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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19912 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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