[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

[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).)