this as art for the statistics, as I was unable to do a word count.)

*Includes one Cosplay makeup project

Ratio of art to fic: 24%

By rating:

G- 1
PG - 7
PG-13 - 6
R - 3
NC-17 - 4

By word count:
The shortest fic was 500 words long. The longest fic was 38,924 words long (29% of the total words).

<1K - 1
1-2K - 5
2-3K - 2
3-4K - 0
4-5K - 2
5-10K - 2
10-15K - 2
15-20K - 1
20-30K - 1
30K+ - 1

Total words written: 132,703 words
Mean: 7,806 words
Median: 4,400 words
Mode: 1-2K

By alignment:
Note that one fic had two main pairings

Slash - 10
Het - 6
Gen - 6

Most popular characters:
By mention in a header

Draco - 12
Harry, Hermione - 8 each
Albus Severus, Gregory, Scorpius, Theodore - 3 each
Luna, Pansy, Rose, Victoire - 2 each

Most popular pairings:
By mention in a header

Draco/Harry - 6
Draco/Hermione - 4
Albus Severus/Scorpius - 3

Some thoughts: A trendy and timely fest, zombies being the new vampires. Perfectly marketed for Halloween as well, the mods could hardly have done better. Still, it was a busy time for fests, and that may account for the mid-sized premiere round with 17 participants.

Personally, I love it when people get super creative with their fan projects, and this fest had two juicy pieces: one was the cosplay Insanity featuring marchenland made up by singlemomsummer to look like a creepy, zombified Bellatrix Lestrange. Really professional level work. The other was the wonderfully sprawling Harry Potter and the Mage Journal Mystery, whose author(s?) strangely wished to remain anonymous. I can't even imagine the time that must have gone into preparing all of the graphics for this project, which mimics a Twitter exchange. Due to the nature of the posts (all text embedded in graphics), I was not able to do a word count on it, but it's amazingly detailed and carefully done.

The word counts really show how much this fest was for every level of interest and time constraint. From the 500-word drabble to the 38,000+ word novella, there was truly something for everyone. The word count distribution is a bit unusual, with equal numbers of fic in the mid-range 5-10K, Big Bang range 10-20K, and novella range 20K+. The largest bunch, though, with just under half of the fics at 47%, were 3,000 words or less. This accounts for the large discrepancy between the median and the mean: there were more shorter fics, but the long ones were much, much longer and did not follow a standard bell curve distribution.

The ratings reflect both the relatively high percentage of gen entries (29%) as well as the subject matter, which made most of the submissions rated at least PG or PG-13 for death, gore, and violence, as opposed to romance. Still, there were apparently some characters who didn't let a few brain-munching undead dampen their libidos, resulting in fully 1/3 of the submissions being rated R or NC-17.

The slashers ended up coming in ahead of het lovers, mainly due to the popularity of Draco/Harry. Gen entries also made a strong showing, equalling those with a het pairing.

The most popular character by far was Draco, again mainly due to his pairing with Harry, but Draco/Hermione was also very popular. These pairings also accounted for Harry and Hermione tying for second place in popularity.

I was surprised to see some new names in the top 10 character list this time, specifically Theodore Nott and Gregory Goyle. They both appeared in the headers for gen fics, and I don't know how prominent they actually were in those fics, but they were important enough to play a part. The Next Generation characters were also represented more strongly than usual, with 4 Next Gen characters all making the top 10, and one Next Gen pairing (Albus/Scorpius) coming in just behind Draco/Hermione in the most popular pairings list.