#silm stats

"Which character would protest the most about the fandom underestimating them" + "Which character would protest the most about the fandom overestimating them"

Protesting being overestimated got 267 votes, underestimated 189. I appreciate the positivity in the fandom. :)

"Alas! Nobody appreciates me!"

Fefe [42 votes] wins over Morgoth [38]. Interesting.

But I'm not that special!

148 votes for Elrond. I agree. He would.

[Edited because I found there are 2 more of them.]

That is: how many people love, like etc certain characters.

(Characters are sorted by likeability, which is defined as average of votes, counting love as 3, like as 1, dislike as -1, and hate as -3.)

Number of votes:

Yes, nobody loves Eol. Not even his mom. :,(

Only 6 people love Thingol. That would be Melian, Luthien, probably Beren, and some 3 Sindar. ;)

Also, Sauron is (slightly) more likeable than Beren. Finrod would disagree. :( However, it is because Sauron gets a lot of love, and Beren gets more toned down feelings (he got more "like" votes than any other character, but also more "indifferent").

If the overall likeability was instead defined with love and hate *2, not *3, Beren would go before Sauron. Sauron is loved (and despaired...), Beren is liked a lot.

Thingol and Turgon also are less liked than Sauron. Not many hate them, but many dislike them. But Turgon gets also a lot of likes.

Feanor is the most liked, but also second-most conflicted (of course Sauron wins this category too).

Percentages:

When we normalize by number of votes, Feanor gets most "conflicted", slightly more than Sauron. He still gets very little indifference, which is not surprising. Well, it is surprising that he got any.

Beren gets the most indifference, which does not surprise me personally. I don't find him very interesting as a character.

Combo chart:

In short: You somewhat agree with my intuition that "I won't let my brothers and father be doomed" was an important factor in the kinslayings.

Votes:

The winning option , when counted separately is:

for Maedhros: he will still do all the kinslayings (32 votes, to 29 "some" and "24" none)

for Maglor: some of the kinslaying (38 votes, to 20 for "all" and 27 for "none")

But the winning poll option is "both will do less kinslaying, but still some", with 16 votes.

Chart:

The nice part is that nobody voted on "captured by necromancy". :) It will change when we get to Celegorm, whom poll results await with fell purpose.

Well, tbh 13 people voted on "Maedhros stayed in Angband, Fingon brought back Something Else". So it's not all roses and Silmarils.

Anyway, charts:

Maglor: 121 votes (41%) for him returning to Aman, mostly early, with Elrond. 41 votes (14%) on him dying (half on reembodied), 89 on still wandering the earth (close to a tie on whether he got better emotionally), 8 on everlasting Darkness, which is as usual not a popular option (I agree), 35 on other.

Maedhros has more decisive results: 160 votes (73%) on him going to Mandos, vast majority on eventually reembodied. This option got the absolute majority of the poll. 27 votes on the dark options. 9 on "he didn't die, Pengolodh lies", 6 on lingering as a spirit, 4 on "was allowed to go Out because of the trauma. 12 on other.

As always, details under the cut.

Allergy warning: may contain cool hair.

Source polls: Námo; Manwë; Melkor|Morgoth; Mairon|Sauron; Finrod

Will I draw the results? Will I do something else interesting with the results? IDK. Maybe I will draw them holding lists of contents or whatever.

Interesting results:

Namo is equally happy about the thigs he can't share and sad about them (7 votes each). (Same as cloak and popcorn emoji). Also, he's most balanced, doesn't have a strong winning option.

Melkor contains mostly issues and getting punched. "Hatered and malice" is third on the list. Also, only the middle Silmaril got any votes (two). IDK how he was lefy with one... i guess the kinfi broke later.

Finrod has more kindness than philosophy (yes!), znd zero discretion, chill or harp. Also, a smaller percentage of cool hair than Námo. OK, hard to compete against a Vala.

Manwë is mostly birds, but also controversial decisions. More cool hair than Finrod, less than Námo.

Sauron got most votes on his poll. The magic is less important, important things are perfectionism and losing just as dramatic irony (or, to say it more, in-setting, hmm, fate) is going to hit him in the face.

Interestingly, the % of "have you considered not being a Dark Lord" content in both is similar: about 5%, which is the traditional margin of "impossible" both in D&D and statistics XD. sauron gets above the margin, Morgoth does not. Unsurprisingly. But still, they are closer than I would expect from the fandom. (Maybe if instead of "remorse?" I phrased it "Mairon did nothing wrong" or "babygirl" the % would be higher, but no, I don't regret my choice of poll options.).

[color coding: roughly looks/personality/activities but not for all, sometimes it's just "whatever seems to fit"]

(I hope I'm using the word "pageant" right)

Guys on the inside; one pie chart so that the difference in "other" answers shows nicely:

The guys got 113 people voting, the gals got 127. Pretty equal.

The ladies also got slightly more of "impossible to answer", which is kind of fair, as they all have full shapeshift, and I let Melkor enter the poll for guys and he's got no shapeshift in later part of the Silm (because glowing gems that deal you constant holy damage to your forehead was a great idea apparently), so it's different.

The ladies also got significantly higher % of "I disagree with the idea of this poll" (16.5% to 7.15) which, with how the society looks at women's looks, is understandable.

The winners!

Melkor got 24 votes (21.2%). Varda got 32 votes (25.2%). No, Melkor, this doesn't mean you get to dance with her. Second place: Irmo and Orome (each 11 votes / 9.7%); Vana (16 / 12.6%… I'm surprised she didn't win tbh), third place Yavanna (10 / 7.9%).

I will (hopefully) made another post, comparing this results to likeability and prayability (from previous polls).

Details

From this and that.

"Where did Feanor got the idea of Everlasting Darkness from?" got 75 voters, "What is the Everlasting Darkness?" got 260. Which is an interesting difference because the questions are rather similar, and the polls ran simultanously. Yet the other one proved much more interesting.

Charts:

Thoughts:

Everlasting Darkness is the Void sweeps (147 votes, 56.5%, majority), with much more votes (78% of those 147) adding "but it is not outer space". Interestingly, in my "where was Morgoth thrown into and how" poll on @morgoth-into-the-void-week, 70.6% voters say he was thrown out of space and time (so, the void ≠ space), and 28.3% equates the coid with some area of (normal, physical) space. Which is a pretty similar proportion, and that is nice, because it means that you are consistent in your voting :)

The second winning option is "nobody knows".

Also, 26 votes for Everlasting Darkness not being true (at least mostly), 170 for it being real and rather precise, 21 for vegue options, 10 for a custom answer. (TBH, I may be misinterpreting some of the votes here, the options were sometimes fuzzy.)

As to how Feanor learned about it, there is no clear winner. "Directly from Melkor" (did they even talk this much?) + "it is an originally elven concept" are tied on the first place, with "indirectly from Melkor" just a stap behind them.

If I were to create a HC matching the poll, I would say Melkor told Fenor and other Elves about the Void, but the name "Everlasting Darkness" was something present in their culture from the beginning (because they're focused on stars etc) and those two concepts merged into one.

In the first poll, there were 33.3% (25 votes) for the concept coming from Melkor. In the second poll, only 1.9% (5 votes) for "Melkor made it up", so apparently he spoke about it but didn't make it up. He was at least partially telling the truth. This happens sometimes.

Detailed votes:

That poll where I asked whether you're religious and whether you prefer Manwe or Melkor. The results are not surprising, but not extremely strong. Also, exactly 100 people voted which saved me one step of the process (converting % to number of votes).

Thank you everybody for voting! I mean, thank you in general, for all the polls, but this one had a rather personal question, and still got many votes. So, thank you especially for this.

1/3 of people in my reach identify as religious, 1/2 as non-religious. Also, a bit above 1/2 voters prefer Manwe, and a bit below 1/3 prefer Melkor. However, the correlation isn't as strong as one may expect.

(Also, the beginning was a "religious" sweep, I wonder if it's a matter of a particular hour or something else (more direct reach?) One day when I'm out of ideas for Silm posts, I may try to check it.)

Religious people prefer Manwe or (both? none?). Other options have a mor even split between those two, and fewer undecided votes.

When we compare results if those two variables were independent with the actual results, we get:

People who identify as religious don't prefer Melkor to Manwe. Which is not surprising. (They do, however, have a bit more of equal preference votes, as other groups. Which is still not much.) The other differences follow from this, I guess.

Edit: I think I finally figured out how to do a chi squared... and turns out that the result above is not statistically significant. Huh.

I wonder if the "equal" was more "both" or "none" or varied. I may do a 3x3 poll on "religious / like Manwe" and "religious / like Melkor". (No, those questions aren't absurd or as obvious as they seem.) Or I may not, I have a poll ongoing that may help solve this mystery.