Sunday is Fathers Day. But you knew that right? Well, just like we did for moms a few months ago, we’ve put together a Power Grid of the 10 Best Geeky Dads. From superheroes to samurai, and even a lion and a badger, they’ve all mastered the tricky role of fatherhood.
See our metrics and other observations below.
Metrics
- Web Buzz: How many Google results for the character.
- Wikipedia Pageviews: How many times their Wikipedia page was viewed last month, courtesy of stats.grok.se.
- Parental Difficulty: Exactly how hard of a row they had to hoe. Sometimes you’ve got a tough job and a normal kid. Sometimes you’ve got a normal job and a kid who is the antichrist.
- Parental Success: Exactly how well they hoed said row. Sometimes even good fathers can’t keep their kids from going out every night dressed like a rodent and punching criminals in the face.
Observations:
This Power Grid was especially interesting to put together after the Moms PowerGrid. Even though the science fiction and fantasy genres have many more male major characters than female, there was a significant dearth of positive father figures. The absent, terrible, or dead-and-in-need-of-avenging father is a pretty common plot element, and that’s leaving aside the great number of scifi/fantasy heroes who don’t have any family at all. As a plot device deadbeat moms are less common.
We also favored a few fathers who committed single badass acts of fatherhood, even if there wasn’t much information on how their kids turned out otherwise, where the moms were much more likely to have succeeded at actually raising a child. We think this probably has to do with different perceptions of parental responsibility, but investigating that is probably beyond the scope of this post.
Oh, and we promise that next year’s Grid will be nothing but the worst parents in Geekdom, thanks to several parental figures asking us to present some moms and dads that don’t make them feel quite so inferior.
