Crowd-sourcing HD fan-fair: Progress Report #3 - Take a Poll

[snowgall]

A poll to see how best to label fics: top, bottom, or switching?

We are so close to having completed our hd-fan-fair spreadsheet with all of the information on who tops in each fic! As of today, we are only missing information on 12 fics rated R or NC-17.

Thanks again to cabinetcaligari, cagnurit, eidheann_writes, and khalulu who have all added lots more information in just the last few days. If I

Comments

[birdsofshore]

Gosh, i tried to answer but mostly i just didn't know. I suspect it's because i don't much care who tops. If it mattered a lot to me, i imagine I'd have all kinds of rules and guidelines for when it was topping and when switching, etc. It was interesting to think about, but what I mostly thought was not v helpful, sorry!

[snowgall]

:)

I expect that this will be the case in general. For people who care, they will likely have Opinions (TM). If you don't care so much about who tops, then you probably don't have very strong opinions on which is which either :)

Although (as I discovered while discussing this with eidheann_writes) even though I don't care who tops, I do have some opinions on the matter of which is which (quelle surprise!). For me, it's because I actually don't like switching all that much, so I care about which fics get called switching. If I were just doing this for me, I would probably make some weird judgment calls on some fics. Like, I tend to think of "IDK by BFF Hermione" by lettered as a bottom!Draco fic, even though it's really switching. But don't worry, eidheann and Vaysh set me straight on that one!

But thanks so much for filling out the poll anyway. More data is good data ♥

[this_bloody_cat]

What, seriously? I also thought about that one as bottom!Draco! :'D

[snowgall]

Oh good, I'm so glad it's not just me! ♥

But yeah, the bottom!Harry scene, while graphic and important, was part of Harry making a point to himself and Draco about acceptance, and not really about their preferences. And it's the character's preferences that matter to me when I think about how to classify a fic. But after talking about this with others, I figured that was a minority view (and also harder to be objective about in the end) and so I concede that this fic is switching :)

[vaysh]

Fascinating poll. I filled it out as I would classify fic for the draco-tops!lists for dracotops_harry and how fic for the DTH Fest is warned for.

[vaysh]

After some thoughts - I do think for the purpose of this study, the actual on-screen sex should count. There are many fics that are bottom!Draco (or bottom!Harry) who simply tag some mention of switching on at the end. But those are still bottom!Draco (bottom!Harry fics, respectively) in my book.

[lauren3210]

That's a really interesting thought, and one that I've been struggling with a little bit tbh. Do you mind if I ask you a question? For example, I've written a fic where Harry wakes up marked and sore, and Draco talks to him about the things he did to him the night before. Then later in the fic there is explicit bottom!Draco. So, would you classify this example as bottom!Draco, or as switching? I guess I'm struggling with working out how explicit both sides have to be for a fic to be seen as switching?

[vaysh]

Um. I get a bit weirded out if people are now starting to write their fic to fit these guidelines. Really, you should write the story how it makes sense to you. What Snowgall is trying to do is not give some Rules about how to write bottom, top or switching fic. She is trying to come up with objective classification systems for fic THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN.

And I don't usually classify fic as switching or anything, I just read and enjoy the story. So please, be as explicit or non-explicit as you want to be for your story.

[lauren3210]

I kinda went with what I remembered from the DTH rules to answer these, because I figured that if the fest catered to those who preferred top!Draco, then the reverse could be applied for those who prefer top!Harry. From what I remember, switching isn't allowed even as implied, and it only applies to actual penetration, so I voted in line with those parameters.

As for case 5, I think that fics of that kind should be filed as Not Applicable or something similar, because I think that what someone does with one person does not necessarily denote what they would do with another, imo.

[snowgall]

It was case 5 that actually prompted the discussion between eidheann_writes and me that led to this poll, so I expect that there will be some disagreement on that one. So far the first three cases seem less controversial. Thanks so much for your contribution and the fascinating discussion with Vaysh above!

[iwao]

Who tops or bottoms doesn't influence me on whether or not I read a fic. Although I tend towards bottom!Draco, I'm just as happy with bottom!Harry (unless it's an Mpreg fic, cos for some reason I really dislike it when Harry is the one carrying. And now I feel I need to qualify this, cos I dislike Harry carrying except in the Gains arch by enchanted_jae. LOL!)) or switching, but for the sake of avoiding trolls and disappointed readers I'm all for labelling fics in an accurate manner.

Hence, when one of them tops (or bottoms) with another character but takes the opposite position when sex is between the boys, I'm not sure it'd be accurate to label it bottom! whoever or top whoever, cos I feel the possibility of switching in the future is pretty high. At the most top!/bottom! whoever in this fic. In the case of one of them topping or bottoming wit another character and then being not sex on screen between D and H, I'd label it as no explicit sex (between H/D

[snowgall]

Oh, I think all opinions are helpful here, if only to clarify which cases are the controversial ones which will need careful thought. And so far, that seems to be #4 and #5, as you suggest.

My own opinion is to do the classification based solely on the in this fic metric you mentioned. But this is only an opinion, not some edict from on high :) And at the end of the day, the number of fics falling into the #4 or #5 sets isn't going to be that large, so hopefully the choices won't make a huge difference either way.

Thanks so much for taking the poll and leaving helpful comments ♥

And P.S. I get you about qualifying my likes and dislikes! I feel I have to be super careful now when explaining what I like since many people have strong opinions and I don't want to offend anyone. Mostly these likes and dislikes are just mild preferences for me and don't stop me from liking an otherwise great fic. But I always want to make that clear now! :)

[capitu]

I swear I tried but I'm not sure I did right, the thing is, I'm really not very concerned about who bottoms and who tops in the grand scheme of things. I have a preference but it's definitely not what I think about when I start reading a story, my expectations and enjoyment of a fic don't depend on this, you know? And it's a debate that gets kind of old for me pretty quickly. Like, I don't like to spend a lot of time thinking about this, you know? XD Sorry

[snowgall]

So funny about the debate getting old! It's crazy how much time I have voluntarily given up to discuss these issues when if you had asked me at the start I would have said that I didn't have strong preferences and didn't care all that much! But it seems like maybe I do actually care a bit more than I thought :)

And I totally get the rationalization behind how you have decided to tag your recs, and for the most part those reasons are how I've chosen to do it too. It's just that when you open up a project to group input (and that has been AWESOME) then you start seeing different opinions about how to tag things and so I wanted to see if we could get a consensus about how to tag in order to run the numbers.

And a lot of time these decisions come down to a gut instinct which can be hard to qualify. I'd like to have a metric that is as objective as possible, but I don't know if that's 100% possible, in the end ♥

[capitu]

Hahahaha. I just sent you a message! lol

No, I'd never dare to ask anyone to give up on a topic at all. I didn't mean that. I just meant that I personally don't think about this too much, don't put much thought in this topic, so I don't have a lot of ground to say 'this is what I think' because I usually don't think about it at great length. :)

And how funny that you realise you do care more than you initially thought. ^^ I do have a preference myself, as I've said before, but for the most part, I'm happy to read bottom!whoever, but I've realised, and mentioned to eidheann_writes and vaysh, I do miss bottom!whoever when there's a ~flood of the other. :D

Yes, gut is mostly how I get by. *lol* Like I said, for me as I rec individually, it's easier to make a note on a specific story in the rec, and tag accordingly, but I get that when it's a group project, or you're talking about tagging several stories, the little things balance it one way or the other. nods. Specially if people feel strongly about this or that, yeah?

<33

[snowgall]

♥♥♥

(response necessarily short as I'm about to be out of communication for the next several hours. Will reply to more comments later this evening. Love to all!)