If yall aren’t aware there was a recent interview Chuck Dixon did where they were talking about comics and the guy mentioned pandering to a female audience has been one of the things that have ruined comics. Third wave feminism to be exact. Dixon talked about his girls used to read comics like Archie, Little Lulu, romance comics, etc. He then mentioned that his sisters read Green Lantern because they thought Hal Jordan was cute (I can’t judge because I had every cd and now every album of Fiona Apple downloaded because I thought she was beautiful).
Some people took that to mean “see girls read comics” when he was essentially saying that if you make comics that cater to what girls/women like you can sell to them. Manga has proved this along with countless YA novels. For whatever reason Superhero comics and Sci-Fi don’t appeal to women in large numbers but that doesn’t seem to stop the IPs from sunken costs.
You know why a lot of women watch sports? Hot men in tight athletic clothing.
This is the exact same with superhero comics, they don't give a shit about the story so when you put said women in charge of those stories, they go to shit.
If you want a female audience, go the superficial route of your 50 shades of grey or your romance novels, stop using the few tomboys that genuinely enjoy comics for what they are to justify your subversion of it.
When I was 12/13 my older sister played volleyball in high school. I went to every game because I enjoyed watching 11th and 12th grade girls in spandex shorts. The girls who liked comics liked them how they were. And you are right. I heard so many women say they don’t know a thing about Superman but wanted to see Cavill. Same with Avengers. So makes perfect sense to replace that with manly looking women.
Also in the Star Wars EU community I knew plenty of women who read the books as well. Disney apparently didn’t care about that
It's also a huge cultural generation thing. Comics used to be made by working class bros for a male audience. Most sci-fi books, movies, games all were as well.
Now, those same industries are completely filled with rich university kids who due to not only their real life, but their social media bubbles have no idea how to relate to a broad audience. Which, wouldn't even matter, because they are of the mindset of 'We will tell you what you should like, because it's good for you.' Rampant nanny safetyism and progressive righteousness.
Combine that with creatives in every industry being replaced by product managers.. Now it's a 1-2 punch of 'We're missing out on 50% of the market, and we gotta tell the customer what they have to consume.'
Nothing in the mainstream is being made by fans for fans. The exceptions are so rare. It's all little teams and individuals making the good shit now.
Also look at the life experiences of people like Tolkien or CS Lewis. It’s almost like you can’t expand the audience without getting rid of your core audience.
Pandering to women could be said to be the reason absolutely everything has gone to shit.
Pandering to small audience demographics in general was when things went to shit.
Obviously they had some ridiculous notion that they could grow and foster a larger audience if they just cultivated it, but they went about it by going hogwild with every single thing, which in reality accomplishes zilch. Then they depended on ESG bailouts to keep the companies afloat.
Or refusing to accept that a customer base is majority male
It does, I swear modern comics read like soap operas or gossip magazines about fictional characters. Gone are the themes of grandiosity and transcendence. You don't get a detective thriller by reading modern Batman, you get endless family and relationship drama
Don’t forget the sitting around a table discussing feelings over coffee
Yes, because who needs ethos and gravitas when the emotional wrecks that are modern comic book writers think they know everything about mental health after their first therapy session?
A lot more women watched MCU movies for Chris Hemsworth and Benedict Cumberbatch than for Brie Larson and "she's got help".
They should have made a movie about Nova instead of Captain Marvel in the first place.
Swap a few details such as;
Dick Rider getting his powers from the Power Stone while it was on Xandar instead of Carol getting hers from the Space Stone while it was on Earth
Have him survive the attack by Thanos mentioned at the start of Infinity War to serve as motivation for actually being there and doing stupid shit fueled by emotions
Not only does this provide an almost identical character to fit the same role, but it also makes the point of not simply finishing the fight and getting his ass handed to him by Thanos near the end of Endgame all the more reasonable - fighting for revenge instead of fighting smart.
Instead Carol shows up, easily takes out a space ship, and then throws pretty lights at Thanos and draws the fight out long enough for Thanos to literally punch her out of the rest of the movie.
And I know it’s nerdy but the gender swap of Marv-ell was so idiotic and I can’t help but believe it was all because they don’t want a woman getting powers from a man. In notice this across the board where they don’t like showing heterosexual relationships but they will have a lesbian relationship.
In a short, modular scene easily edited out for broadcasting in areas such things are not allowed, of course.
They do this for a few reasons:
Most men are absolutely stupid (as evident by some of them even on this forum) who will justify it because "lesbians are hot, bro" and you see this in almost every single entertainment medium, where men will justify lesbians being in the media because "they're hot".
They can use that as a wedge to keep pushing it, forcing it into everywhere because of reason number one, and it gives them leeway to start focusing more on trans content and male homosexuality. And once people accept lesbians due to reason no. 1, then they can start putting more of the LGBT nonsense in other aspects of the property.
They have also convinced women to experiment with lesbianism by over-promoting it everywhere in media, magazines, influencers, and of course, fiction. It's extremely prevalent now in high-schools and colleges (it's thankfully not quite so bad in the U.K., but it's about one-third of college-aged women in the U.S., and even women who consider themselves "exclusively heterosexual" have regularly experimented: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5844220/)
It's a pretty sinister thing, as they use it to demoralise the men and to entrap the women. Even while people don't particularly like this stuff, and obviously most women are not supporting stuff like Captain Marvel, it's in enough places where its prevalence makes it hard to ignore, and it helps continue to create that wedge in disrupting the dating market and ultimately the family unit, as one symptom among many.
Completely agree
Manga HAS specific manga catered to women, they're not superhero stories, often times slice of life with family or romance as a focus but not always. I actually enjoy a couple of those, they're very niche though. Jousei especially has amazing stories but barely anyone knows of a lot of them.
Instead of making stories women would enjoy let's take these super heroes and try to morph them into something women might enjoy and the original audience won't. That's what they are doing. Women are not ijnto super heroes, it just doesn't work like that.
I bought my first manga ever last spring and it was Oh My Goddess. Loved the anime but I would say the core audience would be women for that but manga sells very well because they know their audience and there will always be some crossover. There were women who read and enjoyed super hero comics but they definitely weren’t in large numbers. A good analogy would be a romance novel company changing stories to action and adventure to cater to males but then all the women stop buying them
There's always gonna be crossover. I do enjoy a lot of shoujo and josei stories but obviously like the broad appealing ones and more male centric ones also. Oh my goddess is btw categorized as Seinen, meaning for young adult men. It does have that crossover though from what I remember(it's been years since I delved into that one). Manga is just different, they don't put a black guy in it and then claim it's for the black kids.
Really? I assumed Oh My Goddess would be something appealing to women. I liked it because I can relate to being awkward when trying to talk to women at that age. Shoujo and Josie mean for women? What’s an anime or manga that has a large female audience?
I think the ones with biggest female audiences are usually the mass appeal ones but I could be wrong there. Shoujo means girl and is the equivalent to shounen(which is for boys, stuff like one piece fits in there) , josei is the equivalent to seinen, young adult female.
TBF I found Fiona Apple very attractive until I heard her talk for the first time. My theory is that comics are just a means to hold the trademarks for movies. Operating at a loss is cheaper over time.
Ok, so I’m not the only one. I briefly heard her spouting the usually lefty talking points so I turned it off and let myself imagine otherwise. lol.
That’s pretty much it. Sucks because even when comics had other issues they had good stories.
For me it wasn’t the politics, it was the diction of her speech. No well adjusted non-nuts woman talks that way.
She also didn’t help herself with that idiotic “we don’t need a white man being movie critics” speech
The other side to this is its perfectly fine to have female heroes as long as you understand your audience is primarily male.
Yep. I never had a problem reading female super heroes until the past decade when the feminist activists took over. Ethan Van Schiver said that the women who are successful at writing super hero comics are good because they understand they are writing for a male audience. If I was writing a male character for women of course I’d make him attractive to women
Perhaps this is where I show my age and/or growing up overseas, but what the hell is a Fiona Apple?
Also yes, boys and girls have different tastes. You can't please everybody all the time and if you try you'll always lose your original fans. Girls don't want to be heroes and save people, they want to be gossipy cunts like Betty and Veronica.
The reason why this keeps being overlooked is one of the more insidious infiltrations of the proverbial they. Namely the slavish idea that change is inherently good.
She was a pop singer that started in the late 90s. When I was in the Air Force I saw her cd at the mall and bought it based on her being attractive. Also another dumb concept is the idea that everything must appeal to everybody
Ah you were in the service? What was your MOS?
Yea, Air Force from 99 to 04. I mainly did a lot of personnel/administrative stuff but the best part was when I was temporarily assigned to the hazardous waste cleanup unit. I wish I had stayed in or at least the reserves or guard after I got out. My dad was Air National Guard for 22 years and brother and sister were in military. Goes back to a 4x great grandfather who was in revolutionary war. So I felt it was my turn.
More than you asked for. Sorry. I assume you were in the Army or Marines? Since you used the term “MOS”
Ha, I was hazmat too, still am in my civvie job. It's fun but by God does it suck being in one of those Saint Gobain suits.
Yeah, Army. Satellite systems engineering, signals jamming and experimental weapons. I'm from a longstanding military family too, going back to the early 1700s. Way back there's a British navy captain from the Napoleonic Wars.
For my part I joined later in life, and I'm glad I got out. The military... isn't what it once was. The pride and spirit is gone and all the bullshit remains.
I’ve heard that sadly. They are running off the very people they need. Cool about the British Naval Captain! I saw some of that through my small amount of European ancestors but haven’t done a deep dive into those branches yet
Oh that's not the best part. My family line is small and the Soviets almost wiped us out, but we're direct descendants from a Renaissance master.
And yeah, anyone who the military needs right now is avoiding it like the plague, or in my case waiting for civil war with baited breath.
Oh cool! Most interesting thing I got family history wise is an ancestor on the mayflower but there are millions of ppl like that. I do have a large extended family though. What country? The family that was almost wiped out by Soviets.
Women don't want to watch these things. They want to ruin them for us.