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Legolas, You're Just So Darn...CUTE!

© Michael Martinez

Now, as a Liv Tyler fan, I often imagined she would steal the movie, even if she was in it for only a few minutes. Reading the critical reviews of her performance over the past few weeks, I think Liv has done as well as anyone other than Orlando Bloom. She surprised a lot of people. But though my Liv Tyler page is Xenite.Org's busiest 1-page site (and is probably the second busiest Tolkien site on Xenite.Org), I had no idea of what to expect from Orlando Bloom's fandom. Well, I knew they were trying to start an official fan club. And I had visited the Bloomin' Marvellous fan site before Angelfire shut it down for using too much bandwidth. Orly's fans are quite devoted. (NOTE: Bloomin' Marvellous is now located at www.crosswinds.net/~orlandobloomfans.) When I wrote my review of the movie last month, I heard from a couple of flamers, as I expected, over the tobacco comment I included. But if they were hoping for a long, drawn-out exchange, they were sadly disappointed. I think I responded to one, and had to let his last message go without further reply. You see, I was too busy reassuring anxious young maidens that their beloved Elf warrior would indeed return in the next two installments of the Orlando Bloom Saga. What, exactly, is it about Legolas which sparked such intense interest? I've thought about starting a poll, but I'm not sure the server has been built which could handle the traffic. Xenite.Org's traffic tripled in December. I have no idea of where the bandwidth will stop flowing for January, but my Web-hosting ISP has already informed me that I won't be renewing on my current contract when it runs out in February. And I don't even have much Legolas content. I've thought about creating some. But I'm not sure I could afford the hosting fees if I did that. Legolas is an incredible phenomenon. If you visit our Lord of the Rings movie news site, you'll see in the left-hand margin a box with images of posters from the movie. These images are randomly rotated. Fortunately for me, they are also served by AllPosters. That means they have to pay for the bandwidth the images use. Now, in about two weeks (after the movie started), we generated over 5,000 click-throughs on those banner images. If you know anything about Internet advertising, then you know those 5,000+ click-throughs were just a tiny fraction of the traffic we got on those LoTR pages. Nonetheless, 40% of them were for one poster: Legolas.