Who tops more, Draco or Harry?
Yesterday I was having a discussion with Vaysh about who tops more in fanfic, Draco or Harry ( link here). I was of the opinion that it seemed fairly balanced, but that was from my perspective of mostly reading recent fic. Vaysh has been reading Drarry fanfiction for much longer than me, however, and she disagreed: "statistical evidence is very clear: There is in no way a 50:50 balance between top and bottom!Draco fanworks. For many people, bottom!Draco remains the default."
Aha, I thought, a statistical challenge! As it turns out, I have a database of Drarry fics which I can consult, so I am in position to offer an answer to this pressing question. There are nearly 1500 Drarry fics written between 2002 and 2015 for which I have information about who tops or bottoms, and according to this data, we're both right :)
- Who bottoms more across all fics in all years?
Answer: Draco, clearly (point Vaysh) - Has the proportion of bottom!Draco to bottom!Harry begun to balance out more in recent years?
Answer: Yes, clearly (point snowgall)
Before I get to the fancy chart and graphs, let me explain a bit where my data comes from and how reliable and/or biased it could be.
My list of Drarry fics includes not just fics that I have personally read, but also every fic that capitu has ever recced, as well as every fic ever recced at hd-storyroom, whether I've read them or not. Capitu (at my-drarry-recs) helpfully includes tags indicating who bottoms in a fic (if applicable) so I have that data even for fics I haven't read. I have also included many (but not all) of the fics recced by gracerene, who also includes top/bottom info. The chart below only contains data from fics where I could determine something about who tops or bottoms.
Of course, for fics not recced by capitu or hd-storyroom, which fics get listed in my database will be skewed by my own reading preferences. However, it's important to note that I personally don't care who tops or bottoms, so I don't think that I will have unintentionally skewed the data one way or the other.
The other big issue concerns the date a fic was published. The vast majority of the fics in my database are fics written since 2007, and precious few written before 2005. But I also should point out that if I can't accurately date a fic, then I'm not including it in this dataset. The earlier a fic was written, the harder it can be to find its pub date, so part of the reason there are so few pre-2005 fics is because I can't be sure when they were actually written.
Ok, enough caveats about the data, on to the chart! I hope it is self-explanatory, because I'm not going to waste more words explaining something you can see for yourself :) Just note that I'm including fics from 2015 too, even though we're only 3 months in.
Year bottom!Draco bottom!Harry switching no penetration Total 2015 9 8 3 27 47 2014 70 70 26 85 251 2013 97 55 16 64 232 2012 67 57 8 29 161 2011 49 33 15 42 139 2010 54 36 12 32 134 2009 58 26 11 31 126 2008 75 32 7 20 134 2007 54 22 14 16 106 2006 27 11 10 9 57 2005 26 10 14 15 65 2004 11 4 2 4 21 2003 7 3 2 2 14 2002 0 1 0 2 3 Overall 606 368 140 376 1490
And now for some pretty pie charts:
As you can see, before 2010 bottom!Draco was much more common than bottom!Harry, but since then the proportion of bottom!Draco fics has gone down, to the point that of the works I've analyzed for 2014, there's a perfect balance between the two!
Is the influence of the dracotops-harry fest part of the reason for this change? It's possible. The DTH fest began in 2011, and my data seems to date the gradual shift to 2010.
It's also true that some of the disparity could be traced to a few big-name authors who tend(ed) to prefer one dynamic over another. Here's just a few examples I know of authors who seemed to prefer bottom!Draco but who haven't written as much in the last few years:
- ladyvader, active approx 2003 - 2010
- jennavere, active approx 2004 - 2006
- pir8fancier, active approx 2004 - 2013
- silentauror, active approx 2005 - 2009
There are many more bottom!Draco authors who are still actively writing HD, among them: enchanted_jae, oldenuf2nb, and samaelthekind.
But interestingly, I can only think of one long-time author who seems to prefer bottom!Harry: megyal.
(Edit: Vaysh pointed out that lomonaaeren is also a bottom!Harry author. My bad!)
If you have any insights into this data, disagree about my analysis, or can think of something I missed, please leave a comment!
Edit: Inspired by suggestions in the comments section, I have re-run the numbers using just data from the hd-fan-fair fests. See my write-up here. The data was collected through crowd-sourcing, and we are currently working on building a second crowd-sourced spreadsheet of data from hd-smoochfest too!