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Notes -
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 Marsand 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.
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
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".
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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.
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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