If someone likes the direction a property is going, by all means travel with it.  There's benefits to a big pool of people enjoying the same thing at the same time - easy to share since lots of people are on board.

But I also don't understand supporting something you wouldn't buy if it had no fans at all, just because the property went in an enjoyable direction at some point in the past.  This sort of misplaced loyalty is why corps buy up IPs in the first place and shovel out pablum they think you'll still surrender money for under its mark, while they search for some compromise increasing the number who find it palatable.   They wouldn't take the risk if they couldn't take you for granted.

Quote from: Jaeger;1112090There is also the larger issue that many SJW's have no cultural references pre-harry potter, they do not have an adequate grasp of historical myth, heroic archetypes, and human morality to create an interesting original story anyway.

Are you talking about comic books specifically? I'm going to assume you are because otherwise it doesn't make sense.

Creating a good story in general doesn't require those things specifically. It requires an understanding of things like plot structure, characterization, consistency, tone, etc. Basic Writing 101 stuff that there are millions of teaching books about.

That's why, using Netflix originals as examples, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is great and timeless whereas She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is bland and unmemorable.

In the former, Lisa Henson (who majored in folklore and mythology) wanted to tell a story of environmentalism on another planet. This is your typical 80s and neo-80s stuff. It makes extensive use of the serialization format to give major characters arcs. It has modern political commentary without coming across as preachy, because the world was built to support those themes.

In the latter, Noelle Stevenson (a newcomer with little experience) took amateur femslash fanfiction and sanitized it for an underage audience. Like a lot of recent Dreamworks cartoons, it has quality issues due to poor writing and a lack of any pre-planning. It is about a mutual guerrilla war fought entirely by child soldiers because the last war killed almost all able-bodied men, but never explores how this nightmare would affect the characters. It is extremely difficult to take any of the conflict seriously when most of the characters are morons who nearly kill themselves in every episode and never develop due to their experiences. It has no themes, no positive messages, no critical thought, nothing to say besides banal platitudes at best and at worst it fetishizes abusive relationships.

If you want to know what I think She-Ra should have been like, then watch Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka. The heroine is a former child soldier/magical girl/war veteran who is trying to resume a normal life only to find herself forced to fight again.

Quote from: Omega;11121121: Off topic a moment. The movie bombed because of A: really horrible marketing. and B: deviating too far from the source

To be entirely fair to the crew, the original stories would not work well if at all in adaptation. A Princess of Mars is less a coherent story and more a rambling travelogue. The stories as a whole are full of inconsistencies and weird tangents.

Quote from: Spike;1112103And Star Wars is fucking DYING. Becuase a handful of guys bitching on the internet are tired of Woke Shenannigans and, lo and behold... voted with their dollars.

No it isn't.  I've been to several Trunk or Treats already this past week.  If my personal experience is anything like the National Experience, licensed Star Wars costumes made somebody a lot of money.  The total amount spent on costumes is supposed to be more than $3 Billion.  I don't know what percentage of costumes are Star Wars but I bet it's more than 1%.  That's the equivalent of a very respectable movie take.

Quote from: Jaeger;1112090And also because as the industry becomes more converged; the "creators" (all SJW's to some degree) just do not know how to create original stories with characters that normal people would actually like.

If you believe that half the countries voters are racist bigots for voting for Trump, and you feel that you have to push that agenda in everything that you do, how could you possibly write an original story that wouldn't alienate half of your potential audience?

So, they go with what has worked in the past... (and even then they can still fuck it up.)

There is also the larger issue that many SJW's have no cultural references pre-harry potter, they do not have an adequate grasp of historical myth, heroic archetypes, and human morality to create an interesting original story anyway.

This.  It's even worse than you say, because becoming a SJW is something few people do by accident. Most of them are indoctrinated.  In particular, they are rabid about a dogma--without understanding that it is dogma, or even being able to parse the difference between dogma and other means of coping with ideas (e.g. premises, reason, intuition, etc.)  I'm not one of those that hates on dogma simply for being dogma.  It has a useful place in the world, because most people have areas where it is more efficient for them to trust an authoritative source.  However, it is entirely clear, and has been for centuries, that people who have faith in a dogma without knowing it is, in fact, dogma--are the last people you want guiding a creative project.  Sufficiently motivated and talented, such a person might contribute a lot, might even be the main artist, but there need to be at least one person riding herd on the thing that gets the distinction.  

By definition, a SJW thinks that whatever ideas they have about society and justice, are more important to the thing that doing a good job.  Of course they don't understand narrative.  They don't even understand people.  It's amazing that they can produce anything useful at all--which is really a testament to the adaptability of people even in the face of crippling, self-inflicted deficiencies.  If you got enough Puritans to write a sex manual, eventually a few of them might have stumbled on some good ideas too.

There is a such a thing as a minimal, lazy boycott.  That's pretty much where I am with WotC right now.  The SJW signals is just the latest reason, too.  I'd be more willing to overlook some of that if they hadn't annoyed me with some of their other decisions (only hardback adventures, dull writing, schizophrenic decision-making, etc.)

With a lazy boycott, I'm not saying I'll never buy anything they do, or quit using what I have.  5E fills a good role for me right now, not least because it is something that players in my active groups can easily acquire, understand, and enjoy.  However, after the three core books, I've not been overly impressed with anything else they've done.  I've bought 3 or 4 items.  Each one I buy radically shrinks the chances that I'll buy another.  I've dropped off of the list that gives them the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not quite where SpinachCat is--yet.  It wouldn't take much to push me over the line.  I suspect there are a lot more like me in raw numbers--still not enough to cripple WotC, as our cautious buying is already incorporated into their sales.  But that's the thing about corporations that walk that line too close.  It will keep working just fine, with no indication that there is a problem, perhaps for a very long time.  Long enough that no one in charge is going to do much to fix it.  Or it could lead to a sizable drop in sales, seemingly overnight.  Marvel and Star Wars got away with stuff for awhile before it finally cascaded into hard numbers--because the hard numbers are a lagging indicator of what happens when you don't listen to your customers--your good, solid customers, not the ones that happen to be screaming the most right this moment.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1112147No it isn't.  I've been to several Trunk or Treats already this past week.  If my personal experience is anything like the National Experience, licensed Star Wars costumes made somebody a lot of money.  The total amount spent on costumes is supposed to be more than $3 Billion.  I don't know what percentage of costumes are Star Wars but I bet it's more than 1%.  That's the equivalent of a very respectable movie take.

Hello, Pauline Kael. So nice of you to join us.

Some properties I've abandoned have withered and died since (Dragonlance), some have achieved new heights of popularity (D&D).  I don't really care that much one way or the other; what I care is whether a) the product is enjoyable and to a lesser extent b) the producer doesn't want me consuming it.

Quote from: S'mon;1112125WoTC-Crawford seems to keep the Virtue Signalling/Magical Realm Gnay Gnomes stuff to a level where it is annoying but generally tolerable so far (though I hear Waterdeep Dragon Heist was bad). I think Paizo's Next-Level Wokeness really is hurting PF2, though.

This is about where I'm at. Some virtue signalling can be ignored if the product itself is good enough. For PF2, the books I own have a few lines of rhetoric, a space for pronouns on the character sheet, and the women are covered up more. No big deal (to me). I've read here that all the Pathfinder NPCs are bisexual, but I don't see that in the books that I have. I hesitate to buy that Waterdeep book you mention and the Cthulhu Berlin book, but I do wonder if those just have a small amount of social justice politics or actually are Provincetown: The Game. The creator comments point towards the latter.

I've been reading Marvel comics since the 70's and had to abandon them after the social justice pivot a few years ago. I gave some of the books a chance, but ultimately I don't really care about the social message, I want good art and story. Some of those books went from being the best they've ever been, to absolute dogshit not worth reading for free let alone for 4$ an issue. I don't know what they were thinking.

For WATCHMEN, it is so over the top that there has to be more to it, right? After 2 episodes, you could make a drinking game out of it, it is so laughably heavy handed. HBO puts out too many good series for me to believe that. Maybe decades of utopia have changed the social dynamics such that the nun character is now the crazy Rorschach character from the original books. She seems to be being positioned for that. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit and it is just a social justice cartoon. We'll see. I'll give it a few more episodes. I have to say, I'd also choose a Grand National as my Batmobile, so it has that going for it.

Quote from: Spike;1112164Hello, Pauline Kael. So nice of you to join us.

If you want to bring film critics into it, not just marketing dollars, Star Wars the Force Awakens has a 93% meta-critic score (tied with the original Star Wars in 1977) and The Last Jedi has a 91% (better than Return of the Jedi).  

In terms of Box Office Gross, the original trilogy combined for $1.9 Billion in world-wide gross; The Force Awakens grossed more than $2 Billion by itself.  

There are a lot of lies you have to tell yourself to see Star Wars as a 'failure'.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1112186If you want to bring film critics into it, not just marketing dollars, Star Wars the Force Awakens has a 93% meta-critic score (tied with the original Star Wars in 1977) and The Last Jedi has a 91% (better than Return of the Jedi).  

In terms of Box Office Gross, the original trilogy combined for $1.9 Billion in world-wide gross; The Force Awakens grossed more than $2 Billion by itself.  

There are a lot of lies you have to tell yourself to see Star Wars as a 'failure'.

Meta-critic...literally Marxist propaganda.

Michael Bay's Transformers series has made 4.8 Billion.



Suck it, losers!

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1112186There are a lot of lies you have to tell yourself to see Star Wars as a 'failure'.

"It's not making as much as projected and our quarterly earnings are off" says the investors call/filing, prior to the stock dip.

Corporate.

Quote from: bryce0lynch;1112201"It's not making as much as projected and our quarterly earnings are off" says the investors call/filing, prior to the stock dip.

Corporate.

Yeah...  Disney Stock $99.25 to start 2016; $130.53 today.  It is up sharply since March of this year.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1112203Yeah...  Disney Stock $99.25 to start 2016; $130.53 today.  It is up sharply since March of this year.

In theaters April 26, 2019! The Avengers take a final stand against Thanos in Marvel Studios' conclusion to 22 films, 'Avengers: Endgame.'

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1112186If you want to bring film critics into it, not just marketing dollars, Star Wars the Force Awakens has a 93% meta-critic score (tied with the original Star Wars in 1977) and The Last Jedi has a 91% (better than Return of the Jedi).  

In terms of Box Office Gross, the original trilogy combined for $1.9 Billion in world-wide gross; The Force Awakens grossed more than $2 Billion by itself.  

There are a lot of lies you have to tell yourself to see Star Wars as a 'failure'.

Yeah, meta-critic is sooo unbiased...

and if you're gonna quote box office gross...I would suggest using inflation adjusted figures instead of just the raw...better yet, let me know what the 'net' figures are.