>When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.

I'm not clear on what exactly you mean. My best guess is: "media is produced to satisfy an audience's desires" but I'm not even confident that's what you mean.

Media is not produced to satisfy an audience's desires; that's only indirectly and coincidental; more and more.

Media is produced to satisfy an executive's desire, which is often based on what they think the audience wants, but sometimes is based on what they think the audience should want.

I don't think that's the incentive. Executives don't care about such things. It's just that they are risk adverse, they try to avoid drama as that's a risk.

Avoiding drama is the exact opposite of what you want to do in publishing. This sentence is true for both meanings of the word 'drama'.

Media is rarely passive and never just follows where consumers point to, is it. Eveeybody with some power has some agenda to push on others.

I dont even mean cia/military-backed ultra patriotic movies from hollywood of the past, eveeybody simply has their opninion and even journalism is rarely objective.

> when the numbers flip sufficiently that a new group is now under represented they get told "that's too bad"

according to whom? do you have any examples?

Sibling comment

Representation never mattered, what mattered was to get a different group on top. It's not just men vs women, you see it everywhere. It's like how a poster of black and Asian people is "diverse".

Have you considered that when people use the phrase “increase diversity,” they mean across the entire medium? That a movie or book can have, in a vacuum, a fairly limited cast, but if that cast is otherwise unrepresented across film or literature it does increase diversity?

I'd much rather have a diversity of stories with appropriate casting than artificially-induced representation via race-swapping cast members. By all means, use diverse casting for modern and future-facing stories, but give me fewer black elves and asian dwarves in old, exclusively European stories and more stories from Asian, African, South American, etc. cultures.

As a small example: I'd love to see more about Anansi, the African spider trickster god elevated into mainstream media. I can only recall him appearing in American Gods and an episode or two of Gargoyles in the 90s.

Are people saying "that's too bad?" Or are they frustrated to see endless criticism of this argument when it is applied to other groups over the past five years while this topic continues to get litigated.

I support grants for authors to create a wider variety of literature. Too bad the NEA and NEH have been slashed to ribbons.

> We just spent the last several years hearing how representation matters

this reminds me of the green piccolo meme (from 4chan, i think?). Piccolo, fyi, is a green alien character from the famous anime/manga series Dragon Ball Z, which is popular with young boys all over the world.

The meme is that boys, regardless of the race and language or other physical conditions, see themselves in a green alien character that looks and sounds nothing like them, and will happy play with a Piccolo figurine.

Meanwhile girls (supposedly, according to the meme) require a Barbie doll that looks and feels like them, and hence all the various dolls that are made to represent the diverse young female audience.

I don't know how true it actually is, but this stereotype tends to format a lot of the representation discussion online. Boys grow up to be men who chafe at the 'diversity' and 'representation' topics, because they would happily see them selves represented in anything, even if it were a green alien. To them, looks are less important than actions. Piccolo was a good father figure to Gohan, and they aim to be as good as him.

therefore, books written with the (supposedly) feminine themes (even if the MC is a boy) tend to not click with boys.

>Boys grow up to be men who chafe at the 'diversity' and 'representation' topics, because they would happily see them selves represented in anything, even if it were a green alien.

As long as its not a girl.

Not necessarily.

Frieren is a manga that has a female protagonist and is wildly popular with boys, elsewhere in this thread I talk about Ascendence of a Bookworm, another story with a female protagonist, popular with boys.

Yes, female MCs are less likely to be common in boys literature, but if the story is good, then boys will read it. What makes the story 'good' in the eyes of boys, is about the themes, at least to my understanding.

I believe Japan does it best, they clearly delineate young/mature, male/female categories in terms of themes, and then have stories can still have a female MC but thematically targeted towards the category 'young+male'(Shonen) or 'mature+male' (Seinen)

Examples of each:

https://myanimelist.net/stacks/41465

https://myanimelist.net/stacks/59021

Many of these stories are something I've read/watched but forgot that they were not labelled under the female category stories.

Have decades or centuries of this and you’ll have an argument, as it is, yeah, get over it.

Current generations deserve all the same fairness. It's not a good argument to say that group X deserves less fairness because people trust belonged to group X decades ago had an unfair advantage.