The Harbour

Juvenile crested pigeons in my mum’s yard

In a nutshell, it’s much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.

This is why children’s toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits they’ve decided to use is “boys versus girls”.

Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? That’s market segregation in action.

The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; they’re viewed as “stealing” the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully “owns” it.

This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? It’s not just artificial, it’s deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying “this is the ways it’s always been” or “this is just what the market wants”, they’re lying through their teeth - this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.

Paul Dini, a writer/producer said this on a podcast: “ That’s the thing, you know I hate being Mr. Sour Grapes here, but I’ll just lay it on the line: that’s the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, it’s like, ‘we need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys’—this is the network talking—’one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as boys, but right there.’”

Cartoon network and Warner brothers deliberately made the conscious decision to dumb down their female characters because they want to push female viewers away. In fact, Tower Prep was cancelled because it had too many female viewers because the writers made too many well written female characters.

So shitty representation of girls isn’t something that just happens. It’s the result of deliberate planning just so the execs can make more money.

And it’s not just cartoon network. I mean, why do you think Nick fucked over Korra so badly? Remember them telling Bryke they didn’t want a female Avatar? Why do you think there are no Korra figurines or action figures?

An explanation for why I’m auctioning off a copy of my book that I sat on

It ended up selling……for $3850……

She also used to “speak” for them online by channeling them through her body so they’d use her to type (and she did this for Satan too and it was as cringe as you’d expect) and basically Michael Jackson is genderqueer and fucking Richard Ramirez from beyond the grave and they’re all fucking Stephanie too, and at one point Stephanie split up with Michael when he wanted to save his deceased father from Hell and he got the astral child in the ghost divorce, but that’s fine because she thinks she can get AIDS from having sex with ghosts so at least Michael isn’t getting AIDS while he’s dead. 

And there was the time she used Richard’s name to send (google translated) Spanish death threats to people, and used Michael’s name to say the N-word because she thought it made the act more convincing. She groomed a group of minors on DeviantArt (me included) and had people calling her “daddy,” and that only stopped because she got in a fight with one of the kids who happened to have a heart condition and had to go to the hospital because of the stress, and then Stephanie took credit for sending Michael’s spirit to pull the girl’s soul out of the afterlife, and when you lowkey kill a disabled teenager from another country and take credit for saving their life other people start to notice and so she got doxxed and now her parents (who she still lives with in her 30s) won’t let her use DeviantArt ever again.