Almost simultaneously, HBO Max and Amazon Prime has launched two hugely lavish fantasy series based on famous licenses: House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The latter in particular, however, has been embroiled in the whole woke debate, but a wider survey suggests it may be the series that has been best received - if only based on Twitter reactions.
Media company Wettfreunde (which is technically a betting company, but also does independent research) has published a report based on 375,000 Twitter messages using the official hashtags for each series to express an opinion.
Based on these responses, it is estimated that 35.3% of posts about House of the Dragon were overwhelmingly positive, 17.7% were negative and 47% were neutral or pessimistic. For Rings of Power, 47.3% of responses were positive, 19.9% negative and 32.8% neutral.
In terms of characters, Rhaenyra Targaryen was mentioned the most in 23.6% of messages, while Galadriel was mentioned the most in Rings of Power with 30.1% of messages. However, it should again be noted that this is only for Twitter, because although the amount of data is large, it is extremely difficult to gauge the overall opinions of the public from this - although it does give an indication.
Do you follow any of them and what do you think of them?