Rare Pairings vs. Non-Rare Pairings, Round Two

[chimbomba.livejournal.com]

I've been noticing in some wishlists some pairings that are not rare, things such as Draco/Hermione. I'm not really sure how this is happening since we are called Rare Pair Shorts. I didn't think I needed to stress that your wishlists must consist of RARE PAIRS ONLY.

If your wishlist contains a non-rare pairing, I will tell you, and you will need to edit your wishlist accordingly.

However, all this did get me thinking. We have a list of things we consider non-rare and therefore not acceptable at this community, and over time we've been getting some questions about a few pairings. We the mods are starting to get iffy about a few of them ourselves, so we figured it might be best to put it to vote.

If you consider any of the following pairings RARE, mark YES. If you think they are NOT RARE, mark NO.

If there are any pairings you feel need to be ADDED to our list, write those in the text entry box. [ETA: THAT MEANS DON'T PUT DOWN PAIRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY ON OUR LIST.] If there are any pairings you feel need to be REMOVED from our list and have not been discussed in this post, please LEAVE A COMMENT.

Thanks for your help! :)



[Poll #1415120]



ETA: The poll has been fixed. ;)

Comments

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

Personally, I use ff.net to gauge these things most of the time. It isn't the best place for rare pairings. Mostly only non-rare ones get to shine. Hence why if you sort based off pairing, and there are more than five pages or so of fic for the pairing, I don't consider it rare.

[the-glass-onion.livejournal.com]

The question of rarity becomes tricky concerning the pairings that are not popular but are not exactly rare either. For those pairings, I voted "I don't know" because they can go either way, depending on where you want the cutoff point to be. I did notice that some pairings that were in between before DH, such as Harry/Luna, became more scarce after DH, and some grew in popularity.

But I do think all femmeslash pairings are rare, simply because femmeslash in this fandom is rare.

[coffee-n-cocoa.livejournal.com]

I edit a Neville-centric newsletter, and out of curiosity's sake I went back over all issues from the beginning of this year to see how many Neville/Ginny and Neville/Luna fics/ficlets/drabbles there were.

Neville/Ginny - 12. However, fully half of those were either written by me or written for me, either as a response to a drabble/ficlet prompt or as a giftfic in an exchange. Take those away, and there are six N/G fics in six months.

Neville/Luna - 11, none of which were written by me. Several were written by one author, though.

Compare that to Neville/Draco, which is commonly considered a rarepair. In the past six months, there have been 30 fics/ficlets/drabbles written featuring that pairing.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

Another little thing:

Upon reading some of the comments and looking at the polls, I think I've got another issue here. What exactly is our definition for rare?

I have to admit, mine is pretty strict. Rare for me is...well, rare. If it's got a LJ community and at least five or so pages at ff.net, then I say it isn't rare. If it has got a fan base of more than ten or so people, not rare.

Is there some sort of community accepted standard for rare?

[vegablack62.livejournal.com]

As coffee n cocoa has pointed out earlier some pairings have fics because one or two people write them and keep their work posted on the comm. I write a lot of Neville and Hannah and post them frequently, but sometimes I feel I'm the only one writing it. I have a hard time finding more than a handful of stories that I haven't written myself or asked for. (The same goes for Alice and Frank.) If I want to read a fic that I haven't written then I have a hard time finding some I haven't already read. To me that makes the pairing rare.

(I'd be happy to accept it if they are deemed not rare.) So I feel that if the pairing appears to have a lot of stories, but really all of them are written by one or two people that makes the pairing rare. (This is my humble opinion only.)

[ceria-taliesin.livejournal.com]

James/Lily and Lucius/Narcissa are difficult because they are canon and often included in other stories, but I rarely see stories strictly about their relationships.

Just like I said yes to the femslash pairings, because I don't see them often. There's never enough femslash in this fandom.

[the-glass-onion.livejournal.com]

After reading through all the comments here, can I bring up a suggestion?

It's clear that not all pairings can be categorized into one of the two categories. What if we had another list for those middle-of-the-road pairings, and the rule with them is that only one pairing from that list can ever be claimed at any one time. So for example, let's say Neville/Ginny, Harry/Luna, and Albus/Gelert are part of middle-of-the-road list. Person A claims Harry/Luna, so Person B (who wants to claim, say, Neville/Ginny) would have to wait until Person A completes her table before Person B can claim Neville/Ginny, and etc. And writers are allowed to claim one middle-of-the-road pairing; after that, if they want to claim another pairing, then they have to pick a rare pair (something that's not on the middle-of-the-road list.) Maybe this can be a way to insure that the middle-of-the-road pairings don't flood the community.

ETA: Out of curiosity, I looked around LJ to see what other communities define as rare pairs.
hprarepairs's list of non-rares:
Snape/Hermione
Harry/Hermione
Ron/Hermione
Draco/Hermione
Harry/Ginny
Draco/Ginny
Harry/Draco
Remus/Sirius
Snape/Harry
Harry/Ron
Snape/Draco [I thought this pairing wasn't common!]
Snape/Lupin

quibbler_report's list of non-rares:
Harry/Draco
Harry/Ginny
Remus/Sirius
Harry/Ron
Harry/Hermione
Draco/Hermione
Severus/Harry
Ron/Hermione
Remus/Tonks
Severus/Hermione
Draco/Ginny
Severus/Lily
Albus Severus/Scorpius
Harry/Draco/Severus
Severus/Remus - editor's discretion

hpspringsmut (not providing a link due to rating)
Harry/Draco
Remus/Sirius
Harry/Ginny
Harry/Hermione
Ron/Hermione
Snape/Harry
Draco/Ginny
Draco/Hermione
Remus/Tonks
Snape/Hermione
Snape/Lupin

Looking through these lists, I agree with their selection although I am puzzled by the inclusion Snape/Draco. They accept the middle-of-the-road/uncommon pairings such as Neville/Ginny (and these pairings are the ones that tend to come in waves: lots of fics, then period of inactivity, then more activity, etc), and none of these comms ban any femmeslash pairings.

In the end, I think it up to the mods. There needs to be a definition of what a rare pairing is. There are other rarepairs communities out there that will accept the uncommon pairings that people can post to. The fandom has slowed down since the release of DH, and it seems to be the uncommon pairings that were affected the most...so not sure what we can do with those, or if we should just let the other comms be open to them.

I wish there was a way to search LJ's tags. What people usually miss is the amount of fics written in gift exchanges/fests, and tags can give a reasonably good idea of the quantity of fics written; those can also give us an idea of ship popularity. For example, you'll find a lot more Snape pairings than Voldemort pairings in a fic fest, but looking into the Voldemort corner of fandom, Voldemort/Ginny and Voldemort/Harry fics take up most of the Voldemort fics.

[ceirdwenfc.livejournal.com]

I tried to answer based on canon and what's out there written. I hope I helped.

[kellychambliss.livejournal.com]

To me, the issue is not so much "what is rare?" (since clearly there are several legitimate definitions), but "what do we want this community do to for its members?" Do we want it primarily to provide a place to encourage people to invent pairings that almost completely original and unknown and that are unlikely to be "shipped" even by a small number of people (Goal 1)? Or do we want to provide a home for unusual (though not necessarily unique or un-shipped) pairings and to encourage people to add more fics to those pairings (Goal 2)? Or both? And if both, can (or should) both goals be addressed by one group?

Both goals are legitmate. In terms of Goal 1, it can be fun to go for the oddest, rarest pairs possible. Once in the Star Trek: Voyager fandom, I was in a comm for a one-ep character named Kashyk. We challenged each other to pair Kashyk with literally anyone/thing we could think of, which resulted in sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-poignant stories featuring Kashyk/biogel pack and Kashyk/prehensile plant, among others. None of these pairings resulted in shippers, of course, and weren't intended to. But they were fun to write/read. So there's probably room for a comm where people write Ollivander/Dobby or Draco/Devil's Snare. If that's our goal -- encouraging odd or unique pairings for the sake/fun of it -- then perhaps we can define "rare" as "as far as we know, fewer than five [or ten] stories exist for this pairing."

But if our goal is Goal 2 (to provide a home and encourgement for "rare" pairs in the sense of "exists and may have shippers but occupies only a small space in the fandom as a whole relative to other pairings"), then we can allow things like Albus/Gellert and McGonagall/Hooch, even though both ships have fans and (very low traffic) communities. I suppose you can argue that this sense isn't really "rare," and you could make a case for this view. But speaking for myself, I'm less interested in rare pairs for the sake of rare pairs and more interested in encouraging people (myself included) to write more stories about less-common characters and ships. (For instance, my OTC, Minerva, isn't exactly "rare," but she's definitely not common. In most fests, rarely if ever do you get any stories featuring Minerva, and this is true even in fests where you might reasonably expect to see her, such as hp_rarities (none so far) or femmefest (two, incl. the one I requested). So I'm happy to have as many communities as possible where she (and the other less-popular characters I like) might show up. Sure, there are a couple of pages of (mostly bad) McHooch stories on ff.net, and I personally know ten people who ship them. But it's not common enough that I'd want to rule out the pairing here.

Bottom line: I don't see any reason why we can't meet both Goals 1 and 2 with one LJ community, so I'd like to keep some of the less-common "iffy" pairings. But I understand that others may not agree.