What is wrong with having a show that appeals to boys/men, or having a strong male hero?
Thankfully I cancelled Netflix over a year ago, but of course I heard about the bait and switch which is pretty commonplace now. The shill websites are doing the usual fan attacks as well as praising the "stunning and brave" direction. One even called it a "radical reimaging". Netflix obviously should've just openly stated that it would be a show about Teela but they know there wouldn't be an audience for it (outside of the sycophants in media). They knew that people who grew up watching He-Man would want a show about He-Man. Although I would rather market to them because they would most likely have kids and buy merchandise, but it makes much more sense to market to blue haired feminists on twitter.
You would think what has happened with comic books over the last 7 years would wake some people up.
I'm glad Anime and Manga are doing well and I hope that Japan never bends the knee. I recently bought some Conan comic books and novels, as well as the complete Robert Howard collection. I know Netflix is doing a Conan show, but I am pretty sure he will be upstaged or he will learn everything from women.
But I will close with my question from above. What is wrong with having entertainment that appeals to boys/men? Or as Yellowflash put it "nothing wrong with having something that appeals to women/girls but why is it that something that generally appeals to men have to appeal to everybody"
This is very, very true, and VERY deliberate. Big Publishing has become dominated by women editors, women managers, women marketers, women "sensitivity readers", etc. YA is the most egregious example of the end result.
My kids have read The Hardy Boys. The Boxcar Children. Isaac Asimov. Other Sci-Fi/Fantasy from my childhood (70s-90s ish). Only the occasional present day book, and I have to be very careful to vet them.
I like most of the books of that "Who was ....?" series.
The good news is, there is so damn much good stuff from the last 200+ years, that there's plenty to pick from.
When one of my kids was learning about Christopher Columbus, I found online a textbook from the 1940-50s that had an in-depth history about Columbus, told in story fashion (unlike today's school books). The kids loved it because it was interesting, there were heroic actions and evil actions, and no, it did not paint Columbus as perfect or flawless either.
I could continue to rant about this for a long time...
If they like scary stuff, I would recommend Darren Shan. His vampire series is really cool and it has actually masculine vampires. At one point one character legit says that vampire life and culture doesn't work for most women's natural proclivities. Of course there are very few vampire women, but they are mostly extreme tomboys.
They are not evil, but they are extremely hard people.
I read the first few Blackthorn Key books by Kevin Sands and The Last Apprentice by Joseph Delaney, those were fun as well.
Oh, also Skullduggery Pleasant.
You may want to look at the Please Don't Tell my Parents I'm a Supervillain series. The main character is a young girl, but the series lacks woke nonsense and acknowledges consequences for the character's actions. It's also a good modern pulp adventure.
Like you I was a big reader at a young age (thanks to my mom dragging us to the library all the time) and I got into golden age sci-fi at first. It’s a shame what happened to mainstream sci-fi.
Check out the Galaxy's Edge books if you like grim-dark sci-fi. They're written by an army ranger so the military tactics are actually really well written.
Will do. Thanks!
When I was a kid in the 90's I grew up on the Biggles books - a series of daring, heroism and adventure about a WW1 fighter pilot written by.... a WW1 fighter pilot.
Even then, the process of sanitizing and pussifying children's media was WELL underway, having begun in the 50's, as you can read toward the bottom of that wikipedia article.
Today, there's basically nothing for boys that's produced in the west, that is anything more than a story about how the best thing they can do for the world is to shut up, lie down and die.
The Westerns of Louis Lamour. https://en.id1lib.org/s/louis%20lamour
The Saint series by Leslie Chateris https://en.id1lib.org/book/4665915/51acc8
The Parker series by Richard Stark https://en.id1lib.org/s/parker%20richard%20stark
Oh man, Biggles was the shit, I loved those books when I was a kid.
My favorite author when I was growing up was Otakar Batlička. I'm not sure if his books were ever translated to English, but he published multiple books and short stories of his travels around the world in the early 20th century, around WWI. Some of them are supposedly things that happened to him, and others are stories he heard people tell, and nobody knows for sure how much of what he wrote about was true, but I ate it up all the same because it was incredible in a similar vein as Biggles - a lot of adventure, heroism, and just general, natural, not-needlessly-exaggerated manliness.
So what you're saying is there's a market here waiting to be tapped?