6 ms·

Report: Star Wars toymakers were directed to exclude female characters

36 points by runarb 11y ago

faitswulff 11y ago
> “I’ve spoken with Disney people, and they were completely blindsided by the reaction to the new Star Wars characters,” he tells Boehm. “They put a huge investment into marketing and merchandizing the Kylo Ren character. They presumed he would be the big breakout role from the film. They were completely surprised when it was Rey everyone identified with and wanted to see more of.” ...they thought everyone would identify with the whiny, emo bad guy?
- fpgeek 11y ago
  They thought everyone would go nuts over the guy with the mask. They didn't understand that the mask was only a small part of what made Darth Vader such an amazing character.
  - a3n 11y ago
    Generals always fight the previous war.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- pyre 11y ago
  It doesn't really make much sense. Even if the toys were only bought for boys, and even if they strongly wanted Kylo Ren characters, there are many significant interactions between Rey and Kylo Ren in the movie. Why would they not want to be re-enacting those?
- stupidcar 11y ago
  It might seem insane, but from the limited and prejudiced perspective of these Disney executives, it makes sense. They won't be Star Wars fans, or consumers of their own company's output in general. They'll be business people, who are probably privately ignorant or contemptuous of Star Wars and science fiction in general as an art form, and who think of it only as a franchise from which the maximum profit should be extracted. Their conception of the Star Wars fanbase will be based on the worst cliches you can imagine — a homogenous mass of awkward, nerdy, unsophisticated adolescent white boys and young adults — and be informed by a crude and cynical view of marketing psychology. Basically, they have no intuition whatsoever for what Star Wars fans want or think, so will fill in the gap in their knowledge by assuming the very worst. All the above leads the executives to believe that the nerdy white boys who are dumb enough love this Star Wars crap cannot and will not identify with any character except the one who most resembles themselves. A moody, caucasian man-child with a cool mask and superpowers? How could they not love him? Any objections about him being a rather unsympathetic villain will be waved away as so much noise. “After all, Vader was a villain or something, and we sell a shit-ton of merch with his face on it, right?” To these same execs, the characters of Finn and Rey won't be viewed as anything other than a bone thrown to potential black and female fans. A way of expanding the franchise's appeal beyond its typical demographic. But they will still look at that homogenous mass of white nerds and say “These losers are the target of our marketing and merchandising efforts, and they will never identify with a female character, or buy merchandise containing one. We don't need to prove this, because we're top execs and our success demonstrates that our intuition is correct.”
  - detaro 11y ago
    I think an important part is that the typical "profitable" Star Wars fan isn't a kid anymore: they are in their late 20s to 40s. Probably white and male. Now with enough disposable income to buy a lot of stuff, and kids they'll take to the new film and buy toys for. But what appeals to them isn't necessarily what appeals to kids, and while the parents pay for the toys, the kids pick the toys. Their market research might have indicated that this is what the typical Star Wars fan wants (or maybe wanted a few years ago, due to changing perspectives in the past decade that weren't apparent during the last rush), but they aren't selling toys to the people that are already Star Wars fans. (Toys as in kids' toys, not "Collectibles")
geofft 11y ago
This is why I'm not such a huge fan of "but the market wants it" arguments, at least in our current society. The market has high barriers to entry (only one entity can make a Star Wars film, and very few can make a Star Wars-scale film) and is run by people who, evidently, have no idea what they're doing, and are still profitable and have no need to seek maximum profit. Their own jobs and raises are not threatened by the possibility that they could have been ten times more profitable, because there's no way for their bosses to know that. Rey action figures aren't on the market, so there are simply no numbers for how profitable it would be. Same goes for startups. Given the barriers to entry in the software business, which are low but still very much nonzero (hence the need for VC), and given that VC can't fund all the possible ideas that want to enter, what's in the market is what non-consumer participants have decided in their wisdom that consumers will probably like. Which may well be very profitable, but is unlikely to maximize profit. Which leads to a simple reply to PG's claim, "When you accuse Silicon Valley of x, you're implicitly saying x works well, which doesn't seem smart if you're against x." No, I'm implicitly saying that x works rather poorly, because Silicon Valley works rather poorly and is still profitable. It could be much more profitable.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  Here's the money quote (literally): > "maintain the sharp boy/girl product division" You're assuming what they're doing is unprofitable and irrational. But a majority of families with two or more children have children of opposite sexes and a cultural taboo against different sexes sharing the same toys means parents need to buy more toys. It isn't hard to believe that this strategy is profitable on net. So it's really showing the other thing -- not that the market isn't efficient, but that it can be efficient/profitable for the market to be sexist. But that makes the analogous thing in tech that boys are encouraged to be programmers and girls are encouraged to be nurses. Which is a thing that happens predominantly in schools and at home and it isn't clear how the software industry would be a beneficiary of that -- which is perhaps why we hear many calls to do something about it. The profit-seeking behavior is to change it.
JanezStupar 11y ago
Yes a noble sentiment. Let's shove stuff down people's throats for greater good. Let me ask you a simple question - who gets to decide what stuff should or should not be shoved down people's throats? Because it may so transpire that you might find yourself quite soon in a position where you are going to say: "To save this village and its villagers we have to slay everybody and burn it to the ground."
- skj 11y ago
  Yeah when I think of selling female action figures I immediately make the leap to murder.
- geofft 11y ago
  > Let me ask you a simple question - who gets to decide what stuff should or should not be shoved down people's throats? The people whose throats they are being shoved down, i.e., the consumers. Right now you have a situation where Rey action figures are unavailable to consumers who want to buy them, because some marketing executives thought they knew what people wanted better than the people themselves. Did you even read the headline? (I'm not even going to ask about the article.)
  - burntsushi 11y ago
    > Right now you have a situation where Rey action figures are unavailable to consumers who want to buy them What are you talking about? How did you arrive to the conclusion that they are unavailable? http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=rey+action+figure http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3D... > because some marketing executives thought they knew what people wanted better than the people themselves. Isn't that pretty much what marketing is in the first place?
    - captn3m0 11y ago
      "rey action figure star wars" - 199 results "kylo ren action figure star wars" - 341 results Most of Rey figures were announced after the backlash. Anecdotally, I went around shopping and was able to find everything SW, except for a Rey figure. They even had action figures for minor characters in the Rebels series, but no Rey.
no_wave 11y ago
When did supply-side economics become a core tenet of feminism?
- alexvoda 11y ago
  This has nothing to do with feminism. This is idiocy on the part of Disney and toy makers. Not releasing toys with the main character of the production when you release toys with other characters is plain stupid. This has everything to do with the fantasy demographic biases in the minds of the executives of toy making companies.
jballanc 11y ago
It wasn't until I had children of my own that I realized just how UTTERLY EGREGIOUS sexism is in the toy industry. When people talk about needing to tackle inequality at every point along the pipeline, this is where that pipeline starts. I understand the argument behind "vote with your dollars", but when an entire industry is on the wrong side of the issue how can you possibly "vote"? (BTW, as unlikely as it might seem, we've found the best gender neutral toys are at Ikea.)
- m_eiman 11y ago
  as unlikely as it might seem, we've found the best gender neutral toys are at Ikea Why would that seem unlikely? We up here the North are the cutting edge of equality, after all...
- jakobegger 11y ago
  I've made exactly the same observation. And people like us are voting with our wallets. Its just that noone (except Ikea and some small "alternative" toy stores) seems to want our money.
gaius 11y ago
They blocked Rey with a lighsaber for 1 month so as not to spoil the movie, is the story I've heard, and it seems reasonable. By the way BB8 is female. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/star-wars-the-force-awakens/bb-8-droid-girl-female/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/star-wars-the-force-awakens/...
- Steuard 11y ago
  That's an excellent explanation for why they didn't sell Rey toys with lightsabers early on. To my eye, it falls a bit flat as an explanation for why they didn't sell Rey toys without a lightsaber (since Rey didn't have one for 95% of the movie).
  - gaius 11y ago
    I'd imagine the manufacturing process for Rey toys is 99% the same and it doesn't make sense to not make all the variants in a single line.
- geofft 11y ago
  1. "a source close to the filmmakers has told the Daily Mail that BB-8 is definitely 'a she'" is not really what I'd call reliable. Furthermore, in the actual film (which was released after this article was published), BB-8 is only referred to as "he"/"him". The anonymous informant claims, "JJ was determined to make BB-8 cute and strong – and female." But Daisy Ridley is quoted by Time as saying, "I remember J.J. saying, 'He's not a child.'" Abrams is quoted as telling Entertainment Weekly, "I named him BB-8 because it was almost onomatopoeia. It was sort of how he looked to me, with the 8, obviously, and then the two B's." There's a video of Abrams answering the question just before the film's release at http://collider.com/bb8-boy-girl-gender-star-wars-7-the-force-awakens/ http://collider.com/bb8-boy-girl-gender-star-wars-7-the-forc... with, "I always referred to him as 'he', but that's just sort of a, you know, I haven't checked. I haven't looked under the hood." So I doubt the leaker's claim that Abrams was "determined to make BB-8 female". 2. A female robot is just a tiny bit different from a female human. But it's not even that: it's a gender-ambiguous robot, whose femininity consists of solely a pronoun used by one executive and an anonymous source, and could have easily been male. That seems to be a serious cop-out. You might as well say that the Millennium Falcon satisfies the request for female toys (the ship is regularly referred to as "she" in the original trilogy).
sandworm101 11y ago
Lol, For all the research, disney doesn't understand the market. This isn't the 1970s. Little boys don't want female characters. That's not odd. It's the difference between playing with "action figures" and "dolls". Disney's market research with little boys would show this. But star wars fans are not little boys. Most of them, myself included, are well over the age where girls are "icky". We want to see girls/women/heroines represented. For us these are not toys but collectables. Disney is also in a tough spot re depictions of female characters. Any 3d/toy depiction will subject them to complaints re body type. A gold-bikini leia is not acceptable today, but any distinctively female profile will be judged harshly. The real character/actress may be a traditional rail-thin model, several inches shorter and 1/2 the weight of her male counterparts. That's what sells tickets. But that same profile in an action figure will be judged harshly. I understand why they might want to avoided the debate.
waspleg 11y ago
An anonymous source... must be gospel.
gamesbrainiac 11y ago
I sense that there's some media manipulation going on here.
a3n 11y ago
I thought Rey was the main character.
dawnbreez 11y ago
The irony here is that studies have shown that there's more boys that are willing to take a product with a girl on it than there are girls that are willing to take a product with a boy on it. They're more than halving their market share, and risking flak over excluding women (again), for a statement that isn't true.
alexvoda 11y ago
Time and time again, western media corporations prove they have no fucking idea how to market their productions to fans. Problem: 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. Solution: 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. Let'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 5/2. Note that the target audience also isn't segregated into male or female. The target customer is simply Japanese. To showcase their agility in the ecosystem let'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. Such a chain of events is mostly unthinkable in the west. - The Mikudayo figurine would never have been launched because of the murkiness of the trademark issues. - The Mikudayo phenomenon would have been squashed and people sued for infringing the original trademarks and misrepresenting the character. - 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.). - 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. 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. The only western company that seems to get it a bit is Hasbro. They aren't really actively targeting their fanbase but at least unlike others they aren't cracking down on fan content too hard. (And it'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. Looking at the length of the comment maybe I should turn this into a blog post of it's own. But it'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.

36 points by runarb 11y ago

> “I’ve spoken with Disney people, and they were completely blindsided by the reaction to the new Star Wars characters,” he tells Boehm. “They put a huge investment into marketing and merchandizing the Kylo Ren character. They presumed he would be the big breakout role from the film. They were completely surprised when it was Rey everyone identified with and wanted to see more of.” ...they thought everyone would identify with the whiny, emo bad guy?

fpgeek 11y ago
They thought everyone would go nuts over the guy with the mask. They didn't understand that the mask was only a small part of what made Darth Vader such an amazing character.
- a3n 11y ago
  Generals always fight the previous war.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pyre 11y ago
It doesn't really make much sense. Even if the toys were only bought for boys, and even if they strongly wanted Kylo Ren characters, there are many significant interactions between Rey and Kylo Ren in the movie. Why would they not want to be re-enacting those?
stupidcar 11y ago
It might seem insane, but from the limited and prejudiced perspective of these Disney executives, it makes sense. They won't be Star Wars fans, or consumers of their own company's output in general. They'll be business people, who are probably privately ignorant or contemptuous of Star Wars and science fiction in general as an art form, and who think of it only as a franchise from which the maximum profit should be extracted. Their conception of the Star Wars fanbase will be based on the worst cliches you can imagine — a homogenous mass of awkward, nerdy, unsophisticated adolescent white boys and young adults — and be informed by a crude and cynical view of marketing psychology. Basically, they have no intuition whatsoever for what Star Wars fans want or think, so will fill in the gap in their knowledge by assuming the very worst. All the above leads the executives to believe that the nerdy white boys who are dumb enough love this Star Wars crap cannot and will not identify with any character except the one who most resembles themselves. A moody, caucasian man-child with a cool mask and superpowers? How could they not love him? Any objections about him being a rather unsympathetic villain will be waved away as so much noise. “After all, Vader was a villain or something, and we sell a shit-ton of merch with his face on it, right?” To these same execs, the characters of Finn and Rey won't be viewed as anything other than a bone thrown to potential black and female fans. A way of expanding the franchise's appeal beyond its typical demographic. But they will still look at that homogenous mass of white nerds and say “These losers are the target of our marketing and merchandising efforts, and they will never identify with a female character, or buy merchandise containing one. We don't need to prove this, because we're top execs and our success demonstrates that our intuition is correct.”
- detaro 11y ago
  I think an important part is that the typical "profitable" Star Wars fan isn't a kid anymore: they are in their late 20s to 40s. Probably white and male. Now with enough disposable income to buy a lot of stuff, and kids they'll take to the new film and buy toys for. But what appeals to them isn't necessarily what appeals to kids, and while the parents pay for the toys, the kids pick the toys. Their market research might have indicated that this is what the typical Star Wars fan wants (or maybe wanted a few years ago, due to changing perspectives in the past decade that weren't apparent during the last rush), but they aren't selling toys to the people that are already Star Wars fans. (Toys as in kids' toys, not "Collectibles")

geofft 11y ago

This is why I'm not such a huge fan of "but the market wants it" arguments, at least in our current society. The market has high barriers to entry (only one entity can make a Star Wars film, and very few can make a Star Wars-scale film) and is run by people who, evidently, have no idea what they're doing, and are still profitable and have no need to seek maximum profit. Their own jobs and raises are not threatened by the possibility that they could have been ten times more profitable, because there's no way for their bosses to know that. Rey action figures aren't on the market, so there are simply no numbers for how profitable it would be. Same goes for startups. Given the barriers to entry in the software business, which are low but still very much nonzero (hence the need for VC), and given that VC can't fund all the possible ideas that want to enter, what's in the market is what non-consumer participants have decided in their wisdom that consumers will probably like. Which may well be very profitable, but is unlikely to maximize profit. Which leads to a simple reply to PG's claim, "When you accuse Silicon Valley of x, you're implicitly saying x works well, which doesn't seem smart if you're against x." No, I'm implicitly saying that x works rather poorly, because Silicon Valley works rather poorly and is still profitable. It could be much more profitable.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
AnthonyMouse 11y ago
Here's the money quote (literally): > "maintain the sharp boy/girl product division" You're assuming what they're doing is unprofitable and irrational. But a majority of families with two or more children have children of opposite sexes and a cultural taboo against different sexes sharing the same toys means parents need to buy more toys. It isn't hard to believe that this strategy is profitable on net. So it's really showing the other thing -- not that the market isn't efficient, but that it can be efficient/profitable for the market to be sexist. But that makes the analogous thing in tech that boys are encouraged to be programmers and girls are encouraged to be nurses. Which is a thing that happens predominantly in schools and at home and it isn't clear how the software industry would be a beneficiary of that -- which is perhaps why we hear many calls to do something about it. The profit-seeking behavior is to change it.

JanezStupar 11y ago

Yes a noble sentiment. Let's shove stuff down people's throats for greater good. Let me ask you a simple question - who gets to decide what stuff should or should not be shoved down people's throats? Because it may so transpire that you might find yourself quite soon in a position where you are going to say: "To save this village and its villagers we have to slay everybody and burn it to the ground."

skj 11y ago
Yeah when I think of selling female action figures I immediately make the leap to murder.
geofft 11y ago
> Let me ask you a simple question - who gets to decide what stuff should or should not be shoved down people's throats? The people whose throats they are being shoved down, i.e., the consumers. Right now you have a situation where Rey action figures are unavailable to consumers who want to buy them, because some marketing executives thought they knew what people wanted better than the people themselves. Did you even read the headline? (I'm not even going to ask about the article.)
- burntsushi 11y ago
  > Right now you have a situation where Rey action figures are unavailable to consumers who want to buy them What are you talking about? How did you arrive to the conclusion that they are unavailable? http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=rey+action+figure http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3D... > because some marketing executives thought they knew what people wanted better than the people themselves. Isn't that pretty much what marketing is in the first place?
  - captn3m0 11y ago
    "rey action figure star wars" - 199 results "kylo ren action figure star wars" - 341 results Most of Rey figures were announced after the backlash. Anecdotally, I went around shopping and was able to find everything SW, except for a Rey figure. They even had action figures for minor characters in the Rebels series, but no Rey.

no_wave 11y ago

When did supply-side economics become a core tenet of feminism?

alexvoda 11y ago
This has nothing to do with feminism. This is idiocy on the part of Disney and toy makers. Not releasing toys with the main character of the production when you release toys with other characters is plain stupid. This has everything to do with the fantasy demographic biases in the minds of the executives of toy making companies.

jballanc 11y ago

It wasn't until I had children of my own that I realized just how UTTERLY EGREGIOUS sexism is in the toy industry. When people talk about needing to tackle inequality at every point along the pipeline, this is where that pipeline starts. I understand the argument behind "vote with your dollars", but when an entire industry is on the wrong side of the issue how can you possibly "vote"? (BTW, as unlikely as it might seem, we've found the best gender neutral toys are at Ikea.)

m_eiman 11y ago
as unlikely as it might seem, we've found the best gender neutral toys are at Ikea Why would that seem unlikely? We up here the North are the cutting edge of equality, after all...
jakobegger 11y ago
I've made exactly the same observation. And people like us are voting with our wallets. Its just that noone (except Ikea and some small "alternative" toy stores) seems to want our money.

gaius 11y ago

They blocked Rey with a lighsaber for 1 month so as not to spoil the movie, is the story I've heard, and it seems reasonable. By the way BB8 is female. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/star-wars-the-force-awakens/bb-8-droid-girl-female/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/star-wars-the-force-awakens/...

Steuard 11y ago
That's an excellent explanation for why they didn't sell Rey toys with lightsabers early on. To my eye, it falls a bit flat as an explanation for why they didn't sell Rey toys without a lightsaber (since Rey didn't have one for 95% of the movie).
- gaius 11y ago
  I'd imagine the manufacturing process for Rey toys is 99% the same and it doesn't make sense to not make all the variants in a single line.
geofft 11y ago
1. "a source close to the filmmakers has told the Daily Mail that BB-8 is definitely 'a she'" is not really what I'd call reliable. Furthermore, in the actual film (which was released after this article was published), BB-8 is only referred to as "he"/"him". The anonymous informant claims, "JJ was determined to make BB-8 cute and strong – and female." But Daisy Ridley is quoted by Time as saying, "I remember J.J. saying, 'He's not a child.'" Abrams is quoted as telling Entertainment Weekly, "I named him BB-8 because it was almost onomatopoeia. It was sort of how he looked to me, with the 8, obviously, and then the two B's." There's a video of Abrams answering the question just before the film's release at http://collider.com/bb8-boy-girl-gender-star-wars-7-the-force-awakens/ http://collider.com/bb8-boy-girl-gender-star-wars-7-the-forc... with, "I always referred to him as 'he', but that's just sort of a, you know, I haven't checked. I haven't looked under the hood." So I doubt the leaker's claim that Abrams was "determined to make BB-8 female". 2. A female robot is just a tiny bit different from a female human. But it's not even that: it's a gender-ambiguous robot, whose femininity consists of solely a pronoun used by one executive and an anonymous source, and could have easily been male. That seems to be a serious cop-out. You might as well say that the Millennium Falcon satisfies the request for female toys (the ship is regularly referred to as "she" in the original trilogy).

sandworm101 11y ago

Lol, For all the research, disney doesn't understand the market. This isn't the 1970s. Little boys don't want female characters. That's not odd. It's the difference between playing with "action figures" and "dolls". Disney's market research with little boys would show this. But star wars fans are not little boys. Most of them, myself included, are well over the age where girls are "icky". We want to see girls/women/heroines represented. For us these are not toys but collectables. Disney is also in a tough spot re depictions of female characters. Any 3d/toy depiction will subject them to complaints re body type. A gold-bikini leia is not acceptable today, but any distinctively female profile will be judged harshly. The real character/actress may be a traditional rail-thin model, several inches shorter and 1/2 the weight of her male counterparts. That's what sells tickets. But that same profile in an action figure will be judged harshly. I understand why they might want to avoided the debate.

waspleg 11y ago

An anonymous source... must be gospel.

gamesbrainiac 11y ago

I sense that there's some media manipulation going on here.

a3n 11y ago

I thought Rey was the main character.

dawnbreez 11y ago

The irony here is that studies have shown that there's more boys that are willing to take a product with a girl on it than there are girls that are willing to take a product with a boy on it. They're more than halving their market share, and risking flak over excluding women (again), for a statement that isn't true.

alexvoda 11y ago

Time and time again, western media corporations prove they have no fucking idea how to market their productions to fans. Problem: 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. Solution: 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. Let'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 5/2. Note that the target audience also isn't segregated into male or female. The target customer is simply Japanese. To showcase their agility in the ecosystem let'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. Such a chain of events is mostly unthinkable in the west. - The Mikudayo figurine would never have been launched because of the murkiness of the trademark issues. - The Mikudayo phenomenon would have been squashed and people sued for infringing the original trademarks and misrepresenting the character. - 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.). - 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. 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. The only western company that seems to get it a bit is Hasbro. They aren't really actively targeting their fanbase but at least unlike others they aren't cracking down on fan content too hard. (And it'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. Looking at the length of the comment maybe I should turn this into a blog post of it's own. But it'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.