#note to self: last updated 04/11/2023

[broomsticks]

Marauders era femslash ship stats

aka what the hell is a dorlene

Some stats focusing exclusively on the 15 ships between the six characters Alice Longbottom, Dorcas Meadowes, Emmeline Vance, Lily Evans Potter, Marlene McKinnon, and Mary Macdonald -- namely all the female characters that appeared in the Order of the Phoenix photo taken in summer 1981 (the former 5) or canonically known to have been in Gryffindor House at the same time as the Marauders (last).

Omission of Pandora Lovegood, Amelia Bones, Black sisters and Hogwarts faculty (incl. Sybil Trelawney) was intentional, but other thoughts/suggestions welcome!

other notes/caveats: works on AO3, stats gathered April 2023.

an overview:

• • •

the first question I was interested in looking at: just how overrepresented in Marauders femslash shipping are Dorlene and Marylily some ships?

Lily and Marlene are the two most-written-about characters on this list, with 42k and 12k works respectively. Dorcas and Mary are both close at 8.5k, and there are comparatively very few fics about Alice (4.7k) and Emmeline (1.5k).

that in itself is interesting and curious considering there's comparable amounts of canon info about Dorcas and Marlene (next to none), a smidge more about Emmeline, and definitely more about Mary and Alice. some suggestions there about what drives fanon popularity, at least within the 2020s HP fandom!

dorlene!

interesting -- it might feel like there's a ton of marylily, but that's actually 'just about the amount we would expect to see if they were all shipped with each other at random, with equal frequencies.'* good to know!

significant lack of alice in these marauders era pairings

also that's quite the overrepresentation of mary/emmeline! (proportionally, for two very minor characters.)

*: i really like this analysis method and might try to apply this to All The Marauders Gen(TM), and maybe make some observations about M/M vs F/M vs F/F shipping. note to self!

some % over- or under-representation. lazy to explain the logic but it's essentially observed/expected similar to that above, "how much more or less do two characters appear shipped together based on what would be expected by how often they're each tagged", where 1 would be the 'baseline' of "these characters are shipped together exactly as often as would be expected", <1 is "less than expected" and >1 "more than expected".

dorlene centralization

marylily overtook lily/marlene

many mary femslash ships growing

alice is really not shipped with this crowd hahaha

• • •

on a different note,

for comparison, the OTP:true % for wolfstar is 43%, drarry 70%, jily 23%, and jegulus 22%. the average otp:true % for the top 5 ships here is 8.9%.

most of these femslash ships are written alongside wolfstar and to a lesser extent jily, more so than jegulus...

...with the biiig exception of lily/mary, which was notably different from most femslash ships in the lack of overlap with jily and 80% overlap with jegulus.

surprising and unexpected: the overlap of dorcas/emmeline with jily, and mary/emmeline with dorlene.

i would love to do a change over time but i'd have to get sO MANY STATS that realistically idt this is happening

• • •

"overall average" looks identical to dorlene, which makes up 70% of the fics here.

this is not filtered for otp:true or for f/f excluding m/m and f/m, so more stats needed to determine whether this relatively low % of E fic is exclusively a femslash phenomenon or a more general marauders subfandom trend.

(alice/marlene, the ship with the highest % of E fic, is one of the ships with a relatively high otp:true %, but with 11 fics total i'm not sure how much we can conclude from this.)

also not too sure what to make of the (in my opinion?) high? percentage of NR fics.

• • •

my very rough attempt to quantify 'average age of ship' -- getting a "date at which which half the existing works in the ship tag on ao3 were posted updated."

Dorcas/Emmeline: 2019/04

Alice/Lily: 2020/05

Emmeline/Marlene: 2020/08

Emmeline/Lily: 2021/02

Lily/Marlene: 2021/03

Alice/Marlene: 2021/04

Dorcas/Mary: 2021/07

Dorcas/Marlene: 2021/08

Emmeline/Mary: 2021/09

Marlene/Mary: 2021/09

Dorcas/Lily: 2021/12

Lily/Mary: 2022/01

all dates obviously veerrryy rough.

• • •

Conclusions:

there isn't actually an overrepresentation of lily/mary (*within the very specific parameters of this study etcetc)

dorlene centralization over time

these marauders femslash ship fics are mostly also wolfstar fics

marylily fics are mostly also jegulus fics

lack of E rated fics?

some interesting differences in 'average age of ship'