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

[coffee-n-cocoa.livejournal.com]

Admittedly, I don't go to ff.net, mostly because so much of the fic there is awful. What goes into my newsletter are the fics I find on LJ/IJ, most of which are much better quality.

Lots of pairings have LJ comms, and some of those pairings are rare. I know there's one for Sirius/Pansy, and another for Neville/James II, and I think we can both agree those are super rare. I think comm activity is a better way of rating rareness, rather than comm existence. The Neville/Ginny comm hasn't had a post in months, while the Neville/Hannah comm is much more active in comparison.

I think pairing popularity rises and falls, too. Pre-DH, Neville/Hannah was definitely a rarepair. Since JKR's interviews though, there's been a small surge of N/H fic, and it's not nearly as rare as it used to be. Conversely, pre-DH there was a lot more Neville/Luna fic posted than what's found now.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

I think that, because of the rise and fall, you can't use activity as a basis for rare either. And then there's the fact that there are many people who love and pairing and don't know about the community, you know?

[coffee-n-cocoa.livejournal.com]

As someone who's belonged to the Neville/Ginny comm from the beginning, I can tell you it was never that active to begin. There are people who might like the pairing, but not enough to write it, which also begs the question whether or not a pairing is rare because it's never written, or because only a small number of people like it enough to write it?

Going back to the newsletter, to look at it you'd think Neville/Bill was a crazy popular pairing, but a closer look shows the vast majority of fic with that pairing is written by three or four extremely prolific authors, so I still consider it a rarepair.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

....Neville/Bill would be a rare pair in my opinion. And I am not basing it off the statistics you just gave me either, fyi.

Looking around at deviantart/LJ/ff.net, I'd say, that while it is small-ish, Neville/Ginny has a large enough fanbase for it to be not rare. I'm sorry your community isn't super active, but it seems to me as an outsider who doesn't take an invested interest into any particular pairing that there's enough strength there to call it a middle-of-the-road pairing, not a rare one.