So I’m not the biggest fan of the whole, how much of the fanbase actually likes something debate, cause it’s often difficult to actually gage something like this, and just because someone’s opinion doesn’t match with the majority doesn’t mean that said opinion is invalid, just that it’s not with the majority. However, if we want to get into the discussion on whether a show is popular or not the best we can do is go to several review aggregate sites and look at the ratings so that we’re not just throwing out opinions that we don’t know the validity of because obviously, people who liked a particular show would say that most people enjoyed it. So I went and collected the data from aggregate review sites, and I’m only looking at the audience ratings and if the site gives a number of how many people reviewed it I’ll post that as well. So IMDB has around 7.1 with 2.9K reviews, Google Users has 84% liking the show, Rotten Tomatoes has it at 64%, Metacritic has 6.6 user rating with 1,981 reviews, and letterbox has it at 3.3/5 with 103,883 reviews. If we take these numbers then we can say that the majority of people did in fact like Obi-Wan, but the fact that the approval rating is only around 65 would imply that people more than likely thought the show was just OK. That’s not an extremely good rating, but it does go to show that most people don’t feel that strongly about the show one way or the other, but that they’re more positive about it than not. Again I don’t really like this whole discussion but if we’re going to be claiming that a majority of people did or did not like something then it should probably be backed up by actually going and looking at the data we have available. And again no opinions are really invalid so even if someone disagrees with the majority that opinion is still completely valid.
This post is very good, and a reminder that what we often see often reddit or YouTube isn’t necessarily fact, or even accurate of the bigger picture. There is far more information to be taken into account than a subset of online fandom, including channels with their own biases and audience appeal. No matter how popular people think these channels are.