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.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

I think, for femmeslash, you have to consider what is rare within the femmeslash community and not base if off the rest of the community. I wouldn't be fair for all femmeslash to be rare when het pairings and slash pairings are restricted.

So I think, for example, things like Hermione/Luna are big enough to not called rare. Hermione/Ginny as well.

[the-glass-onion.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be fair for all femmeslash to be rare when het pairings and slash pairings are restricted.
That's true. I didn't think of it that way. :)

Aww, love your icon! ♥

[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]

That's what I am saying though. You can't compare it to the rest of the community. You can't say that jsut because Draco/Ginny is oh so very active and according to LJ, Hermione/Ginny isn't, that Hermione/Ginny is a rare pair.

You have to base it on femmeslash alone because femmeslash isn't very popular in comparison to het or slash, and all of femmeslash can NOT be rare.

So based off the demographics of the femmeslash community alone, Hermione/Ginny is definitely not a rare pair.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

Yup, I've never considered Neville/Draco a rare pair, and I think, especially now that you've brought this evidence, that it should be put on our list of not rare.

[chimbomba.livejournal.com]

Wow, thanks for taking the time to look all this up. This is very helpful. :)

[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?

[terravayne.livejournal.com]

I think it might be easier to define rarepair as a "pairing that is rare in proportion to the other fics in that category, e.g. gen, het, slash or femslash." It's a matter of percentages, not absolute numbers. That might cut down on the confusion.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

Ugh because if all of femmeslash is rare, then it isn't fair to slashers and those who like het, okay?

Plus, okay, think of it this way, it isn't exactly what is popular, right? It is what is common seeing as common is the opposite of rare.

So what are the common femmeslash pairings? Well, Hermione/Ginny and Ginny/Luna are common. They are what most people would list/write if femmeslash was brought up.

And that's not what this community is for. It is so people can write things that aren't common, that aren't the first thing people think of when you say femmeslash/slash/het.

Luna/Pansy would be a rare femmeslash paring as far as I know. Bellatrix/Lily, Molly/Hermione, Umbridge/Minerva, etc.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

YES! This exactly. ♥

[terravayne.livejournal.com]

James/Lily - It has 619 pages of fic devoted to it on FF.net and an active comm. For the same reasons as Harry/Luna, I say I don't know.

619? That's almost 15 times more fic than Harry/Luna. Why would you consider this possibly rare?

As for Draco/Ginny, there are several active comms for it and it has a couple of websites hosting hundreds of fics dedicated specifically to D/G. I call "not rare."

[coffee-n-cocoa.livejournal.com]

Well, in Neville/Draco's defense, I should probably add that slightly over a third of those 30 fics were by two different authors. I have noticed a definite upswing in fics with that pairing post-DH, and it's safe to say it's rapidly approaching that fuzzy middle ground where it's not a super-rare pairing, but it's not as big as, say, Harry/Ginny or Harry/Draco.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

Everything is rather small when compared to the UBER BIG popular pairings, but I think D/N is big enough on the small scale to be not-rare. Or at least, I've always thought so.

But then again, as I've said, I've got a strict definition of what is rare and what isn't so...

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

Honey, I'm not being rude with you, okay? And I'm not sure where you got that from. If you've felt I've been rude, I'm sorry, but it was never my intention.

Femmeslash isn't as popular as het and slash, and that's what I am saying here. You can't lump it in with both of them because of that. Obviously no femmeslash pairing is going to be as big as Draco/Harry or James/Lily. It just isn't possible.

However, there are plenty of femmeslash pairings that are common within the femmeslash community.

That's what I've been saying all along.

You clearly have your opinions, I have mine and you obviously aren't interested in hearing any dissent.

And, I'm sorry, but pot meet kettle. :-/ I don't appreciate being called rude only to get this impolite phrase thrown into my face, okay? If you don't want to debate something with someone, don't start up a debate. D: I'm just responding to your claims that my claims are wrong. There's nothing rude or pig-headed about that.

[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.

[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.

[chimbomba.livejournal.com]

When peskywhistpaw and I began to put the list together, what we generally looked for in a non-rare pairing was overall presence. (Admittedly, we were really iffy on a number of them, so what we ended up doing was just sticking some of them on the list anyway in the hopes that others would help us to refine the list.)

What I mean by "overall presence" is the number of existing fics for the pairing, whether it be on LJ or FF.net or wherever. Since a numerical limit would be difficult to keep track of, I guess the task at hand is to come up with a way to categorize all the middle-of-the-road ships as rare and not rare.

[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?

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

Maybe you could take middle-of-the-road on a case by case basis?

That way, unless we have someone who desperately needs to write something middle-of-the-road, we don't have a whole community full of middle-of-the-road?

Because, quite frankly, if all the middle-of-the-road pairings are allowed in, I think who sort of lose the "rare pair" community. And that would be very, very sad.


(And yes, I have quite an opinion on this because I'm really into this community for RARE. I mean...look at the ships I've written. >.<)

[chimbomba.livejournal.com]

Also, this brings up the question of popularity vs. rareness. If a pairing has accumulated hundreds of pages of fanfiction over time but does not have as great a following as it once did, do you think the pairing should be considered rare?

I'm inclined to say no, because it's hard to measure exactly how a ship's popularity is decreasing. Also, just because a ship's popularity is decreasing doesn't mean fanfiction for that ship is hard to come by.

[ex-absolute.livejournal.com]

On a post where people are discussing, it is. Especially when you are replying to someone else's opinion saying you disagree.

As to my turn of phrase, it was not meant to be rude, as I have stated. And, again, I'm sorry you took it that way. There's nothing I can do about it now.

[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 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?