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.)
no subject
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.)