I'm wondering if a good story technically aimed at teenaged girls tends to appeal to a) more grownup girls and b) more people in general than a good story technically aimed at teenaged boys appeals to a wider age range as well as more people.

Huh. Is Harry Potter aimed at teenage boys or girls? Both?

For that matter, is The Hunger Games really aimed at girls? It has a female protagonist, which maybe means more girls read it, but I'm not sure that's as true as it once was. The love triangle is played up a lot, but it's a pretty minor part of the book, really. I wouldn't say the book is aimed just at girls.

I think YA novels in general have had a lot of appeal recently, but I actually think that's mostly because the kids read it, get excited about it, and get their parents to read it. The other direction doesn't happen as much.

For that matter, is The Hunger Games really aimed at girls?

The marketing campaign for the movie was specifically designed to appeal to boys because it's assumed that anything with a female protagonist is a chick flick. Seriously.

[link]

I read that The Hunger Games was supposed to pull in a lot more boy viewers than the Twilight movies. Don't remember if they expected it to appeal to boys as much as girls, though.

eta: Huh. Jessica's link seems to contradict what I read.

Yeah, I've read a lot of uninformed complainants assuming that any YA book with a female protagonist must be Twilight-esque, and that Twilight is effectively identical to the whims of teenaged girls.

I suspect that the period during which you're least likely to get entertainment gender crossover is during adolescence, but I have nothing to back that up with. Just that kids younger than that don't care yet, and that adults have made more peace with their gender identity, but that being a teenager can be fraught with considerations of "appropriate" gender behaviour.

Harry Potter has a more balanced gender makeup, plus I suspect, as with many things, it's more acceptable for chicks to poach nominally male-branded territory than vice versa.

Harry Potter has a white het male title character - he's the default. (He's British, but that's apparently less of a marketing hurdle than if he were black or a girl. This is why I have Tivo and AdBlock.)

OH MY GOD PEOPLE...I just read the article on Jezebel about people being appalled that a black girl was cast as Rue.

I mean, I can't even...

/hates peoples

OH MY GOD PEOPLE...I just read the article on Jezebel about people being appalled that a black girl was cast as Rue.

Wait, what? I thought the book mentioned her "brown skin" a lot, which, from the point of view of someone like Katniss with "olive skin," would seem to pretty clearly mean black.

Yeah, what? She's pretty clearly written as black, as far as I remember.

The teenage girls that were at my showing were scary. There was lots of whistling and giggling at inappropriate times. Like the shot just after games start where they pan over all the kids that already died? There was a group in the back that was laughing and clapping.

Exactly. And it's part of the whole socio-political-economic description of Panem; she and Thresh are from what's now the South, and it's been returned to black people working the fields.

But apparently many readers pictured her as JonBenet, and "her death didn't mean as much" if she's black. [link]