Just wondering

Is this true? It doesn’t tally with my observations, but I try to minimize my exposure to popular culture.

Something that is often forgotten about J.K. Rowling’s books/movies is that while they started out being almost equally popular among girls and boys (the authoress chose old-fashioned initials to hide her sex from little girl-hating he-men), by the time the eighth and (sort of) final movie in the series finally came out, their appeal was almost wholly to girls, just as J.R.R. Tolkien’s fans are overwhelmingly male.

The bit about Tolkien fans would be news to the rat maiden at the too-long-idle Quenta Nârwenion.

One thought on “Just wondering”

  1. Shifting the goalposts from “first book popularity” to “final movie popularity” makes the claim basically impossible to evaluate. Even if you restricted it to the books, how is “popularity” being evaluated? Sales figures around the world won’t tell you anything, and pollsters can’t get good access to children (fortunately), so do you troll social media and guess gender on fan forums, do head-counts at cons, publicity events, and movie premieres, what?

    My guess is that a lot of the supposed evidence is social-media based, which would tend to bias the results in favor of girls.

    As for Tolkien, the word “overwhelmingly” just reeks of wild-assed guessing, probably based on believing that the movies are the primary source of modern fans, and that they appealed only to men because of all the fighting. (which brings to mind comments from the producers of the Highlander TV series, which de-emphasized the head-chopping when they discovered the majority of their fans were women drooling over Duncan and Methos…)

    -j

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