Report: Star Wars toymakers were directed to exclude female characters
Time and time again, western media corporations prove they have no fucking idea how to market their productions to fans.<p>Problem:<p>Western corporations treat the consumer as some sheep to whom you show some advertising and then they are supposed to react accordingly and purchase their stuff. You show the advertisement for the movie and then consumers are supposed to pay you to watch the movie. You show them the movie and then they are supposed to go buy the toys you make available on store shelves.
They treat the consumers as a simple black box with an input for advertising and an output where money comes out.
And time and again people prove they are not this simple revenue generating mechanism. And whenever they prove this, western companies are baffled, unprepared, and ultimately blame it on the consumers by starting anti-piracy crusades and trademark protection crusades. Many pages could be linked here to prove the utter stupidity of these companies, but maybe in a grandchild post. The market and these companies are not efficient. They just barely manage to make a humongous profit. This is typical of any monopoly. The market is inefficient, the market actors are inefficient and the monopolizing actor makes a profit (most often not as much as an actor could possibly make if the market was healthy) to the detriment of all other actors.<p>Solution:<p>They are even more pitiable when compared to the state of affairs in places like Japan.
The media industry for anime, manga and all related things understands there needs to be a symbiosis between the source (usually or eventually a company) of original content and the fans. Once a company releases something it becomes part of an ecosystem around that content. They are no longer the sole provider in that ecosystem. And this serves to keep the ecosystem healthy. Fan content keeps the community active and buzzing during the periods between releases by the original source.<p>Let&#x27;s take one company acting in such ecosystems for example. More precisely one range of products(Nendoroids) for one year(2015) from one company (Good Smile Company). For those unfamiliar, Nendoroids are high quality posable figurines (with a few articulations and interchangeable parts) of super-deformed(chibi) versions of characters. For the particular issue of gender representation of characters a rough count leads to around ~125 female figurines and ~50 male figurines released in 2015 which results in a ratio of about 5&#x2F;2. Note that the target audience also isn&#x27;t segregated into male or female. The target customer is simply Japanese.<p>To showcase their agility in the ecosystem let&#x27;s take a much more narrow example. The Mikudayo figurine. This is a figurine with a lot of fan history behind it. It starts with Hatsune Miku who started as the box art mascot for a voicebank for the vocal music synthesis software Vocaloid. Fans in turn created an entire character around this one picture sparking an entire phenomenon that spread through the entire world (I may write a tangent explaining a bit the Miku phenomenon). Good Smile Company crated a Nendoroid figurine for Miku in the specific style of the line. Eventually, a fan based an entire costume on the  Nendoroid version of the character and wore the costume at a convention. The result was rather grotesque, but the sheer discrepancy between the cuteness of the Nendoroid figurine and the eeriness of the life size costume version sparked a phenomenon around this new version of the character that turned into a new character of its own called Mikudayo. Subsequently Good Smile Company released a figurine of exactly this new character.<p>Such a chain of events is mostly unthinkable in the west.<p>- The Mikudayo figurine would never have been launched because of the murkiness of the trademark issues.<p>- The Mikudayo phenomenon would have been squashed and people sued for infringing the original trademarks and misrepresenting the character.<p>- The Hatsune Miku phenomenon would have been squashed and people sued for infringing the original trademarks by creating fan content that mislead people into thinking Miku was anything else than a piece of software (People new to the phenomenon usually mistakenly associate Miku and Vocaloid in general with the hologram not the voicebank and the software. Trademarks were designed to prevent exactly this.).<p>- The Vocaloid software would never have been made or would never have succeed, because the very idea of making your voice available for everyone on the planet to create songs with is baffling and outrageous to artists in the west.<p>And yet the ecosystem around this phenomenon (Miku) is healthily spreading and growing and all actors are making a profit even if there is rampant copyright and trademark infringement.<p>The only western company that seems to get it a bit is Hasbro. They aren&#x27;t really actively targeting their fanbase but at least unlike others they aren&#x27;t cracking down on fan content too hard. (And it&#x27;s a good thing they are not targeting their fanbase because their biases around what the demographic of the fanbase would want would make them change the content and abandon the very strengths that made people fans in the first place)
Hasbro has on their hands a completely unexpected phenomenon of an unprecedented growth and scale. This phenomenon is called My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the volume and demographics of the fanbase is something Hasbro could never have anticipated.<p>Looking at the length of the comment maybe I should turn this into a blog post of it&#x27;s own. But it&#x27;s not like I said anything new.
Maybe I should end this by saying that we should make these companies that treat consumers as a money spewing black box fail. Alas, it may actually have no effect since there actually are a lot of sheep that will just buy what is given to them, and any of our efforts ignored with the decrease in sales blamed on piracy.