#multi book

[janeaustenpolls]

If you had to be stuck in an elevator for 3 hours with one of these characters, who would you pick?

Mr. Collins

Mrs. (Augusta) Elton

John Thorpe

Miss (Anne) Steele

Sir Walter Elliot

Mrs. Norris

Voting ended onSep 23, 2025

[korrcsami]

the krew + first and last appearances

[janeaustenpolls]

Results!!!✨

The first batch of polls has closed, so we now have Official Scientific Data™️ on the quality of Jane Austen's main love interests!

Notes for context:

Respondents were asked to rate each man "as a person and love interest," which I intended to mean general likeableness (and/or dateableness) as opposed to how well-written a character he was.

The polls also asked people to base their ratings on the books only, not on any adaptations -- "see results" explicitly included not having read the book or not remembering it well enough.

Did people follow those instructions? who's to say. but make no mistake these are Official Binding Scientific Results.

Here they are, with the "see results" responses taken out. (Image description under the cut at the very end, didn't want anyone to be stuck listening to 42 numbers in alt text)

Some takeaways:

Darcy is the most liked overall: he has the most total positive responses (would date + love + like all count as positive). He also has the fewest negative responses, aka he's the least disliked. Quite impressive for the guy who's supposed to be unlikeable for the first half of the book!

Tilney is far and away the most dateable -- at least according to tumblr users, so take that for what it's worth.

Otherwise, Tilney, Wentworth, and Knightley are about equally well-liked, with Brandon trailing them. While the former three all got around 5% negative (dislike+hate) votes, Brandon doubled that with over 10% dislikes.

Edward the unfuckable, poor lad. It's not his fault Austen didn't write any of his romantic scenes. But he's not just milquetoast boring, he got quite a lot of negative responses too!

Edmund, with a whopping 30% negative responses, is still more dateable than Edward.

Edmund is simultaneously the most and least polarizing, depending on how you want to look at it: on the one hand, he got way more neutral "he's OK" votes than anyone else, but on the other hand, if you wanted to start as many 1v1 arguments as possible, Edmund would be the best choice to bring up (because he has a sizeable number of both positive and negative responses).

Finally, I wanted to show the percentage of "see results" votes for each man because they surprised me!

I had expected "see results" to mostly be used by people who hadn't read the book but were familiar enough with the man in question to be curious about the results -- in other words, I expected it to be higher for the men from books with beloved screen adaptations. We got pretty much the opposite of that! (unless y'all are out there watching Billie Piper Mansfield Park for reasons unknown lmao)

Image description for the first chart under the cut:

Image #1: A stacked bar chart showing the responses for each poll.

Darcy:  Would Date: 15%, Love: 41%, Like: 34%, He's OK: 8%, Dislike: 2%, Hate: 0%.

Tilney:  Would Date: 29%, Love: 31%, Like: 24%, He's OK: 11%, Dislike: 5%, Hate: 1%.

Wentworth:  Would Date: 16%, Love: 35%, Like: 33%, He's OK: 12%, Dislike: 5%, Hate: 0%.

Knightley:  Would Date: 13%, Love: 32%, Like: 35%, He's OK: 13%, Dislike: 3%, Hate: 3%.

Brandon:  Would Date: 14%, Love: 23%, Like: 35%, He's OK: 16%, Dislike: 12%, Hate: 0%.

Edward:  Would Date: 2%, Love: 10%, Like: 35%, He's OK: 38%, Dislike: 10%, Hate: 6%.

Edmund:  Would Date: 5%, Love: 2%, Like: 11%, He's OK: 52%, Dislike: 23%, Hate: 7%.

End image description.

[korrcsami]

i’ll always love you, korra.

[janeaustenpolls]

Protagonist popularity results!✨

Happy new year everyone!

This batch of polls was a follow-up to the first batch about the main love interests. I kept the response options exactly the same so we could do direct comparisons.

Notes for context:

Respondents were asked to rate each protagonist "as a person, not as a character" (which is what I intended on the love-interest polls as well but it was a little more explicit this time.)

The polls also asked people to base their ratings on the books only, not on any adaptations -- "see results" explicitly included not having read the book or not remembering it well enough.

As before, who knows whether people followed the instructions -- tbh I personally found it harder to separate my opinions on "as person" vs "as character" for the protags than for the love interests. Regardless, these are Official and Binding.

Here they are, with the "see results" responses taken out. (Image description under the cut at the very end, didn't want anyone to be stuck listening to 42 numbers in alt text)

Some takeaways:

Anne is the most liked overall, with 90% positive responses (would date + love + like all count as positive). Elizabeth, Catherine, and Elinor are all in the 80-90% range, Emma at 75%, and Fanny and Marianne both in the low 60s.

Unsurprisingly, the top 4 most-liked are also the least-disliked, at or under 5% dislikers with no haters. The bottom 4 have notably more dislikers but still basically no haters -- very different picture from the men!

Fanny seems like the biggest surprise, I feel like she's stereotypically disliked a lot? Not by tumblr, apparently! 10% is nothing compared to Edmund, and she got way more love than Marianne.

And we can't let it go unmentioned that while Emma got the most dislikes, she's very far from living up to the prediction by Jane Austen of "a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like."

Anne is the most dateable protagonist, but didn't come close to Tilney (who got 30% dateable). Catherine and Marianne are the least dateable. (Obligatory disclaimer that the tumblr userbase is not representative of general dating preferences at large.)

Nobody on here is as polarizing as Edmund, but Emma just beats Marianne for most polarizing protagonist (with the metric I used last time of being able to start the most 1v1 arguments between positive and negative respondents).

To help us compare with the love interests, here's a combined version showing the couples next to each other, formatted to focus on the overall positive and negative spreads. (Image description under the cut)

The most striking differences are of course between Elinor & Edward and Fanny & Edmund; those guys definitely married up personality-wise. (As did Wentworth, but less significantly.) Lizzy, Emma, and Marianne were all slightly beaten out by their respective love interests. Catherine and Tilney are almost perfectly tied, although with a massive difference between would-date and love.

For completeness's sake, here's the percentage of "see results" votes. (Description in alt text for this one)

As with the men, this definitely doesn't correlate with popularity of screen adaptations, as I had originally expected would be the case if people wanted to see the results for a book they hadn't read. It somewhat correlates with controversy, so maybe it's a lot of undecided/nuance votes. No particular correlation between the couples either (except that Lizzy & Darcy both had the least see-results) so I won't bother posting a chart for that.

Thanks for voting, and as always, feel free to suggest poll ideas!

Image description for the first two charts under the cut:

Image #1: A stacked bar chart showing the responses for each poll.

Anne:  Would Date: 20%, Love: 57%, Like: 13%, She's OK: 7%, Dislike: 3%, Hate: 0%.

Elizabeth:  Would Date: 11%, Love: 49%, Like: 26%, She's OK: 9%, Dislike: 5%, Hate: 0%.

Catherine:  Would Date: 2%, Love: 52%, Like: 30%, She's OK: 11%, Dislike: 5%, Hate: 0%.

Elinor:  Would Date: 5%, Love: 47%, Like: 30%, She's OK: 13%, Dislike: 5%, Hate: 0%.

Emma:  Would Date: 7%, Love: 27%, Like: 40%, She's OK: 11%, Dislike: 13%, Hate: 0%.

Fanny:  Would Date: 4%, Love: 31%, Like: 27%, She's OK: 27%, Dislike: 9%, Hate: 1%.

Marianne:  Would Date: 2%, Love: 14%, Like: 48%, She's OK: 24%, Dislike: 12%, Hate: 1%.

End image description #1.

Image #2:

A stacked bar chart showing the same data with each protagonist's love interest's data underneath hers. The bars are formatted such that Date, Love, and Like are combined, and Dislike and Hate are combined. OK is a transparent gap.

Anne:  Positive: 90%, Negative: 10%.

Wentworth:  Positive: 84%, Negative: 16%.

Elizabeth:  Positive: 86%, Negative: 14%.

Darcy:  Positive: 90%, Negative: 10%.

Catherine:  Positive: 84%, Negative: 16%.

Tilney:  Positive: 84%, Negative: 16%.

Elinor:  Positive: 82%, Negative: 18%.

Edward:  Positive: 46%, Negative: 54%.

Emma:  Positive: 75%, Negative: 25%.

Knightley:  Positive: 81%, Negative: 19%.

Fanny:  Positive: 63%, Negative: 37%.

Edmund:  Positive: 18%, Negative: 82%.

Marianne:  Positive: 64%, Negative: 36%.

Brandon:  Positive: 72%, Negative: 28%.

End image description #2.