#the movie trailer is all over my dash so ofc i had to say something

[googlekromer]

everyone knows the real minecraft movie already came out AND it's free on YouTube AND it has more heart than anything we've seen so far

go. be free. we are the pioner

[earlgraytay]

....So here’s one thing I don’t get. 

I saw someone on my dash talking about the all-lady Into The Spiderverse sequel that’s coming up. The person they were talking to is pessimistic about the chances of the all-lady Spider-sequel being good because it’s all ladies. They feel like it’s “pandering to women” and that, because it seems like it’s targeted to a specific demographic in a self-congratulatory way, it can’t be good. 

but let’s be honest for a second. in this, the year of our lord dracula 2019, girl power is a form of marketing. saying “this [piece of media] takes a beloved male character and turns him into a group of ladies!” is a thing that will get people’s attention and net you an audience, regardless of anything else you’ve said or done. 

a big media company making a Girl Power Movie isn’t an inherently feminist act, and it isn’t a conspiracy against men. in this day and age it is a marketing gimmick with about as much moral weight as “we’ve made this movie about an 80s Nostalgia Thing!”  Media Companies make money by making something people will feel strongly about and getting people who will strongly like it to come watch; ofc they’re going to try to make things for People Who Feel Strongly About Feminism.  

at this point we don’t know much of anything about the All Lady Sequel. We know that it’s not coming until after Spiderverse 2 (which will have at least some focus on Miles and Gwen’s relationship), that Spider-Gwen will be the lead (and both Spider-Woman and Silk are showing up), and that both members of the OG Spiderverse team and ATLA alumni will be working on it. That’s it.

Anything else we’re seeing right now is marketing. it is designed to hype people up for that movie. it is specifically designed to pander to the kind of people who would be interested in an all-lady spiderverse movie. it has very little correlation to the content, themes, or quality of the movie- we’re so far out from it coming out that everything but the most basic premise could change.

...so of fucking course it looks like the lady spiderverse movie is “pandering to women”. all we’ve seen is the fucking marketing and marketing is inherently kinda pander-y. the point of marketing is to make you feel good about the thing and excited about the thing (and sometimes ‘to make you feel like you’re better than everyone else for liking the thing’). and if you’re not in the target audience, yeah, marketing is often a bit offputting. it can make you feel excluded, because it’s basically trumpeting THIS MOVIE IS FOR THESE PEOPLE OVER HERE THAT WE’RE MARKETING TO. 

but marketing has no goddamn correlation with anything about a piece of media except maybe its budget. we’ve all seen movies where every good thing in the movie was in the minute-long trailer.  conversely, earthbound- one of the best JRPGs of all time, the thing that’s influenced everything from cave story to yume nikki to undertale- earthbound’s marketing was all about how much it stank. literally. 

(it was the 90s, I thiiiiiiink they were going for gross-out humour? but that’s not the kind of gameEarthbound is; even if that advertising had appealed to edgy Gen X Teens, it wouldn’t have worked.) 

like. honestly i’m sympathetic to people who look at this kind of marketing and go “...oh god”.  there’s a lot of tropes in Feminist Fiction that I just plain can’t stand and a few that I think are outright harmful.*  good Girl Power stories are important, but if you’re not careful it’s very easy for a Girl Power story to turn into a Message Fic or a Broken Aesop.  if I see that something i like is getting a “feminist” adaptation and that thing wasn’t already heavy on Girl Power Themes, my optimism for it is usually cautious. 

but... if you really are worried about The Thing You Love getting a Bad Adaptation, the best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut and wait for the adaptation to come out. Don’t say anything, don’t talk about it on social media until after you’ve seen it, refuse to get into arguments about it, just keep your mouth shut. 

 wait until the movie comes out. wait until you see what they’ve actually done with it. once the reviews have started to come in, get an impression of what it’s actually about and not what they’ve tried to market it as. choose to see it (or not), and complain about (or praise) it as you will. 

i’m not saying this because i want to Quash Anti-Feminist Dissent or because i have a principled stance about not judging books by their cover. i’m saying this because man, this is one of the classic blunders.  

by talking about a Feminist Media that hasn’t come out yet- especially by making a stink about how It Might Be Bad Because It’s Feminist- you’re playing into the company’s hands. you are letting people know, “hey, there’s a new Spider-Man movie coming out soon, and it’s Feminist!”  and since there are many many more people who would like to see an all-girl reboot of a popular franchise than people who have strong ideological objections against one... if nothing else, there’s a lot of six-year-old girls out there... you’re letting people know that this thing exists and that they might like it. 

you’re essentially giving the company free advertising.  

i mean, fuck, i didn’t know there was gonna be an all-girl Spiderverse sequel until after I saw people on my dash arguing about it. and from what i’ve seen of it... yeah, I’m interested. so you’ve advertised to at least one person. if not more. 

just... honestly, learn some basic fucking media literacy and stop letting people you hate manipulate you, yeah? it’s fucking embarrassing to watch.     

*the big ones are “it is important for young men to sit down, shut up, and do what older women say, because young men are Brash Hotheads and older women are Wise”, “it is okay- even hilarious- for women to verbally abuse men to the point where the men involved feel worthless”, and the variation of “Deserving Love does not mean you get the girl“ that involves a disabled man giving up his crush on an abled woman so she can be with an abled partner. I do not think I need to explain why these are bad.