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