This year Geek Native had two copies of Danie Ware’s Children of Artifice to giveaway in a competition. To win a copy of the fantasy novel readers had to have an address in the UK and answer a question about their choice of lead character in a fantasy story.
We asked whether or not competition contestants preferred either a male or female lead character and we also asked whether they were male, female or non-binary.
If you want to check out other non-scientific surveys like this that Geek Native has run then preview the stats tag archive on the blog. This section is home to a whole bunch of quirky surveys. The disclaimer ‘non-scientific’ is always used as the sample size is rarely over 200 and in almost every case correspondents were entering a competition rather than carefully picked from non-bias sources.
In this survey, we had nearly 200 respondents and 1% identified as non-binary, 70% as female and 29% as male.
Men prefer women, women prefer men as lead characters
This survey was close, but 52.8% of male respondents said they prefer lead female characters in fantasy novels. 51.2% of female respondents said they prefer lead male characters.
The overall results are even tighter. 100% of the non-binary respondents said they prefer fantasy stories where the lead character was female. The final results are;
I prefer lead female characters in fantasy stories: 50.55%
I prefer lead male characters in fantasy stories: 49.45%
Which do you prefer?
What about you? Do you prefer a lead male or female character? Perhaps it makes no difference to you.
Creative Commons credit: Intruder by Jason.
