And here's the actual count. I don't think he would have had much trouble finding a doll that looked white like his daughter. pic.twitter.com/MLy6GVtkrh
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) December 12, 2022
Professional Newsmax right-wing grievance collector (claims he) took his daughter to a massive mid-high-end commerce palace in the beating heart of one of the world’s top tourist destination (Rockefeller Center, NYC), and there were many purchase offerings not devoted to ‘cute little White girls’!!!
How dare the New Wokified Mafia commit such Thoughtcrime!
(Note: New Yorker Patrick Chovanec, who wrote the tweet at top rebutting the Newsmax bullsh*t, has biracial daughters — his wife was born in China.)
Of course, anything suggesting the world doesn’t revolve around middle-class suburban White people is grist for the Wingnut Wurlitzer’s coarse mill, but there’s a new genderfluid (not-)elephant in the room. Per the Washington Post, “Critics pan American Girl book for handling of gender, trans identity”:
American Girlās latest guidebook, āA Smart Girlās Guide: Body Image,ā has some parents fuming over its discussion of gender expression and identity aimed at its audience of kids ages 10 and up.
The book, written by Mel Hammond, teaches readers about body image and body positivity. But critics have taken issue with the guideās āGender Joyā section, which explains pronouns, gender expression and gender identity. It explains what it means to be cisgender (ācomfortable in the sex the doctor assignedā), transgender (when their āgender is different than the sex they were assigned at birthā) and nonbinary (when a person doesnāt āfeel like a girl or boy insideā).
The book also advises kids questioning their gender identity, or who know theyāre trans or nonbinary, to reach out to an organization listed in the book or to talk to a trusted adult…
American Girlās āA Smart Girlās Guideā series offers guidance to tweens on a range of topics, such as race and inclusion, money and friendship. The books are part of the companyās decades-long legacy of empowering girls with increasingly diverse representation.
The American Girl brand of dolls, books and toys was launched in 1986 by Pleasant T. Rowland, whose goal was to combine her love of history and educational products to inspire girls, the American Girl website states. Toy giant Mattel acquired the collection in 1998.
Yep, the crafty peddler of boutique sexualities to innocent White children here is that well-known leftist cabal, Mattel. Which has spent *the last quarter-century* expanding its range of imaginable identities (including boy dolls, dolls with disabilities, and BIPOC dolls beyond the early, conservative-approved ‘1860s girl escaped from slavery’), because adults with money were happy to buy dolls representing a 1910s Jewish girl growing up in New York, or a modern surfer girl with hearing loss.
Funny how so-called Conservatives believe that money is the measure of all values, until somebody wants to spend money on values of which the Conservatives don’t approve. (And, in case it needs to be said: The fact that a marketable segment of consumers would be willing to give a major toy corporation money for child-friendly information about gender fluidity is A Very Good Thing!)
(Related story: Christine Emba’s “We need an American Girl doll who hasnāt given up”. I was an adult before the Pleasant Company was invented, but now there’s more than one generation that’s grown up on them, enough to use the dolls as Instagram and TikTok memes.)
War for Ukraine Day 317: Fix Bayonets! Wheel Right!
Cameron
Wokefied?Ā What kind of a stupid-ass word is that?Ā If you want to call people names, call them names, you cowardly MAGA piece of shit.Ā Not some made-up nonsense that Christopher Rufo invented for you.
Frankensteinbeck
On the contrary.Ā Because they know they are right, they conclude that companies are forcing liberal propaganda products into the marketplace, even though conservative-leaning products would surely sell much better.Ā Conservatives being ‘normal’, there obviously can’t be more than a niche market for non-white dolls, for example.Ā Thus their ‘go woke, go broke’ chants.Ā Facts?Ā They don’t need no stinking facts.Ā They know in their guts what is true.ā
EDIT – Elon Musk is currently experiencing great stress and confusion as this conservative fantasy fails to happen no matter how many times he pushes the ‘I hate trans people’ button.
NotMax
Step by step by step.
“Math is hard” wasn’t all that long ago in dollspeak.
Dan B
The “Woke” meme is is an effective method to make BIPOC and LGBTQ into “the Other!”.Ā In the ancient Middle East the worst thing was to be shunned because you would die in the wilderness.Ā That’s the underlying goal here.Ā They want us gone, not just invisible.Ā The threat feels real.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yes! Reminds me of anti-Dem lefties.
ā¦Because they know they are right, they conclude that [Democrats] are forcing [neo]-liberal [policy proposals] into the marketplace, even though [leftist]-leaning [policy proposals] would surely sell much better.
Frankensteinbeck
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Oh, yes.Ā Truthiness is a fundamental human brain function, and both groups are drowning in it.Ā In both cases, primarily to downplay the existence of bigotry.
Ohio Mom
One of the things the American Girl doll company is famous for is that you can pay extra and get a custom made doll who looks just like you.
FelonyGovt
Makes me want to go get myself an American Girl doll!
@Frankensteinbeck: Elon Musk wants to move the Tesla shareholder lawsuit against him because he says prospective San Francisco jurors are biased against him.
HumboldtBlue
I’ve never seen a Willie Nelson doll, and if the dipshits on the right had their way, any Willie Nelson doll would look like this.
different-church-lady
Hey, I got an idea: have your daughter play with a fuckin’ doll that doesn’t look exactly like her.
Because at some point she’s gonna figure out that’s how the world really is, even if you don’t want her to.ā
different-church-lady
@FelonyGovt: “Your honor, every potential juror in the entire city can smell the reek coming out of our headquarters…”
Feathers
@Ohio Mom: yeah. I laughed hard at the idea of not being able to find a white American Girl doll. There may have been a display featuring one of the non-white dolls, but there sure as hell were a lot of white dolls, of every imaginable hair color, right around the corner.
These assholes lie all the time, like rugs, and they are allowed to get away with it.
A friend had her sonās trans college roommate staying with them over the holidays. Turns out the kid wasnāt invited home and would have been alone in the dorm. The kids are alright, itās the adults who are the issue.
I am convinced some of this is the infantilisation of American kids that has been going on since at least the 90s. Children must be supervised at all times and belong completely to their parents. I remember during the Schiavo case, I had a coworker who couldnāt comprehend that upon marriage a spouse became the legal next of kin of an adult, rather than the parent still being in control. āHow do I stop this?ā āDonāt let them get marriedā was my answer, and it wasnāt well received. Iām sure she voted for Trump.
Major Major Major Major
@Frankensteinbeck: idk, the negative take I tend to see is that the corporations arenāt truly woke, theyāre just doing it because thatās where the money is (because schools and the media have brainwashed everybody into wanting to buy it)
Darkrose
@Cameron: This is a perfect example of how basically, “woke” has come to mean “saying the n word without actually saying it”. You know “wokefied” meant “the American Girl dolls are near.”
Capri
American Dolls have been punching bags for the right for a long time. Back in the day the hated them because they supported the Girl Scouts in some manner, and the Girl Scouts had the timerity to say that lesbians were OK.
Major Major Major Major
Time to fire up the ol dwarf fortress for me.
dmsilev
@FelonyGovt:
So, postponed until the twelfth of never?
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Is dwarf tossing on the MAGA wishlist? Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
//
LeftCoastYankee
If that store is FAO Schwarz, he’s really pissed he had to take out another mortgage required to buy his kid a doll, and all the other rich assholes bought up the white dolls BEFORE Christmas.
MobiusKlein
@Major Major Major Major:
Sadly the Mac versions are not available yet in newest release. Stuck on 0.47
Amir Khalid
@dmsilev:
… And that’s a long, long time …
Mike in NC
Ron DeSatan has decided his anti “woke” far-right wing bullshit campaign will land his stupid fascist ass in the White House. He’s not the first shithead Florida Man to believe that. Just ask JEB!, thirsty Micro Rubio, Rick Batboy Scott, and several lesser assholes.
different-church-lady
@Amir Khalid: It’s always a day away.
frosty
@Major Major Major Major: I am starting to figure out that dwarf fortress refers to a video game.
NotMax
@different-church-lady
People forget that Daddy Warbucks offed himself in the newspaper strip when FDR was elected.
But in true comics fashion, he miraculously got better.
Major Major Major Major
@MobiusKlein: I didnāt really pick it up until the GUI version dropped on steamā¦ too inscrutable.
Amir Khalid
@different-church-lady:
The Twelfth of Never is a childhood musical memory for me: Donny Osmond, the Justin Bieber of the early 1970s, driving 12-year-old girls wild with his covers of Nat “King” Cole’s hits.
Poe Larity
Iām confused, you go to the market to buy a companion for your daughter and you want her to have a white slave?
HumboldtBlue
@Amir Khalid:
Here’s a man singing 12th of Never
Of course, if you want to live the 12th of Never, you need to take a fantasy ride. We’ll be forever as one.
NotMax
@Amir Khalid
One of the 111 Osmond children.
Mormons. What’cha gonna do?
//
ColoradoGuy
Nixon ran on the Culture Wars in 1968 with his “Silent Majority” bullshit, and the GOP has been playing on that harmonica ever since. It’s the best vote-getter the GOP has; the subtle charms of small government and cutting taxes only gets the Country Club vote, and is too narrow to win any election.
By now, the GOP and FoxNews are basically the Culture War party, and it is fought with all the Lost Cause fanaticism of Civil War re-enactors. They know it is a Lost Cause, and that awareness just makes them fight all the harder.
NotMax
@ColoradoGuy
How else ya gonna move all those pillows and bitcoins?
:)
Frankensteinbeck
@Major Major Major Major:
After a lot of experimenting, I killed the Forgotten Beast. Ā Luring it inside onto stone didnāt help much. Ā It just set one of the military fighting it on fire, and the smoke stopped everyone else from moving or attacking. Ā I let it boil all the fat off its body by standing in its own flames, which still didnāt slow it down visibly, and then it charged inside into the middle of my waiting melee squad. Ā Before smoke immobilized them, they got a couple of good artery-opening hits in, and it bled to death on top of them. Ā They, of course, stood around and slowly burned to death because they couldnāt path through their own smoke. Ā I lost about 20 citizens, and thatās the lucky āI won!ā result. Ā But itās dead and I can rebuild!
frosty
@Frankensteinbeck: That’s entertainment!!
BlueGuitarist
@Cameron:
They hate the woke and they hate the dreamers; they are the nightmare.
NotMax
@Amir Khalid
An astonishing WTF Osmond miscue.
Frankensteinbeck
@frosty:
The Dwarf Fortress communityās term for it is āFunā with the capital letter. Ā Itās a game thatās full of Fun. Ā I think the most Fun I ever had was the fortress I lost to a Forgotten Beast with a gas attack. Ā Its corpse was surrounded by an invisible cloud that caused death about 60 seconds or so after a living thing got a lungful. Ā Long enough for my dwarves to bring the corpse inside and death notifications started to scroll down the screen with no visible cause.
Major Major Major Major
@Frankensteinbeck: Losing Is Fun!
I just had a child go mad because his vague workshop demands weren’t met somehow… second time this has happened… last one grew violent and had to be disposed of rather unpleasantly in front of his parents… had to dismiss them…
I do think I’m getting the hang of things though. All these dang migrants keep messing up my agricultural scale though. I feel like an establishment Republican–keep as many around as possible, put them to work, ply them with food and liquor… seven resident human bards for entertainment…
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: The really harsh reality they are struggling to adapt to is that counties that voted for Biden are more than ā of the US economy. Regardless of how many consumers you think there are for liberal leaning or conservative leaning products, there’s twice as much money out there for those liberal leaning products.
As much as their ability to win national elections is undermined by their demographics, their economics are in way, way worse shape, and for a party that is 100% focused on culture, having advertisers ignore you because of your lack of buying power is really painful.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Did someone say bards?
:)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I am just trying to imagine what kind of luzer ends up having a job were all he does is harp on and on about the skin color of a girl’s toys all day. I just imagine him at the family table during dinner with an empty, Culture War induced PTSD stare and muttering to his family about one day he will get a real job at a real news organization.
West of the Rockies
Seriously, conservatives must be masochists.Ā They simplyĀ mustĀ be victims:Ā somebody somewhere is forever picking on them, belittling them, cramming something down their throats, rounding them up, stealing their jobs, country, women…Ā Their religion is under siege, their rights being trampled…
They just can’t stop hitting that “I’m a victim” feeder bar.
NotMax
@West of the Rockies
Songs Helen Reddy never sang.
I’m a victim
Hear me roar
Whining loud from shore to shore
.
Frankensteinbeck
@Major Major Major Major:
Surface crops. Ā Wall them off and cover them over, or dig down a level and cover them. Ā They grow year round. Ā There is always at least one grain around. Ā Milled grain and rope reeds, and you will soon be growing more plants than you can ever possibly use for roasts, cloth, and booze.
eclare
@NotMax:Ā Ā Hahaha…
Growing up all I had were a few strangely colored pinkish plastic Barbies.Ā Representation is great, but last I checked those American Girl dolls are really expensive.
Chetan Murthy
@Martin: And it seems even the normies in those counties didn’t fall for anti-LGBTQ scaremongering.Ā Which surprised the hell outta me (happily — I like that kind of surprise *grin*).Ā The first glad portents I’ve seen since the 2020 election.
Martin
@Frankensteinbeck: Nice. I’ve had good RNG so far on the forgotten beasts – they’ve gone down without too much trouble in this fort. That won’t last.
Having a bit of trouble with my moods right now. Got a little too ambitious with my building plans too early, but at least have my magma forges all up and running.
NotMax
@Frankensteinbeck
On the hunt for the delectable lunchbeast.
:)
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Nothing wrong with setting your pop cap. Alternatively, you can expel dwarves from your community – select them, icon in upper right corner under the camera.
The game difficulty can ramp very aggressively if you get a big migration wave.
I really like playing generation forts – turn migration off, get your dwarves married off and get those kids going.
MobiusKlein
@Martin:Ā ā
Gotta watch out for the web spraying forgotten beasts too. They are the worst after fire breathing.
Aussie Sheila
@Dan B: āWokeā is the new āpolitically correctā and serves the same function of defensive agrievement.
It is as fatuous and ultimately as powerless as its earlier incarnation.
This time however it appears some politicians are trying to bend various educational institutions to their idiocy. Looking at you Ron Desanctimonious (sometimes trump gets the insults exactly right).
The word and its ultimate Ā meaninglessness will play out quickly, and the sooner the left stop reacting, and start laughing, the better.
Start by attacking āstate censorshipā, and go on to the absurdities and cruelties of the maga nonesense and above all, its grotesque self pity and governmental Ā incompetence.
Frankensteinbeck
@NotMax:
Oh, you can sure as Hell bet this bastard is ending up as 300 masterpiece Forgotten Beast meat roasts. Ā After that bullshit, we are eating him, we are carving his bones into childrenās toys, and anything thatās left I will put in a damn display case in the tavern.
NotMax
@Aussie Sheila
Also cited as a target directly by McCarthy in his Pettysburg address.
eclare
Time for pie!
Martin
@MobiusKlein: My son’s fort got taken down by webs last night. They’re at least useful if you can contain them you can farm them for webs.
Iron or steel + deadly dust – extremely difficult to defeat. Have a cave-in trap prepped or possibly steel upright spikes on a lever. A deadly dust beast is why I build hospitals big enough to hold my entire military or half of my fortress, whichever is larger.
Aussie Sheila
@NotMax: Heh! Yes, McCarthy is Ā a ādead man walkingā politically.
What a shitshow. Fancy airing intraparty grievances like that on the floor of Parliament. Unbelievable.
The Dems did a good job over the four days, and Jeffries fulfilled my expectations of him going in. He has a killer instinct for parliamentary rhetoric and the Dem caucus did well to both look and behave like a party united behind both its leader and a series of political propositions.
Very well done all round.
I look forward to the Biden administration and the democrats in Congress telling this fascist caucus in September re the ādebt ceilingā (what a stupid name for a process designed to pay a nationās incurred debt), -ānothing congressmen and women, tell them, my answer is nothingā.
Any horse-trading in these circumstances would be electoral and institutional suicide for Dems going into a general election.
DMcK
@West of the Rockies:
Remember the Great Lightbulb War of the mid aughts? Y’know, when Obama’s jackbooted thugs were going to forcibly replace every proper God-fearing lightbulb with a CFC one as part of a sinister conspiracy to induce mercury poisoning in their ranks? These idiots were proudly hoarding their incandescent bulbs in brave defiance of energy efficiency and lower electric utility bills.
billcinsd
@NotMax: nor was Astrophysicist Barbie
billcinsd
@Frankensteinbeck: It’s funny you don’t think you and the formerly disgruntled one are doing that here
Gvg
The idiot also doesnāt understand that toy companies have discovered that they make more money if they indulge people in collectivitus. The object of the game is to train them young to think they must own one of every one of a certain type of desired object. Cards, Beanie babies or dolls. Barbie has people collecting hundreds into their old age. American girl starts with young girls and some keep collecting all their life. Even if they donāt, they indulge their own children when the time comes. See? Money spent, corporate profits. Sure, they sell dolls that look like everyone, but once you have that doll, you want a few more, all different. Higher class than Barbies but Barbie does it too. in fact I am not sure why Barbie doesnāt get attacked because they have every ethnic type too, itās just they do more glamour not realism. They do every profession too.
The gun nuts I know also have collectivitus. Itās pretty common here in America. Very encouraged by marketing.
rikyrah
@Dan B:
Because, the threat is very real. And why we need to fight back
gene108
I got my niece one or two āSmart Girlās Guideā books, when she was 11-ish. They seemed to explain things to girls that age in a manner suitable for girls that age to understand.
I didnāt realize they were part of the American Girl doll franchise.
NotMax
@Gvg
Remarkably, Arugula Patch Kids never did catch on.
;)
Aussie Sheila
@rikyrah: Yes, the threat to vulnerable minorities is very real from these fascists A holes. A lot has to be done at the local and state level to protect people subject to this political and rhetorical violence.
At the wider national political level they need to be hammered for their pathetic self pity and grotesque governmental incompetence at every level.
Frankensteinbeck
@billcinsd:
Everyone does it, all the time, and it takes effort to overcome it and focus on patterns of evidence like the consistent ineffectiveness of socialist messaging on a large scale in America* and the consistent failure of anti-liberal consumerism compared to deliberately liberal.
*Alas, because a more class conscious America would be so much easier to fix. Ā But bigotry is too powerful a driver, and demands the primary spot fighting against it.
opiejeanne
@LeftCoastYankee: No, the American Dolls have their own store. The one here is pretty large store and you can have lunch with your kids. Or maybe it was tea.
Frankensteinbeck
@Martin:
I lost my last fort to tourmaline +
deadly dust. Ā Ironically, it wasnāt the syndrome, it was the shockwave from the dust release that kept my pickaxe-wielding military from doing enough damage to take it down. Ā Steel armor doesnāt help much against being repeatedly thrown against walls.
EDIT – It wasnāt a Forgotten Beast, either. Ā It was an angel from one of the new angel prisons. Ā Boy, those are a mix of incredible temptation and Fun dangled right in your face.
Aussie Sheila
@Frankensteinbeck: What is this āsocialist messagingā of which you speak?
Was FDR a socialist? Not in my reading of US history. Was LBJ?
Hardly.
Was Obama?
You have to be joking.
Be careful not to mistake the present discontents for past ideological wrangling.
Things change fast, and generations make their own meaning for their experiences. I am a lot older than people who are 45 years old. But I recognise the world they live in, and the lives they are expected to lead are a lot more difficult than the one I expected and actually lived.
The last 30 years have been brutal for young, not well educated young people, particularly those living in non dynamic economic areas. This is true throughout the advanced western capitalist economies. Think Brexit.
This does not mean excusing or even bending to the ludicrous and largely oligarch led campaign against so called āwokenessā, whatever that means.
It does mean a serious political and economic campaign against homegrown oligarchy and political suppression.
This requires serious political organising in every state and county, as well as relentless political messaging at every level, including, but not limited to, the Congress.
Forget stupid labels. Focus on melding familiar cultural liberal norms together with real material benefits designed for the many, not the few. š¦¾
glc
@Major Major Major Major: Is this still the game or are you talking about Congress now?
MobiusKlein
@glc:Ā ā
I think congress?
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
They just canāt stop hitting that āIām a victimā feeder bar.
They have to play that game, because the people providing the money are the ones that make money by moving crap around. The people that own the stores that sell the not so cheap crap. The wally world owners for example. Sell cheap crap at a significant profit and continue to build stores to reach more and more people who will come in to buy cheap crap because they don’t make enough to buy anything of actual value. (And they aren’t alone in this game.) But they make serious money providing crap to people who don’t earn enough to purchase better crap because they work at wally world or businesses that operate the same way, don’t pay a cent more than they have to for labor. Don’t build a valuable workforce because that takes away a billion or two that belongs in a now very, very large pocket that is overflowing.
Aussie Sheila
@Ruckus: Yes. Exactly.
Now, what is to be done about it in the US?
Baud
Now I’m questioning whether the War on Christmas was ever real.
Aussie Sheila
@Baud: No. No it wasnāt. But the Right made some hay out of it, largely due to the ineffectual big city presses (looking at you nyt) not properly mocking it for the political and cultural BS it always was.
I know it is fun to mock and rage against the NYT and itās ilk, but really they are as bad as our big city press in OZ, and that is 75% owned by Murdoch.
Notwithstanding our execrable press and broadcast media, including the so called āindependent ABCā, the US print and online mainstream newspaper outlets are simply awful.
Perpetual excuses for the Right, constant bleating about ānormsā long since abandoned by the Right and republicans, and shockingly both siderist headlines.
I donāt know what can be done about it tbh.
Martin
@Aussie Sheila: Pretty sure we’re going to either swing democratic socialist left or fascist right. Capitalism has fought against regulation too hard and turned 2 generations against it. Will take a while before institutional power can act, but I don’t see big-L Liberalism surviving this.
I think demographically we’re likely to swing left, but barely.
James E Powell
@Baud:
If it wasn’t for these things being discussed here, I wouldn’t be aware of them. I feel like right-wingers have a full time staff searching for things to be outraged about.
Aussie Sheila
@Martin: I hope so for your and the rest of the worldās sake. But I am not so confident.
The US is frighteningly politically violent, has a weakly if at all organised working class, and is so āfederalisedā that concerted political action against voter suppression and electoral shenanigans is well nigh impossible.
I feel bad for colleagues I still know working hard there, but above all I fear for my own country. A unified republican government in the US determined to show China āwhatās whatā could mean the physical destruction of my country.
Whatās worse, if it was in reaction to some provocation, real or imagined by China, a lot of the normie Dem base would be right behind any US action. I am genuinely worried about the anti China BS emanating from US elites. This doesnāt mean Xi and his ilk are goodies. It just means the US learning some rhetorical and physical restraint when met with a smart and rich adversary.
The CCP is not the CPSU, and I hope to heaven that US political elites, on all sides understand that. Otherwise we are efffed down under. Really and truly efffed.
Anne Laurie
Agreed — the threat is very real, and we have to keep fighting it.
But the good news is that Mattel is ignoring these noisy bigots, and training up new generations who will believe, down to their very bones, that genderfluid people are normal, just more tiles in life’s colorful mosaic.Ā Because that’s the future, and what riles the bigots almost as much as the coming of that future is that they can’t get enough traction to stop it.Ā Even Fox News doesn’t want this content any more — they’re reduced to Newsmax, which is very niche indeed.
It might amuse you that the 2023 ‘Girl of the Year’ doll (according to my friends with grandkids, sometimes even more desirable than a lookalike doll) is a South Asian girl from New Jersey who really wants to grow up to be a Broadway performer… *after* graduating from Princeton, of course!
SWMBO
@NotMax: I don’t think that’s kosher…
Baud
@James E Powell:
Absolutely. The lion’s share of their actions are designed to manufacture talking points to feed to their base.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major:
The first part of that statement, of course, is true. But pushing them to better representation through the bottom line is the point.
Where I see the “go woke go broke” chant the most is YouTube and YouTube comments, but especially when it’s about gender–there are a lot of people there who really want to believe that companies that don’t cater to white people, straight people, especially to men will be punished in the marketplace. When this does seem to be happening, they crow about it; when anything different happens, there’s some kind of conspiracy, people are being paid off or hiding the truth.
They’ll just claim hit movies bombed at the box office sometimes–the most recent I saw was Black Panther 2; somehow a movie that made $800 million on a $250 million budget was a flop.
LiminalOwl
@Amir Khalid: We must be contemporaries. Ā Seventh grade, I had a classmate who played āPuppy Loveā for two hours straight, every day, for months. (In a place where I couldnāt escapeā¦ long story.)
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Makes sense as a practical matter. They can’t stop America from getting less white, but the male to female ratio won’t change.
The Thin Black Duke
@Matt McIrvin: I think that’s the biggest difference between Marvel and the DCU. Although they won’t admit it, their earlier movies catered to that toxic white fanboy demographic, which explains why garbage like Synder’sĀ Justice LeagueĀ was never as popular as they wanted it to be.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: And, I mean, it’s obviously still true that you can make a lot of money by catering to the dad market–Top Gun: Maverick is making allll the money. But that’s not enough for them; they want to eliminate anything that reminds them of anything else, and of course media and toy corporations, etc. just see those markets and the money they can make.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Haven’t heard any anti-Avatar II noises yet.Ā (Haven’t seen the movie).
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Avatar II seems like it’s going the same path as the first one: amazingly, it’s going to make back its colossal budget and more from people just going for the visual spectacle, even if they remember nothing about it five minutes later. I don’t know if people care enough about the movie’s politics to complain about it. Haven’t seen it–I never saw the first one either–but I think it doesn’t hit the gender angle that really gets YouTube chuds steamed.
Matt McIrvin
@The Thin Black Duke: The interesting thing to me was that those Snyderverse rageboy DC movies actually did make a lot of money, just not quite as much as Warner would have liked. Just looking at box office, they were successful. But they seemed dissatisfied at them getting a poor critical reception and negative buzz while Marvel (at the time, at least) could seemingly do no wrong.
And then the one that got good word-of-mouth and hit big was… Wonder Woman!
We can’t really read a simple political story into their box office, though. Birds of Prey was DC’s attempt at doing an out-and-out feminist cheeky superhero film, in some ways it was one of their more interesting efforts, and it really did bomb (just before the pandemic really hit so it can’t really be blamed on that). But I think there were several causes for that–the movie was mis-marketed and didn’t have the instant recognition hook of Wonder Woman. People seemed to really want there to be a good Wonder Woman movie.
Matt McIrvin
@The Thin Black Duke: …and the product of theirs that really amazed me was James Gunn’s TV show Peacemaker: this is a show that somehow managed to walk a tightrope where it could appeal to drunken fratboys and liberals at the same time, while being extremely R-rated, and have all those factions think they were being catered to. (And, like Guardians of the Galaxy, the property he started with was so obscure that he had zero name recognition to work from.) I guess just having good writing is a lot of it.
That they’ve decided to make Gunn their Kevin Feige to try to rescue the franchise is, I think, a good sign. His re-do of The Suicide Squad didn’t make a lot of box but that was because it was a pandemic-era release that was mostly seen on streaming.
The Thin Black Duke
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah,Ā Justice LeagueĀ made money, but I think DC also recognized that it didn’t have the creative momentum to earn a sequel. Other than the fanboys, audiences weren’tĀ passionateĀ about it.
That’s why the DCU’s treatment of Patty Jenkins is abominable, because I believe Wonder WomanĀ was the best superhero movie they made. The scene of No Man’s Land (which Jenkins shot at her own expense because the producers didn’t like it) is the embodiment of The Hero Discovering Herself and accepting her destiny.
And of course, because the sequel didn’t do well either artistically or commercially, Jenkins can’t doĀ Woman Woman 3, because women directors don’t get second chances.
Birds of PreyĀ (an excellent movie, by the way) might have been more successful as a television series, which is what Marvel does with it’s more oddball properties.
More to the point, DC also doesn’t do inclusion very well. The POC in their movies are reliable tokens, nothing more.
CliosFanBoy
I never thought DC’s characters, other than Batman, were very interesting compared to Marvel’s.
The Thin Black Duke
@CliosFanBoy: Thing is, during Alan Moore’s run onĀ Swamp Thing, his interpretation of the DC’s iconic characters was revelatory and ground-breaking. In an interview, Moore said he felt more drawn to the DC heroes because they felt more primal. Unfortunately, Synder took the superficial aspects of Moore’s reimagining of the characters and left behind nuance, complexity and vision.
Matt McIrvin
@The Thin Black Duke: I thought Birds of Prey was just OK but my wife and daughter really, really loved it and kept wanting to watch it again. It’s always interesting to me to see that phenomenon of “OK, I am not the main target audience here; there are things in it I can’t entirely see.”
A similar thing happened with the 2016 Ghostbusters, a movie whose mere existence made Internet rageboys blow a fuse and claim it was “raping their childhood”.
Anne Laurie
I was always more drawn to the DC comics than Marvel’s, even as a small child (and when I was a *major* comix geek as a teenager, back in the mid-1970s).Ā Because it always seemed to me that DC heroes were written as ‘real people’ while Marvel heroes (Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, sigh) were ‘teenage boy action figures’.
This led to a lot of getting yelled at by male comix geeks when we were in college, but nothing that’s happened since then — especially since the movie & media Marvel Universe Takes Over era started — has changed my mind about that!
The Thin Black Duke
@Anne Laurie: I think what made Marvel such a game changer back in the day was it was the first time in comics that the alter-egos were just as interesting as their superhero personas. As a child, I related more to Peter Parker than Clark Kent. And Lee and Kirby’sĀ Fantastic FourĀ was revolutionary. “This Man, This Monster” is still on the short list of the one of the greatest comic stories of all time.
different-church-lady
This is an interesting thread to read if you donāt know thereās a computer game involved.
JML
@The Thin Black Duke: If the movie bombs, the director doesn’t get another bite whether it’s DC or Marvel, man or woman in these franchises. (Alan Taylor didn’t get invited back after Thor: The Dark World either)
DC’s movies have made money, but haven’t had the level of critical acclaim that the earlier Marvel movies got and they were clearly chasing that…but that’s also part of avoiding diminishing returns on a franchise. You need the good reviews and quality to keep people coming back.
Marvel now has the problem of critics being sick and tired of super-hero movies and trashing them almost by rote (remember, critics always want something new and different, prefer darker and more complex, and are usually much more interested in villains than heroes, unless the heroes are deeply flawed/broken) and a level of market saturation. There’s been a lot of super-hero movies (finally) so you have to work a little harder to make them more interesting and different…and that increases the risk of failure.
Marvel generally seems to know what they want to do as a studio, for better or worse. DC is still throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks.
The Thin Black Duke
In Hollywood, women directors get one strike and they’re out. Taylor’s Thor:The Dark World was a gawdawful movie, but he’s not going to be unemployable for the rest of his career. Jenkins, on the other hand, has already been ostracized in Tinsel Town for the heinous crime of being “difficult”.
I would disagree with regarding how the MCU defines it heroes. DC always dials the nihilism to 11, because constructing a nuanced “good” isn’t an item to be found in their toolbox. Marvel is smart enough to give their actors well-written scripts to work with and the room to improvise if need be.
The MCU’s “problem” is their Phase 4 was populated by their minor-league heroes, so they let them loose in the whole to see what worked and what didn’t. It’s a clever strategy because they’re waiting for a decent amount of time before recasting their Big 3 characters so the fan base won’t freak out too much.
Ultimately, the MCU works because Feige genuinelyĀ likesĀ the superhero genre. I don’t get that vibe from DC.
J R in WV
One of our excellent Veterinarians has in her exam room a great Vet Barbie doll in a place of honor. I’m sure those sell pretty well, as many girls really love critters of al sorts. Also sure they were not on the market when she was a little girl loving animals in her neighborhood, next county over from ours.
J R in WV
@Aussie Sheila:
Historically the RWNJs regarded FDR as one tiny step away from Marxist Leninist, which was why there were very real conspiracies to over throw the government before FDR could turn it against Republican democracy and seize the means of production for the workers.
Of course this was a madman’s fantasy, but it was a very real one at the time. I’m surprised you weren’t more aware of this bit of American history. Only wild-eyed liberals regard FDR as a savior of democracy and the populace in the ’30s and a rescuer of freedom in the ’40s of WW II ~!~
When I was a kid in theĀ ’50s and ’60s of rural WV, many living rooms had 3 pictures on the wall — FDR, Jesus, and later JFK.
Jinchi
My guess is the guy was desperately looking for any excuse to extract himself from the American Girl shop and, he decided the racist excuse was his best bet.
Gravie
We lived in Madison, WI, near the original American Girls headquarters in Middleton, when those dolls debuted. Our daughterās first American Girl doll, a gift from her grandpa, was Kirsten, who looked pretty much exactly like our daughter. A few years later, we bought her another one because we really liked the company, the books, and the accessories. A lot better than the sexed-up Barbie dolls. Our blonde, blue-eyed daughter picked Addy, the African-American doll, and played happily with both her āgirlsā for years.
Connor
@The Thin Black Duke:
Don’t know who told you that Patty Jenkins paid for shooting the No Man’s Land scene herself, or that the producers were against it, but neither of those things are true. Here’s what Jenkins herself had to say about this particular false internet meme:
Full story located here: https://www.cinemablend.com/news/1699309/who-was-actually-against-wonder-womans-epic-no-mans-land-scene-according-to-patty-jenkins
Bottom line, if WB had been against the scene, the pushback would have taken place at the script phase and it would never have been filmed in the first place.
Jenkins is doing just fine — she is moving forward on her STAR WARS ROGUE SQUADRON film and has multiple other projects in development.
As for why she and Warners parted company on WONDER WOMAN 3, you’ve come to the wrong conclusion because of a fault in your premise.
Jenkins obviously made a massive contribution to the first WONDER WOMAN film as a director, but she wasn’t primarily responsible for that film’s story.Ā When she joined the project there was already a screenplay by Allan Heinberg, based on a story co-written by Heinberg and Zack Snyder and Jason Fuchs, and anyone who reads it (https://imsdb.com/scripts/Wonder-Woman.html) will be able to see that 95% of the film is already there: the WWI setting, the No Man’s Land scene, all the characters, etc. (It is generally acknowledged that Jenkins and Geoff Johns did some rewriting before the film was actually shot, but their contribution wasn’t enough to get the WGA to grant either of them a screenwriting credit.)
Because the first film did so incredibly well, Jenkins was able to demand and get creative control over the second film’s story in addition to directing it. She and Geoff Johns developed the story, and she, Geoff Johns, and Dave Callaham wrote the screenplay.
Unfortunately, WONDER WOMAN 1984 was terrible. Jenkins’ direction was fine, but the story and script were really, really bad.
So there’s the nub of the problem. Nobody in Hollywood would hold WW84’s lack of financial success against Jenkins, because it was a pandemic-era release. But reviewers and fans and studio execs hated the story that Jenkins, Johns, and Callaham came up with…and word within the industry is that Jenkin’s pitch for the third movie was more of the same, storywise: i.e., bad.
So it got rejected.
Here things get murky. Anonymous WB sources claim that Jenkins was asked to come up with a new idea and chose to walk away rather than do so. Jenkins went public with a diplomatically-vague counterstatement (āI never walked away. I was open to considering anything asked of me. It was my understanding there was nothing I could do to move anything forward at this time. DC is obviously buried in changes they are having to make, so I understand these decisions are difficult right now.ā)
Jenkins is an excellent director but only a so-so writer. It’s her failings in the latter category that resulted in this parting of the ways, not anything else.
The Thin Black Duke
@CliosFanBoy:
@Connor: Damn. I’m sorry, but I thought this thread was dead. Thank you for your welcome and insightful comments. Let’s continue to continue another time.
Connor
@The Thin Black Duke:
Absolutely! Looking forward to it. (And by the way, I totally agree that the first WONDER WOMAN is by far the best DC super hero movie.)
BruceJ
@J R in WV:
Their big beef with FDR was that he was the Great Class Traitor.. he was one of them and went ahead with the New Deal to benefit the serfs.
This is why they hated him with the heat of a thousand suns.
Kayla Rudbek
@J R in WV: as an adult, I have purchased the Barbies for Katherine Johnson, Doctor Who (Jodie Whittaker), Barbie scientist with microscope, and Barbie astrophysicist with telescope and sky chart
part of me would like to collect more of the Barbie scientist/engineers, although I am a bit hesitant (thinking that I should leave them on the market for little girls to receive).
I like seeing the representation of different racial/ethnic groups, although the one thing that I wish Mattel would offer is more variety in the white Barbies than blue eyes and blonde hair.
grandmaBear
Long dead thread, but when my granddaughter was on chemo for lymphoma her school gave her a bald American girl doll that came with pjs and a doctorās lab coat. I thought it was very kind.