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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25377 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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The US government is seeking stakes in Intel, TSMC, and Samsung, among other firms:

Expanding on a plan to receive an equity stake in Intel in exchange for cash grants, a White House official and a person familiar with the situation said Lutnick is exploring how the U.S. can receive equity stakes in exchange for CHIPS Act funding for companies such as Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung. Much of the funding has not yet been dispersed.

Similarly, a few months ago, the Trump administration approved Nippon Steel's acquisition of US Steel contingent on the USG receiving a golden share that gives it considerable supervisory authority:

The golden share gives the US government veto authority over a raft of corporate decisions, from idling plants to cutting production capacity and moving jobs overseas, as previewed in a weekend social media post by the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.

It's an interesting turn for the traditionally market-oriented, small government party to start making a play for the commanding heights of the economy. The Federal government has a long history of giving out subsidies as a matter of policy, but it generally hasn't tried to assert an actual stake in recipient businesses (it will sometimes assume control of failing institutions, but this is generally an emergency measure rather than a long term plan).

  • Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?
  • Are there risks of corruption arising in the Trump administration related to government acquisition of major shares in large companies?
  • Does this represent an expansion of executive authority? What do we expect USG to do with its stakes in these companies?
  • Does this raise potential conflicts of interest, directly aligning the interests of the Federal government with large firms (rather than their merely influential status today)?

Stupid government scope creep is fine when my favorite team does it!

I think if you're pro Trump doing this you also need to consider you're implicitly pro Kamala doing this, do you think that sounds good?

Because in 4-8 years the blue tribe might start doing it too, and this is a silly road to go down.

Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?

It's definitely a move away from New England Finance's control over the party

Are there risks of corruption arising in the Trump administration related to government acquisition of major shares in large companies?

Profoundly, this is a risk for every government in perpetuity

Does this represent an expansion of executive authority? What do we expect USG to do with its stakes in these companies?

Yes, I'm not sure but I have serious doubts as to their ability to make better choices than businesses now. If they could, planned economies would have a way better track record than they do.

Does this raise potential conflicts of interest, directly aligning the interests of the Federal government with large firms (rather than their merely influential status today)?

Yes.

I can kind of think of a Steelman here where government shareholdings in major national champions could enhance corporate governance and specifically help align business and government interests over the long term, but I give this roughly a 0% chance of happening with the current status of western governance institutional skill.

Feels like everyone in the political class finally woke up to China's industrial results and going "oh fuck maybe there was something to be said for this" and are now trying to cargo-cult-government to replicate.

I think if you're pro Trump doing this you also need to consider you're implicitly pro Kamala doing this, do you think that sounds good?

My rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly.

"My rules" would be no government control of companies. "Your rules, fairly" would be that all political sides get to have the government control companies. "Your rules, unfairly" means that only the left gets to do it.

The answer to this is the same as the answer to a lot of similar things: The left broke the norms so much that the only choices are to do so equally or to do so only for the left. And doing it equally is better. The option of not doing it at all would be the best, but the left has foreclosed that option.

When have the Democrats nationalized a private company?

Consider also that this is simply retarded. It's not Trump or Republicans who will own $INTC, it's the United States Government, and so in 3.5 years it'll likely be handed to "Democrats".

I would not call this nationalizing Intel (etc.)

My rules are also "no government control of companies."

I'm pretty equitable, I think the motivations and intellectual caliber of both the left and right are stupid as fuck. Americans are of course, as with many things, at the cutting edge of this trend.

I find your response quite fascinating. It strikes me that both American parties in a multi-turn prisoners dilemma game where the payoff for "defect" is a temporary gain in political power, which is then offset by the other side doing the same thing, and american governance/institutions/leadership being overall degraded as a result. Both sides are so myopic they seem to only have the capacity to smash the "defect" button over and over again, as American institutions rot, economic and military dominance over the world wanes, and the government gets worse and worse at doing... anything.

And your response to this is "yes! Smash the defect button before they do! Smash it!!!"

I know you don't want to be the first one to cooperate while the other side defects and gets a leg up, but damn, you must all realize this isn't going to end well for your children right?

Smashing the defect button in response to someone who always defects is the correct move.

This statement is wrong in the general case on game theoretic grounds. Not everything is a prisoners dilemma, and not everything your opponent does that you don't like is a game-theory defection. In this case, if you believe that government intervention in the market is bad, then cons are just doing a harm and not disincentivising future similar actions by liberals.

Kind of?

Until you're both way worse off at the end of it all. Although I guess you're both worse off together.

Would much prefer an unwinding of the political cold war and a commitment towards shared prosperity (as that's worked quite well for the last 10,000 years) but that brings us back to "the current crop of western political leaders are myopic morons"

Would much prefer an unwinding of the political cold war

And exactly how are you going to do that?

By forming an orthogonal coalition with other people willing to press the "cooperate" button. "Orthogonal" meaning you cluster around a set of self-consistent values that are split between the current political coalitions. For example, if I had the charisma and moral fortitude, I'd try and pull together a movement that concedes to the left-wing economics of the liberation theology catholics but promotes the right-wing moral culture of the tradcaths. We'd advocate something like an open-borders welfare state, but with brutal enforcement of moral orthodoxy to discourage leeches from coming here. (I'm a morally spineless neoliberal currently, but compromise means being willing to give stuff up.)

Genuinely I have no idea

I'm willing to be the first to cooperate vs defect as I believe in the power of human win/win coordination

But I am a single human with 0 political power

Honestly I'm mildly a doomer about all of this, I just refuse to say "fuck it" and embrace the zero sum game

This implies that the right wing and left wing argument about state control are entirely about morals and not about the effectiveness of capitalism, free markets and a hands-off government.

If "your rules fairly" includes doing things that you think are stupid, inefficient, counter-productive and extra prone to corruption (as the traditional small government conservative would think of governments owning companies) then doing it back would be nonsensical.

It only makes sense in a situation where the main argument to not do something is because of morals or tradition or law, rather than it being bad policy. Why hit our country in the face just because the left hits our country in the face sometimes? You just help to normalize and move the overton window on counterproductive self-face hitting among normies.

You just help to normalize and move the overton window on counterproductive self-face hitting among normies.

Just like you can't get back to the state of "nobody does it", you also can't get back to the state of "it isn't in the Overton window". Either it's acceptable for only the left to do it, or it's acceptable for both sides. You can't move the Overton window to "it's acceptable for nobody".

There are a great many situations where your statement would be obviously untrue. Should cons start getting abortions to own the libs?

If you believe that state ownership of private enterprise is a good thing for the nation then you don't need to talk about "the other side" to begin with, you can justify it off the merits of state ownership.

If you don't believe it's a good thing for the nation, then why would you want the country to harm itself?

Thank you so much for putting this into words better than I could

Because in 4-8 years the blue tribe might start doing it too, and this is a silly road to go down.

Trump doing this doesn't make the Dems more likely to do it. They've already thought of ways to do this on their own (e.g. the government held over 60% of GM as part of Obama's plan in the aftermath of the GFC) anyway. The danger is more that if it appears to succeed (i.e. Intel both does well in the short term and builds more advanced fabs in the US) that a future Republican administration will do more of the same. If, as I think is more likely, it fails (because Intel sucks and this amounts to a further bailout) and future Republicans decide to do more of it anyway, that's mostly on them.

I would posit the GM share ownership was as a result of a huge exigent circumstances, which Intel is not facing.

I also think this makes the Dems more likely to do it, as Trump is moving the Overton window towards doing this whenever you feel like it and towards companies that aren't on the verge of total collapse (although maybe Intel is, lol).

How would you feel if the Dems started buying equity shares in solar panel manufacturers because "the climate is an urgent crisis we must address"?

But overall I am a fan of your comment and mostly agree with you. Thanks for sharing!

I would posit the GM share ownership was as a result of a huge exigent circumstances, which Intel is not facing.

They were already facing it; this is a follow on from their taking of CHIPS Act money. Intel is in trouble; x86-based architectures have lost to ARM at the high end, they don't have a GPU design, and their foundries aren't state-of-the-art. They can either try to build down and compete only in markets which don't want the cutting edge (defense, aerospace, automotive), or build up and try to get themselves out of the hole they are in. They probably are simply too big and have too much debt to do the first without bankruptcy, and it's simply not clear how they can do the second.

How would you feel if the Dems started buying equity shares in solar panel manufacturers because "the climate is an urgent crisis we must address"?

About the same way I felt about Solyndra. My point isn't that this isn't bad, it's that it's not some new sort of badness.

Fair points!

I think if you're pro Trump doing this you also need to consider you're implicitly pro Kamala doing this, do you think that sounds good?

That would sound scary, if I didn't see the entire tech and financial sector coordinate to cut off dissident companies way before any of this was ever talked about. If stuff like this is going to happen anyway, I prefer state control to be made explicit, so you know which companies are allied or compromised, depending on the administration.

Every wartime economy is planned economy. Make what you want out of it.

They're not - the sort of total, top-down mobilization of the economy that characterized the World Wars is fairly unusual. But leaving that aside, these economic arrangements were not intended to be welfare improving for the people living in them.

IMO these companies would benefit from having shareholders with very long-term focused horizons like governments.

It's not too unusual in Europe for strategic companies like Airbus and VW to have this.

This seems backwards. By their nature, private businesses tend to be focused on the long-term, since their value is equal to the net present value of all future cashflows from now until the end of time, whereas governments tend to focused on the short-term, since they just want to win the next election.

private businesses tend to be focused on the long-term

Private businesses aren't focused on anything, since they don't have minds. The people who make decisions on their behalf are quite often focused on the short-term. As a chief executive, I may be able to sell shareholders on a long-term plan, but often as not they're looking for a good quarterly report and I'm looking to keep my job and score a bonus.

Well, the shareholders care about the market's assessment of the long-term profitability of the company, and the shareholders elect the board of directors, so the company has a much stronger incentive to care about the long term than the government does. For the government to care about the king term, the voters need to be able to assess their performance and vote in that basis, and they just don't.

their value is equal to the net present value of all future cashflows from now until the end of time,

Totally false. The vale of an equity is simply an estimate of the future value of itself, ad infinitum. A perfectly rational trader will be perfectly happy to buy a stock if he thinks it will go up, even if the stock costs more than the expected sum of all future dividends and distributions.

The value of the company's assets, dividends, buybacks, hostile takeovers, etc prevent the company's value from reaching totally arbitrary values, but none of those can be plugged in to a formula to determine the current equity value of a company.

The entire value of the company comes from the money it eventually pays out to its shareholders.

By their nature, private businesses shouldbe focused on the long term if you consider a purely theoretical universe populated by homo economicus.

Private companies in the real world, headed by real humans, only rarely tend to be concerned with the long term.

No, I think that in practice, private companies are much more focused on the long term than governments because they have very strong incentives to be. Most real humans aren't paid millions of dollars to run large companies after going through an extensive filtering process disciplined by markets. Most companies don't even survive more than a few years. The market selects for companies that are unusually well-run and mostly only allows them to survive, at least in competitive industries. It's not perfect process but I think it works much better than politics.

Modern economic theory is founded on the premise of the rational actor. My economic theory is founded on the premise of the retarded actor.

That's why it's an actor, they're only pretending to be retarded. They're also method actors.

They went full retard. Never go full retard.

with very long-term focused horizons like governments.

Is 4 years really that long?

4 years > 1 quarter

It's not too unusual in Europe for strategic companies like Airbus and VW to have this.

And Germans are poorer than Mississippians.

The problem is that States are also extremely risk averse, and therefore terrible as shareholders in anything that requires flexibility and innovation.

Semiconductors are hard in part because you need levels of investment similar to large civil projects and that flexibility to be successful.

However USG is uniquely good at throwing money at zany things for long term strategic gains as States go, so maybe it will work out .

If in the future politicians start telling you we need to use the dividends of this ownership for social programs, that's your signal that Intel will become irrelevant.

Obviously the dividends are going to get plowed into social security if intel ever makes a profit.

Well then you'll get the same outcome as French Dirigisme: a very nice infrastructure and industrial base slowly rotting under the weight of uncertainty as all your competitors catch up and loot it until it can no longer support its own weight.

receive an equity stake in Intel in exchange for cash grants

How does this differ from just buying shares?

These grants have strings attached, including but not limited to: national security requirements, clawback provisions, profit sharing clauses, etc.

Intel can't use this money to go build a bunch of factories in China, which would kind of defeat the point of the CHIPS act.

This is just restructuring the deal over that money that the US desperately wants to give companies like Intel, but only insofar as it unwinds it's dependence on Taiwan and China.

I'm surprised and pleased by how philosophically coherent this move is. If the government is going to give out industrial subsidies, why not get something in return? We all know the big corporations will dodge any tax we throw at them, but trying to get around paying dividends risks pissing off their own power base.

That being said, I'm very bearish on the chances of this particular administration doing anything productive and socially useful with additional industrial control. Probably it just goes toward enriching the Trump empire with corruption.

why not get something in return?

The question is how much return. Do we trust the government to be a great asset manager? Why not just have governments dump money into PE funds if you're trying to IRR-maxx?

Do we think government agencies/employees are better capital allocators than the current cohort of capitalists and Wall St et. al?

The thing is, regardless of whether the government buys specifically stocks, the government will allocate capital anyways. Currently that goes toward treasuries and direct subsidies. The government buying stocks instead is pretty much a direct improvement.

Why is that an improvement? This seems like a terrible way to allocate capital.

Subisides are just a strict loss of monies, and treasuries have abysmal interest rates. The superior growth rate of stocks makes them a means to raise government revenue without raising taxes.

Subsidies don't have to lose money if they have a positive multiplier.

I'm not entirely sure what treasury ownership you're referring to? Social security?

Because in that case, that's the government owning a Treasury issued by the government. The interest paid is real it's paid by the way everything else is, taxes or debt.

I fully agree social security is a shitshow nightmare from numerous perspectives. I think they should move to the "Canadian model" a la CPP, where investments are managed by an extremely competent and largely independent team.

I would like to reiterate that the executive branch borderline randomly scooping up equity stakes in flavor of the month companies is not this. Also, it's likely a transfer of welfare from taxpayers to equity holders AND it will definitely fuck heavily with equity price discovery, leading to a less efficient market overall.

Subsidies don't have to lose money if they have a positive multiplier.

They do if the government can't effectively recoup their investment via tax revenue-- which is what happens when money goes to tax-avoiding corporations.

Because in that case, that's the government owning a Treasury issued by the government.

Yes, that's the problem. Treasuries are essentially just an investment in the government's future ability to raise revenue, but that comes with the obvious moral hazard that when growth fails to cover the interest, "raise revenue" ends up becoming "raise taxes". I do agree with you on the "managed investments" bit-- and also the competent, professional team bit. With reference to...

I would like to reiterate that the executive branch borderline randomly scooping up equity stakes in flavor of the month companies is not this.

You won't find me arguing in favor of the implementation. Trump is definitely not the president I trust to do this. But the fact of the matter is, the government helicopters loads of money into flavor-of-the-month causes literally all the time, regardless of party or president. So why not set the standard that the government will get equity in return? And with reference to price discovery-- the government committing money into a sector is a truthful signal that the government is interested in promoting it, and that the government will become self-interested in making favorable regulations toward it. Obviously there are moral hazards associated, but price discovery, of all things, is not going to suffer.

All excellent points!

If the government is going to give out industrial subsidies, why not get something in return?

In the case of US Steel, the government didn't give out subsidies, it simply demanded a payoff for approving the deal.

More generally, it's not philosophically coherent. If the USG expected to get a stake in exchange for subsidies, the most of the South and Midwest would be government property. The general pattern the US has followed is that it may offer subsidies or very favorable lending terms (which amount to subsidies) for things the government wants to promote, but hasn't insisted on receiving partial ownership. Partly this because Americans (and especially Republicans) have traditionally been averse to state ownership, but also partly because subsidies are not generally conceived of as business investments but the state paying you to do something it wants. The CHIPS Act was not the USG dipping its toes in the market to make a little money, it was promoting the development of domestic chip production.

If they're getting something in return, then it's not a subsidy.

Well, State-Owned Enterprises are a feature of one notorious, nominally Communist state that the US is dedicated to beating, and this does look like a market-flavored convergent evolution in this direction, but no, I don't think it's theoretically leftist. It is of course statist and industrial-policy-pilled. Probably prudent; will allow the state to strongarm Intel into restructuring by TSMC executives, which seems to be the plan to save the beleaguered corporation.

Are there risks of corruption arising in the Trump administration

Oh yes.

For what it is worth, the government taking direct control of key industries is not a leftist-only thing. Historically, fascists were also big on dirigism. If the Fuehrer wanted German car manufacturers to build tanks, he will tell them to focus on building tanks, and they will comply, or else.

From what I can tell, Intel foundries are basically in the third place after TSMC and Samsung for 3nm processes. Also, it seems that the foundries -- the only part of any strategic importance -- are perhaps 10% of their business.

Personally, however little I trust CEOs to be aligned to the long term interests of their companies, I trust the USG a lot less. I can totally see Trump wanting the ability to fire CEOs when they report weak quarterlies for making him look bad, I just don't think that this is going to make companies more competitive or serve urgent national security needs.

"the Government taking a direct share in owning companies isn't a state-owned enterprise, it's simply market-flavored convergent evolution (??????)"

The government owning common shares in a company makes it (partially) state-owned, the state has a share of ownership. No amount of word games will change this underlying fact.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, the duck owning shares in something has an amount of ownership proportional to the % of shares owned (moderated by shareholders agreements).

It is of course statist and industrial-policy-pilled.

Dirigism. It's called dirigisme. Just tell Trump it's French if you oppose it.

Dirigism with retarded characteristics.

[ With sincere apologies to Deng Xiaoping ]

Similar industrial policies (with some degree of squinting) seem pretty common: Japan and Korea have their quasi-government conglomerates with strong political ties. The Nordics have state-owned enterprises. Norway also holds lots of shares in its wealth fund. Airbus is partially held by several European governments.

That said, I intentionally don't (didn't?) own INTC because it really needs some leadership and strategy changes to remain competitive.

The right has begun to sour on Capitalism for a few reasons. The current iteration of the “free market” has so much government intervention that it’s basically corporate socialism already, making calls to preserve the free market ring hollow. Libertarians burned too much of their conservative cachet and are now a fringe group without much pull. Also the right realized that “all that is solid melts into air” includes religion, nation states, ethnic groups, gender roles and families.

I wouldn't underrate the effects of woke capitalism on shifting conservative attitudes among the rank and file. CRT and pride are very very unpopular with the republican base.

I would also point out that the current crop of senior republicans mostly realize that getting unions to defect from the democrats is a serious blow against their enemies rebuilding a winning coalition, and unions are likely to see this as Trump getting more ammunition to force a mutually acceptable deal.

The worst part of these deals is the bailout CHIPS Act which already happened. It appears that while the Intel stake (which is quite large, 9.9% of the company) is technically common stock, the government isn't allowed to vote it independently.

"The government also agrees to vote with the Company’s Board of Directors on matters requiring shareholder approval, with limited exceptions."

Since it looks like there were strings attached to the CHIPS Act funding which are being dropped, this could be anything from an effective takeover to a mere minor technical restructuring; someone would need to dig deeper into it to find out.

As for the questions:

Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?

No, I don't think so. It's a turn towards industrial policy (so collectivist), but not in the Western leftist tradition. I think Trump is probably taking his cue from Japan and South Korea here. The idea seems to be to make money, not improve the lot of the workers or anything like that.

Are there risks of corruption arising in the Trump administration related to government acquisition of major shares in large companies?

There's always risks of corruption, but this doesn't seem any worse than other things the government does.

Does this represent an expansion of executive authority? What do we expect USG to do with its stakes in these companies?

Does this raise potential conflicts of interest, directly aligning the interests of the Federal government with large firms (rather than their merely influential status today)?

These are the big problems, especially the last. Although I'm far more worried about the other direction, increased political control of the large firms using the government's power as a stakeholder (which may be less limited than the government's more direct political powers). The government acting in ways which helps American companies isn't necessarily bad. Acting in ways that helps Intel and other large firms over smaller competitors is bad, though not particularly novel. But the threat of the government setting Intel's corporate priorities while protecting Intel from competition... it seems we have a microchip shortage, comrade!

The idea seems to be to make money

Why not buy units in private equity funds then? Much better returns than Intel lmao

Furthermore, if that is the goal, why do we think government bureaucrats and elected officials are better capital allocators than Wall St et. al? Are we pretending government employees are hyper competent now?

Are we pretending government employees are hyper competent now?

Trump obviously thinks HE is.

Why not buy units in private equity funds then? Much better returns than Intel lmao

Not to speak for The_Nybbler, but I think the intent is to both exercise control and make money. You could conceive of a similar bailout not concerned with making money off the deal that's solely about protecting jobs / paying off unions / encouraging local investment even if it turns out net negative.

Buying into private equity funds would simply result in the government getting better returns while the investment goes to foreign countries / companies if that's the most efficient way to get returns. Buying directly into a company like this with these restrictions is certainly a market distortion but the idea is that it should still be financially net positive, just less so than in the most economically efficient world possible, and help support (their idea of) national interests.

Thank goodness the government is finally diversifying its investment holdings. Do you know that most of our money is in low yield Treasury bonds? It's no wonder USG is nearly bankrupt. As a stakeholder myself I'm a big fan of this move, though I would still prefer a more balanced portfolio.

Treasuries are a liability of the government, not an asset.

What am I missing?

The government has various parts, including the "Social Security Trust Fund", which hold its own liabilities.

Libertarianism as the only right wing ideology is a flawed view of the left/right spectrum. Most right wing governments have historically been involved in the economy and securing essential resources for the nation. Mercantilism, fascism, monarchy etc are completely compatible with a nationalistic economic policy. If anything the liberal factions have often been aligned with leftist groups against nationalists and traditionalists.

Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?

I mean, Trump representing a turn from free markets was something talked about since his first term. If I remember correctly all the Blues were mocking the very idea, even endorsing Rainbow Capitalism, starting with Clinton's "will breaking banks up stop sexism?".

Hillary's comment was aimed at Bernie, not Trump, though.

I don't think that matters much, it still marked a change in Dem rhetoric. Even Bernie himself had to adapt to be more appealing to the rainbow coalition.

Disney is back where it started:

Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles

But we've been here before. Around the late '00s, Disney felt that it was shackled by its perception as a girl brand, and needed some boy-friendly properties. There were some that had had some success - Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars - but it wanted more. (Article 1, article 2 on marketing research in 2009 about this.)

They took a few gambles on intellectual property they already owned (or at least that wasn't too expensive) - Tron, The Lone Ranger, John Carter of Mars and so forth - but those didn't give them the wins they wanted.

So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both. But now both Marvel and Star Wars are sputtering at best, so it seems they think it's time to start up the search anew.

The obvious question is what happened to their last investments. The polite answer is that they stopped producing acceptable stories, or overexposed or overextended their franchises with TV shows and the like beyond general audiences' interest. But is that all? "To lose one strategic franchise may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness." What's to say that they won't make the same mistake again, whatever it was?

So there are less polite answers. That link leads to the /r/saltierthancrait discussion of the article (taken down now, by the looks of things. Too impolite even there!) where the poster summarizes their take on the story as "1. Buy new IP to have something for boys 2. Alienate them by pandering to girls 3. Repeat."

And even if it's so that both franchises' declines followed girl-power (or other identity-politics) pushes, that's still not a correlation that one's supposed to draw in polite company, not without a lot of throat-clearing. And true: the orthodox explanation of quality decline and overextension has much truth to it, and it's even possible to explain any alienation of target demographics as being due to such overextension: the same ambition that led Disney to want to give itself some appeal to boys also could lead it to try to make Marvel or Star Wars appeal more to girls. Maybe pure greed is the only explanatory factor needed.

Still, though, I have my doubts. I feel like there's a cultural undercurrent, much broader than just Disney, that it's a problem whenever anything is enjoyed by boys(/men) and not girls(/women). Perhaps there's an element of blank-slatism here: the belief that gender differences are all due to socialization, and in a perfect, prejudice-free world, male and female tastes would be the same.

That is: if there were any value to [something], then girls would see it. If they're not there with the boys, then either they're being kept away by something toxic or exclusionary, or there isn't any value to the thing and the boys shouldn't be having fun with it, either. Anything with predominantly male enthusiasts therefore should be either integrated or banned. (Going the other way, it seems much more easily accepted that boys are at fault for not being interested in something that girls are, for example.)

But if it's not true that, but for patriarchy, boys and girls would have the same interests, then the pursuit of this equalization can result in feeding a whole lot of interests or fields or value in general into the void. If lightsabers and starfighters appealing more to boys than to girls was not a problem that needed fixing, and Disney doesn't realize this, then they'll slide right back into this pit every time they try to escape. And if it is true, well - they'd better hope that they can somehow find fixes that work.

Disney was always for chicks, some people fell for a marketing ploy when they decided to chickify a couple boys IPs. This was always an act of aggression against those fanbases, and that's why it was done. Disney is a giant international slopCorp staffed by failed theater kids and orally fixated women. If you care deeply about Disney, you need to make your peace with that.

Or you could do what most boys do by the age of five and stop thinking about a globohomo company that makes princess cartoons. It's not the masculine flex you might think.

what about, OG Mickey Mouse and friends in comic and animation. Slapstick, mysteries, criminals, mad doctor apes in haunted castles.

I grant that "Disney" was a different in 1930s to 1950s, it was a name of a man with a company, not just a company. He certainly was aware of the boy demographic: Treasure Island (1950), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1952), Davy Crockett TV series, Man in Space (I think it was 'childrens TV' in 50s. Or perhaps family documtainment?).

1990s DuckTales had some of the same spirit, and coincidentally nearly all the DuckTales IP was ~50 years old. In comparison, "Disney Princess" line was launched in 2000. It did tap into some more effeminate than masculine aspects present in many of the animated Disney products, but it was not a conscious product line choice until after that. their target segment was family friendly / boys and girls.

slopCorp, failed theater kids, orally fixated women

Or you could do what most boys do by the age of five and stop thinking about a globohomo company that makes princess cartoons. It's not the masculine flex you might think.

many transgressive choice of word, very little sourceable facts

There’s a tendency to simplify choices - ‘unfortunately we couldn’t keep this once-great thing neutral and now we have to oppose it’ becomes ‘it never had any redeeming qualities, it’s getting what it always deserved and if you think otherwise you’re not really one of us’.

I don't live in 1930, and neither do you.

He has a point though. Not sure what went on in America during that time, but when I grew up in the 90s, there were numerous disney products that were pretty obviously marketed towards boys. No idea what happened in the 2000s, though.

McDonalds sells salad too. Mattel sells Ken dolls. Don't be obtuse.

Rude.

I'm not about to check whether the numerical market situation of Disney products in 90s Germany lines up with my memory of that time and place. You can have the win if you like. Here, if it please you: Disney is purely and entirely a girls' thing. Have a nice day.

Nobody’s being obtuse. The claim

Disney was always for chicks, some people fell for a marketing ploy when they decided to chickify a couple boys IPs.

is IMO ahistorical and incorrect, and you haven’t made any attempt to back it up. Several people including me have said so and provided receipts, and you’ve spammed snark at them.

And you interpreted that to mean if an international entertainment company ever produced a show aimed at boys, then what I said was falsified?

You guys are slaying that straw.

The Lion King? The Jungle Book? The Emperor’s New Groove? Aladdin?

Aristocats is more borderline but the American audience is mostly intended to identity with the chirpy working-class American-accented tomcat rather than the beautiful English-accented heroine IMO.

The Lion King?

They turned it into a Broadway musical. I can't think of better way of making @JTarrou's point.

They almost made Batman into a Broadway musical, with Jim Steinman and Tim Burton. Is this argument that Batman is almost a girl-ish princess product? It tells more of Broadway than history of Disney.

It wouldn't say anything about Batman, but it would say something about Warner Brothers.

Yeah, McDonalds sells salads too.

But we've been here before. Around the late '00s, Disney felt that it was shackled by its perception as a girl brand,

This is weird. To me they are a girl brand, and they've been that way a very long time. I vaguely recall liking Disney when I was a very young child, but it seems like me and every other boy I knew stopped liking them when we were around 10 years old. Not even into puberty yet, but old enough to be interested in more violent, action-heavy stuff. Disney was about pretty Princesses singing songs and wearing fancy clothes. And that was fine, we didn't make fun of girls for liking it, we just weren't interested, for the same reason we weren't interested in any of the other pink brands.

I can see why their corporate executives might want to change that and become some universal brand that appeals to everyone. But institutions have cultural inertia and sometimes they just can't be changed. It's like how almost every country tries hard to get into the World Cup but there's only a few that are regularly good at it. And it's not always about money or resources because tiny countries like Uruguay can be weirdly good at it while the US struggles. Sometimes we just have to accept that things are as they are.

When I went to Disneyland for the first time a few years ago, everything had this feeling of "cute, safe, friendly." Perfect for a stereotypical 1950s family on vacation for 2 young children, and I guess also fun for Disney adult women who want to cosplay as princesses. But the whole Star Wars area felt weirdly out of place, like trying to cram an actually scary haunted house into a McDonalds.

I think Disney has long refused to let the stories and universes be themselves. They seem to have to rebrand everything to be Disney friendly, nothing too weird, masculine, violent. And while it works for cute kiddie shows or girl-friendly shows, but not really for the more action-adventure series like Marvel and Star Wars.

I mean, I'm a girl (at least a good while ago) and I like SF and I thought they ruined "John Carter" because they didn't know what to do with it or how to market it - dropping "of Mars" from the title was the first signal they hadn't a clue.

There will always be more boys than girls who like certain properties, and even for the girls who like the SF properties, the way they handled things was terrible. Who on earth liked the Force witches or whatever the hell these things are supposed to be? (Just a hint here, if you're doing a sacred mystic ritual, try not to have it look like an am-dram society pretending to have epileptic seizures).

"The Mandalorian" worked because the female appeal was Pedro Pascal plus baby Yoda (and I understand the female lead was not actively terrible in a Girlboss mode, so of course Disney bounced her for badthink) while having enough of the SW lore to appeal to the guys. The later SW movies with Rey could have worked if they'd concentrated more on the ensemble of Ray and Poe and Finn (and had managed to retain a coherent plot arc, instead of every new director deciding to drag the plot in a different direction). Also don't fuck up Luke's character, but they couldn't resist doing that.

But as it is, the properties they get their sticky fingers on are then revamped to lose the core audience (coughRingsofPowercough) and introduce the Girlboss who has to be so much better than the icky Patriarchy. Girls who aren't interested in SF won't watch this stuff, girls who are and like the original IP will be turned off, boys won't watch it either, and so the expensive new series that is going to be the star show of the streaming service falls flat on its face.

And then they do it all over again with a new one.

Who on earth liked the Force witches or whatever the hell these things are supposed to be? (Just a hint here, if you're doing a sacred mystic ritual, try not to have it look like an am-dram society pretending to have epileptic seizures).

Didn't watch the Acolyte, but it is sad to see them botch the Force witches so bad. I like the concept of there being non-Jed/Sith force traditions out there, and I think with the right approach they could absolutely make them feel distinct and interesting. Too bad Disney doesn't know how to do that.

We had the Witches of Dathomir and they were fine.

Much like The Rise of Skywalker was an incompetent and facial adaptation of Dark Empire, this is once again just Disney remaking the EU but worse.

I take some perverse pleasure in remembering the old arguments about how ditching the EU was good, actually, because it unburdens the new writers by what has been, and enables them to be more creative.

I also seem to remember one of our regular posters had a bit about how nerds need to shut up, because corporate executives know better how to make their product appealing to a wider market.

With this latest capitulation, I've thought about doing a bit of a gentle retrospective over the various long-running fan debates here on the motte over whether or not The New Stuff was or wasn't a good idea. Most of those conversations died off as most of the old-timer Blues left, but it seems now the writing is pretty much on the wall.

Ditto for the conversations a couple years back about how the UK Tories were showing everyone what right-wing competence looked like.

Ditto for the conversations a couple years back about how the UK Tories were showing everyone what right-wing competence looked like.

I was thinking a lot about that one too.

I guess Lucas should have listened to the suits instead of his nerd buddies and ditched his pulp space opera idea. Audiences won't connect with it. And even if it was produced they would only give him the toy rights.

Reading the text of the chant (“The power of one. The power of two. The power of many.”) is doesn’t sound so bad, but when you watch the scene itself it sounds like a cross between “Gen-Z boss and a mini” and a cringe college protest chant. Just absolutely awful sound design.

"The Mandalorian" worked because the female appeal was Pedro Pascal plus baby Yoda (and I understand the female lead was not actively terrible in a Girlboss mode, so of course Disney bounced her for badthink) while having enough of the SW lore to appeal to the guys.

I like to think it worked because it (well, at least the first 2 seasons) was a freshly brewed batch of the original Star Wars recipe. Instead of reheating in the microwave the same old moldy batch of samurai/western (same thing) tropes with pulp sci-fi trappings from the originals like Disney did with the sequels, Jon Favreau took the recipe but made it with fresh tropes. Western/samurai tropes that were not part of Star Wars yet, starting with the premise taken straight from Lone Wolf and Cub.

If LucasFilm wasn't run by idiots, they'd have caught on and the Obi-Wan movie would be a Yojimbo pastiche with spaghetti characteristics instead of the tepid and lame saturday morning cartoon the tv show ended up being.

I mean, I'm a girl (at least a good while ago) and I like SF and I thought they ruined "John Carter" because they didn't know what to do with it or how to market it - dropping "of Mars" from the title was the first signal they hadn't a clue.

In this case, it seems like the decisions were made by the director who had a blank cheque due to his animated work and wasn't the most objective about John Carter's place in the modern scifi landscape (the perilous place of having influenced deeply successful and beloved works while not being as popular)

I think the core problem is that nobody really likes the Girlboss, here defined as a synonym of Mary Sue rather than anything else, but a rather large group of people feel obligated on political grounds to include her in stories. It’s sort of like a certain genre of Christian allegorical protagonist, who is always good and opposes the many faces of evil, which of course are all atheism, and receives infinite blessings which are immediately apparent for their good behavior. There’s nothing particularly interesting or appealing about this character, and indeed the most narratively compelling part of Christianity (going back to the life of Christ) is the struggle with oneself and inevitable temporal consequences of choosing what is right over what is advantageous. But, from what it appears, the key motive of the storytellers is to encourage virtue and avoid vice as a sort of line item thing. Check them off: never take the Lord’s name in vain, tithe or donate appropriately, wear the right amount of coverage… and so on. So they think it’s necessary to make the stories very simple and to keep them laser-focused on the right things, because it’s unconscionable to even come close to permitting the bad things.

So instead of a story, you get something like a spiritual safety manual. “John always wears his hard hat. But Bob didn’t, and got seriously hurt.” Great - safety manuals are supposed to be blunt and no-nonsense. You don’t want to encourage deep intellectual exploration of the morals of lock-out-tag-out. You just want the fuckers to do it. But these aren’t stories, in the end. Stories are meant to entertain, and at their highest purpose to encourage a kind of internal and emotional development which I think is the true nature of virtue, over and above the box-ticking. That means seeing otherwise good and impressive people make mistakes, human mistakes, and wrestle with the imperfect clay of humanity as they are and not how one wishes they would be. It means that Christ must curse the fig tree and spend a lot of time talking to prostitutes, and in the end, bear his cross.

This is roughly what is wrong with the Girlboss. There’s a lot of instruction on Dismantling the Patriarchy, as a series of required checkboxes, but nothing really interesting to the character. So the people who write her feel obliged to, but never really feel interested in her. If the numbers are correct, they prefer romantasy. And this gap between ill-considered moralism and pure hedonism would be filled by works of real virtue, except that all the air’s been sucked out and there’s nothing left but a void.

Goes without saying that none of this really helps girls learn how to grow into women with power over their own lives and communities, which I thought was the point but apparently wasn’t.

Brandon Sanderson is the most successful ‘Christian’ writer I can think of today, meaning a writer who both is Christian and whose religion clearly informs his work.

Notably:

  1. He never depicts literal Christianity in his work.
  2. Most of his characters who think a lot about religion really think about it. They have crises of faith, they wonder how to reconcile their faith with what needs to be done, etc.

If we're counting LDS as Christian, Orson Scott Card and Larry Correia might rival him depending on how you count 'successful'.

Orson Scott Card, definitely (dual Hugo-Nebula winner two years in a row; Ender's Game became required reading in many schools and the USMC, as well as a big budget movie). But I don't think Larry Correia is in the same weight class.

And Stephanie Meyer far surpasses any of them.

There's probably a worthwhile discussion there, right?

Sanderson, Card, Correia, and Meyer are all Mormons. Now as it happens I don't count Mormons as Christians, but that aside - it is interesting that all these examples are from the same religion. Are Mormons in general punching well above their weight in science fiction and genre spaces?

Mormon cosmology might have something to do with it.

Mormon cosmology definitely has something to do with it, but the "Banned Mormon Cartoon" doesn't have much in common with Mormon cosmology.

If you don't believe me (a Mormon), here are a bunch of bitter ex-Mormons saying the same thing.

As for the substance, it is largely accurate, in the sense that, for most things it says, you can find some quote where something like that was taught by a Mormon leader at some point. There are a few just plain misstatements like “Star Base Kolob.” No church authority has ever called Kolob a star base, as far as I can find anywhere.

But it is wildly inaccurate in the way it characterizes and connects things. If they were giving the Catholic Church the same kind of treatment, they would say that Communion is “Catholic ritualized zombie cannibalism.” And one could argue that they are technically correct. After all, Catholics believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And another word for a person who came back from the dead is a zombie. And Catholics believe that in a sense the Host is transformed into the literal body of this Christ. And another word for eating someone’s literal body is cannibalism. But calling it that communicates a wild caricature, that no Catholic would actually identify with. No Mormon would identify with the caricatures in the cartoon, despite the fact that you could find a seed of truth in most of the particulars.

Early Christians were put to death partly because they were said to be practicing cannibalism. This statement is much more true of Christians than most of the claims in that cartoon are of Mormons.

Many are saying this.

Every living, significant fiction author I can think of is either Mormon or atheist/agnostic.

In order to write seriously about religion, you probably have to believe seriously in religion. Given that Mormons are mostly in a small concentrated area of the US I would be unsurprised that a lot higher percentage of Mormons seriously believe than other religions.

I wonder if there's a cycle - there was a phase, I thought, of really Catholic science fiction, works like A Canticle for Leibowitz, or A Case of Conscience, and prominent Catholic authors; Gene Wolfe springs to mind. Apparently some people think there's something there even today, though to my untrained eye the golden age of Catholic science fiction was in the past.

So maybe just different subcultures or groups get into particular genres every now and then. There may not be that much to it.

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Mormons also have people checking up on their religious adherence.

There's more to it than just geography--why are they mostly concentrated? Anyone who wasn't fully on-board with the religion in the 1840s, and willing to give up everything for it, would have stayed behind when they were kicked out of the state.

The result is possibly the most powerful religious selection effect ever. The only comparable effect I can think of is the early Christian church, when converts understood they faced pretty high odds of being executed for their faith if they converted.

It's also much harder to be a lukewarm Mormon than, say, Catholic. Our doctrine is much newer, our church much smaller, and there's far less room to say basically "sure maybe it's all just metaphorical but I like what it teaches my kids" when the Book of Mormon's very origin must be either literally true and from God, or a deliberate scam. (Arguably, other Christian churches are the same, but at least their "scams" were thousands of years ago.)

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Very true, but her work doesn’t seem religious at all (bar ‘Meyer is twisting your childrens’ minds in service of her evil cult’ articles). I mentioned Sanderson because he really, obviously cares about how man relates to god and manages to tell good stories about it.

She wrote a vampire romance story where the main characters waited until marriage. In fact the entire story seems to be built on top of resisting the temptation to sleep together before then; Edward's bloodlust an obvious metaphor for actual lust.

There are some other connections--the eternal youthful marriage, the vampires from Rome possibly representing Catholics, the idea that you need to develop and grow as a person as much as you can before becoming immortal--but those are all stretches.

Sanderson's works deal much more explicitly with religion, but I'd argue his most important religious themes are also subtextual. For example, Mistborn has the explicit themes with Sazed, but the entire story is built around the implicit themes--the Lord Ruler is a false hero, and Ruin can alter any scripture not written on metal, leading to doctrinal decay over time. Elantris is built around the exact same theme, actually; the magic used to work but people forgot why, so when the underlying fundamentals changed it stopped working.

All the explicit dealings with gods are pretty lackluster in comparison, and arguably not really "religious" at all. The Percy Jackson books had that.

She wrote a vampire romance story where the main characters waited until marriage. In fact the entire story seems to be built on top of resisting the temptation to sleep together before then; Edward's bloodlust an obvious metaphor for actual lust.

The entire vampire baby plotline (where the choice is between aborting a fetus eating the main character from the inside out or...to let that happen and let her give birth and likely die) is basically an extended pro-life parable. It might be the most successful version ever really.

Characters explicitly refuse to call it a fetus and demand their opponents use the b word.

He's LDS at any rate.

I was wondering how a Christian worldview would mesh with interplanetary science fiction, but this explains it.

Christopher Ruccio is doing a pretty interesting job.

John C. Wright is a former atheist who did a hard-right turn into Catholicism. He's written space operas pre- and post-conversion.

There's been quite a lot of Christian big name science fiction writers, actually- Jerry Pournelle was Christian even if he changed denominations a lot, CS Lewis wrote science fiction, etc.

C. S. Lewis doesn't count; that was back when everyone was Christian, or at least Jewish. Even Jerry Pournelle was towards the tail-end of that era. A science fiction author being Christian doesn't really become remarkable until after the New Atheism of the 2000's.

It was remarkable for Lewis to be devoutly Christian and write a space trilogy specifically as apologetics against those who said that God can't care too much about Earth due to how large the cosmos are.

I thought it was the other way around. Lewis wasn’t a Christian for most of his life. He converted in his middle age and wrote those books. Not everyone was Christian.

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Lewis's Space Trilogy does a pretty excellent job, I think.

The Mandalorian was heavily inspired by classic spaghetti westerns—especially the "lone gunslinger" type of story. The Mandalorian worked because they are fundamentally masculine stories. The appeal of the lone gunslinger story for some men lies in themes of rugged individualism, courage, moral ambiguity, and the romance of the untamed frontier. These characters often embody a desire to protect the innocent, confront evil, and possess a self-sufficient, solitary strength that resonates with a desire for independence and a simpler, more honorable way of life.

All that is very true, but they managed to also appeal to a female audience with baby Yoda and the Mandalorian being the protective figure there. I mean, there's a decent and simple plot that was difficult to mess up (until they managed to do so).

Who on earth liked the Force witches

My wife's disabled, non-binary friend who sums up every character in any show they like by starting with their attributes re:gender, sexuality, race, ability status, etc.

Said friend sadly is a parody of themselves at some times.

My wife's disabled, non-binary friend

Out of curiosity in which way is she (assuming natively she, correct me if otherwise) disabled?

Other than the (I suspect partially trendy) AuDHD? Something to do with physical mobility, but I've never learned what. Has needed a walker to get around for ages, and is certainly not yet old enough where that'd be unremarkable.

Thank you for sharing.

The subset of these types of people who end up requiring medical attention is of course not representative of the true population but I've Noticed Some Things that are of course not captured in the literature even when they are hinted at so it is useful to collect more N.

I initially read this as "in which way is she otherwise disabled?"

Yeah, unfortunately it's the bingo card approach to writing characters (do they tick off all the right boxes?) and then any kind of development or interesting use goes by the wayside, because any criticism can then be safely dismissed as review bombing by the haters who are white straight cis male racist homophobe etc. etc. etc.

Only sometimes?

Sinners and saints alike, we all contain multitudes.

What are some examples of "girl" stories that aren't cringe pandering softcore-relationship-porn wish fulfillment only (lame) women find appealing?

That isn't a leading question, it's an honest one, I'm sure they exist. But the people who write those don't get jobs at Disney. A lot of these girl stories seem to be made completely independent of everything that's been learned about basic storytelling structure, like they've been made up from scratch instead of being built on a foundation of previous works.

I Think the only woman author I've read extensively is the Dragonriders of Pern books by Anne McCaffrey, which was back in high school. While I remember those having female protagonists, they did heavily feature men, many of whom were genuinely loved by the author and characters in-universe (the master harper), for being men. There was the full spectrum of heroes and villains of whatever gender. I suppose some of the male characters had realistically male flaws that stuff written for dudes would normally leave out, almost like the author had, you know, known men in real life. But in McCaffrey is very obviously some kind of spergy horse girl, and wasn't writing to be in line with 2020s corporate intersectional feminism.

Oh and Harry Potter. Those are at least competently written, and are generally appealing to everyone without pandering to one gender or another.

Ursula le Guin was a woke feminist, but she wrote stories that didn't feature romances or girlbosses (partly because she did her best work before the girlboss trope crystallised). I'm not sure whether you count her as writing "girl" stories.

Gone with the Wind

Atlas Shrugged. Dagny Taggart could be seen as a prototype girlboss.

I skim-read that as 'Call of the Wild' (the Jack London novel where a sled dog goes to live in the woods with wolves) and was very confused. But happy that 'girl stories' were finally moving in my direction. Alas.

What are some examples of "girl" stories that aren't cringe pandering softcore-relationship-porn wish fulfillment only (lame) women find appealing?

Depends what you mean by girl stories? Stories with female protagonists, or stories that girls/women like?

If it's the former, I remember enjoying the Old Kingdom series as a kid. The stories all (or mostly?) had female protagonists who were recognisably women, but they weren't romantasy books, the focus was on the magic and the fantasy elements. The author is male but I think he just preferred writing female protagonists.

Susan Cooper's 'The Dark Is Rising' is pure young-adult adventure fantasy and done very well.

CS Friedman's 'Crown of Shadows' series is a personal favorite, and a twisted mix of sci-fi and fantasy and also done very well.

Hell, even the penultimate male-fantasy young-adult book 'My Side of the Mountain' was written by a woman.

I always considered it a bit weird when people bitched about the lack of female writers in fiction, when I turn to my bookshelves for 1970/80s fantasy and flip through female after female writer. If anything, it's the men that are lacking, not the women.

Labyrinth starring David Bowie.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman starring Jane Seymour.

Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.

There are plenty of high quality stories exploring the feminine side of the human condition. They're just a bit hard to find because you have to dig past the propaganda lists of explicitly ideologically feminist works. Not that those are necessarily bad, but they do hog the spotlight to a pretty insane degree.

Girl Genius perhaps. Though there is a romantic subplot, the main female character explicitly chooses the well-being of her people/land over and above romance.

I would not count Girl Genius as a girl story. It isn't aimed at a female audience, at least I don't think it is.

The writers are a husband-wife pair (I think they said the wife is mostly responsible for the story, the husband mostly responsible for the art), the title literally has "Girl" in the name, and the main character is a woman.

That said, it does have the old-style male adventure feel. Sometimes as parody, sometimes seriously.

I think we can say it has broad-spectrum appeal. I went to their Facebook page and looked at the names of the people who liked the latest comic page, it seemed about 50/50 male-female split.

I guess it all depends on what a "girl" story is. If girl story is only defined as a story that men avoid then of course we won't find any "examples of "girl" stories that aren't cringe pandering softcore-relationship-porn wish fulfillment only (lame) women find appealing"

Next morning edit:

I almost didn't suggest Girl Genius out of fear that it was one of the cringe pandering stories. It has a love triangle where the main character is pursued by a heir-to-the-empire and a boy with a past that haunts him. And the boys are terrible simps, totally head over heels for the main character. And also surprisingly chaste/respectful, averting their eyes and blushing if they see Agatha in her (Victorian-style) underwear.

It has a lost society of Amazon women warriors. It's kind of a Princess Diaries plot, "ordinary women finds out she's secretly a lost princess and must learn how to fit in with her new society" type thing.

I would argue that it's very much a female story, even if the females reading it are the ones making up the "39% of physical science degrees awarded in the US."

I wish they’d bring out more of the novels. I love the writing but the art doesn’t really do it for me.

Yeah, the art is busy. And shiny. When I first read it I mostly just looked at the dialogue bubbles, which was worth it on its own. Then once I caught up to the present, I took the time to look through the new comic pages as they were released, one at a time, and started picking up on the visual gags.

I wouldn't say it's my favorite art style, but I started to parse it better after exposure, then went back and reread it. It almost conflicts with the story. If you try to soak in the art, the story slows to a crawl (which is fine on a re-read, less fine for a suspenseful visual novel like this is.)

People don't always realize, art in GG changes noticeably during its run.

Some context. In comic book industry it is(/was) quite common that the artist is responsible for "art" (pencil line-drawings), but black ink is done by the inker, and other colors are added by the colorist. Last two are/were viewed assistant role. In The Dark Knight Returns, drawing is credited to Frank Miller (who most people have heard of), inks are by Klaus Janson and colors by Lynn Varley who are less known. I think the division of labor was product of the 20th century color print technology, all the tasks were bit different skillsets. There always has been 'auteurs' who wanted control over all aspects of product, and with digital indie publishing it has became more common, but division of tasks was industry standard practice for pumping out comics product quickly.

How is this relevant to Girl Genius? Phil Foglio started his illustrator career in the old industry (born in 1950s, genuine member of boomer generation), I guess that is how he is used to work. Today the colorist is Cheyenne Wright. Additionally, Mr Foglio's style for GG today has quite faint line art, and he embraces a comic book style with bubble heads and round eyes (which is not perhaps most artistic, but it is his style and enables him to draw one page in day). Most of the work that makes it look semi-realistic is with color, shadows and textures. Consequently color and ink has huge impact on the visuals, in the way it doesn't for more 'flat' art like Garfield. First volume available on the web has muted colors, which were a later addition to original black-white publication (you can see it was originally BW, there is so much black ink). Then subsequently they brought in a colorist, who did very colorful, shiny neon lighted color-work. (in-story explanation that it represents main character's inner world expanding as her superpowers "break through". I think when people complain about GG art, it is this period, unless they can't stand Foglio's rubbery faces at all). After couple of volumes the colorist changed, to Mr Wright and I think it is better.

About the story aspect, I believe the Foglio's are true believers in sex-positive feminism. (Look up XXXenophile). Many elements in the stories do tick the GIRLPOWERR box. (Nearly every female character in the series is excellent superstrong martial arts fighter, justified by magitech). I agree it doesn't fail the way some other more pushy products fail. First reason is the romance, about that later. Secondly, they are boomers, perhaps it helps them stay somewhat grounded. Their takes are often informed by their feminist takes, but they are still also interested in telling compelling stories and interesting characters, not stories about characters who are feminist ideal stereotypes and nothing else.

First it is important, the main protagonists' romantic subplot is not really subplot, the romance plot(s) very much are main drivers of all story archs. Most of sidekicks have their romantic subplots, too. It just that "for boys", the main action on screen is mystery-action-adventure, not the romantic elements. Very shonen anime, frankly. Romance is often background cause of the situations that come to be. The reason why it works, it is pracically always a cishet romance, so it must involve male characters. And they do write male characters competent, interesting, different personalities, with varying amount of masculine traits, with pursuits and challenges that have story weight of their own, not only about their interest in heroine but then interact with her.

I suspect they think they're feminists. Joshua Norton thought he was emperor of the United States.

As far as I can tell they're fandom carnies.

Kaja looks like one of those women who Doesn't Count as far as the People Whose Opinions Matter are concerned, like most autistic "feminists" who think principles trump social skills and status. Occasionally useful, always disposable.

The writing is too "sex pest" to earn remembered approval in real life and too heterosexual to thrive outside it. (I see there's already been drama of the expected variety.)

I would file it under the same category as any "comic-book woman with green eyes, red hair, and Amazonian physique" thing. Even if the protagonist doesn't look the part. She's burlesque enough.

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Many elements in the stories do tick the GIRLPOWERR box. (Nearly every female character in the series is excellent superstrong martial arts fighter, justified by magitech).

...And yet, they don't actually crowd out the male characters, who are likewise super-strong martial arts fighters, again justified by magitech, unless they're just magitech wizards or some other variety of superbeing. Klaus Wolfenbach in particular is portrayed from the outset as more or less omnicompetent, universally feared and respected, and a massive threat to the main characters and their plans, escapable only due to the unwieldy nature of his empire. Othar, Gil, the Jaegers generally, all are portrayed as prime hero material, and frequently enjoy genuine spotlight time.

I'd argue it's the advantage of true belief; in the world of Girl Genius, men and women are equal, in every way that counts; muscle and bone mass and psychological proclivities are eclipsed utterly by the power of the Spark.

Moana 1 is great. Encanto is great.

Zootopia too. There's some woke messaging, but the story is a hell of a lot of fun.

Count one up for the furries. Zootopia is probably the best rubber-meets-the-road film about the prejudice of biological differences. And they get to make that story because it stars talking animals.

During the writing of that movie, there was a significant amount of development done around the concept that in order for the society to work, the dangerous animals were fitted with control collars. In the making of, there's this wonderful deleted scene that they didn't end up including in the movie where an father predator animal is at his son's birthday and getting him fitted with that collar, and for the kid it's this great rite of passage: I am finally an adult - and there's just this sadness in the adult's eyes because they know what is being done to their child.

They didn't keep it in for obvious reasons after a few rounds of story review, but I think about that scene a lot these days.

Aspects of Encanto are great, but central plot elements are treated in a very unsatisfying way.

The magic of the setting appears in several different guises: Roman Catholic folk miracles, brujería, Disney princess magic; but it doesn't behave consistently with any of them, doing instead whatever the writers thought was dramatically appropriate at the moment. The movie collapses the object and meta levels of its major symbol in an unprincipled way that feels like a cop out. And even once it's established that the symbolism of magic = family love is all that matters, the backstory revelations undermine it: Was it grandpa's death that brought about family love?

Great animation, good songs, exasperating writing.

once it's established that the symbolism of magic = family love is all that matters, the backstory revelations undermine it: Was it grandpa's death that brought about family love?

... Yes?

He's leading refugees away from their burning village, he sees soldiers catching up to them on horseback, and he kisses his wife and babies goodbye to turn back and (checks video) wave down the soldiers. Rather than using the opportunity to run or hide, his wife stops in her tracks to watch him die. The natural interpretation here is "he loved them so much that he would run to his own death just to buy them another minute to run and hide, and she loved him so much that even in those circumstances she couldn't bear to leave him, and The Magic rewarded such powerful love." (The other interpretation, "neither of them had the common sense or tactical acumen of a mouse, and The Magic took pity on such powerful stupidity", doesn't really fit the movie's tone.)

Encanto was...2/3rds of an interesting story with some great music that suffered from the same problem as a lot of recent Disney - no actual antagonist.

Wasn’t the grandma the antagonist?

Sort of... it was ultimately the grandma's misunderstanding of the magic's source/purpose that created the anxieties that led to the magic not working anymore, but it was this abstract anxiety that was the antagonist rather than an outright malevolent force. The only stakes for the magic not working were that the magic was cool and it would be sad for it to not work. To me, actualization/fulfillment is a perfectly good goal for a story.

There's a pretty decent number of women authors who just write male-focused or general fiction, especially for teen and young adult audiences. See Diane Duane (the first three Young Wizards and then Book of Night With Moon are highlights) or (and 6/6 of Erin Hunter) for better-known examples. It's probably more interesting to talk about women writing female-oriented-relationship-stuff in ways guys wouldn't be repulsed by. For that... :

  • Diana Wynne Jones is best-known these days for Howl's Moving Castle, but I like to recommend her Dark Lord of Derkholm and Year of the Griffin as good examples of stories that have a plot, but are about relationships. In Derkholm (tl;dr: fantasy send-up of portal fantasy from the view of the world's natives who are treated as a tourist spot, as a commentary on industrialized evil and pointy-haired bosses), between the main character and his wife and family, and with his immediate peers; in Year of the Griffin (tl;dr wizard school story with the interesting twist that the main characters don't struggle to fit in) between the protagonists and a society that they don't know if they can trust.
  • CJ Cherryh's more standard scifi fare, and she's no Zahn, but she's a pretty good writer, and especially Chanur is driven by relationships far more than tactics or technobabble, but still hits that Pernish 'there's an actual plot, it's just not faffing and then suddenly everybody's friends/lovers'.
  • Bujold should go without saying, but the Vorkorsigan saga is very much about phrasing women-relationship-things into forms men and especially young men are trying to grow into: honor, loyalty, trustworthiness, and legitimate use of force. I'll recognize that Gentleman Jole isn't very good, but Komarr, Memory, Cetaganda, just very strong each.
  • Mercedes Lackey... is mixed. Valdemar is Very female, even by the standards of Telecoms (if you liked that bit of Pern) or Romantic Fantasy; the Elemental Masters series (and not-quite-part-of-it Fire Rose) are extremely well revised takes on classical fairie tales in ways that are more enjoyable reads than technically impressive. But she's pretty much a distillation of what guys say they don't like, without the obnoxious parts that they don't like about it.
  • Tamora Piece is more male-friendly and often technically better, but in turn it's less clearly women's-relationship-writing in most works, if still less could-pass-as-male as Duane.

((That said, I'm one of probably thirty people on the planet who liked Darkship Thieves, so my taste is... not very refined.))

EDIT: for a 'do they follow the Hero's Journey' rule, I'd say most of them fit pretty well. No on Fire Rose and there's a couple of the Vorkorsigan books that break from it, though they've still got the 'failed-to-do-thing, developed-skills, do-the-thing' bit. Year of The Griffin's Abyss is pretty shallow -- it's a ultimately a comedy -- but the points are there and somewhat refreshing for not just slapping the Harry Potter-style stuff in. Book of Night With Moon's Abyss is both deep and realistic enough (Satan kills the viewpoint character's mom and drowns The New Guy's siblings such that he contributed to their deaths to survive) that I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for younger readers, but the mirrors to the Monomyth actually play a pretty big role in the denouement.

There's a pretty decent number of women authors who just write male-focused or general fiction, especially for teen and young adult audiences.

I recently delved into LitRPG/Cultivation sphere, which I think is somwhat newish offhoot of scifi/fantasy genre and is at least adjacent to YA scene/audience. And to be frank, I start to think that female protagonists like in surprisingly interesting Azarinth Healer series may work better in that context. The male protagonists in many of these stories are some combination of weak whiners, being overshadowed and constantly scolded/humiliated by female side characters, having weird fetish/harem sidestories and more.

The pet theory of mine is that feminism is basically projection of male virtues/characteristics on females. Terrible girl-bossing is just projection of what feminists view as toxic masculinity on women: aggressive know-it-alls, emotionless or even cruel leaders etc. If the author can do modicum of work to reign that tic at least a little bit, they can actually end up with decent formerly male character only in skirt. With female protagonist you will not see her being literally hit on head if she says something "dumb", scolded for being a creep, being told that she is an idiot, humiliated or womensplained for not knowing something or any other type of terrible writing now so prevalent with male heroes. Or to me more precise even if they are addressed like that, they have a mature response to it.

It reminds me of the story how the character of Ellen Ripley from Alien was originally written for male actor and how it surprisingly worked well for female - especially in a world where only women are allowed to have oldschool male traits/virtues.

Mercedes Lackey... is mixed. Valdemar is Very female, even by the standards of Telecoms

...huh. Wasn't expecting to see a link to one of my own old posts.

Mind if I ask what prompted you to keep a link to it?

You've got a strong skill for explanations available to outsiders, so I've got a pretty decent number in that category. Here you also go into both the appeal of the genre and a lot of its weaknesses, and how they could be much stronger if writers engaged with them more critically, in ways that even a lot of strong fans of the genre (and even some Digimon fans!) tend to overlook.

Well, uh... awkward. And a bit embarrassing. But glad it resonated, and thank you for answering.

Cheers!

((That said, I'm one of probably thirty people on the planet who liked Darkship Thieves, so my taste is... not very refined.))

I liked it okay, for what was basically Heinlein fan-fiction with a self-insert Mary Sue.

Mercedes Lackey? Not everything she's written, but there was that one book about a teen boy being bullied... who then gets the magic power to set his bullies on fire (and set other things on fire). I had no complaints.

Wasn't that the one where the male passes on the romantic opportunity with a pretty girl in favor of his horse or something?

I mean if you just mean 'written by a woman' the Hunger Games trilogy had broad appeal.

Hunger Games was a hit with a mostly female audience - I think it counts as a "girl" story. I also think it counts as a refreshing new take on the obnoxious romance/girlboss tropeset - see this three part vivisection by the Last Psychiatrist, which I fully endorse on this point.

This book should not resonate with 15 year olds, not this much. Which means that these girls are still getting sexist signals from somewhere, and, follow the trail, those signals came from the 40 year old women who like the story, i.e. "feminists." This is what I mean when I say the system no longer needs men to maintain the status quo: it has feminists doing the job for it. - TLP

In this, Dave Sim was prescient when he authored and drew Cerebus the Aardvark. Initially a Conan the Barbarian satire, it became one of the greatest long-form anti-feminist screeds in Western literature. The political and religious totalitarian sect known as the Cirinists do their best to demolish the patriarchy, but in the end, become a monstrous variation unrestrained by chivalry.

Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising quadrilogy. (Skip the first one until you’ve finished the rest.) To my mind it’s the best of what British fantasy can be, though not modern.

I also loved those books. (Alan Garner was my favourite contemporary fantasy writer growing up in England, but Cooper was a close second). The Dark is Rising is written by a woman, but it isn't a "girl" story - Will, Bran and Merriman are all standard male heroic archetypes played straight.

Man, I didn't think anyone else but me has read those. Yes, this was my absolute favorite series when I was a kid.

(And Over Sea, Under Stone is a bit dull compared to the rest of the series, but don't skip it.)

Do skip the movie, though. Hollywood made a movie (supposedly) based on the first book called The Seeker that pissed off Susan Cooper so much she was kicked off the set. With good reason- it is one of the worst movies I have ever seen.

Man, I didn't think anyone else but me has read those. Yes, this was my absolute favorite series when I was a kid.

I also read the series as a kid, and while it wasn't my favorite, I enjoyed it.

I also haven't seen anyone mention the book that was my favorite read as a kid — enough I wore out my first paperback copy and had to buy a second — which also had a female author and was first in a fantasy-with-some-SF-elements (some might call it the other way around) series (not to mention more than one less-than-good film adaptation by Disney): Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

(I still get a chill rereading the passage when Meg finally sees IT.)

I also read the entire Wrinkle in Time series as a kid. Great books (and while not explicitly Christian, very Christian-influenced).

Also great, though I haven’t read it for years. I’ll have to dig it up.

I liked the Cooper books especially because they’re steeped in English history and mythology, and they resonated with me very much growing up in the English countryside.

Greenwitch won the Newberry, so the series would be a pretty common read for 1990s kids.

Wasn't it The Grey King that got the Newberry? I mean, it has conspicuous Newberry bait at one point.

You're right, my bad. I think I just remember watching countless book reports of Greenwitch in 5th grade, which was popular due to its low page count.

Oh, Christ, the movie. I only saw the trailer but that was more than enough. It’s a pity Cooper wasn’t as good as Rowling at keeping the maniacs off.

Over Sea, Under Stone is good, I just don’t recommend it when I’m recommending the series because it gives the wrong impression about what the series will be like IMO.

Glad to find another fan!

Little House on the Prairie springs to mind.

For fantasy, I enjoyed The Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce when I was 11-12ish. It’s basically just your standard medieval setting hero’s journey story with a girl, mostly avoids giving her waif fu, and as I recall eventually makes her a mage to give her a leg up on competing with the full grown adult male knights at the end of the series.

She also wrote the Wild Magic series following a teenage girl who was some kind of special wizard, which had 4 books. I recall the first two being pretty entertaining for an adolescent male, and the last two descending into kind of stereotypical “Who will I choose, poor plain I, the powerful demon or the powerful wizard?” sort of modern female romantasy.

The first series she wrote in the 80s, and the second in the 90s, so there might have been a bit of a canary in the coal mine there as far as which direction publishing was heading.

Are you asking for "girl stories" (that aren't smut-adjacent) or "stories written by women that aren't girl stories"?

I would argue that Harry Potter is not a girl story. While Rowling has some problems writing adolescent boys (and for that matter, her adult Cormoran Strike novels sometimes show a bit of women-writing-men weaknesses), the Harry Potter series was very much a boy's adventure (and was sometimes even criticized for that, despite its fanbase being majority female). However, as a story that appeals to girls yet doesn't also alienate boys, it's probably the ur-example today.

Dragonriders of Pern is, as you say, something that appeals to spergy horse girls and I have seen female authors inspired by it refer to it as "girl-canon," but back in the day it had a broad cross-gender appeal. (The "Harper Hall" sequel trilogy was much more of a for-girls thing.)

There are a number of female authors who write decent novels that appeal to men: Lois McMaster Bujold, Elizabeth Moon, C.J. Cherryh. Leaning more towards "feminine perspective but still readable by a man," Leigh Bardugo, Cathrynne Valente (the author is insufferably woke and has one of the worst cases of TDS I have ever seen, but I really do recommend her Fairyland books, which are both very much "girl" stories but something I would totally read to a boy), Naomi Novik (a lot of people love her Napoleonic wars-with-dragons Tremaire series though personally I didn't), Ursula LeGuin. And outside the SFF genre, Alex Marwood, Sara Gran, Lisa Brackman.

Really, it isn't that hard to find good female authors who aren't writing didactic man-hating feminist novels or romantasy. Finding books that appeal to young readers of both sexes is harder but not impossible.

Even when she writes boys it feels like she's writing girls. Like the most soy character presence, dialog and actions. Bless me I didn't have the words to describe it back then, but I always hated those parts of her stories. The movies were mildly ok because I could focus on the fantasy setting instead of the misery porn that was poor little orphan Harry.

Aw, I liked Tremaire (although I didn't even think of the author's gender until now). Not a fan of how hard it leaned into the telecom tropes, or an issue the writing quality/plot pacing?

I like Temeraire but it annoys me how often the book goes, ‘Man isn’t Napoleonic England stuffy! Just as well dragon riders are rare and so we get to be as liberated as we please!’.

Great books. I would say they are, if not explicitly Christian, at least meant to be read that way. Jesus gets name dropped once or twice, angels feature prominently, and one of the books (Many Waters) has the protagonists get dropped right in the middle of the Flood story from Genesis. L'engle doesn't come right out and name Christianity, but the pieces are there (and of course she herself was Christian).

Edit way after the fact: this was supposed to be a reply to @Amadan about the Wrinkle in Time series, I have no idea how it got attached to this comment instead! Sorry for any confusion, Corvos.

I can't really say; it just didn't grab me. Part of it is that frankly, the Napoleonic era is just not a setting that has ever interested me much.

Naomi Novik

also helped code AO3 and still writes fanfiction under a pen-name. Plus her fairy-tale retellings and scholomance series were very solid reads, if undeniably girl-coded.

She's like the spiders georg of female-author-male-appeal. Legit built different.

also helped code AO3

That’s awesome, I never knew that! I knew she was a writer on video games but I didn’t realise she coded as well.

LeGuin started strong but then became consciously feminist and repudiated her earlier work.

I recall her describing how embarrassed she felt in retrospect at making Ged a man, as though a male hero should be the default.

She was always consciously feminist (or at least very leftist). I am not aware of her repudiating her earlier work, but I agree that her early stuff was better.

She was, but it wasn’t until later that she decided that you couldn’t be feminist and write a world containing a male-only organisation that was powerful and wise. Especially when a certain number of your women are witchy - powerful but often in a secretive and manipulative way.

I'm asking for stories that are identifiably girl stories but also follow basic storytelling rules rather than expressing the basest cringe urges of women (and then the vampire bad boy and the werewolf bad boy fight over me while I sit there and wait to be taken by the winner, and the vampire wins, but the werewolf is okay because he finds someone else, then the vampire marries me) or being girl-power pandering. I'm talking "man goes up tree, people throw rocks at him, man comes down from the tree, Changed" level rules.

I know they exist, writers who can write them exist, and yet Disney can't find them. Instead it's "girl goes up tree, is stunning and brave, rocks bounce off of her, men are such trash amirite, the end."

Joan Aiken's Dido Twite books might fit this, as might Patricia Wrede's Mairelon the Magician series.

I'm asking for stories that are identifiably girl stories but also follow basic storytelling rules rather than expressing the basest cringe urges of women

Kemono no Sou-ja Erin. It's about a sensitive but plucky young girl who, over the course of her life, tries to make connections with people, create social peace, and uphold her values in a cynical world of intense political and social conflict. Positive femininity is shown as a kind of extremophile lichen, which grows in the cracks of an amoral dog-eat-dog world. With each new challenge, Erin has to find a way to turn people away from their dark impulses, resolve interpersonal conflicts, and be subversively moral under evil rules.

I'd certainly introduce this show to a 8yo-16yo daughter if I had one.

Famously, the entire corpus of Jane Austen.

and then the vampire bad boy and the werewolf bad boy fight over me while I sit there and wait to be taken by the winner, and the vampire wins, but the werewolf is okay because he finds someone else, then the vampire marries me

You’ve got Wickham/Churchill/Willhoughby/Henry Crawford as the werevolves to the vampires Darcy/Knightley/Ed Ferrars-Brandon/Ed Bertram.

Maybe what you consider "basic storytelling rules" are actually male character archetype rules?

No, there is a female version of the hero's journey. It is not quite the same, notably the struggle tends to be more internal, but it exists.

Women have recurring mythic structures based on their own experiences too.

The recent feminist attempts to associate a queer style rejection of all structure and in particular of the causality structure of storytelling is not a woman thing, it is a feminist thing. And it's not even really that popular in its own circles.

The best depiction of the heroine's journey is, unironically, the schlocky Princess Diary movie, which plays it so straight that it is practically canonical. A awkward but virtuous heroine discovers her inner beauty and refinement and prevails over circumstances to end up with a good man. She overcomes her own insecurities and the judgements of others to become a princess in heart as well as in fact.

And this is an internal journey, for the most part: complementary to the masculine hero. If you watch media that women genuinely like to consume (like magical girl anime and Disney princess movies) the fighting and bluster is largely secondary to the dramatic arcs of feminine self-realization.

The perversion happens when you combine the superficial aspects of the masculine journey with the contemplating-one-navel nature of the feminine one. If you're a supercompetent girlboss you have no virtues to realize in the feminine sense or to learn in the masculine sense. Stagnancy. The only arc that is possible is 'the world doesn't recognize how awesome I am, and so it must suffer'. This narcissistic plot is utterly repugnant and is rejected by all but the most hidebound ideologues.

I don't know if this will meet your strict criteria - it runs on the "basest cringe urges" of its author for sure - but I will not pass up an opportunity to recommend Unsounded. A rock-solid epic fantasy doorstopper, except it's a full-color graphic novel created by one person. Sure, attempts at these things are a dime a dozen; this is one that pulled it off.

(I will caution patience with Sette early on, though.)

Unsounded is great. Alderode is a ethnat police state with strict castes, Cresce is a child-sacrificing horror communist monarchy, and Sharteshane is the worst of Dickesian Victorian capitalist apathy.

How can you care for anyone, in such a soul crushing world?

Without spoiling anything, I think Cope answers that question quite well.

Seconding Unsounded. I haven't caught up in a couple years, but the first arc was absolutely fantastic. Also, I would argue Sette is amazing from the very start; I get that people might think of her as a "girl boss", given that she's a... girl(?) and is certainly bossy, but the thing is that her confidence is very obviously artificial, and that while she is in fact quite competent in a variety of ways from the start, the gap between her competence and the situation she's stuck in is immediately obvious, and quite stark. Also, the rest of the characters, male and female, are really, really well done. Duane is amazing as a portrait of a man of principles slowly being ground down by an unprincipled world.

Also, Kill Six Billion Demons, which I likewise am a couple years behind on, but was amazing as far as I've read.

This is a good to catch up with it. The epilogue just finished yesterday (for Unsounded proper: the second half will have a new title and begin in January.)

Interestingly, also seems to be a Kickstarter in progress right now.

It's really hard to tell what you are asking for specifically - are you asking for no romance at all? That's hard! Stories of any kind usually jam in a romance element because it is a "cheap" way to add additional appeal. Stories written for women or by women are more likely to do this because women are generally more interested in people, it's usually only hyper-masculine coded stories and themes that avoid any romance at all and even most war/military properties will find a way to slide in a romance element, even something close to explicitly homoerotic like Top Gun.

I've been on an anime binge recently so:

Full Metal Alchemist - written by a woman, most people can't tell.

Dan Da Dan - written by a man, many would guess the writer is a woman. Has lots to appeal to women and to men. Has a cute teenage romance that even some of my gym bros enjoy.

The Apothecary Diaries - written by a woman, clearly teenage girl fantasy elements but still enjoyable for many who hate that. Female lead has "super powers" but is helpless at the appropriate times and weird with significant character flaws. So yeah "basest" urges of women, maybe? But also illustrates that if you do a good job who cares. Same thing with hypermasculine product that everyone loves if it is good enough.

Now all three of those are Eastern so yes a possible theme here is The Message tanking artistic product, so to take it in another direction - how about Shrinking* and Ted Lasso? Two modern comedies with low levels of romance elements, strong female characters who aren't perfect (even the literal girl bosses), strong female coding in the form of lots of feelings discussion, therapy culture, and so on.

Non-slop and um, quality slop? still exist.

*only seen season 1 of Shrinking.

I'm more trying to make a point that stories about women/by women have been written that can be enjoyed by humans of whatever gender, this isn't utterly uncharted territory where artists have to build everything from scratch.

I like my anime by ex-hentai artists, desperately trying and failing not to cross the eros line. (Hellsing/Freezing)

Gargantia of the Verdurous Planet. Though admittedly he doesn’t try very hard.

I kind of feel that there’s a recent crop of writers who actually suffer the opposite problem: no romance at all, ever. Which feels very… inhuman? The human experience is such that at least some kind of attraction is bound to come up in any developed world covering any significant stretch of time. Even more so for teen protagonists, but hardly exclusively. So it feels weird when these stories don’t bother, either, possibly because writing good romance is admittedly at least a little difficult.

As an example there’s a very noticeable divide in the manga/manhua world between boy audience and girl audience fictions. It’s increasingly common that the guy oriented ones either play the typical harem-flirty route, where everyone is interested but the main character never commits, or increasingly never being it up at all, focusing on other power fantasy aspects or simply going all in on visuals and violence. Depressing, really, that commitment is so rare, and that many relationships (even friendships) are either one-way, or trivialized with no real conflict.

Blood+. The main character has multiple love interests (sort of) but the story is both intensely focused on her attachments to the world in general (brothers, father, friends and other more spoilery ones) and an excellent globe-trotting thriller.

Little House on the Prairie is a classic.

Well, see some of my recs. Most of them follow that formula and show character growth in the female protagonist. Whether individually they suit your tastes, I can't say, but a lot of the complaints about Disney and romantasy just aren't that applicable to the entire field of published genre works. (And I do recommend stepping outside of genre to broaden your horizons.)

Sailor Moon, but there's a reason that people point to anime as being insulated from woke influence.

Sailor Moon is too old for that anyway. It finished in '97.

Crystal?

Oh. I never heard about that (whereas I vaguely recall watching the first anime, probably while I was preschool-aged).

I saw on Twitter someone comment that the idea that the company that owns Marvel, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones would need to look for a new IP to help draw in young male audiences in their teens & 20s is pretty hilarious and absurd. You could probably have put any random 8th grade boy in charge of any one of these franchises back when Disney acquired them and turned them into at least good draws for that crowd, if not great. Yet the actual executives in charge appear to have less competence than that (or, perhaps, different incentives than making the best product or most money).

Makes me think there could be a modern remake of Big where he becomes a studio exec instead of a toy store VP and greenlights hits over the adult execs. Would have to be a longer timeframe and also, I'm guessing Big probably won't get a remake anytime soon given the implied statutory rape.

different incentives than making the best product or most money

I think they absolutely have these incentives and are just out of touch idiots like most of the """elite""" class in the West at this point in history.

I saw on Twitter someone comment that the idea that the company that owns Marvel, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones would need to look for a new IP to help draw in young male audiences in their teens & 20s is pretty hilarious and absurd.

You know it's fascinating. If the movies were actively actually bad (like worst Transformers movie bad) and you ran that for 20 years it would still be easier to recover from than what we got.

It's worse than bad.

Truly one of the most epic bag fumbles of all time.

Anecdotally - I was a kid who grew up a Star Wars nerd and it was a big part of my identity, establishing my interests, and so on. I spent a ton of money on it when I didn't have a lot of money to spend.

Now I'll never spend another cent not just because its bad right now (it is), not just because it hates me for demographic reasons (it does), but because it's associated in my mind with all the extremities and terrors of shitty social justice and all that did. I've seen too much fucked up stuff, lost friends, etc and Disney dropped their flag on that behavior.

Lots of people are never coming back and they didn't really connect anyone new.

Now I'll never spend another cent not just because its bad right now (it is), not just because it hates me for demographic reasons (it does), but because it's associated in my mind with all the extremities and terrors of shitty social justice and all that did. I've seen too much fucked up stuff, lost friends, etc and Disney dropped their flag on that behavior.

They would have to do something really extreme, like declaring all the Disney content non-canon and hiring George Lucas to oversee a new sequel trilogy (while not directing). I'm honestly not sure even Andor should be part of the canon despite how good it is. Even Lego star wars is more tonally consistent with the overall property than Andor is.

I'm not saying Lucas is some kind of genius but there needs to be a clean break and delineation between Disney star wars and the property going forward, things are that broken. Alternatively the quality of the content needs to be close to Andor level but that is obviously unrealistic and if you could guarantee that you wouldn't need to buy IPs in the first place.

They would have to do something really extreme, like declaring all the Disney content non-canon

If they flip to the Legends canon and make a Yuuzhan Vong trilogy I would return to the franchise.

Disney lost a bunch of parents pushing gay shit too. Like toddler movies that aren't good is recoverable from- they're toddler movies, after all- and probably doesn't even make a difference. But the people writing their preteen sitcoms being in charge of pixar wasn't the thing that pissed people off. It was GayBC agenda pushing.

Yeah, idk when the realization hit exactly, but the day was odd when it occurred to me that we would no longer be allowing Disney anything in our home. At least nothing made after the year 2000, with the occasional ad hoc exception.

I can't think of parents who have a consistent hard ban on disney, unless it's a generic no screens policy. But I also can't think of parents who allow the new stuff from them. Granted, filter bubble effects- but my filter bubble is probably at least as biased towards including parents vs genpop as it is to being conservative vs genpop.

Yes, it's this exactly. I used to dream about the prequel and sequel trilogies coming out. Had one where I found the sequels in the store and was gobsmacked that they'd made it to home video without me hearing about their release, etc.

Then the prequels came out and I was fairly disappointed but fundamentally tolerant. Then the sequels came out and, well, I still haven't seen the last one, and should be surprised if I ever do.

Rogue One scratched the itch though.

That last one was shockingly bad. Confusing how they could make such a thing. I almost recommend watching it just to feel baffled at every turn. It is a unique movie experience in that sense.

They made the new movies on a crazy timeline. A new movie of the trilogy every two years.

The first final drafts of scripts where due before there was a final cut of the previous movie.

Obviously doing something like that requires careful planning. Naturally they did no planning.

The first movie copied all of the beats of ANH. The second movie is supposed to set up the final conflict of the third movie.

Then Rian Johnson came in for the second and did his own thing. He either ignored or was possibly never aware of some of the things the first movie set up. He killed off The Big Bad / Chessmaster (Snoke) and promoted the Dragon (Kylo Ren) to be the new Big Bad.

Some people liked how it subverted their expectations, but it subverted the arc of the series.

For the third movie they had no villain with a grand plan, no idea where character's stories were supposed to go, and Bob Iger wouldn't budge on the timeline. It had to be out xmas 2019.

The first one was a pure reshoot of ANH. The second misconstrued “subverting expectations” with writing a movie. The final one was writing by a precursor of AI.

I still haven't seen the last one, and should be surprised if I ever do.

I feel so seen haha. I also refused to watch the last one. Can't even remember its name if I'm being honest. Total fundamental drop off of interest.

You know I also thought Rogue One scratched the itch - interesting. Lots of the more traditional non-woke critics hated it.

Andor was actively incredible though (although I have yet to see the second season, just timing issues).

I feel so seen haha. I also refused to watch the last one. Can't even remember its name if I'm being honest. Total fundamental drop off of interest.

I was disappointed at The Force Awakens, and dropped the franchise after The Last Jedi. My first instinct is still to call Episode 9 "From His Nap".

Andor was actively incredible though

Haven't looked into it at all. I know redditors who enjoy it immensely so I assumed it was pretty soy.

It's kino. Best show in years. Never mind best starwars show.

Take it from an old expanded universe grognard.

I can only speak to the first season as I mentioned, but it's one of the best seasons of television of the last ten years. Full stop.

Now admittedly it's not to everyone's taste, it's a slow and deliberate Cold War spy thriller living in the most Star Wars feeling Star Wars since the original trilogy.

If you are the kind of person who liked Better Call Saul as much or more than Breaking Bad you are 100% going to love it, but I don't fault people for needing a faster pace etc.

Put another way it reminds me of Winter Soldier which duct taped an excellent non Marvel script to Marvel IP and kept the advantages of both.

It does have some woke elements but they are chiefly background casting stuff that isn't too annoying when it's drowned in quality. It is also explicitly anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian but not in the childish modern politics way so it shouldn't chafe too much.

It's much less Wolfenstein haha kill the nazis and much more Das Leben der Anderen this is the reality of these systems. Sure the woke end up liking it but that's by accident.

There was a preteen movie when I was a kid- something like Big Liar- that my parents liked too(so I didn't just like it because I was a kid at the time) which was about an eighth grade boy who loses his creative writing assignment that by hilarious and unlikely coincidence is picked up by a hollywood director who proceeds to adapt it into a screenplay, and he engages in zany schemes and pranking with his plucky girl best friend to get credit for it. Very 2000's. But the concept that 'golly, these hollywood executives could have a random preteen come up with better movies than they do' isn't new.

Big Fat Liar (2002). Surprisingly good for a kid's film; the "Hungry Like the Wolf" pool scene is very memorable, as is the "I Wish" warehouse montage, and, of course, the "Right Here, Right Now" helicopter ride. And, yes, very 2000's; right up there with Shrek (2001) and Digimon: The Movie (2000).

What I've heard of the last Indiana Jones movie is depressing. They could have handled "guy gets older, his adventuring days are naturally now behind him, he can retire to that long-delayed happy domestic life and honored retirement with the respect of his colleagues and students after one last hurrah handing over the reins to the new hero/ine" but no, they had to ruin Indy for the cheap jokes.

It isn’t just movies. Tasks the theme parks. Infamously Disney reimagined a fan favorite in Splash Mountain allegedly due to racism (note the ride literally contained zero humans or depictions of humans). The original ride was great story telling as the ride itself cohered with the story telling. The story wasn’t gendered but arguably somewhat masculine (ie had a frontier / wandering aesthetic).

Disney turned it into a black princess ride that is a pale imitation of its ancestor.

Or the Indiana Jones stunt specular. They removed swords for batons. Indiana no longer has a gun. The bad guys don’t “die.” They even removed the bad guy’s Nazi symbols. They sanitized the show removing the things boys would find interesting (probably without making it interesting to girls).

I’m not sure these moves are to pander to women so much as Disney has strong progressive / feminine decision making.

I have my doubts about the simple version of the "pandering to girls" hypothesis because the particular thing about the sequel trilogy that girls seemed to find most appealing (the prospect of a romantic relationship between the heroine and the villain) was entirely an accident and they ultimately clumsily failed to exploit it; the real audience they were trying to pander to, an unhealthily sexless sort, finds romance just as icky as "boys" do.

Let's say "pandering to the stated desires of progressive women". Whether their actual and stated desires are different, or whether girls and adult female progessives want different things anyway, isn't going to matter.

This raises the question of- can you name mass-market popculture franchises which are more popular among men?

Alien.

The terminator.

John Wick is a well known franchise. Perhaps not quite mass market.

Dune?

Indiana Jones before it overstayed its welcome. Die Hard? Superman?

Gundam? Pokemon? Dragonball Z? Half a dozen other major Japanese IPs?

Even if we limit to within the Anglosphere, I'm fairly sure that- various efforts to the contrary- franchises like D&D, Warhammer 40k, and most fighting/strategy genre video games are more popular among men than women. Each of these have had merchandising, novels, movies/TV series, comics, spinoffs and emulators, and so on.

If you look at the Star Wars sequels, what male character can boys look up to? Can any of them be considered heroes? Look at Indiana Jones. They wheel him out, make him useless and is replaced by a woman. Marvel is the same. Robert Downey Junior retires, and they replace Iron Man with a sassy black lady.

In modern media, white men cannot be the hero, cannot do anything heroic. This fundamentally is why these boy brands are dying. They take these properties and then the only thing the creatives want to do is tear down the characters that people like.

Boys don't enjoy literature/films with female protagonists, while girls are okay with media with male protagonists. This has been demonstrated in numerous studies:

A 2022 analysis based on PIRLS data found that elementary school boys were significantly less interested in texts with female protagonists—even when the text was otherwise identical—while girls showed consistent interest regardless of protagonist gender - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959475222001013

A 2008 British study of about 4,000 children aged 4–16 found that only 5% of boys preferred books with a girl protagonist, while 22% of girls were comfortable with male protagonists. Boys were as interested in protagonists like robots or monsters as other boys, suggesting the issue isn't solely the female gender but perhaps relatable content or format - https://lisamartinbooks.com/articles/2016/11/26/where-the-boys-are

A long-standing pattern noted by children's literature professionals is the belief that “girls will read books with boy heroes, whereas boys won’t read books with girl heroes” - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/06/gender-imbalance-children-s-literature

Heroes who suck at their jobs don't get traction from boys. Heroes who have emotional angst get traction from girls even if they suck at their jobs.

Famously, several properties were sustained by women deep into fanfic before it was even a thing. Gundam, Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek are examples where rabid female fanbases saw deep meaning where authors probably didn"t intend it and interest was sustained as a result. It wasn't a girlboss doing girlboss things that made girls interested, it was angsty shit. If girls wanted to see girlboss badasses they'd watch Star Wars and demand to play as Luke while the little brother is Leia being rescued.

Girl protaganists aren't associated with badassery because for the most part girls aren't badasses in real life. Mom may crush it at her rock climbing gym but she still needs dad to lift the heavy rock in the garden. By practical reality observable feats are skewed male, and thats just biology in action. Slam dunks by six foot plus dudes look awesome, positioning for shots at the backline looks lame. Female combat sports are awesome, much more so than male, but thats within the constrained environment. The world we actually live in simply requires physical reality to dominate and thats just what historically we end up sering most of.

I think a bigger problem is that social justice made certain categories verboten to criticize and thus they survive the writers room far longer than they should have. The Acolyte should have been smothered in infancy when the witch chant was proposed, but because the lead was a black woman championed by a queer person no one stood up to say shit this is lame we gotta rework it. By historical analysis most creative works, even ones with straight white dudes, suck. Its just that a mild tilting on the scales can make the sea of suck force bad ideas survive much longer.

Gundam and Star Trek had rabid female fanbase?

The original Mary Sue was a a parody of Star Trek female self-inserts, interestingly enough. Apparently so many people were sending in this sort of work to a Star Trek fan magazine they wrote Mary Sue to parody the phenomenon.

The strength of the Star Trek female fan base has always been slightly surprising to me: it’s military science fiction! That said, I can see it: it’s military sci-fi, but the military solves problems through the power of empathy and diplomacy, Kirk and Riker (my phone literally autocorrected his name to “Romeo,” which is hilarious) are… present, and most stories in Trek are soft science fiction, using alien societies or time travel to explore social structures and personal relationships. TNG always stood out to me as having a remarkable number of episodes about character romance, particularly for the female characters.

Trek also stands out to me for how it’s very formalized and society (in Starfleet — who knows what people do on Earth) is regimented, and I think that’s a factor in geek culture more broadly. Geeks seem to really like dreaming of societies with clearly-defined rules and chains of commands and even uniforms. I have a theory that geeks, often autistic or hypo-social, find the improvisational and non-explicit social rules of society hard to navigate or understand, and wish things were more explicit and systematic. I think this is what psychologically unites ren faire people who dream of m’ladying their way into a woman’s affections (or a woman who would like to be treated like a courtesan), and Trek fans who dream of color-coded uniforms.

Star Trek has ranks and command structures (but is highly non-rigid in social organization for a quasi-military organization — it’s how a progressive imagines a military should operate), Harry Potter has Hogwarts houses with found families based on character traits ordained by a magical hat. Both are about social institutions that provide the security of structure without the rigidity of oppression, with many stories revolving around how morality and justice override authority. There’s a fundamental liberalism at the heart of nerd interests, but one that absolutely finds the improvised social structures that actually characterize liberal society hard to fathom.

But also after a long period of miss after miss, even my geeky friends aren’t into Star Trek. I know more fans of The Phantom Menace than The Next Generation. I remember when I took IT classes and the instructor was appalled when I was the only one in the class who copped to liking Trek. Nerd culture has changed.

I don’t think it was Scott Bakula’s show that killed it — I’ll come out as actually liking Enterprise, but also I liked Voyager so I have terrible taste in Trek. Was it Abrams? I always used to joke that Abrams ruined Star Trek as a job interview for ruining Star Wars. No one should have let this man near a franchise. (While I hated The Last Jedi, I also generally like Rian Johnson, just not for a main episode in a long-running franchise focused on nostalgia.)

The only person in my cohort I’ve ever known as a Star Trek fan was an autistic, asexual girl who seemed to have picked it as her special interest, reading the novels, playing STO, and of course writing fan fiction. I would have liked to have known her better but she was a hard person to get to know.

Harry Potter has Hogwarts houses with found families based on character traits ordained by a magical hat. Both are about social institutions that provide the security of structure without the rigidity of oppression, with many stories revolving around how morality and justice override authority.

It's basically sports teams for nerds as well.

But also after a long period of miss after miss, even my geeky friends aren’t into Star Trek. I know more fans of The Phantom Menace than The Next Generation. I remember when I took IT classes and the instructor was appalled when I was the only one in the class who copped to liking Trek. Nerd culture has changed.

Interesting that this applies to me, despite not really being a central example of a nerd (bounced between Africa and the UK and came to America relatively late) . I never really had "my" Star Trek show, I did catch some episodes and Nemesis (which didn't help) but I was more of a Star Wars/Stargate and then Battlestar kid. My impression was that I simply fell through the cracks between major ST shows but I checked and Enterprise was airing right up until the time of BSG's first season and Voyager and SG-1 overlapped so those shows were out there.

Might just be a change in values or people tiring of it? Stargate was milscifi without the utopianism.Battlestar was self-consciously made by former Star Trek writers to avoid problems they thought Trek had (and to be much darker in a post-9/11 world). Just as Sci-Fi Channel took BSG and Stargate out back and shot them when they were seen as outdated. I thought it was absolute folly but they may have been overcorrecting due to past experience.

Battlestar was self-consciously made by former Star Trek writers to avoid problems they thought Trek had (and to be much darker in a post-9/11 world).

Specifically, Ronald D. Moore had been a writer on DS9 and went over to Voyager after DS9 ended, but left Voyager not too long afterwards due to disagreements with the producers over storylines, basically in that they were reluctant to take seriously the implications of the premise -- that Voyager is on its own, without support, and their situation should be getting more and more desperate as time goes on. There was an interesting interview some fanzine did with Ron Moore after he left where Moore more-or-less ranted on this subject at length (and I wish I remembered the name of said fanzine and knew if that interview was online). It's interesting to think of that interview in light of the Ron Moore edition of BSG, which is more or less an attempt to "do it right" in this respect for both Voyager and the original BSG (which was also rather inconsistent on the whole issue on how desperate the Last Surviving Human Refugee Fleet is -- one week everyone's fleeing the destruction of the 12 Colonies, the next week everyone's whooping it up on the casino ship like nothing's wrong...). I like to imagine that every Friday night after a new episode of the Ron Moore BSG aired, Moore prank-called Brannon Braga and said "See! That's what Voyager should have been like!" and then hung up.

Which is not to say that Ron-Moore-BSG is not without its problems, they're just different problems -- the main one being that Moore tried for a massive story arc like JMS did in Babylon 5, but didn't want to spend the time obsessively planning out 5 years of stories like JMS did, so he decided to wing it as he went along. The thing is, Ron Moore is almost good enough for this to have worked, for a while anyway; the wheels didn't start seriously coming off the thing until season 4.

I've never actually watched either Stargate or Battlestar!

My parents are boomers, so they watched Star Trek and The Next Generation when they aired, and especially saw the films when they started coming out. Talking to them about movies is an interesting experience: they remember a time when movie theaters were everywhere, and going to see a movie was almost an everyday occurance. My dad talks about how when Star Wars came out in 1977, he saw it several times before it left theaters.

So I grew up on watching Star Wars films with my parents, we'd pull the lounge chair into the center of the living room and I'd curl up with my dad and watch the OT. When the prequels came out, we watched those too, but my favorite was Empire, obviously. When I was a little older we started watching Star Trek too, I remember liking Star Trek 1 and I was surprised when I got older and found out everyone hates it. But I also was obsessed with the Voyager probes as a child, so I guess it hit the spot for me.

Star Trek and Star Wars have always been the most mainstream of the space franchises, so I grew up with them as normal popcorn movies that my parents liked. Now, if you start talking to my mom about Lord of the Rings, that's where you'll start finding the nerdiness.

So part of this is that I grew up on a bit of an older wave of nostalgia, and I don't know what the Xer and Millennial parents of my cohort raised their kids on.

Some people would say you should go out and watch all of SG-1 now, but don't listen to them; it's fine to stop after season 8.

BSG, on the other hand ... "The humans haven't figured out what the Cylons are doing" is a compelling premise, right up until you add "the BSG writers are humans" and complete the syllogism.

I'd think LotR was the least nerdy thing you've mentioned, though. Pre-Peter-Jackson, sure, knowing the name "Frodo" marked you as an ubergeek, but today they're still top-100-lifetime-gross movies; when The Return of the King came out it was like top 10.

I remember liking Star Trek 1 and I was surprised when I got older and found out everyone hates it. But I also was obsessed with the Voyager probes as a child, so I guess it hit the spot for me.

You're not mixing up 1 and 4, are you? Everybody thought 1 was dull but loved 4.

I don't know what the Xer and Millennial parents of my cohort raised their kids on.

I tried to suggest to them at least a little of everything I knew was decent as soon as it was mostly age-appropriate; sometimes sooner if the writing was clever enough to slip by ("Under a blacklight this place looks like a Jackson Pollock painting!" - Guardians of the Galaxy) or pointless enough to edit out ("What if we reuse the same joke but don't understand subtext?" - Taika Waititi). I try to tell them which yet-unwatched options are better or worse or scarier or slower or whatever than others.

And they take turns getting to pick what we watch together, which is sometimes the hard part (Gravity Falls was good, Owl House less so, and was Amphibia really worth three seasons?) but is still the important part, because their preferences often surprise me. They've all soured on the MCU and Star Wars (except that we're planning to watch Andor). My oldest loved TNG and likes DS9 but dislikes Kirk too much to watch more TOS. My younger two just tolerated Trek (and won't watch any more scary Borg episodes) but they really like Babylon 5. Everybody loved The Martian, though not as much as the book.

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I agree and disagree. I think Trek's fandom has always been predominantly male, with a substantial distaff side. The boys like geeking about the Warp specifications and photon torpedo load-outs of the various versions of the Enterprise and playing Starfleet Battles -- the girls like cosplaying as Orions and shipping Kirk and Spock.

The quasi-military structure of Starfleet was always a bit of thematic dissonance; Roddenberry was really envisioning a post-religious, post-military, globalist society, but framing a crew of explorers who also sometimes have to fight Klingons (Chinese/Soviet analogs) as anything other than a military vessel would not have made sense to a 60s audience. Making them a space navy was an easy way to get the normie audience oriented, but the show itself was, as has often been noted, actually Wagon Train in space.

You'll notice the officer/enlisted distinction in Starfleet is practically non-existent and getting promoted rarely has much to do with command as opposed to just being good at your job (like in a civilian job).

I think this cognitive dissonance has continued through various iterations of Trek; sometimes they try to lean away from the military themes and more into political or social ones, and sometimes they lean into it and tell a war story (DS9, the best Trek), but lately, it's just kind of incoherent as Trek parodies itself. That said, Trek has also always been a commentary on contemporary issues, told through the medium of sci-fi, so it's not surprising that as woke spread, Trek became more woke.

The fundamental problem with Trek is largely the same one as Star Wars (and to a lesser extent the MCU) - it's running on fumes. It's got a huge fanbase of aging nerds who loved it when they were 12, but a franchise can only live so long on nostalgia, and both Trek and Star Wars are having trouble pulling in the next generation. I think this is something we are starting to see with cape movies as well. How many Zoomers are invested in 60 years of Superman or X-Men lore? Will alphas even read comic books at all?

The fundamental problem with Trek is largely the same one as Star Wars (and to a lesser extent the MCU) - it's running on fumes. It's got a huge fanbase of aging nerds who loved it when they were 12, but a franchise can only live so long on nostalgia, and both Trek and Star Wars are having trouble pulling in the next generation. I think this is something we are starting to see with cape movies as well. How many Zoomers are invested in 60 years of Superman or X-Men lore? Will alphas even read comic books at all?

That's not a fundamental problem. It's something perfectly manageable, and something that was managed competently in the past - there's a reason it's called TNG. All these franchises, in all their media forms including comics, deliberately turned hostile on the kinds of people that enjoyed them, and are now doing a surprised Picachu that the next generation is not picking them up.

Star Trek invented fan fiction. This is, uh, not a male hobby.

Kirk/Spock was the original slash, and it (mostly) wasn't guys doing it.

Where else do you think the Kirk x Bones shipping came from?

A 2008 British study of about 4,000 children aged 4–16 found that only 5% of boys preferred books with a girl protagonist, while 22% of girls were comfortable with male protagonists.

I didn't read the article or the paper. However, those aren't parallel statements, as currently written. The percentage of boys comfortable with girl protagonists could be higher than 5%. The percentage of girls who prefer boy protagonists could be lower than 22%.

Heroism generally involves some combination of self-sacrifice, self-improvement, hyper-agency, hyper-competency, physical and/or mental strength. Based upon their Lived Experiences of interacting with boys/men and girls/women, it'd be sensible that readers (whether it be boys, girls, men, or women) would more easily suspend disbelief for a male hero than a female heroine. And that girls/women would find a male hero more plausible than boys/men a female heroine.

It's like how preteens will more readily accept teenaged or adult heroes than vice versa, teenagers will more readily accept adult heroes than vice versa. And adults are usually disinterested in works where the protagonists are preteens or teenagers (sometimes even young adults)—a common gripe is that even kid side characters are a negative value-add to a story, just a source of annoyance, "idiot plot," and plot armor.

Robert Downey Junior retires, and they replace Iron Man with a sassy black lady.

Even worse, a character who is the worst stereotypes about "urban youth". If you were trying to write eat hot chip and lie deliberately you couldn't have done it better.

Riri Williams originates nothing of her own, she works on Tony Stark's original tech to 'refine' it, she steals (literally) the Iron Man suit, gets rightfully expelled for being a massive pain in the backside, goes around then with a chip on her entitled shoulders about how this is unfair and it's only Because I Is Black. Falls in with a gang of weirdoes and criminals, knows they are criminals, happily goes along with crime and violence for money, blackmails a guy who is trying to avoid going down the same path his villain father did, frames him for her crimes so he ends up in prison, and then ends up literally selling her soul to the actual Devil, all of this knowingly and with full consent because she thinks she is Just That Special. (Disparu had great fun reviewing the series).

I am fully open to the conspiracy theory that Iron Heart had writers who were self-aware and actively rooting for its downfall. It's hard to believe anyone would lean into Riri's 'Tony Stark wouldn't be Tony Stark without the money' when the 'Tony Stark made this in a cave with a box of scraps' was one of the stand-out lines of the early MCU foundation.

She got everything handed to her on a plate (and, um, if she's Lil' Ms Genius, how come she's not back in Wakanda doing high high high level super science?) and still complained. Disparu went a bit too hard on the series, but he's not wrong: she bitches about what good is a degree, it'll only get her (a really good high-paying doing science) job, then she's all shocked Pikachu face! when they go "okay then, you don't want a second chance, you're expelled".

She's aware right from the start that the Hood and gang are a bunch of criminals, there's no "oh well maybe they're just misunderstood, maybe they're actual urban revolutionaries". Nope, she jumped straight at "violence? crime? murder? for money? gimme gimme gimme!"

That "am I supposed to know who you are?" line to Mephistopheles isn't as smart as she thinks, because now if she's messing around with magic, she better know who is who in that world. But of course this is Riri Williams, Know-It-All Brat, and she can't be bothered to learn anything because she already knows it all. Tony Stark, when faced with the fallout of what he's been building all along, decides to go the hero route. Riri goes straight to "I don't wanna work, I want free stuff, I want money, if I have to commit crime and sell my soul to the Devil, no problem".

Tony Stark was Tony Stark from the start, he was being shown around as a kid genius from the age of four. That's not the family weapons industry at work there. And yeah, box of scraps in a cave, as against Riri being handed the tech from the start and then stealing it because she's incapable of producing her own.

That's not "more interesting" as character arc, that's straight up "she's dumb and evil".

I am fully open to the conspiracy theory that Iron Heart had writers who were self-aware and actively rooting for its downfall.

The thing to remember here is that the show was conceptualized much closer to the Floyd/BLM time period. It's just been delayed forever, presumably because they realized what they made after the high faded and tried to cut it into something viable or dump it when it would do the least brand damage.

In light of the absurd views on crime that flourished then, I can understand why they decided to make the genius with the full scholarship to MIT a criminal without really considering the "Stormfront or SJW" implications.

The shaming of "mediocre white men" or "nepobabies" is just par for the course. It's a reflex.

The thing to remember here is that the show was conceptualized much closer to the Floyd/BLM time period.

Yeah I've always heard the writing was done quite proximal to Floyd events so it has zero moderation or sense.

It begs the question why did the world lose its mind over that incident?

I mean it seems to be clearly multifactorial and a perfect storm situation - lock everyone up with a lot of fear and guilt, have this roiling social justice/woke thing that's been fermenting increasingly unquietly for years, and have a lot of money and power and propaganda trying to aim itself at Trump and anything that seems Trump related. Boom.

A number of non-conspiracy conspiracy theories over the years have commented on this like foreign funding trying to divide America and Democrat aligned sources trying to create division to make Trump bad.

There were multiple dress rehearsals for a national reckoning with race over black males getting killed by police or vigilantes. A lot of those cases (e.g. Michael Brown, Trayvon) didn't really pan out as good outlets or didn't have video.

With Floyd, we did. The video was bad enough that, iirc, initially even conservatives were sympathetic.

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It would be interesting to know why this is. My intuition is that, if I picked up a mass-market piece of adventure literature with a girl protagonist, there would be a greatly increased likelihood of there being some point in the story where the dramatic arc is sabotaged in the way that is so typical of female-protagonist stories - like the heroine actually had the power to solve all the problems in her if only she realised her own worth, or there was a solution that involves using emotional intelligence and likeableness to dissuade the villain from his villainous ways instead of defeating him, or whatever. I would find this disappointing and anticlimactic, especially in literature of a tier so low that I have no expectation of the victory-by-leveraging-wonderfulness-of-women being written in a remotely interesting way. Could a similar line of expectations dissuade other prospective male readers?

Indeed, it doesn't seem like boys avoid e.g. the Metroid series of video games; even if the protagonist is revealed to be female, the genre guarantees that Samus will still only defeat the final boss by getting gud. I also do not get the sense that the fandom of wildbow's Worm (whose female protagonist does not get treated well by the universe at all) leans female.

Worm was written by a man, and it shows. So was Practical Guide to Evil. It shows so hard that you can clock the author's sex just by reading the book, even when they use a totally sexless pseudonym and write an opposite sex protagonist.

A quick check confirms that Samus was created by a man as well.

If you've ever read chicklit, the difference is obvious. A female author of a female protagonist will linger on her interactions with every remotely relationship-appropriate male, to make sure the reader knows how desirable he is, and the flavor of his desire for the main character. Is he a good friend who respectfully hides it? A burning frenemy who offers aid even though he shouldn't? A simp?

As a man, reading that sort of book is alien in a way that few other things in sci-fi or fantasy manage. Like, you really go through life keenly aware that most men you interact with are at least some level of interested in you? Just because? As the default?

There is a male version of this, called "glazing", but it takes the form of gratuitous reaction shots to something impressive the male character has just done.

But women can more easily imagine being showered in attention and praise for doing something impressive than men can envision a world where they are loved and wanted just for existing.

Disclaimer: I think that last category might actually exist in anime, but I don't watch enough to know for sure.

It's amusing how online women will complain about "men writing women."

Yet, the archetypal outcome of a male author writing a female protagonist for a male audience is an unrealistically strong and independent badass female protagonist, like Samus or Lara Croft.

The archetypal outcome of a female author writing a female protagonist for a female audience is a realistically passive, hypoagentic female protagonist, like Bella from Twilight or Anastasia from 50 Shades of Grey.

It's also annoying because women aren't exactly better at writing men. I've seen some truly awful caricatures of what women think men are like (mainly from books my wife reads, and then asks me "is this accurate"). Yet the "men writing women" complainers act like this is a uniquely male offense. They don't seem to understand (or perhaps don't want to understand) that it's simply hard to get in the head of the opposite sex.

I swear you gotta find chinese cultivation literature written by women for women. The guys there are the angstiest most memory addled (literally necessary every female cultivation novels male protag gets hit by pans/trucks/magic/curses every 5 minutes) wangstfests ever. The men will have an all consuming inciting incident that traumatized them and they will have no plan of action (or a ridiculous 2 million step rube goldberg plan nothing in between) that cannot be resolved unless the female acts as the motivating force for them to move forward. After that its just endless emotional traumas and memory wipes to torture the protag and the male love interests repeatedly so the denouement of love declarations can be made over and over and over again.

Any idea on what's the source of mind wipe obsession?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Sm61Fau9w7k?si=z-rOmvg1_LzKWMBF

There are so many layers of doublethink about it, but like many other bits of feminist media criticism, "men writing women" complaints are fundamentally horror at the thought that a man might ever have sexual thoughts about a woman without permission (both her permission and the permission of You, The Female Observer). Any realism concerns are a fig leaf. All of this is trivially revealed, say, when women make a "men writing women" complaint and are then embarrassed to discover that the writer was a woman writing for women about her real nigh-universal woman experiences which they already knew they shared when making the complaint.

Closely related: women policing "unrealistically" attractive female characters as a crude disguise for envy that they're prettier than them.

Like, you really go through life keenly aware that most men you interact with are at least some level of interested in you? Just because? As the default?

Mate, in the last Culture War thread we had someone on here commenting about that immigrant case saying that sure, it's totes normal for an adult man to want to bang a 15 year old girl (because men are wired to be attracted to youth and fertility). Women do learn early that simply having boobs and a pulse gets you male attention in the "I'd hit that" sense. Not that they're interested in you as a person, that's where the fantasy wish-fulfilment comes in.

I'm not saying it isn't true, or at least very common. I'm saying that as a man who is usually invisible, it's not something I can easily relate to.

Yeah, it's tough for men. But for women, it's not attention as "here you are as a person", it's "here's boobs on legs". Visibility, sure, but might as well be invisibility. Some women work that angle, but when you're fourteen and growing into womanly features this kind of "every male from fourteen to forty is looking at my tits" is not the boon it might appear.

I wasn't thinking about it in a sort of "grass is greener" sense (I really am quite happy being invisible!) It strikes me more as a people vs things dichotomy. Like, the detailed flourishes of the attention are the draw of the work, for women readers, where as it's just not for male readers. And that isn't to say that women don't appreciate some plot, or men some interpersonal character moments. But I observe a sort of fascination from one or the other that serves as a fairly reliable tell.

And I would bet that for women authors, delivering satisfying amounts of good attentions, and satisfying comeuppances for bad attention is possibly the most important skill in their craft.

I'm the worst potential audience in the world for "romantasy" (and believe me, Tonstant Weader Fwowed up when I learned this neologism) so I can't speak for the mass audience of women readers of such stuff.

But I think it's more about soft porn (as per the devolution of the Anita Blake series) than romantic attention, as having two or more supernatural beings lusting after your PI/Wiccan/half-Fae heroine means you can stuff in the adult scenes that publishers crave for page-turning appeal; you can describe the ravaging by the werewolf tech executive founder of the billion-dollar startup on pages sixteen to twenty, then go for the seduction by the vampire biker gang leader on pages thirty to thirty four, and maybe throw in some will they-won't they UST between your hard-boiled heroine and her on-again/off-again boyfriend who's a half-demon sorceror running his own rival paranormal detective agency sprinkled all through the novel (volume six of the fifteen - and growing! - volume Susie Superb, Witch Attorney series, on sale in every good bookstore now!)

See Laurell Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, where she completely lost the plot, as the main focus is "I gotta get pregnant so I need to bang every single hot guy I encounter". All this is for ostensibly magical purposes, so that's why she has to have sex with fairies, humans, every other supernatural being, etc., but that's only the figleaf for "and now here's sexual encounter number fifty-six".

EDIT: I think the main difference between men and women readers of erotica (shall we say) is that the guys will go straight for the Hawt Action without much need for justifying it, but women need a lead in (hence the establishing of the love-hate relationship between Hot Guy Numbers One Through Four and the heroine before they bang, or the Merry Gentry "The Goddess said we have to bang so we can get our old magic powers back. Yeah, it's a divine command, so strip now").

glazing

Why have I never seen this word before this week, and yet like eighteen references in the last few days, each of which is presented in such a way as to help normalize it? Is this a psyop?

I don't think we had a lexical gap here. I don't think a new word is called for, and if it were, I definitely don't think it should be that one. Nothing about this feels organic or warranted.

For me, this was back in April with "crashout." These things come and these things go.

Why have I never seen this word before this week, and yet like eighteen references in the last few days, each of which is presented in such a way as to help normalize it? Is this a psyop?

It's popping up because it is slang and then it got picked up in the tech-sphere (which is highly adjacent to here) as the term of choice for the behavior of LLMs being overly supportive in chats.

It's all over the place right now because of people complaining about LLMs and then a bunch people picking up and using a youth term because "neat new" and "how do you do fellow kids."

I picked it up from my son, and it really feels like a perfect term to describe the thing in a lot of progression fantasy where the MC does something impressive, and then the focus swaps out to random other characters just to show how jaw-dropped impressed they are at how that was IMPOSSIBLE!

It hits a sweet spot as a specific term for unsightly over-praise.

Meng Hao walked into the McDonald's. The cultivator taking his order gave a derisive snort, but Meng Hao did not really care, because he had repressed his aura down to the Single Patty Realm, and a fool would not be able to tell his true level of burger eating.

"Give me... a Happy Meal!"

The cultivator's face flickered before he finally regained his composure and laughed. "You couldn't afford a Happy Meal. Get lost! Don't you see that there are Double Quarter Pounder Realm eaters waiting behind you?"

Meng Hao slapped his bag of holding and threw 80 billion spirit McDonald's coupons onto the counter, causing an earthquake which demolished half of the restaurant. Everyone dropped their jaws. None could see how this was possible!

Please, for the love of dog, actually fucking write this. I NEED to see the Burger Xianxia cinematic universe.

The full copypasta:

Meng Hao walked into the McDonald's. The cultivator taking his order gave a derisive snort, but Meng Hao did not really care, because he had repressed his aura down to the Single Patty Realm, and a fool would not be able to tell his true level of burger eating.

"Give me... a Happy Meal!"

The cultivator's face flickered before he finally regained his composure and laughed. "You couldn't afford a Happy Meal. Get lost! Don't you see that there are Double Quarter Pounder Realm eaters waiting behind you?"

Meng Hao slapped his bag of holding and threw 80 billion spirit McDonald's coupons onto the counter, causing an earthquake which demolished half of the restaurant. Everyone dropped their jaws. None could see how this was possible!

"I'll take that Happy Meal with a side order of fries, " Meng Hao said. He was as calm as the ocean in a painting of an insanely calm ocean. "And let me see your manager!"

The cashier cultivator coughed up a mouthful of ketchup. He simply could not handle Meng Hao's killing intent, because he was only at the Quarter Pounder with Cheese realm himself. Even though Meng Hao had suppressed his aura, because he had cultivated the Heavenly Burgin' Qi, this was enough to kill people a few levels higher if he truly wanted.

It was then that another man which a much more fierce aura stepped forward. "You dare make trouble here?"

"P... Patriarch Hamburglar!"

Patriarch Hamburglar was 99 cents of the way into the Big Mac Realm, plus tax! Meng Hao was pushed back two feet, knocking over a soda machine. Powerade Mountain Berry Blast geysered outward, killing several onlookers.

Of course, Mayor McCheese saw all this happen through the window.

Meng Hao coughed up a mouthful of blood, snorted, constricted his pupils, and then his expression went calm. He unleashed the aura of 64 patties, condensed down to a 2 patty stack that could fit into his mouth!

Mayor McCheese coughed up a mouthful of cheese. His pupils constricted.

"Is this... Seeking the McRib stage??"

Meng Hao had the gentle air of a scholar, but it wouldn't stop him from killing several people in a McDonald's.

"Burger Devouring Scripture! I'm Lovin' It!"

With the first keyword of the Burger Devouring Scripture, everyone below the early Quarter Pounder With Cheese stage exploded into purple mist. The light of the immense heavenly burger shone down with the contours of a golden arch as 9 illusory burgers floated around Meng Hao's body, which is probably an important xianxia number that matches the number of lakes in some sacred Chinese province I've never heard of. But that was only a fraction of Meng Hao's power. He waved his arm, bringing forth thirty more cultivation techniques that hadn't appeared in over 400 chapters!

"Heavenly Tribulation Fries! Eastern Everburning Egg McMuffin! Fruit Smoothie Guillotine! Soul McCafe Mocha Incarnation!"

Meng Hao's expression was the same as ever as he slapped his bag of holding, and brought out his karmic ketchup packet, Fry Cook Lord medallion, seventeen different wooden time spatulas, a five-coloured resurrection coupon, the silk burger wrapper, various souls of lightning McNuggets that he may or may not still have, and his mask of the legacy of Ronald McDonald. Oh, and the image of a flying Chicken Snack Wrap dragon appeared. Remember that? It was basically his Main Thing at the start of the novel, but quietly faded into irrelevance. Until now!

All of this takes some time to describe, but actually happened in the space of only a few breaths.

"What! Impossible!"

Meng Hao wanted to summon the parrot as well, but it was too overcome with eroticism by the purple fur depicted on a nearby poster of Grimace, and was busy drilling out a glory hole straight through the poster, and the wall it was pinned to, with its strong parrot erection.

But it was more than enough. The Hamburglar's soul flew out and was absorbed into his mask! He screamed as his body was destroyed completely.

Meng Hao brushed off his robe and swept up his spirit coupons and everyone's bags of holding which probably didn't have any cool sh*t inside unless I write him into a corner later, and anyways, don't worry about it for now. He surveyed the rubble that was all that remained of the McDonald's.

"Guess I'll be taking that Happy Meal... to go!"

Originally from this review of I Shall Seal the Heavens.

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It's a copypasta that's been around for ages.

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I am both dispirited by the increasing influence of Chinese cultivator tropes, and cheered by the reminder that, yes, people are people (and often have bad taste).

What's this, Snow Crash fan fiction?

Gotta make it present tense for that.

It's used widely elsewhere in modern zoomer-ish parlance from what I can tell.

A quick search indicates that this forum saw its first use of "glaze" in this sense 11 months ago.

Why have I never seen this word before this week, and yet like eighteen references in the last few days, each of which is presented in such a way as to help normalize it? Is this a psyop?

It's relatively new, but I've seen it around more than one week. What you observe happens with all buzzwords, including "psyop".

Could a similar line of expectations dissuade other prospective male readers?

The last major intended-for-girls cartoon that didn't have this, that being MLP G4, had an absurdly large male following precisely because it lacked this.

The show bible for My Little Pony is on archive.org, and it has some interesting things to say about how they positioned the world. It's also from 2009 so it predates the woke spillover:

What does it take to make someone fall in love with a brand? What makes a series of stories you heard in your childhood memorable for you entire life, so much so that you want to share them with your children once you become an adult? Think of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter. These brands settle into the hearts and memories of their audience and remain there. Why? These brands are worlds. The possibilities within these worlds are vast, yet there is a defined logic and structure to these alternate realities, making them highly believable. Moving more inwardly, these worlds have limitless lands where limitless types of beings and characters can live in them. You see, it is not just the world that the audience loves, but mostly the characters that live within them and the different, yet somehow similar trials they must face in their lives.

This approach has been utilized for countless intellectual properties, including Transformers and G.I. Joe, with much success, but has fallen short when attempted with girl properties. Perhaps this is because the softer gentler nature of girl properties felt limiting to those who would try. And all too often the worlds created for girl properties are left vague, ambiguous and generic. But I do not think this has to be so. A girl world can be set up the in the same manner, it is the intentions that must be different.

Rather than set the stage for epic, dramatic adventure stories like the examples above, a girl world should set the stage for friendship, heart and laughter as well as adventure--- adventure that is more fun and exciting than dramatic and epic, but adventure nonetheless. With only that alternate intention, the same strong history, mythology, back story and even the alternate logic and physics of an alternate world will serve the same purpose to endear you to the characters and make the stories memorable.

This sounds right to me, though the contrast between the corpospeak and the graphic design is certainly pretty jarring. I never watched it (not even when it was big), but there's a richness to the detail of the world and characters. Contrary to modern female character design, every character page has a "bad points" section as long as her "good points" section, and this is probably one of the reasons it had such a strong following in its heyday. Characters' bad points cause conflicts or avoidable problems, creating room for the ponies' good points to shine and resolve them.

The target audience was very carefully designed, and they knew they were targeting boys too (given the bronies of the 2010s, perhaps it worked a little too well). Some cut-down quotes from p65, if you want to read it in detail:

  • Girls (6–11): My Little Pony offers 2 elements that are very important and popular to girls: relationships and fantasy. (Snipped much more from this point.)
  • Preschool (3–6): The ponies are cute. Preschoolers own ponies. The stories and morals within are nice enough for parents. Little kids want to watch big kid stuff. They'll watch.
  • Boys (believe it or not): They won't admit it, but they'll watch. When their sister’s watching it, they'll balk and act like it’s dumb, then they'll sit down and watch it. For the same reason Moms will find My Little Pony interesting enough to happily share with their daughters, the compelling conflicts, the strong characterizations, the silly humor and (most importantly for boys) the ADVENTURE, the boys will watch, too. Really
  • Moms: We've got a few good points going for us when it comes to Moms. First, the original buyers of My Little Ponies are in their late twenties to mid-thirties and are likely to have daughters within the target age range, 3-11. Bringing back elements of the original ponies from the 80's ... will nurture a sense of nostalgia, something that is not difficult to do with Gen-Xers. Second, compelling storylines (ie: truly engaging conflicts, both external adventure and internal relationships,) characters with depth and complexity, clever and silly humor that doesn’t talk down to kids and even a few jokes that might go over the kids’ heads will all engage Mom enough that watching My Little Pony will become a fun thing for Mom to do with her daughter. Not only will Mom be sharing her favorite childhood toy with her little girl, but she may actually enjoy watching, too!

While MLP was a breakout exception, it's an existence proof that the suits used to know how to make girl shows that that boys could watch. But all we have now are the corpses of old franchises going to resyk to be turned into slop. Why haven't we seen other major media cater to girls-but-also-boys in this way, instead of the torrent of flawless mean-spirited girlbosses that we did get?

Contrary to modern female character design, every character page has a "bad points" section as long as her "good points" section, and this is probably one of the reasons it had such a strong following in its heyday.

An important distinction here: "modern female character design" does still produce characters with lots of bad points, but not on purpose.

Why haven't we seen other major media cater to girls-but-also-boys in this way, instead of the torrent of flawless mean-spirited girlbosses that we did get?

Because someone mentioned it above: the flawless mean-spirited girlboss is a religious thing, and most show writers are, if not necessarily that religious, encouraged in that direction by the suits. Problem is, of course, that because their religion is a religion of hatred, people need to have some other motivation to watch it.

The best example of a Western show post-MLP (or at least, post-Lauren Faust-directed MLP) to not be outwardly religious in this way is Gravity Falls. I don't think Alex Hirsch is particularly religious in that way (or at least, he isn't in a way that negatively impacts his work, though there are also signs that he understands what I'm about to talk about below).

given the bronies of the 2010s, perhaps it worked a little too well

Oh yeah, about that. The boys that persist in watching it are also [at least sometimes, if not most times] doing it for that reason, just like they were with Sailor Moon back in the '90s (and is part of why the post-woke MLP [G5, the 3D era one] designs look significantly less attractive, like dogs), and is why slice of life anime with all-female casts tend to have significant male followings.

(What that reason is... is more complicated; smarter men than I have tried and failed so I'd have to think about it more. I'd say 'moe' as a first pass, but that's not any less dense.)

Young boys also enjoy Bluey.

I hate everything, but I like Bluey.

like the heroine actually had the power to solve all the problems in her if only she realised her own worth

Evolutionarily speaking, a woman's worth is largely dependent on immutable physical characteristics (modulo things like plastic surgery), so these sorts of stories tend to psychologically resonate with women. They don't have to go wrest their value from the external world like men do.

I once asked my mother why so many Hallmark movies copy the "It's a Wonderful Life" plot where a woman makes a life-altering wish, gets transported to another timeline, and then realizes she doesn't like it and has to find a way back. She responded, "oh, the movie is telling you that actually everything is great for you already, and you're just too stupid to realize it!"

or there was a solution that involves using emotional intelligence and likeableness to dissuade the villain from his villainous ways instead of defeating him

That one strikes me as perfectly reasonable and not necessarily anticlimactic...

Evolutionarily speaking, a woman's worth is largely dependent on immutable physical characteristics (modulo things like plastic surgery), so these sorts of stories tend to psychologically resonate with women.

"worth is largely dependant on immutable physical characteristics" is true evolutionarily speaking about all forms of life

Well sure from a deterministic perspective this is trivially true, but the sense we are using it is that a woman doesn't have to do anything in order to be wifed up and have a decent lower-middle-class family life except excercise judgement over which specific suitors she ought to choose. In this frame, far from being slop, Twilight is actually the core female struggle heightened by supernatural fantasy elements.

@self_made_human's recent posts about the pretty-but-dim model from this week's thread are a sad counterexample. You might get no shortage of men wanting to sleep with you, but it was the social technology of enforced monogamy that made them commit. Identifying who will stick is a prerequisite to choosing a suitor, and seems like a much harder question.

Consider the number who become obese, refuse to socialize, or are just unpleasant and offputting, there's clearly a 'something' she has to do.

Unpleasant and offputting to some extent = "picked no suitor, which is by definition not the correct suitor".

I think my limit on "significantly loses attractiveness due to weight" is about BMI 35 or so (100kg/220lb at 168cm/5'6''), which is significantly into the "obese" range.

She just has to avoid failing; she wins by default. It's completely different from a man, who can be nice, safe, reliable, and still end up completely overlooked.

There is a reason Fluttershy is the most popular of the mane six. Butterscotch would have ended up FA.

There is a reason Fluttershy is the most popular of the mane six.

Since when? If we accept the sheer number of works involving a character as a proxy for popularity, and look at Twibooru, Fluttershy is in third place (nearly tied with Pinkie Pie, at 295K and 291K respectively), far behind Twilight Sparkle (1st, at 410K) and Rainbow Dash (2nd, at 318K).

It's completely different from a man, who can be nice, safe, reliable, and still end up completely overlooked.

Rather humorously, the same dynamic is true for Worst Pony Applejack (227K), behind Rarity at 247K.

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The default for secular western women is an obese woman too unpleasant to hook the men she does manage to attract, but that's ok because she has no way of knowing if she can trust him anyways.

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So, you take a work of fiction with a male main character. It falls into the "Men want to be him, women want to be with him" tropes and everyone is happy. You try to do the same thing with women? You create a woman that women want to be, and men don't want her or you create a woman men want, but women don't want to be her.

You create a woman that women want to be, and men don't want her

Speak for yourself, I want a woman who can knock me unconscious.

Sam Hyde has some advice about this.

Sam Hyde has some advice about this.

And that would be…?

(I mean, this is totally vague — you don't even have a link — how is it not "low effort"?)

Here you go. Timestamped!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=P6mdWmP-v58&t=705

Thank you; that does indeed clarify what was previously too vague.

Sometimes jokes can’t be explained without ruining the joke and therefore are “low effort” but jokes should be the exception

Sometimes jokes can’t be explained without ruining the joke

Is a quote that's very rarely actually true but likes to be paraded by people who simply made a bad joke and they aren't willing to own up to it.

A true man of culture, I see.

You try to do the same thing with women? You create a woman that women want to be, and men don't want her

Male audiences might not want modern Hollywood female lead character because Hollywood writers often insinuate the woman of the show doesn't want them in her life.

I firmly believe there is a good number of strong female characters that western/American male audiences have been fans of. Even in the action-centric genres, Ahsoka from the the Star Wars Clone Wars tv show, Katara from Avatar, and Vi from Arcane, Gwen Stacey from the newer Spiderman are all examples of very well received female characters. These aren't solely male fantasy waifu audiences either, and had strong female fandom components as well. They run a gauntlet from girly-feminine to tomboy, unabashedly straight to gay, supporting characters to show leads, and so on.

But they all also have very clearly dear personal relationships with men in their life- and not even necessarily romance fantasy waifu stuff either. Ahsoka is the apprentice for (secretly married) Anakin Skywalker, and it's a mentor-mentee relationship with no sort of romantic tension between them. Katara was the center of one of the larger (fan-insisted) love triangles of its time on television, but she's also a sister who simultaneously gives sass and cares for her brother and is almost defined by her consistently demonstrates compassion for strangers female and male alike. Vi is punk-butch aesthetic and unambiguous lesbian, but one of her closest relationships- and deepest regrets- is regarding her surrogate father-figure Vander, and her regret at getting him and her adopted brothers killed. Gwen may be in a tragic/doomed romance trope with Spiderman-Morales, but the emotional crescendo of character conflict/character arc in the second movie is her reconciliation with her father.

None of these characters are defined by their romantic relationship with the main man of their narrative. However, they also all have close and personal relationships with the men in their lives, the sort of thing that they worry/anger/fear over and would fight for. They wouldn't fight beside / for the men in their life merely because 'it is the right thing to do,' but because it's personal and they care and if someone threatened to take the men they cared about away from them, it would be visceral.

By contrast, what sort of personal male relationship does Brie Larson's Captain Marvel treasure enough to fight for? In the Star Wars sequel trilogy, what is Rey's emotional connection with Finn, her co-lead and the series larger self-projection male role? In Rings of Power, who is Galadriel's male emotional connection... besides the awkward love interest of the Dark Lord himself?

These aren't characters who show any particular desire / want / interest with an emotional relationship, romantic or otherewise, with the men in the setting who might serve as an audience proxy. Captain Marvel is stoic and most personal relationship is an abusive one she destroys the moment she girlbosses harder. Rey is... hard to place, since she's somewhere between oblivious / stuck in a fated romance / the trilogy was a thematic mess. Galadriel's indifference towards her own subordinates spawned sociopathic comparisons in her first episodes.

But note that all three of these characters have romantic love interests! It's forced / non-central / etc., but the nominal titulation is there if that was all that it took to get male investment. Captain Marvel got ship-teased with War Machine. Rey and Kylo Ren are having sexy abb scenes in the second movie. Galadriel and Sauron are the bad boy trash.

But I doubt much of the male audience could see themselves having a warm or interesting conversation over dinner, let alone something more. Polite discussion at best, maybe, if not barely restrained impatience / apathy. Oh, sure, they'd Do the Right Thing and save you if you were in danger, but only with the same emotional intensity as stranger #XYZ.

Compare that to a character who might not be a lover, but who might love you as a brother, or a mentor, or a friend... how many Strong Female Characters would extend even that?

I firmly believe there is a good number of strong female characters that western/American male audiences have been fans of. Even in the action-centric genres, Ahsoka from the the Star Wars Clone Wars tv show, Katara from Avatar, and Vi from Arcane, Gwen Stacey from the newer Spiderman are all examples of very well received female characters.

How can you write such list and omit The two strong women in western action movie canon: Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor? Zero girlbossing, 100% believable authority, Significant Relationship Stuff, all while exhibiting classic female traits. I’ve never heard a single guy say anything bad about either character.

What made them such great and believably strong characters is that they were strong women instead of being "strong" teenage girl romantic fantasy protagonists. A show vs tell difference. Anyone who's seen a mother on the warpath for their children knows they can be really fucking scary. That's the energy channeled by Ellen Ripley at the end of Aliens and Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. That's what made them both so believable for teenage boys because which teenage boy doesn't know a mother (their own or some friend's) whose wrong side you really don't want to end up on?

It really is a shame both movie franchises ended after only two movies.

How can you write such list and omit The two strong women in western action movie canon: Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor? Zero girlbossing, 100% believable authority, Significant Relationship Stuff, all while exhibiting classic female traits. I’ve never heard a single guy say anything bad about either character.

Ageism!

Or rather- I wanted to pull from relatively recent characters, while Ripley and Connor were much older (as in, pre-2000s) characters who might be filed under a 'well, writing was better back in the day.' Newer characters with still-younger audiences make a stronger point on current audience-reception dynamics.

Have you watched Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles?

I was just revisiting it and God, it’s good. They focus a bit more on the motherly side of Sarah and the difficulties she has trying to bring up a son and keep him safe, whilst keeping her every bit as badass. John Connor grows in a very realistic and impressive way over the course of the series, and the new characters are very good too.

No, but perhaps I should. I tend to be awerse to watching series that have (or at least should have) long term plot but were cancelled before resolving it or, worse, started strong but were derailed / ruined before the end (cough Game of thrones cough).

IIRC, Terminator: Sarah Chronicle Chronicles was showing clear signs of being about to be derailed when it was canceled. (That is, they pulled the whole "let's change the setting entirely" thing as a cliffhanger)

It would be interesting to know why this is

My gut says that it's something very profound and evolutionary. In the ancestral environment, a boy has to earn his place as a man (by hunting, fighting etc) whereas a girl grows into a woman without doing anything per se. It would make sense for boys to seek out male role models for that reason.

Also a boy's hero journey might be more interesting to a girl than vice versa because women have higher levels of cognitive empathy or perhaps it resonates with women in an evolutionary "selecting a winner" kind of way.

starfighters

Such a good example. In the second most recent Star Wars movie they had a dyed-hair girlboss talking down to a fighter pilot saying the last thing they need are any more “trigger happy fly boys” … in their ongoing ship vs ship combat. The writers repudiating the spacefighter dogfighting aspect of Star Wars. Something that hypes boys much more than a disapproving HR manager talking down to a combat pilot for being too high-T.

It's especially remarkable because she was telling them all to trust the plan.

But she had no plan. We are informed in episode 9 that the 'Holdo Maneuver' of FTL ramming was 1 in a million, it can't be reliably repeated. So she was really just trying to flee, only to get spectacularly lucky.

Except that wasn't the plan. The plan was escaping on cloaked ships while the First Order chased the larger ones. But because Poe sanctioned Rose and Finn's mission who brought back a slicer who betrayed that plan to the First Order, plan A was shot. Hyperspace ramming was the hail mary.

If the plan was 'escape to not-Hoth and hole up in a fortress against much stronger space and ground opponents' then it may as well not exist. I don't recall any reference to cloaked ships either.

Then you missed quite a bit. The plan was most of the resistance evacuate on cloaked ships to Crait, where they can hide in a secret base, while a skeleton crew on the main ships leads the First Order on a wild goose chase. If the cloaked transports were undetected that was a reasonably solid escape plan. Because the First Order would have no reason to search Crait because they would have destroyed all the main ships and thus believed the Resistance destroyed.

I'm not saying its a great movie but the plan was slightly more well thought out than a one in a million shot.

Well that still wouldn't work since they would've caught up to the big ship since it was imminently about to run out of fuel, attacked it, discovered the crew were mostly absent, then traced it back to Crait.

However you're clearly right, I'm surprised the cloaking/stealth angle wasn't in the extensive plot description on the wiki where I checked first, before AI confirmed you: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Episode_VIII_The_Last_Jedi

Princess Leia acted the same way in ANH, but it was presented as a bad thing.

A lot of stuff in these movies are like this, reused badly or inexplicably. Even down to Holdo's Leia-style costuming frankly. Leia dressed that way in ANH because she was still undercover in the Senate, still a princess. Why does Holdo dress like that during open warfare?

I have never found a source for this, but I am absolutely convinced that Admiral Holdo was just a way to recycle Princess Leia’s plot and lines after Carrie Fisher died mid-filming.

Principal photography on The Last Jedi was done in July 2016. Fisher was done all her scenes and finished an entire book tour in the remainder of the year, before dying from an out-of-the-blue heart attack around Christmas. She did not die "mid-filming".

I think a lot of modern writers directors and producers are simply unaware of why a given decision was made, so they end up copying the look and mannerisms without understanding why it worked or why it doesn’t work in their context.

Holdo also had the sin of being a terrible leader in general. Going from assuming command to a mutiny in a matter of days, when the mutineers are experienced and committed believers in the cause, says far more about the commander than the mutineers.

Plus, it was frankly poorly thought out on a thematic level. 'Defer to people in positions of authority and do as you are told even if they appear incompetent' is not only contrary to the themes of much of Star Wars, but anathema to a lot of the cultural convictions of the more individualist/egalitarian West. In turn, it created tonal confusion for the major themes of the movies, while also flagrantly demonstrating the lack of concern for the verisimilitude of the broader IP.

Defer to people in positions of authority

Well, women, anyway.

What's strange is I've known many women who are into Star Wars. It's basically a tentpole franchise, at least before Disney bought it. My mom loves Star Wars -- even was on Star Wars fan forums back in the 2000s. I almost dated a girl back in high school who was really into me; I met her in school, and we flirted (to really date myself) at a Star Wars premiere, which she was really excited to go to. I don't think Disney needed any help making Star Wars appealing to women.

I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like. Too many creative leaders at the company have spent too long telling stories that women like, that they don't have experience telling stories that men do. This applies to their parks as well: long before lightsabers were the hot Disneyland souvenir, Davy Crockett coonskin hats were the big seller in the 1950s. Walt Disney was a man who loved cowboys-and-indians stories and trains: Disney was a children's brand, not a girls' brand. There are plenty of heterosexual male fans of theme parks, but show me a straight man who likes EPCOT and I will show you a man who is incredibly angry at the Disney company. They took a park about science, technology, and cultural awareness -- a "permanent world's fair", as it was described -- and turned it into a place to get drunk and ride rollercoasters.

Once upon a time, Disneyland was a place about exploring the frontier, riding canoes, riding on a train, riding on a space-age train, there was a show where they simulated going to space on a rocket... the Disneyland of the 1950s and 60s was a respectable place for a little boy to be into. But more and more Disney's parks feel like places for little girls to wear dresses, women to go on a "girls' trip", and gay men to be Disney adults. They've lost touch with what boys are into, and have gotten stuck in a rut of being a "girl's place." I genuinely blame the introduction of the Disney princess dress -- which, surprisingly, dates back only to the late 90s -- as the beginning of Disney as a brand being wildly associated with girls and not boys. (Disney Channel basically being "dumb sitcoms for preteen girls" probably didn't help.)

That said, I don't believe girl-power storylines are the problem with Marvel. I also don't think it's "franchise fatigue." I think the problem with Marvel is that the early MCU films had a kind of grounding in the real world: Iron Man had war on terror connections (and got worse over time), Thor was relatively grounded and intimate for a story about a norse god and at least had the real-world mythology connection, Captain America had the historical fiction angle and the connection to fighting pseudo-Nazis (which they later handwaived away as villains because ???). Avengers feels realistic compared to what comes out of Marvel these days.

Guardians of the Galaxy was wildly successful, but I guess I'm in the minority who didn't like the first film and preferred the second, and especially the third. I actually fell asleep at the theater watching the first Guardians, the only time I've ever done that. Marvel seriously overreacted to that success, and took everything in a cosmic, ungrounded, fantastical direction. The early Avengers films earned their cosmic dimensions. The recent films ask viewers to accept a lot of wild and unbelievable stuff without earning it. Time travel! Multiverse! Alligator Loki! Wanda creating an entire fictional town! Apparently Kang (and Loki?) has the ability to CONTROL ALL OF TIME now? Or he did, because Kang is no more.

Really, the problem with Marvel is that they're running into the limits of comic book stories trying to reach general audiences. I don't read a lot of comic books, and generally don't care for superheroes. But I liked Iron Man 1; it didn't feel like a comic book story. It felt grounded and human, and was more like a science fiction film than a comic book movie. The real problem with Marvel is baked in: most of their stories are about fantastical, ungrounded, space events involving mutants and aliens, and this quickly becomes confusing and alienating for general audiences. There's a reason comic books aren't considered hard sci-fi.

There are lots of complaints from comics fans about what they did to MODOK in Ant-Man, but my response is always that MODOK as a concept looks hilarious and stupid, like something a child would design. There was no way to translate this into live-action in a way that general audiences wouldn't find ridiculous. Making it a joke was inevitable.

(And the new Fantastic Four felt genuinely AI-generated to me, all of the effects had a ludicrious quality and the soft, undefined edges I associate with AI video. I don't think they used AI to create it, but dang if they didn't create a great imitation of AI art.)

My mom used to watch Star Wars because she was a Harrison Ford fangirl. When she'd gush, I used to groan and tell her that was TMI. To be fair, he's a handsome man, and I get the appeal.

She also, uncritically, enjoys the second trilogy, which I can't excuse on any level except the second film, which I will defend as decent.

She also, uncritically, enjoys the second trilogy, which I can't excuse on any level except the second film, which I will defend as decent.

Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn, Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Oh, yes. Worth suffering through Jar-Jar Binks and horrible little Anakin for. And Natalie Portman's costumes in the first movie are gorgeous. Hayden Christensen? Eh, Anakin is a whiny spoiled brat so that's tough to pull off, but the Master-Padawan relationships (and the betrayal involved) make it work.

Oh dear. I forgot that there was a third trilogy, that's the one I meant. I'm quite content with the second one myself, they're not high cinema, but they have their charm.

I'm old enough to have been there when the first Star Wars movie was released (mid-teens), and I honestly never thought Lucas would get the second and third sets of trilogies made.

Now it's almost a shame that happened.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if they weren't Star Wars specifically, the prequels (especially the first) would have been much better received, Jar Jar Binks aside.

I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like.

In contrast to you, I think the ideological reason is very important here - it's not the only problem, but ignoring it brushes over a big part of the picture.

I doubt their explicit goal was to alienate men, but there's an exceptionally female-biased undercurrent behind a lot of Disney's decisions that can't be ignored - see: Star Wars, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, etc. They certainly believed they were regressive franchises that alienated women due to their supposed focus on male characters and upheld harmful stereotypes by failing to depict strong female heroes the way they wanted. As such they were very intent on portraying "powerful and strong women", and creating storylines which preached to men about their supposed privilege and shoved women in their faces which were ostensibly supposed to be admirable but just ended up being odious. Hell they placed ideological messages in media for female audiences too - see: the Snow White reboot. But these narratives are particularly repulsive to men due to the consistent portrayal of them as incompetent, oppressors, or dutiful little allies whose only role within the story is to lift up the strong female Mary Sue. They chose to belittle their male audience instead of appeal to them. You get what you deserve.

I think what happened here is that once they acquired Star Wars and Marvel properties, many of the creatives behind the scenes saw the opportunity created by the fact that these were primarily male-dominated IPs which they could use to incalculate the existing male fanbase into feminism while bringing in a fresh crop of female viewers. They assumed they had a lock on the existing fanbase due to their significant legacy power. When that didn't succeed, and their audience then went on to complain about the fact that they were being forcibly shut out of cultural properties that they were patrons of in the beginning, the answer was always to double down with something along the lines of "If you're not progressive enough to get with the times, you deserve to be alienated. How sad for you to live in a world where men aren't catered to all the time, you misogynist". Then the original audience left and Disney panicked. In practice, they did in fact "alienate them by pandering to girls", and some of that was intentional on Disney's end.

What really gets me is that Disney is actually capable of creating pieces of media that are worth watching if they didn't prioritise progressivism over actually good storytelling (in practice, this does end up being a tradeoff; if you prioritise irrelevant metrics of success, that will sometimes come at the cost of other considerations, especially when it means your main female character might need to fail and be very imperfect in order to be a realistic and relatable character). Andor is a sterling example of this, with a grounded premise, nuanced character writing and believable portrayals of the banal nature of evil that resonated with mostly everyone. Disney's not entirely incompetent and are actually capable of creating properties that cater to the original fanbase, they have just chosen not to in favour of other considerations due to heavy ideological capture.

Until they learn to stop doing this and openly issue a grovelling apology for the last decade, I hope they keep losing their male audience. Vote with your feet.

So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both.

Did they actually get a return on Lucasfilm? I know they made a decent profit on the first few films, but Lucasfilm cost them 6 billion, IIRC, I don't know if they managed to net that much across all their SW projects.

Probably not from a discounted cash flow perspective. Also you ought to factor in failures like the Star Wars hotel in WDW.

In 2020 there were reports that they were making $3bn a year in Star Wars retail merchandise, and plastic toys, T-shirts etc are an ultra-high margin business. They were making 25% of revenue from licensed games, and in 2021 EA suggested that had been $2bn between 2019 and 2021 alone, and that’s pure margin. They spent $2bn on the Star Wars parks but parks revenue has grown since 2021 (or 2019) even if it slowed recently. Money was very cheap through the 2010s, so they may well have made out fine.

They were making 25% of revenue from licensed games, and in 2021 EA suggested that had been $2bn between 2019 and 2021 alone, and that’s pure margin.

I can't really even remember any games from that time. Battlefront II (the second Battlefront II), the one with the lootboxes, I guess?

Jedi fallen order is the biggest game that Disney star wars has produced by far and that was released in 2019. That should only have been 1.2 billion in revenue though.

I’m struggling with the sale in that case if video games were generating 700m of FCF pa

As I recall he sold it well below what he’d have received in an open bidding process because thought Disney and Iger would be better stewards of the brand.

It seems like they are still pretty deep in the hole. They paid $4 billion in 2012 dollars, and the movie profits are nowhere close to this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/04/14/disneys-star-wars-box-office-profits-fail-to-cover-cost-of-lucasfilm/

Note those numbers also don't include marketing costs, which are often $100 million plus for a blockbuster.

Disney+ lost $11 billion, the theme parks have been a bit of a mess apparently, so I don't see how merch could come anywhere close to filling in the gap.

Merchandise is the biggest earner for IPs by a huge margin, indeed the value of Star Wars was probably 90% merch sales when they bought it

And judging by the size of the Star Wars toys section at Target compared to 10 years ago (or even when I was growing up in the mid-90s, more than a decade since the last Star Wars movie came out), it seems the golden goose is well and truly dead. When I was a kid, Star Wars had an entite aisle all to itself, literally every boy I knew had a lightsaber and dozens of action figures. I can't remember the last time I saw a kid playing with a Star Wars toy.

To be fair kids don't really play with toys at all anymore, they do the Roblox on their Kindles and watch 20something Influencers

Kindles? iPads

Kindles? iPads

The Kindle Fires (I don't know if they use the term "Kindle" for these anymore) are the cheapest way to get a kid a tablet and they went crazy coming out with various kid-themed versions and cases.

Edit: for instance, here's a $100 tablet advertised for kids and themed to the Avengers.

Phones.

Do you have any numbers on that? Like I said, from what I remember the Disney Star Wars merch didn't move at all. Star Trek had the same problem. Was it actually enough to cover the movie shortfalls, or were they making money with the legacy merch, or something?

https://www.licenseglobal.com/retail-news-trends/-star-wars-the-brand-saga-continues#:~:text=%E2%80%9CStar%20Wars%E2%80%9D%20is%20big%20business,at%20an%20estimated%20$29.057%20billion.

A quick Google bought this up immediately:

The franchise has raked in an estimated $46.7 billion, with merchandise sales at an estimated $29.057 billion.

So not quite 90%, but still a majority of earnings.

Whether this means Disney has made profits or a return on their initial investment I don't know, although some of the other Google results suggested merch was still bringing in around 1b per year for them.

Apparently they had a deal with Hasbro for a minimum of $225 million in royalty fees for the three new movies. Lucasfilm would get 20% of the wholesale price in royalties, which would kick in once the minimum threshold was crossed. For comparison their deal with Hasbro for the prequels had a minimum royalty fee of over $500 million, which seems to indicate that they expected lower merch sales.

https://www.jeditemplearchives.com/2018-09-16-the-cost-of-hasbros-star-wars-license/

Maybe not by box office receipts alone, but counting other revenue streams like merchandise, I wouldn't be surprised.

Sequel trilogy merchandise was also a complete dud from what I remember. So where the theme parks (which themselves cost billions to build).


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