Whenever there’s a “show your pictiure” thread in MPSIMS, inevitably several will be wearing SCA-atyle fantasy garb.
The most popular threads on the SDMB were related to Lord of the Rings.
Several years ago, I attended a Dopefest that took place at a Renaissance Fair.
So, why does it seems like there’s a larger percentage of Dopers who are into the whole medieval/fantasy scene than among the public at large?
‘Cause us geek-types are the most likely to be hangin’ out online and postin’ on internet message boards, I guess? 
Otherwise, no idea how to answer that, personally. It was the first thing that popped into my mind.
This place was built to fight ignorance. Ergo, our modern society has a phenomenal ignorance about medieval times and thus most threads will try to fight that particular lack. 
I used to have a lot of swords and knives as I thought good steel could make a man right. You know, man conquering the natural, the heat of the forge, sparks flying(I loved working metal), but it’s all a bunch of BS. Life makes you hard, you just have to make sure your temper is right. You all know how steel loses its temper and bends, or you heat it too much it gets brittle. I guess there is a message in there somewhere. I’ll leave it to you guys to sort it out. 
Maybe there’s just as many among the public at large - you just never knew it.
I seriously do think this has a lot to do with it. Geeks tend to be drawn to both messageboards and fantasy/sci-if stuff for the same reason: Escapism. The people who don’t fit in or get picked on in the real world tend to enjoy building new, fantasy-based worlds where they can be accepted on other merits. Hence, it makes sense that in the not-quite-real world of this board as well as in places like the Ren fair, you’ll find people who tend to be geekier than the average person.
(For the record, I don’t think geeks are a bad thing…we need all kinds of people in this world 
)
It is my best estimate that Dopers are extremely intelligent folk. Smart enough to know that medieval/fantasy stuff = teh r0xx0rz!!!eleventy!!
I think it depends on which dopers you know and which threads you hang in.
Several years ago, LOtRs was a huge deal. People who didn’t like fantasy liked watching hot guys get sweaty with swords. People who had a ‘meh’ relationship with the book saw a visualization of it which got them excited. The current LotRs thread doesn’t have nearly as many pages or views as any of the threads during LotRs madness.
Why do Dopers like cats (not universal) or shoes (shoe threads, handbag threads and nail polish threads take on a surprising life of their own)? We kept a wine club going for a year. Baseball threads are popular.
I think it has to do with wanting there to be a clear difference between right and wrong, good and evil. People want to be on the side of righteousness and goodness, but in these modern times, how can you know which side that is? As Steinbeck puts it in the Grapes of Wrath, “Who can we shoot?” People (erroneously) believe that life was simpler in medieval times. There’s also a sense that life was more exciting back then.
Now, I dig medieval and Rennaissance history, but you couldn’t pay me enough to live in those times. Life was just as complicated, just as morally fraught, and just as boring as life now. Life was also bloodier, meaner, sicker and shorter than life today.
What’s not so cool about sword fighting? Of course there is nothing attractive about getting stabbed in any manner.
I’m not really into the Medieval/Renaissance thing; I’m more of a Neo-Victorian Imperialist.
In fact, just because I can, I’m wearing a Pith Helmet as I’m typing this (I’m also working on my Victorian Adventure Yarn in MS Word at the same time, but that’s besides the point :D)
The Medieval/Fantasy thing is popular on Teh Intarwebs because, as others have suggested, it offers chances for escapism for intelligent people (most internet geeks are intelligent people) who might not be CEO of a Fortune 500 Company or a Rock Star, but in World of Warcraft or during D&D sessions or at SCA get-togethers they can become Elgar The Incredible Wizard, Grunvar the Giver of Troll Wedgies, or the aptly named Sir Not Appearing In This Thread* with other, like-minded people.
Personally, I think fantasy is over-done. Trolls, Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, etc. Yawn. On the other hand, lots of people like it, and more power to them. I’ll be over here with my copy of King Solomon’s Mines when they’re ready to join the 19th Century.
*Come on, you didn’t think you were going to get away with a Medieval thread without at least one Monty Python reference, did you?
FWIW, I have zero interest in that scene, never read science fiction or fantasy, have not seen any of the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter and Star Wars movies (except the first one back in 1978 or whenever it was), and own not a single bit of chainmail. Maybe I’m just an outlier.
But that’s really just asking the question with different words, isn’t it? They’re not Elgar or Grunvar, either, so why not pretend to be a CEO or a Rock Star? Why don’t those things appeal to us* - why aren’t there Fortune 500 Faires where you can dress up in suits and pretend to make mergers and sudden hostile takeovers while ordering overpriced coffee drinks from a vendor wearing a beret? I suppose there are Rock Star camps and fantasy baseball camps, but they’re not nearly as popular or widespread (or affordable) as SCA or Ren Faires, it seems.
I mean, I think the answer is perfectly obvious: 'cause swords are corsets are just really neat! But, again, sort of begging the question, coming from me.
*for a specific value of “us”, of course
You aren’t hanging in two worlds if you don’t think fantasy baseball is as popular as Ren Faires and SCA. Though, because you can’t “pretend” to throw well, fantasy baseball is a paper and pen (or internet) thing.
Course, there are always bar softball leagues for people who want to believe their big time sports dreams didn’t dry up at 17. I know lots of Festies. I know far more people who play softball.
And if you spend any time with golfers at all, a huge percentage of them think they could have gone to Q school “if they would have just put in the time.”
There are at least two fantasy sports related threads over in The Game Room going on right now.
There is a lot of confirmation bias.
Lots of people do that in real life (Executives and Rock Stars), though, so it’s lacking some of the charm of doing Something Different. As I said before, I’ve no idea why the Medieval thing has so much charm- it’s not my cup of dried leaves from Ceylon boiled in water with a drop of milk and some sugar, but lots of people like it and there’s quite the industry built up around it now.
I can only posit that magic (in the fantasy sense, not in the Penn & Teller or David Copperfield sense) allows people to “bend the rules” and do things which simply can’t be done in the real world (launch fireballs/killer bees/lightning bolts from their hand, levitate, conjure Fire Elementals, and so forth).
The question I’ve always wondered is “Why is Magic so indelibly associated with the Medieval Period?” I mean, you get things like Shadowrun and Iron Kingdoms which have Magic and Cyberpunk and Steampunk respectively, but as a general rule, when you start talking about Magic Spells people immediately think of people with funny names in armour armed with swords or wearing robes and brandishing staves with glowing crystals on the end going hunting for hobgoblins.
True. I also hadn’t considered amateur softball teams and the like as akin to garb addicts, but you’re right.
So really, it comes down to “swords are cool”. And the internet being the great equalizer, even small groups have loud voices. There probably really aren’t that many people out there who enjoy lesbian corprophagia, but you’d never know it by the number of internet references to Two Girls One Cup.
I think there is a feeling of freedom on a place like the dope.
Even here I rarely talked about D&D until the Game forum opened up. It is almost something you don’t talk about in mixed company. Mixed company being those the play role playing games and those that don’t.
As to the LotR, this place has been great for discussions. It is rare that a week goes by without a question about the books or movies. There is a lot of positive reinforcement for talking about Middle Earth here. You gets dozens of posters that share a strong interest in the works. The SDMB is a very book oriented group to start with and this is one of the more special works written. It defines the Fantasy Genre and is the main inspiration for both D&D and most video games like World of Warcraft and the other popular fantasy games.
Baseball is easy to talk about IRL, it is just fun to talk about it here as we have some really intelligent dedicated fans and you have a rare chance to have discussions with fans of dozens of teams.
Jim
Two of the subcultures on the Dope that have a few rabid fans (and you get to be part of both) are LotR and baseball. There are about six people who can keep a LotR thread going for pages, days and views over the most obscure thing - even if no other Doper wanders into it. And there are six or eight Dopers that can keep a baseball thread going for days, even if no other Doper wanders into it. Those two core groups have some very well informed members who enjoy keeping a discussion going - and there are a number of controversies and beliefs in each hobby which cannot be resolved, but can be talked about endlessly.
The number of views, length of those threads, and frequency of their existence gives the impression that lots of Dopers participate in them. But like threads on politics or religion, you really see the same few people enjoying very similar conversations over and over again.
I know what you are saying about the core fans and I am near the top of both those niches. However, I know there are at least 70 active Tolkien fans members of this board and that is out of maybe 2000 active posters, possibly less. That is at least 3.5% of the members will post about Middle Earth. I think that is a high percentage.
I think the baseball fan is actually under represented on the dope. When I joined the dope, I found it very welcoming as a Tolkien fanatic and science fiction fan, but as a sports fan I found it somewhat hostile. For a variety of reasons, the hostility has died down over the three years I have been here. But it was real and sports thread probably got threadshit more often than anything but religious threads.
I am not sure we have 70 active Baseball fans that post. I have never tried to figure that out before. I believe we have far more football fans than baseball. Sports in general is a bigger part of daily life than fantasy, so this is why I think it is if anything under-represented on the Dope.
For all that, I think you can blame D&D, and thus, again, the LotR books. Which of course takes us to things like the Mabinogion and such, with tales of adventure, magic and suchlike that happened to take place in the Middle Ages.
While Steampunk, and modern fantasy is growing, the bulk of it all is still based off of Fairy Tales that harken back to the middle ages. IMO, of course.