HP Halloween statistics

[swissmarg]

Fest community: hp_halloween
Master List: Here
Fest type: Drabble exchange
Premise: Halloween
Ratings restrictions: All ratings allowed
Length restrictions: 200 words exactly
Creation period: 2 weeks

There were 48 drabbles written by 47 participants. severed_lies wrote 2 drabbles (one for the community).

By rating:

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

By alignment:

Slash - 17
Het - 8
Femmeslash - 7
Threesome - 3 (1 M/M/M, 1 M/F/M, 1 F/M/F)
Human/inanimate object - 1
Gen - 11

Most popular characters:
By mention in a header

Severus - 17
Harry - 12
Remus - 9
Draco - 8
Ginny, Hermione, Luna - 5 each
Bellatrix, Lucius, Voldemort - 3 each
Albus Severus, Fred, George, Minerva, Pansy, Sirius, Tonks - 2 each

Most popular pairings:
By mention in a header

Remus/Severus - 8
Harry/Severus - 3
Draco/Harry, Draco/Hermione - 2 each

By generation:
Of main characters in headers

Harry's generation - 46
Marauders' generation - 40
Older generation - 7
Next generation - 4
Mid-generation (Bill, Tonks) - 3
Unknown (house-elf, OFC, Myrtle) - 3

Some thoughts: These statistics are very exciting! There are all sorts of goodies. But let's look at them in order.

First, the ratings. How awesome is that? 13 in each of the first three categories. It's like there was an agreement. (There would need to be 4 more in the R/NC-17 category to make it perfect, but oh well.) These ratings also show that the emphasis was by far on gen, humor, fluff, or other genres other than smut. Although, it's not necessarily easy to do smut in 200 words, so that may also have been a factor in the generally low ratings.

Despite the relatively low amount of smut, the participants didn't shy away from relationships, with 75% of the drabbles involving a pairing or threesome. Still, 25% is a pretty strong showing for Gen. As is 15% for femmeslash, which nearly ties with het at 17%. Slash was far and away the most popular, with 35% of the drabbles. And look at the threesomes! There's a special little treat in symmetry, with all three threesomes representing a different configuration.

Moving on to the most popular characters, there were no real surprised, except perhaps for the presence of Voldemort in the top 10. I would explain his presence by the fact that this was a Halloween-themed fest, and Voldemort does have a strong tie to Halloween in the Potterverse. Aside from that, we have some more really neat configurations here. First, the top four popular characters are males; the next three, tied with 5 fics each, are females; and the next three, also in a tie with 3 fics each, are Death Eaters.

The fact that Severus was by far the most popular character, appearing in twice as many fics as the next most popular character, can be partly explained by the popularity of the pairing of Remus/Severus. This also accounts for nearly all of Remus' popularity; Remus only appeared in one fic with another pairing. I am just guessing that there must have been a large contingency of Snupin shippers who joined in on this fest.

I also find it interesting that Harry/Severus was the second most popular pairing, since apparently up until last year, Snarry had never featured in a drabble written for this community.

As commonly happens, characters in Harry's generation were the most popular, but the Marauders' generation made a surprisingly good showing. Again, this is due in large part to the Snupin drabbles, and perhaps also those drabbles involving events on or around Halloween, 1981. (Although I didn't read all the drabbles to see if that was in fact the case.)

I didn't post separate statistics for House affiliations here, but this was basically a Gryffindor-Slytherin fest. The only Sorted characters not in those Houses were Luna, Myrtle, and Tonks. There were a few unknowns such as Vernon and the Next Gen characters, but other than that all of the characters were Gryffindors or Slytherins.

P.S. I totally only made the master list so that I could do these statistics. :p