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bring the pain, hardcore from the brain.
Aug. 2nd, 2007 12:44 pmWhich is the Best Fantasy Series, Facebook asks.
The response:
Harry Potter (57%)
Lord of the Rings (32%)
Chronicles of Narnia (11%)
So I'm thinking, really? What the hell? Luckily Facebook is good enough to break down the responses by age and gender, and then it all becomes clear. 53.6% of the respondents were female, and an alarming 36.9% were between the ages of 13 and 17 (how are these people on Facebook?).
The female vote breakdown looks like this:
Harry Potter: 66%
Lord of the Rings: 18% (!!!)
Chronicles of Narnia: 13%
The male vote breakdown looks like this:
Lord of the Rings: 48%
Harry Potter: 45%
Chronicles of Narnia: 7%
Ages 13-17:
Harry Potter: 64%
Lord of the Rings: 23%
Chronicles of Narnia: 12%
Ages 18-24:
Harry Potter: 55%
Lord of the Rings: 36%
Chronicles of Narnia: 9%
Ages 25-34:
Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings (tie): 41%
Chronicles of Narnia: 18%
Ages 35-49:
Lord of the Rings: 56%
Harry Potter: 32%
Chronicles of Narnia: 12%
Needless to say, this greatly disappoints and worries me. I suppose Lord of the Rings is seen as too masculine, too military-based, and too "old" and "boring". No teenagers. Very little romance (for the ladies, who apparently only judge a book on this quality). Perhaps there are too few female role models. Maybe it also reflects that many women only started paying attention to fantasy in the last five years, when Harry Potter came out and the Lord of the Rings movies came out. If Grendel's Mother is any indication, Harry Potter is preferable to these normal American girls who are used to reading Gossip Girl and Jane Austen or not reading at all. She is planning on reading all seven in thirty days after having seen all the movies and cooed over Hermione's Yule Ball transformation. But when she saw that we were watching Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on her television freshman year, she said, "What is on my television?!" Yes, it happened to be orcs, but still.
I don't even know what to say about the Chronicles of Narnia thing. You know, Chronicles of Narnia getting 13% of the female vote, only five percentage points below Lord of the Rings. I mean, that just defies reason. To be fair I do remember liking some of those books when I was little - I liked Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair. But others could not hold my attention - Prince Caspian, The Horse and His Boy. After my mother randomly snapped one day that all my fantasy books had female villains I started becoming sensitive to that - perhaps that's because the writers are male, and afraid of women? Who knows. Then I couldn't even pay attention to The Last Battle, so I skipped to the end and found out they were all dead and now they could be with Aslan forever. And that scared the shit out of me. And later on I started realizing that the Christian allegory in the Chronicles of Narnia was overbearing, and... and goddamn, if there's a series without strong female characters, isn't it this one?
So what is it between Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings? There are more ugly monsters in Lord of the Rings. There are no children or adolescents. Battle scenes are much more extended, with lots of troops on either side. There's no chitchat, not a lot of banter, and of course, there are three female characters, and they get very little screen time. It's more medieval. There are more consequences, and more travel, more diversity of place and people. There's more strategy involved. Arguably less magic.
Lord of the Rings carries the stench of geek-dom, of nerdiness. J.R.R. Tolkien is dead, his stories were printed years ago, and they have largely only been known to the nerds of any given time and place (although they are canon to nerds). Even when Peter Jackson converted them into critically-acclaimed Christmas blockbusters with impressive casts and the best special effects in cinema to date, and the entire social hierarchy flocked to see the trilogy, they still carried that old smell. I suppose it smells like retainers and gym socks, to the popular kids (especially the girls, who cannot be told by their fathers that this is epic battle stuff, just like World War II, and it's about men being men and all that). So while they still spent the money, and will probably give the movies a thumbs-up, they remember - this is the stuff that those freaks in the Sci Fi Club like, right? And then it becomes a joke - haha, the Sci Fi nerds and their dwarves and stupid card games and their inability to get girlfriends. Harry Potter, by contrast, came first by book, and with intense marketing drives to put them in all libraries, in all bookstores, to get readers who are not yet in the high school stratum but still wandering around under close scrutiny of teachers and parents who will do anything to get them reading - middle school, and elementary school. Harry Potter is new, fun, magical, current, and written to grow up along with his readers. Coming of age, colorful, relatable. Harry Potter was not uncool, not where I went to school. After all, Harry and his friends are the ruling elite of Hogwarts, and they're the good guys to top it off - absolutely perfect. And untainted by fifty years of sitting on a bookshelf with a gray-haired wizard on the cover.
The response:
Harry Potter (57%)
Lord of the Rings (32%)
Chronicles of Narnia (11%)
So I'm thinking, really? What the hell? Luckily Facebook is good enough to break down the responses by age and gender, and then it all becomes clear. 53.6% of the respondents were female, and an alarming 36.9% were between the ages of 13 and 17 (how are these people on Facebook?).
The female vote breakdown looks like this:
Harry Potter: 66%
Lord of the Rings: 18% (!!!)
Chronicles of Narnia: 13%
The male vote breakdown looks like this:
Lord of the Rings: 48%
Harry Potter: 45%
Chronicles of Narnia: 7%
Ages 13-17:
Harry Potter: 64%
Lord of the Rings: 23%
Chronicles of Narnia: 12%
Ages 18-24:
Harry Potter: 55%
Lord of the Rings: 36%
Chronicles of Narnia: 9%
Ages 25-34:
Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings (tie): 41%
Chronicles of Narnia: 18%
Ages 35-49:
Lord of the Rings: 56%
Harry Potter: 32%
Chronicles of Narnia: 12%
Needless to say, this greatly disappoints and worries me. I suppose Lord of the Rings is seen as too masculine, too military-based, and too "old" and "boring". No teenagers. Very little romance (for the ladies, who apparently only judge a book on this quality). Perhaps there are too few female role models. Maybe it also reflects that many women only started paying attention to fantasy in the last five years, when Harry Potter came out and the Lord of the Rings movies came out. If Grendel's Mother is any indication, Harry Potter is preferable to these normal American girls who are used to reading Gossip Girl and Jane Austen or not reading at all. She is planning on reading all seven in thirty days after having seen all the movies and cooed over Hermione's Yule Ball transformation. But when she saw that we were watching Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on her television freshman year, she said, "What is on my television?!" Yes, it happened to be orcs, but still.
I don't even know what to say about the Chronicles of Narnia thing. You know, Chronicles of Narnia getting 13% of the female vote, only five percentage points below Lord of the Rings. I mean, that just defies reason. To be fair I do remember liking some of those books when I was little - I liked Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair. But others could not hold my attention - Prince Caspian, The Horse and His Boy. After my mother randomly snapped one day that all my fantasy books had female villains I started becoming sensitive to that - perhaps that's because the writers are male, and afraid of women? Who knows. Then I couldn't even pay attention to The Last Battle, so I skipped to the end and found out they were all dead and now they could be with Aslan forever. And that scared the shit out of me. And later on I started realizing that the Christian allegory in the Chronicles of Narnia was overbearing, and... and goddamn, if there's a series without strong female characters, isn't it this one?
So what is it between Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings? There are more ugly monsters in Lord of the Rings. There are no children or adolescents. Battle scenes are much more extended, with lots of troops on either side. There's no chitchat, not a lot of banter, and of course, there are three female characters, and they get very little screen time. It's more medieval. There are more consequences, and more travel, more diversity of place and people. There's more strategy involved. Arguably less magic.
Lord of the Rings carries the stench of geek-dom, of nerdiness. J.R.R. Tolkien is dead, his stories were printed years ago, and they have largely only been known to the nerds of any given time and place (although they are canon to nerds). Even when Peter Jackson converted them into critically-acclaimed Christmas blockbusters with impressive casts and the best special effects in cinema to date, and the entire social hierarchy flocked to see the trilogy, they still carried that old smell. I suppose it smells like retainers and gym socks, to the popular kids (especially the girls, who cannot be told by their fathers that this is epic battle stuff, just like World War II, and it's about men being men and all that). So while they still spent the money, and will probably give the movies a thumbs-up, they remember - this is the stuff that those freaks in the Sci Fi Club like, right? And then it becomes a joke - haha, the Sci Fi nerds and their dwarves and stupid card games and their inability to get girlfriends. Harry Potter, by contrast, came first by book, and with intense marketing drives to put them in all libraries, in all bookstores, to get readers who are not yet in the high school stratum but still wandering around under close scrutiny of teachers and parents who will do anything to get them reading - middle school, and elementary school. Harry Potter is new, fun, magical, current, and written to grow up along with his readers. Coming of age, colorful, relatable. Harry Potter was not uncool, not where I went to school. After all, Harry and his friends are the ruling elite of Hogwarts, and they're the good guys to top it off - absolutely perfect. And untainted by fifty years of sitting on a bookshelf with a gray-haired wizard on the cover.
