SwissMiss' Creativity Outlet

dudley_redeemed has posted their final round-up from their fest, and although they will still be coming out with a master list of their own, I couldn't wait to do the stats. :)

Community: dudley_redeemed 
Fest type: Open prompting (or use your own prompt)
Theme: Dudley Dursley-centric, must be 'redeemed' (i.e. not a total arse throughout)
Minimum fic length: None
Ratings allowed: All
Creation period: 3 months + 1 week

Total fanworks created: 24 (one posted anonymously)

Fics: 20
Art: 4

2 participants, aigooism and trickofthedark , each contributed 2 creations.

By rating:

FIC
G - 2
PG - 4
PG-13 - 5
15 - 1
R - 2
Hard R - 1
NC-17 - 5

ART
PG - 2
NC-17 - 2

By pairing:

Gen - iiiii iiii
Het - iiiii iii
Slash - iiiii i
Threesome (het) - i


Dudley/Luna - ii
Dudley/Dean - ii
Dudley/Pansy - ii
Dudley/Cho - i
Dudley/Piers - i
Dudley/George - i
Dudley/Padma - i
Dudley/Gregory - i
Dudley/Dennis - i
Dudley/Lavender - i
Dudley/OFC - i
Dudley/Pansy/Draco - i

By length:

<1K - i (944 words)
1-2K - ii
2-3K - iiiii
3-4K - ii
4-5K - ii
6-7K - i
7-8K - i
9-10K - i
10-11K - ii
11-12K - i
12K - i

Some thoughts: For an 'unregulated', anything-goes fest, the stats turned out pretty much the same as for most other fests, both in terms of rating distribution, pairing alignment (het/slash/gen) and fic length. So... do fests actually need all the pingely little rules they have? Is fandom not able to self-regulate pretty well? I guess the fact that this wasn't a gift exchange made it easier in that respect, in that there was no need to guarantee a minimum effort so that no one would be disappointed. But given the fanworks made for this fest, no one would have been disappointed with any of them anyway, as far as I can see.

In terms of ratings, you could hardly ask for a more even spread. Exactly half the art was smut, and the other half ... well, not. 40% of the fics were rated R or higher, the rest being rather more tame.

In the gen fics, I included 2 that aren't exactly gen... one was a wanking scene, and the other was actually a multi-pairing fic, but I felt that the emphasis was not on the pairings as much as it was on Dudley himself, so I put it into the gen category. There were a couple of other fics that also announced themselves in their headers as mostly gen, with mentions of Dudley pairings, but those I included in the het or slash categories. Maybe that's inconsistent of me... do with it what you will.

I thought it interesting that there was so much gen in this fest, and that even some of the 'pairing' fics put the pairing in the background. To me, that means there is a lot of fascination with the character of Dudley himself, and not just using him to be one of the two bodies banging each other. The whole premise of this fest necessitates getting into Dudley's character, digging deeper than what we are presented with in canon.

I also found it interesting that of the pairings, all of them were within the same generation. There was no cross gen, either pairing Dudley with an older character or a Next Gen character. Also, all but 2 of the ship fics had him paired with a wizard or witch. It's not exactly surprising, given that there are very few Muggle characters mentioned in canon, but again I think it takes a bit more explaining to pair Dudley with a magical person than with a Muggle.

As I said, there was no minimum fic length, so it is interesting that the spread of word counts looks exactly the same as for fests with a 1000-word minimum. The one fic that was shorter than 1000 words was actually 944 words, so it wouldn't have taken much to bring it up if it had been necessary. The mode (largest bunch of fics) was at 2-3K words, which is actually longer than I would expect for a 1000-word minimum fest. This could also be because of the relatively long creation period, so that people who normally would have written a slightly shorter fic had leisure to expand their story a bit.