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I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
I found an interesting counter point recently.
https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales
This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.
You know, the idiocy of Disney's "The Force is Female" push doesn't take a genius to figure out. I was talking to my wife about it, and I just asked:
"When we were kids, how many little boys did you know who liked Star Wars?"
"Tons."
"Did you know a single girl who liked Star Wars?"
"No."
It's the absolute height of fart huffing retardation to literally jettison your entire built in audience for an IP, and try to replace it with an audience that never cared about it one iota. Like I get the typical neoliberal line of "They're just trying to expand their market". Except now the experiment has been run, and they've wound up appealing to less people than before.
It was literally inconceivable to me, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, that I could stop loving Star Wars. I dragged my poor not-yet-wife to a midnight screen of The Force Awakens, well past her bed time. And she went with me because she knew how much it meant to me, god bless her.
And yet here I am. I fucking hate Star Wars now.
The ways they've seemingly purposely spit in the eye of every fan of the original Trilogy and EU is insane. Between turning all the legacy characters into beaten down pieces of shit, killing them off ignominiously and denying fans the reunions they desperately wanted. Putting aside all the glaring technical issues with the craftsmanship of the films, like poor writing, poor characterization, completely nonsensical plot contortions, etc. I forget where I heard it, but someone joked that all new Lucas Films are made for an audience of one, Kathleen Kennedy. Every film has to be about a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views herself, replacing a character that is a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views George Lucas. Once I heard that, suddenly it all made sense.
God I hope Disney sells it all back to Lucas at half the price.
I actually think the gender split is how the ideologues convinced the capitalists to buy into the change in direction. If you already dominate 50% of the market with the boys then the best path for growth could be to go after the girls. Obviously the risk with this is you don’t get the girls and alienate the boys. Bud light is the best recent example of this strategy backfiring spectacularly.
Perhaps that strategy was claimed to be what Bud Light was after to placate a few ABInbev dinosaurs. But everything since has confirmed that the real strategy was (and IS) not to widen their customer base but to replace it. Unfortunately their old customer base realized they were obsolete before the new one was ready, but that's often the way things go.
Even though I agree that it was done for ideological reasons, I don’t think there was any intention to “replace” the customer base by the marketing executives, they’re not complete imbeciles in that specific way. They wanted to maintain the ‘legacy’ audience (and I guarantee that word was used) while attracting other people.
They're not imbeciles, but like the Admiral executives in Mad Men, they don't want to sell to those people.
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