mwnrnc
1yr ago
I've listened to a YouTuber reviewing some of the books, though I haven't read them myself. What leaps out to me is a near-complete lack of creative passion and vision. No one in the writer's room felt the burning desire to tell these stories with these characters. The whole project smacks of corporate quadrant marketing and revenue stream diversification - not authors writing stories, but committees assembling them from a word cloud.
My understanding is that the shift away from legacy fans was largely encouraged by economic incentives and has only lately been rationalized with politically-charged calls for diversity and inclusion. Essentially, legacy (read: stale pale male) fans were tapped out and unlikely to deliver the kinds of quarterly sales growth that investors were demanding. The allure of youthful demographics and especially women was simply too great to resist. If you weren't going to even try to capture that, you'd be swiftly replaced by someone who would. Star Wars might be foundering, but D&D has seen tremendous growth even as it has distanced itself from and even alienated many in its traditional audience.
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