SwissMiss' Creativity Outlet

Gosh, it's been a while since I've done one of these. I'm not sure I remember how, hahaha!

Fest community: hp_harlequin
Master List: Here
Fest type: Anonymous prompt-and-claim
Premise: In the style of Harlequin romance novels
Ratings restrictions: All ratings allowed
Length restrictions: Minimum 1,000 words, no maximum
Creation period: 2 months



There were 28 fanworks created by 25 participants. nerakrose and naturegirlrocks each created 2 fanarts and drarryxlover wrote 2 fics.

Art: 11
Fic: 17

Ratio of art to fic: 65%

By rating:

Art
G - iii
PG - 0
PG-13 - iii
R - iiii
NC-17 - i

Fic
G - ii
PG - iii
PG-13 – iiii
PG-15 - i
R - i
NC-17 – iiiii i

By length:

1-2K - 0
2-3K - ii
3-4K - ii
4-5K - ii
5-6K - iii
6-7K - 0
7-8K - 0
8-9K - 0
9-10K - ii
10-15K - iii
15-20K - ii
20K+ - i

The shortest fic was 2,200 words long. The longest fic was 41,000 words long (24% of the total words written).

Total words written: 169,788 words
Mean: 9,987 words
Median: 5,543 words
Mode: 5-6K

By alignment:

Slash - 22
Het - 6

Most popular characters:
Number of times featured in a main pairing

Draco - 22
Harry - 17
Hermione, Severus - 3 each
Albus II, James II, Luna, Scorpius - 2 each

Most popular pairings:
Number of times featured as a main pairing

Draco/Harry - 17
Hermione/Severus, James II/Scorpius - 2 each

Some thoughts: Well, for a first time fest, this did extremely well. In an era of generally declining fest participation, this garnered 25 participants, which is a solid number even for well-established fests outside of the really huge ones like hd_holidays or sshg_exchange. The positive explosion of art was a big bonus. I've only rarely seen an art-to-fic ratio that high (not trolling through all my past posts to check though).

The ratings were fairly evenly split between tame (up to PG-13: 54%) and smutty (46%). Even the art, which is usually lower rated than fics in a fest, showed the same range of ratings.

The word counts showed an interesting split, with a clear break between 6,000 and 9,000 words. 53% of the fics were in the lower word count group, and 47% in the higher word count group. And of course, there is the one author whose muse just took off with them, ending up with a whopping 41,000-word fic in two months of writing. (And it was based on one of the prompts that I submitted ;).)

Slash was by far the preferred genre, due largely to the flood of Harry/Draco fanworks. In fact, Harry/Draco accounted for 61% of all submissions, and even 74% of the slash submissions. This is not entirely surprising, given the general popularity of that pairing in fandom, although it would have been nice to see a bit more diversity.

One other interesting note about Draco and Harry is that Harry only appeared paired with Draco, but Draco appeared in several other pairings as well, including one het pairing (Draco/Luna).

The Next Generation of slashers made a secondary showing, with Albus II, James II, and Scorpius being among the top 8 characters, and James II/Scorpius the second most popular pairing.