Yep, that's it!

Reshared post from +Isaac Sher

"There's No Market For Girl Stuff."

Okay, for the record?  The "there's no market for woman/feminist-favoring products" line of thinking is OFFICIALLY HORSECRAP.  And it's pissing me off.

I hold up as a very specific counter-argument… the American manga industry.

For decades, Comics has been the bastion of the White Man.  Most of the heroes are white men, most of the female characters are primarily there to serve as sex objects for male hetero readers (look, I love comics, but we HAVE to be honest with ourselves about this), and most of the plotlines are firmly along Manly Adventure lines.  Both in terms of their hiring practices and marketing strategy, American Comics did everything short of put up a "NO ICKEY GIRLS WANTED HERE" sign.  There were always exceptions to that rule, but those were quite rare.

Then, about fifteen years or so ago, publishers started getting ahold of Japanese manga that was primarily marketed to girls.  "Shojo Romance" comics and the like.  They translated it cleanly and professionally, put a very reasonable price point on it (roughly ten bucks for nearly 200 pages), and started selling it through mall-based bookstores in order to avoid the Boy's Club mentality that so deeply infects most Comic Book Stores.

AND THEY SOLD LIKE EFFING CRAZY.   Suddenly, Anime and Manga conventions became so gender-mixed compared with other genre media cons that it wasn't even funny, the influx of female fan numbers was unbelievable — and speaking as someone who was highly ranked on one of the largest Anime conventions in North America at the time, you could really, REALLY see the difference year by year.  It was insane, and it was fantastic.

And all through that period, the American Comic industry, mainly DC and Marvel, put their fingers in the ears and screamed "SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP", and refused to see that they were leaving huge amounts of money on the table by willfully ignoring female readers.

So I don't want to hear any bull-crap about "there's no market for girl's video games" or "girl's comics" or "feminist roleplaying games."  That's a lie, and you are willfully lying to yourself if you parrot that line of garbage.

Thank you for your time, I just really needed to get that off my chest.

#ToM