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

[terravayne.livejournal.com]

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.

I would agree with you if we were talking about a smaller fandom. But HP is huge. We need to look at the fics in terms of % of total fics in the category. 5+ pages on ffnet for a smaller fandom (let's say...15% of fics) = definitely not rare. But when we're talking about tens of thousands of writers and hundreds of thousands of fics, 5+ pages starts looking like nothing (only 0.0003% of fics).

We can't look at absolute number of shippers/fics or there'd be next to nothing that's rare in HP. You're probably going to be able to find 10 people who'll ship anything in HP. A recent Remus/Fat Lady fic I read had more than 10 comments on it. I'm sure in all of fandom, there are at least 10 people who would support it, as ridiculous as it is.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

I do actually. There are many I consider rare. There are plenty of pairings that have been written for this community that are rare, rare, rare.

I'm obviously not being clear enough though. Heh.

Okay, you've got your super pairings right? And by that I mean Draco/Harry, Snape/Harry, Ron/Hermione, Harry/Hermione, Remus/Sirius, etc. Okay, those we automatically take out. And we probably lose over half of our accumulated fic right?

Okay, then we divide into groups: slash, het, femmeslash, and look at them individually.

Based on that anything that has 5+ pages and a big enough fanbase to have a community isn't rare. And I'm not tlaking about people who 'like' the pairing. I'm talking people who write/comment/join communities based off the pairing.

Does that make a little more sense?

[terravayne.livejournal.com]

So what you're really doing is comparing one rare pair (e.g. Neville/Charlie) to all other rare pairs in the category (e.g. slash-not!Draco/Harry, Severus/Harry, Ron/Harry, etc.) if I understand you correctly. I'm not sure sure that's fair to the straddling-the-fence pairings.

Let's say hypothetically that Harry/Luna is 3% of all het fics. That makes it rare. But if you excise all popular pairings, then it would probably be 10-15% of what's left. That makes it not rare. So, which is it? I would still call it a rarepair, because its presence in fandom is substantially lower than other pairings as a whole.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

I'm not exactly sure I understand what you are saying so if I say something that sounds weirdly off topic that's why. Sorry!

--

I would say it isn't rare. Because if we compared pairings with all the popular pairings included then almost everything is rare, and that is far too broad. Everything is a small percentage with popular pairings included because there is so much fic for them. You can't compare accurately with the popular pairings included for that reason. If everything looks small, then everything except for the giants are rare.

Rare is a small group hence the name rare. If you open it up to all the pairings that are "kinda/maybe/sort of" rare like Harry/Luna, you lose the rare aspect. Rare should be the smallest, most uncommon pairings. There are quite a few because people either like popular or are willing to dabble in middle-of-the-road. Rare pairings are those that aren't iffy or popular, they are just...hardly there or unheard of.

Please tell me if anything I've said isn't clear. :)

[terravayne.livejournal.com]

*nods* I understand what you're saying. This is a percentage problem that cuts both ways. If we look at the proportion of one pairing to ALL pairings then there will be too many that are rare. If we DON'T include all pairings then there will be too few that are rare (IMO, of course). No matter what, it throws uncertainty on the straddling-the-fence pairings in the middle. By one comparison, it could be rare and by another, not.

Honestly, I think that if a pairing represents less than 2-3% of all het fics, then it's rare...even if it ends up being 7-10% of all unpopular-pairing het fics. For instance, I think Snape/Luna is rare. But there's an exchange for it and a bit of fic here and there. I think you would consider it not rare. Then again, I have a higher threshold for rarity. It comes down to definitions and cutoffs, I guess.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

Mmm. Yes, definitely. What defines rare is so...double edged which is why I go crazy with the hack saw on anything that's 'iffy'. Haha.

Although, tbh, Snape/Luna seems rare to me as well. Haha

[terravayne.livejournal.com]

That's interesting because Snuna has substantially more than 10 people who ship it. :P

I'm the opposite. I tend to let more pairings in than risk freezing one or two out undeservedly.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

I think I did go a bit crazy seeing people saying that pairings like Albus/Gellert, Ginny/Luna, etc are rare. And then seeing comments saying Lily/James and the like could be rare.

So I was like, okay, we obviously need to be stricter to keep these non-rare pairings out.

:)

[chimbomba.livejournal.com]

because its presence in fandom is substantially lower than other pairings as a whole.

Overall presence/volume in fandom was what peskywhistpaw and I were going for when we began to write the list. Just because a ship doesn't have the volumes of fanfiction that Draco/Hermione has doesn't automatically make it rare; those that still have a considerable volume as compared to fandom as a whole can still be called not rare, even if as compared to another ship, its volume is much less.