One of the most insane corporate decisions in entertainment media ever in my opinion is still Hasbro doing the 1986 animated Transformers movie where they violently kill off over 10 recurring beloved characters on screen, including the main guy, and then were surprised when children showed severe anguish over seeing Optimus Prime slowly dying of his wounds in a fucking hospital
What people fail to realize is that the execs saw Transformers as a commercial, a way to sell a product. They didn’t think of Optimus as a hero to kids; he was a robot that turned into a truck and had a plastic figure that wasn’t selling anymore, so they told the writers to make room for new robots that turn into trucks and could be sold in plastic. Of course the backlash surprised them; they only think of money money money. That’s capitalism, baby, and it’s capitalism that brought him back as a Powermaster.
It’s not simply capitalism money money money. There’s a non-malice/greed-based reason stuff like this happened. Well, mostly-non-greed-based, but… you’ll see.
It was very much a different time and a very different market.
TF:TM was being developed as far back as 1984, still very, very, VERY early into the era of “advertainment”. Having an entire cartoon made to advertise a toyline was pretty much ILLEGAL just a couple of years prior. Companies were in uncharted territory here. The only “success story” at that point was He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and that one was 1) the first to try this out, 2) only like a year old or so, and 3) positively fucking TIMID in what it was doing with this new advertising medium. The entire toy market was very much in the “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” mode cuz it was about all they could do.
In the early 80s, toys were absolutely thought of as things to amuse a child for a fairly short time then be disposed of or forgotten and replaced by another toy, or no toys at all as the kids “grew up”, and had been for decades. Most kids didn’t hold onto those toys as they turned into teens, and sure as shit not into adulthood. We were a good 15ish years away from the boom of “adult toy collectors”. The reason clean vintage toys are expensive today is because toys got played with to hell and back and if they weren’t ruined in the process, they ended up in a landfill or got garage-saled to another small child who would then take the toy further on its journey to plasticine Valhalla.
So yeah, they didn’t really have a good idea how attached kids could get to these toys as characters. And really, a lot of that hinged on lucking into the right creatives for the advertising vehicle who put a lot of priority on making the advertisements also genuine pieces of entertainment (also probably some lingering bitterness over the squeaky-clean restrictiveness of 70s Hanna-Barbera era of cartoons that could be channeled into envelope-pushing now that they could be a bit more… “PG” with their works).
I don’t blame them for what they did, really. I really don’t think they could have known.
overwatch is a silly piece of shit on its best days but its continued insistence that magic is real but only in japan is especially hysterical
hanzo and genji have haunted their hodgepodge of a narrative since 2016 with unambiguously magic powers in a soft-SF setting that went out of its way to conceptualise bogus technology like hard-light and biotics in order to fit its weirdness into some kind of “science” category. the fact they then didn’t extend that consideration to hanzo and genji? they just left them as is? as witches? as fate-touched human vessels of ancient dragon spirits?? if genji wasn’t a cyborg they could feasibly be minor sekiro bosses and that’s weird dude!! and then kiriko gets released?? and these people had all the years in between ow1 and ow2 to find a way to hand-wave whatever weird shamanistic magic they accidentally let get into the game, and instead they make the only other japanese character a fucking spirit vessel as well. they doubled down. magic IS REAL in overwatch but ONLY on the BEAUTIFUL ISLANDS OF JAPAN, and no it’s never ever going to be addressed because overwatch has as much coherent story as a themed puzzle page on the back of a kids cereal box. hysterical.
this also extends to the ability to wall climb
overwatch said if you are japanese you can do the following:
contain within you ancient spirit magic with powerful destructive and/or restorative capabilities
for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal
before it was like, “what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?”
and now it’s like, “ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it’s pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we’ve normalized this experience”
Instagram and TikTok have successfully created the Torment Nexus from Jim Carrey’s iconic work, “Don’t put people in the Torment Nexus”
“ohh but this character is an athlete/survives in the wild so it doesn’t make sense!!!!” L + ratio + don’t care + you have a very narrow understanding of how the human body works + thin =/= fit + fat representation matters more than any fragile feelings you may have regarding internalized fatphobia + learn to draw bodytypes other than skinny people + wizard BLAST
