FACTS ARE USELESS IN EMERGENCIES

media literacy includes understanding why a media product was made, to whom it's being sold, and the assumed preferences of its marketing demographic. narrative is not produced or sold in a vacuum.

you might be totally correct that your ship would be narratively satisfying. I don't know, I'm not watching your show. Whether your ship is likely to happen on the show is a whole different question to whether it's satisfying, because the show is being sold to Netflix or Amazon or the BBC, and they are purchasing a show they think they can market to a particular demographic and that demographic isn't you, the nightmarishly online tumblr user. The show is being made for marketability to a constructed average viewer. It is being funded with that audience in mind. This art is being made to commission, and commissioned art is art, but at some point you have to stop expecting the Church to commission a statue of Lucifer fucking St Michael. It might be narratively satisfying, but that's just not what they're paying for.

oh the other thing is, none of us have the data the broadcast companies do about audience demographics. just because something has a large or lively fandom, that doesn't necessarily mean that fandom people are the majority consumers of the product. Judy from work, who has two kids and watches The Traitors and Love Island and also sits down every week for Stranger Things with her kids, she is not posting about it, but she is watching it, and she is logged in and her watching is seen by Netflix. We don't know about Judy. Netflix knows about Judy. We could be outnumbered a thousand to one by Judy and we would never know. So be cautious in assuming you're the market, even if there's a lot of sound and light from your corner, okay? It might simply not be true that the thing, made for someone else, is actually selling to you. It might be selling to people who are less online.

Also, the criteria of success and failure may not be what you think. There have been popular cartoons cancelled because they weren't selling enough toys, or because they were popular with the wrong gender. There were successful sitcoms cancelled because the executives found them embarrassing (see "The Rural Purge 1971").

As we enter an increasingly anti-Black time, cuckoldry becomes the foundational psychosexual fixation of the racist masses. I don't mean jokes about "the cuck chair" or whatever, which is largely racially neutral and is more akin to jokes about swinging, but cuckoldry as in sexual anxiety surrounding stereotypes of Blackness. The specter of Blackness overshadows every sexual context for these people. You can't see a beautiful woman without preemptively imagining comparative sexual humiliation at the hands of a Black man. Racist whites will model themselves after "demure" sexual norms designed to contrast specifically with the imagined stereotype of Black women. It is deeply pathetic, increasingly dangerous, and also: lol fucking losers