[research] All fanfic and dojinshi samples selected, whew

[unjapanologist]

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

'Textual Echoes: Fan Fiction and Sexualities' was absolutely fantastic and deserves a long separate post. While I'm working on that one, a bit of news for everyone who didn't catch me crowing about this on Twitter: I've completed selection of the 100 dojinshi and 100 fanfics that I'll be comparing over the next couple of years.

The selection process was arduous and time-consuming, and is described in all boring detail here (kindly let me know if you catch me failing maths at any point in that text). You can see the dojinshi data set here, and the fic dataset here.

I've already entered data about genre (slash/het/gen), pairings, and whether characters are top/seme or bottom/uke in slash/yaoi pairings. Data about other narrative and visual elements to come. You can use the search function at the top of both datasets to filter data, but I'm currently doing battle with Zoho to create an interface where it's easier to compare data from the two sets. Here's a couple of things that struck me after a cursory first comparison of the datasets:

Genres (slash, gen, het)
    Fanfic: 16 gen, 61 slash, 24 het (note: doesn't add up to 100 because some samples contain more than one kind of genre)
    Dojinshi: 5 gen, 95 slash, 2 het (those 2 het djs involved Snape in a biologically female body, not Snape in a relationship with a woman)

Populair pairings (two most popular)
    Fanfic: Snape/Harry 34, Snape/James 0
    Dojinshi: Snape/Harry 10, Snape/James 61

'Division of labor' in slash pairings
    Fanfic: Snape bottom/uke 11, Snape top/seme 35 (plus many 'undetermined': it's much harder to figure out these roles in fic than in dojinshi)
    Dojinshi: Snape bottom/uke 94, Snape top/seme 1 (this feels skewed, I think I saw more Snape as seme than this. Will reconsider)

Food for thought. If you're the author of one of the works mentioned and don't want me to use your fic or dojinshi for this research, please let me know and I'll remove the entry from the dataset (see research ethics).

Comments

[paceus.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed by your system of deducing how popular different pairings are! Using only LJ feels limiting though (this while acknowledging that there have to be limits, otherwise you'd spend three years going through the internet to find fics). Hypothetically, it might be useful to check every Snape fic on fanfiction.net and see what pairings people write there. Then you would have two sets of data and could compare them. On the other hand, it might take forever and it might not give us much new information, since ff.net is just another site and not really representative of fandom as whole.

I think the 'division of labour' statistics are fascinating. You said (IIRC) that one dojinshi can set a trend -- is the Snape characterisation in the dojinshi you're studying consistent? In other words, is Snape uke in those 94 stories in the same way? (I hope you know what I mean, because what I'm saying may not make much sense...)

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

Using LJ only is indeed limiting. I'm not yet sure exactly how limiting it will end up being -I haven't worked my way through any LJ research yet. A couple of the results I got by comparing LJ interests did surprise me a bit, in the sense that some smaller pairings seemed more popular than I would have estimated. No idea if that's due to an error in the methodology, or I'm just no good at estimating pairing popularity, or smaller/rarer pairings are more popular on LJ. Do you think the latter might have something to do with it? Have you had any experiences that would suggest the LJ environment generates more fic featuring rarepairs than, say, ff.net?

*goes over to ff.net to check numbers* There's 1346 HP fics that explicitly list Snape as a character, and probably many more actually have Snape as the main character. It's not really impossible to check 1346 fics for which pairing is portrayed. OTOH, it would be impossible to check over a thousand fics for the several dozen narrative elements I want to check, and as you say, ff.net is just one more community. There's so many other HP fic archives, plus personal homepages... Ack.

is the Snape characterisation in the dojinshi you're studying consistent? In other words, is Snape uke in those 94 stories in the same way?

Yeah, I get what you mean :) Can't answer this one, though, I haven't studied the djs long enough to distinguish between the various types of uke. Going on memory alone, I would say that it's mostly a single type, yes -Snape is mostly temperamental and crabby while James happily pursues him. But this is probably analysis according to Scott Adams ("The word analysis is formed by the root word anal and the ancient Greek word ysis, meaning “to pull numbers from“" -from Dilbert and The Way of the Weasel)

[paceus.livejournal.com]

No idea if that's due to an error in the methodology, or I'm just no good at estimating pairing popularity, or smaller/rarer pairings are more popular on LJ. Do you think the latter might have something to do with it?

LJ interests may not be very trustworthy because some people (like me) add interests haphazardly and it may be that they don't even have the more popular pairing as an interest at all. But who knows? Since it's impossible to tell, I say carry on!

The description of the dynamics of James/Snape made me smile. I'm looking forward to hearing more about your research! A fascinating subject.

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

Yeah, LJ interests aren't exactly the most reliable indicators in the universe either. I chose the group interests instead of individual interests in the hope that the group interests might possibly perhaps be edited a bit more often, but as you say... :) Thank you for the lovely comments!

(BTW, reading your comment made me realize I'd forgotten to set the dataset with LJ interests to 'public'. Gah. Here it is (http://creator.zoho.com/nele.noppe/fanficforensics/#View:LiveJournal_interests_View).)

[mithen.livejournal.com]

Oooh, interesting, especially the seme/uke skew in the doujinshi. How do you determine seme/uke? I would suspect in doujinshi it's fairly easy as most of them probably follow the traditional labeling of the uke first and seme second...does the same hold true for the fics? Are you using "uke" as a physical term (the receptive partner in sex) or as a psychological term, and does that make a difference at all? I'm guessing (with no actual evidence so I'd be curious to know if I'm wrong) that Snape tends to be the seme in Snape/Harry and the uke in James/Snape (although the numbers would immediately tell me I'm at least somewhat wrong, since clearly he must be the uke in some of those Snape/Harry ones)... (can you tell I'm kind of fascinated by seme/uke dynamics and the difference between them in Western and Japanese fandoms lately?) :D

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

Exactly the right questions :)) Long answer, because I've been wondering about this same thing for weeks. It didn't really hit me how different these categories seem to be in slash vs. in dojinshi until I was inputting these data. With the dojinshi, it was indeed very easy to figure out who's uke and who's seme. The uke is very recognizable, same as in BL manga: physically smaller than the seme, clearly not on the initiative when interacting with the seme in any situation, the receptive partner if there's a sex scene, etc. It rarely took more than a couple of pages before I was certain I had them sorted out.

With many fics, OTOH, I ended up using 'uke' as a physical term only -the receptive partner during sex. There were many cases where no behaviour in the non-sex interactions struck me as top- or bottom-like. These days I don't read much anime- or manga-based yaoi fic in English, but I remember always being incredibly sure who the uke was with these fics. Not the same with slash that's not based on a Japanese work, apparently. I ended up using "undetermined" for 17 fics instead of pegging either partner as top or bottom, and even with the ones where I did assign a category based on who was the receptive partner during sex, it sometimes didn't feel quite 'right' because the outside-the-bedroom interaction didn't seem to suggest that any one partner was more forward than the other. I think I'll have to go over this category again and perhaps make some changes to the data when I've figured out what precisely would constitute a top or bottom in slash fic.

Or maybe there isn't any such definition? It felt as if seme/uke is a much more meaningful category in dojinshi/yaoi than in slash fic. Even the notation bears that out. If you put a name on the wrong side of the X with yaoi, it looks incredibly strange, but the receptive partner is put on the left side of the / with slash lots of times.

It really is fascinating. I wonder if top/bottom has always been relatively 'unimportant' in slash fic, or if these roles losing meaning is some recent development. My personal experiences are a bit useless here, because when I first started reading fic somewhere in the late nineties, I read very little that wasn't based on Japanese works, and my slash reading is comparatively recent. What do you think? How would you judge the importance of top/bottom roles in slash?

I'm guessing (with no actual evidence so I'd be curious to know if I'm wrong) that Snape tends to be the seme in Snape/Harry and the uke in James/Snape

You can has evidence! Using the search function at the top of the datasets, filter out every dj that has Snape/James as the main pairing (observe weird notation there), then filter those results a bit more to see how often Snape is uke in those. Out of 61 Snape/James dj, Snape is indeed uke in every single one of them. Doing the same for Snape/Harry, we have 10 djs in total, and Snape is actually uke in 9 of them.

(Now, I've never seen a Snape/James dj that had Snape as seme, but I seem to recall more Snape/Harry with Snape as seme than only 1 in 10 would suggest. There may be a problem with the representativity of the samples here. I'm keeping an eye on djs outside the sample set to see if this needs correcting.)

Part 2

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

On the whole, Snape seems to be uke in djs very, very often. Speculation time!

One guess for the continued casting of Snape as uke (the Snape/Harry djs are more recent, with all except one being published after HBP, while half of the Snape/James djs were published before HBP) is that Snape started getting coded as 'uke' beginning somewhere around 2001, when there was lots of Snape/James, and when Snape/Harry gained traction later, Snape had already been uke-ified to such a degree that people just continued writing him as uke even with Harry.

Why make him uke to begin with? Snape is in a position of power over many characters as an adult, but he wasn't when at school with James, the period during which most of the early djs took place. He was certainly a more 'natural' uke back then.

There's also an interesting naming detail we could consider. Snape is 'Suneipu' in Japanese katakana. This is the purest of pure speculation, but the verb 'suneru' means 'be peevish or sulky' and is often associated with non-dominant characters in anime/manga. Perhaps the sound of the name alone made people's uke-alarms go off right from the start? (Also, there's a 'ne' in there, which might suggest the word 'neko', meaning 'cat' (and also slang for 'femme', as opposed to 'butch'). Snape does get given cat ears quite often, and I think this might be characteristic of a non-dominant character in anime/manga, too. Examining this cat-ification now for a different paper, so I don't want to speculate as to the reasons for it just yet.)

There's also the question of why he was paired with James almost right from the start. Snape/James is a real rarepair in English-language fic. Not so in djs; it's very popular there. I've had it suggested to me that James' bullying of Snape and Snape's insistence in canon that he hates James to pieces might get interpreted like this: the harder the uke professes to hate the seme, or the more the seme pulls the uke's pigtails, the more hints there are as to a possible relationship.

But did Snape get made uke because people wanted to pair him with James and James just seemed a more natural seme, or did they pair him with James because they wanted to cast him as uke but couldn't do that very fluidly with other characters? Chicken or egg? :)

Re: Part 2

[mithen.livejournal.com]

Oh, more interesting stuff! (I responded to your last comment without realizing there was another!) I can definitely see why Snape is the uke in James/Snape...the bullying and the way James is the leader of a group of boys versus Snape as a sullen outsider definitely sets that into motion.

Hm, if we were talking Western fandom I think it would be easy to explain the jump in Snarry after HBP--the events in that book move the two beyond a traditional teacher/student dynamic and into something more resembling moral equality, what with the bond of empathy the shared book creates between them. But if it's Japanese fandom, I'm less sure (other than indeed, the bond between them deepens so much).

You know, I'd forgotten about the neko/femme connection! That would explain the cat ears theme beyond the obvious "kawaii!" factor. :)

Re: Part 2

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

Causing confusion with multiple separate long comments is fun! Yeah, James being the seme in James/Snape djs 'feels' natural to me, too. The one thing I don't quite get is why this pairing was so popular from the start (around 2001, long before there was any info on James except that Snape clearly didn't much like him). Perhaps I need to read the meta talk and authors' notes in djs from that period.

(Edited for spelling fail)

Re: Part 2

[mithen.livejournal.com]

It's true, that was one of the things that threw me! So those stories date from before the flashback scene? I guess the information about the time James saved Snape from the Willow might be enough to hypothesize a long-standing antagonistic relationship...it must have been thrilling for such fans when the flashback scene showed up and gave them so much more to work with. :)

[mithen.livejournal.com]

*facepalm* I actually meant the seme was listed first, not the uke, sorry. I think in some fandoms that holds true when using Western notation X/Y, but in most it doesn't.

It's true, the doujinshi I've read are all very clear about the seme/uke distinction...in my preferred pairing it's actually especially fascinating because Western fandom, when it has any recognizable version of seme/uke, fairly consistently has the two characters exactly the reverse of Japanese fans of the same pairing. Show a Western fan a Japanese SupermanxBatman doujinshi and they'll boggle with horror at uke!Batman. I've thought a long time about why that happened, and I think some of it is the Japanese roles are usually assigned relative to age and physical power, in which Superman beats out Batman, but in the West the more "feminized" partner is usually a personality issue, with Batman a lot more dominant and controlling. But yeah, fanfics seem in general a lot more careful to keep dynamics outside of the bedroom more equal...and Western fans are a lot more likely to kick and scream early and loud if they see one of the characters regularly assigned the "female role" (although this depends a lot on the pairing, I guess...Batman/Robin I've never seen Robin played as seme that I know of).

I'm kind of shocked at the HarryxSnape dynamics! An older, larger man and his social superior? There must be something very interesting overriding the defaults there...

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

Show a Western fan a Japanese SupermanxBatman doujinshi and they'll boggle with horror at uke!Batman.

Really? I obviously need to read more slash outside HP, I'd always gotten the impression that absolute insistence on the preservation of these sexual roles was more a yaoi fandom than a slash fandom thing. Or would the bogggling be more about Batman being given a uke personality (with lots of blushing and "iya, dame")?

Western fans are a lot more likely to kick and scream early and loud if they see one of the characters regularly assigned the "female role"

Perhaps because involvement in slash fandom is more political on the English-language net than in Japanese fandom, people are quicker to insist that slash relationships shouldn't portray weird stereotypes about 'real' gay males?

Is there a lot of SupermanXBatman in Japan? It's interesting to see which non-Japanese fandoms get the dojinshi treatment. HP and LotR got pretty huge, but other non-Japanese fandoms seem downright tiny in the dojinshi world.

EDIT: gah, forgot to address the HarryXSnape dynamics. I seem to be confusing myself more than you with all the comment threads. Looking at the dojinshi data set a bit more closely, it looks as if at first glance, at least six out of the ten HarryXSnape djs were either created by a circle best known for JamesXSnape stuff (prt) or involve some past relationship with James. Perhaps Snape really had been coded as uke so thoroughly by the time Snape/Harry became popular that this encoding managed to override him being the older, larger man, and Harry's social superior?

[mithen.livejournal.com]

Really? I obviously need to read more slash outside HP, I'd always gotten the impression that absolute insistence on the preservation of these sexual roles was more a yaoi fandom than a slash fandom thing. Or would the bogggling be more about Batman being given a uke personality (with lots of blushing and "iya, dame")?

In this case the latter--not so much that there's a rigid assumption that Superman can't be seme but because seeing Batman blushing and welling up with tears is particularly out of character for him. Superman's the more demonstrative and emotional of the two, so I think many people wouldn't recoil quite so hard from the traditional uke treatment in his case (although it would still be quite odd!)

SupermanxBatman is a very niche pairing in Japan--it doesn't get much play simply because it's darn hard to get comic books; the manga industry renders them superfluous and a bit silly. On the other hand, because the characters are so iconic you don't really need to have read any comic books to "get" it, so it crops up here and there.

Perhaps Snape really had been coded as uke so thoroughly by the time Snape/Harry became popular that this encoding managed to override him being the older, larger man, and Harry's social superior?

Interesting. Is it possible that people who are fundamentally JamesxSnape fans are using HarryxSnape as a sort of..."James II?" There's a lot of love for fated lovers replaying roles in different generations, so maybe people see Snape as so struck by Harry's resemblance to his father that he intuitively falls into his traditional role there?

Hee, now I'm curious if Snape/Draco fans also code Snape uke...although if they do it may well be because there's a fair amount of Lucius/Snape and then Draco once again steps in for his father...poor Snape, haunted by the sons of men who made his life hell...

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

Incredibly curious about SupermanxBatman dojinshi now. I'll see if I can pick up any in Osaka next month.

It's equally hard to imagine Superman getting an uke makeover as Batman. Any character not originating in a Japanese source work getting the uke treatment tends to baffle me a little, at least initially. I often need to flip a mental switch to recognize Snape as 'Snape' in many dojinshi. (First HP dojinshi I read was about Snape, and I actually didn't recognize him at all until another character called him by name.) Fanon in dojinshi really can be wildly different from English-language fic fanon.

Fated lovers.... Yes, that might well have much to do with it. There really is a lot of that in anime/manga. I should go consult TV Tropes and also find its Japanese equivalent. But not half an hour before bedtime, the vortex will suck me in. Tomorrow!

I just recalled that Dumbledore actually mentioned Snape having a life debt to James in the very first book. Perhaps this one factlet was powerful enough to launch the James/Snape ship for dojinshika?

Re: Snape/Draco... Not sure who's uke there, I haven't seen much Snape/Draco djs. Will keep an eye out. There are definitely suggestions of Snape/Lucius in some of those James/Snape djs, for sure.

Say, I'm adding a dataset to my site keep track of all these ideas, and who said what. I want to keep that file public so people can consult it to see what's already been discussed. Is it okay if I put (mithen) next to whatever you mentioned? I can make an invisible column for names too, if you'd prefer.

[mithen.livejournal.com]

It's equally hard to imagine Superman getting an uke makeover as Batman. Any character not originating in a Japanese source work getting the uke treatment tends to baffle me a little, at least initially.

Ah, true. The uke dynamic comes from his secret identity as Clark Kent, in which he's shy and stammering. :) Similarly, Batman as an uke tends to focus on his Bruce Wayne (spoiled pampered playboy) side. It does tend to create a lot of flexibility in how you write them!

Citing me as Mithen should be fine! Thanks for asking! And keeping a database for where you get thoughts from is a cool idea. :)

[mithen.livejournal.com]

It really is fascinating. I wonder if top/bottom has always been relatively 'unimportant' in slash fic, or if these roles losing meaning is some recent development. My personal experiences are a bit useless here, because when I first started reading fic somewhere in the late nineties, I read very little that wasn't based on Japanese works, and my slash reading is comparatively recent. What do you think? How would you judge the importance of top/bottom roles in slash?

I forgot to respond to this! I personally think that from its origins there's been a strong streak of resistance to assigning top/bottom roles rigidly (um, so to speak). If you want an early contemporaneous take on the topic, you should find a copy of Joanna Russ's Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts:
Feminist Essays, which has a fantastic essay in it called "Pornography for Women, by Women, with Love" which is the earliest academic writing about slash out there (1985). I was very struck by a passage where she discusses how a lot of slash is a fantasy of fluid gender roles, using Kirk/Spock to discuss how the "coding" of the two switches back and forth a lot. I think there's becoming more tendency to assign clearer roles, but there's a strong history of just the opposite--and I think a lot of bone-deep dislike of it in a lot of places. Like I mentioned, people will start to kick and complain a lot in certain circles if a male character is "the girl" (though in some cases I suspect it's because the WRONG character is being coded "the girl," not simply that one of them is...)

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

I'll check out that Joanna Russ book! (Just finished 'How to Suppress Women's Writing' and fangirling her a bit.)

I think there's becoming more tendency to assign clearer roles, but there's a strong history of just the opposite--and I think a lot of bone-deep dislike of it in a lot of places.

That would be a very, very interesting tendency. I'll try and see if I can pick up anything like this from the datasets, although they're probably too limited in time (five years or so).

gaaah!

[futago-02.livejournal.com]

Dude I am SO friending you. This is EXACTLY what I want to do... well, not exactly, but I want to do this sort of thing for my phd diss!!! :D

I'm doing a senior honors paper right now for my undergrad, but only about english online slash, so I'll keep in touch! I can't wait to see the results for this!! I totally am into doujinshi and BL
Is your project only doujinshi? Have you looked into Drama/BL cds (my sis is crazy about them now)?

Re: gaaah!

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

Hey, thank you! Are you going to do something with Japanese fanwork for your PhD? Planning to start anywhere in the near future? We need more dojin research!

Right now I'm only looking at print dojinshi on the Japanese side and fic on the English-language side. I'm definitely going to add fanart to the fic and shosetsu to the dojinshi. It's too early to say if I'll have time to add other media (online djs, other kinds of dojin media), but I'm going to try. The influence of technology on narratives is becoming a more and more important part of the research, after all.

Haven't looked into drama cds yet, no. I'm not familiar with them at all, beside knowing they exist. Any recs? :)