The nexus of fandom and logic (was: A little experiment)

I see what Coop is doing here and I don't think it will work very well. That said I did fill it out and have to wonder how many people ranked things 1 and 10 (two rankings which I did not use for I don't consider any EU to be great literature nor total drivel) out of spite and "affection" towards certain authors and other users.

 

Oh come now, this is all relative...a 10 there is not indicating that you put something on par with classic literature...it just means you offer a supremo status relative to other EU.

And there are things in EU which deserve zeros, so a 1 can be perfectly satisfactory...unless you score a minimum of 2 because they got the page numbering in order.

If you scored it based on what you think is desired from the results...or the opposite...you're not serving the purpose of the survey...have fun with it!

 

The only things I rated 10 were things like Shatterpoint where the immediate reaction is "pure awesome!" The only thing that got a one was SWDBPODANOTOR, because the immediate reaction was, well, 0, but 1 was the best I could do.

 

How do I rate question nineteen?

'Cause Jacen never got any Potentium training from Vergere.

 

Me too. I took it to mean the "return" in the HoT, which was good, but not original Thrawn good.

 

filled it out. Hopefully you will get enough feedback to tell us if your hypothesis was proven or disproven.

 

*shrugs* To me a 10 means either perfect or transcendent and a 1 means abysmal. I know some people like handing out perfect scores, but I see major problems in even my favorite materials, ie the Thrawn Trilogy and Shatterpoint, which if I'm honest with myself knocks them down to a 9 at the most. And since GoDV was not on the list I didn't have any mental debate about one vs two.

And I was merely pointing out that many people tend to rank things like "Zahn 10 and Stover 0", etc. or vice versa just to be morons. I spent a bit of time on the imdb boards and there were always people trying to convince people to give films like LotR a 1 to knock it down in the rankings and in my experience it always happens when fans get their hands on surveys like this one.

 

Except for Barbara Hambly's two novels, mostly Children of the Jedi which I HATED, I've enjoyed everything I've read.

 

I'll guess, and I'll probably be wrong.

But I would say that it has to do with how fans perceive the NJO versus LOTF for the most part, and how much people read hard covers vs. soft covers or the big books versus the fillers.

One other angle could be the amount of violence and realism in the novel - as we see the deaths of major characters. Or, how we rate events that happen in books as compared to the book.

Chewie's death - Vector Prime
Vergere's training - Traitor Novel
Anakin Solo's Death - Star By Star
Jacen becomes a sith lord - Betrayal
Mara's death - Sacrifice
Luke going to the dark side - Dark empire (I said don't know for this, since I couldn't remember which book he went to the Dark side in and never read it).
Shatterpoint?
Return of Thrawn?
Dark Empire Trilogy?
Dark Tide Novels?



One equestion Cooper - after you submit it, is it supposed to automatically go to your blog?
I can't wait to find out the results.

 

I had it forward to the blog, just because the system isn't designed to create a results page - which is good, because I don't want them public yet.

And no comment on everybody's guesses, except to say that they're almost as interesting as the results themselves...

 

I thought it was referring to his "return" in the HoT duology, too. *sigh* Subtract two points from the total, please.

- lazy

 

So, what do you "see" that he's doing?

Come on, I don't want to be the only one throwing out crazy guesses.

Other possibility would be the correlation between your feelings and your chosen screen name, but that would be just silly as I don't think the computer is tracking that.... (I hope!)

 

There definitely is a lot of that, but when you get enough responses, it still evens out more or less realistically.

 

^ Yeah, that's pretty much how polling in general works.

 

Statistics include difficult mathematics that I ahev happily forgotten the ady after the test. I know there is some way to balance extremes, forgot how that worked, though.

Maybe it's just a test of how far we read. Everything that gets 'Don't kow' is rated as 'not read' and then we see how many people have read how far.
Or how much more emotional the voting is for events in contrast to books. Like: Mara dies: OMG!!!+1 -> highly emotional; Sacrifice: okay -> not that emotional.

Though, I do like the username theory best so far.

 

Perhaps it's something along the lines of how we rate certain moments when compared to the story that they were in overall? If I remember correctly, most of the moments on the list also had the book they were in on there.

 

I've submitted my answers. Most were high really, but only a few got nines and tens. Look forward to finding out what the results show!

 

Lies!

 

My theory? How we rate events based on what we've actually read.

 

I submitted my take on it yesterday.

 

Okay - for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the results are coming in more and more slowly as the news post drifts further downstream at TFN, I'm gonna cut the deadline in half, from two weeks to one. Anyone who still wants to fill it out has until the end of the day on Monday the 11th (or thereabouts, depending on when I have a chance to turn it off )

Oh, and...no one's quite got it yet.

 

Same goes for me.

 

Despite all of the kvetching of Del Rey and Bantam over the years, the ratings will be distributed equally between the two eras.

 

I'm being serious (if a bit pedantic ).

What I'm asking, Coop, is do you mean "Potentium training" in the literal sense, or the fanon sense?

(And yeah, I know which one, but like I said, I'm being a pain, since this is a peeve of mine. )