[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

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. :)