Richard Armitage fans make it into the annals of academic research: Were you quoted?

Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

I don’t know if anyone else remembers, but in 2012 and subsequent years a group of New Zealand academics were doing a study of the audience for the Hobbit trilogy that related to fans, marketing, perception of these, etc. Many of us answered questions from at least three surveys relating to our perceptions of the films. Today I (and I assume others) got an email from the researchers noting that the project is complete. The summary of their findings is found in this (somewhat expensive) book. There are some previews available of it at Google Books and some chapters of it available via open access at the university website.

If you’re not trained to read academic prose and/or don’t care about methodological issues for studying fans, much of this material probably won’t be of high interest to you. However, all of the articles include extensive first-person quotations of remarks by respondents, which are quite interesting to read (perhaps they quoted you!).

Overall, while “celebrity followers” (people like me who were primarily interested because of one of the actors involved in the film) represented a small proportion of respondents, Richard Armitage, the Richard Armitage fandom and RichardArmitageNet.com do appear in the research as much or more than any other actor. I didn’t dig deeply enough into the data to figure out if that was because the call to respond was posted prominently in our fandom media, or that we were actually over-represented in the “celebrity follower” sample. This information does, however, conform to my own general hypothesis that marketing to Armitage fans does not take up a significant amount of effort even in a blockbuster production like this, as we’re just too small of a market segment.

I thought this discussion of how expectations changed before and after TH: AUJ was interesting; most readers will want to skip past the methodological discussion and the review of previous research to the results. This piece discusses audience reactions to the (at the time highly contested) HFR shooting medium (celebrity followers and Armitage fans did not make up a noticeable or differentiable contingent in this group). This paper concludes that while the films were highly marketable, in the end they were not playable — most audiences were on some level disappointed with them. Again, the “celebrity follower” fan does not make an appearance as such in this paper, although the last fan quotation (apparently intended as somehow definitive by the authors), which refers to “fans of the film’s actors who are disrespectful to the story” did raise my hackles a bit. That informant thought the films split the fandom in a way she found intolerable. (I would say: it wasn’t the film, it was the fans themselves.) This paper discusses responses to the labor controversy between Warner Bros. (fanned by Jackson) and the New Zealand Parliament.

The main discussion of Armitage fans occurs in this paper about anticipation for the film. We’re included under G3, “celebrity followers.” (This is an earlier form of a chapter that ended up in the book, which makes reference to the “brooding presence of Richard Armitage as Dwarf prince Thorin Oakenshield” on p. 67; the book also references Armitage fans as frequent merchandise consumers.)

Here’s the snippet:

and

As far as I know I’m not quoted but that’s an accurate description of me and my responses as I remember them. I was 43 in 2012.

~ by Servetus on February 22, 2018.