Streaming Services: First 2023 POWER RANKINGS (And what's up with Prime?)

[Gradine]

I don't have the inclination to waste my time and energy on transphobes, but for the rest of the home audience

"Concerns about single sex spaces" is code for "Trans women (it's always trans women specifically) are male perverts and sex criminals who: <pick a choice below>"
(a) Force their kinks on others
(b) Prey on women and children
(c) Seek some advantage over women
or (d) Whatever combination of the above or anything else they can make up to back up their point
The thing about transphobes is that they don't have any real coherent philosophy beyond "trans = bad" and so they'll make up whatever imagined fears they think will work on susceptible people. None of the above is real, by the way. Neither is any of the things they make up about regret/desistance (Regret/Detransition rates are extremely low and more often than not based on societal pressure and discrimination than anything) Not a single peer-reviewed study backs up anything other than the overwhelmingly positive impacts of transition.

Other nonsense code words to look out for:
"Male pattern violence"
"Socialized male"
"Transwoman"
"TRA/TIM"

All of these are nonsense at best and slurs at worst.

Oh and on the "eradicate trans people" most people aren't going to come right out at say it (except for the neo-nazis who have, of course, absolutely been invited to march/protest with transphobic speakers), they'll say things like "ideally we limit the number of trans people" or "trans people are a problem in a sane world" or "we need to eliminate trans ideology" which are all real quotes from the people JK Rowling has platformed and supported, and are also just roundabout ways to get to the same goal which is no trans people existing. The only real difference is how they want to achieve that goal: forced detransition or death.

Unfortunately, for a great many trans people, that's a distinction without a difference.

 

[Gradine]

Like keep your books or whatever; if I couldn't fully separate the product from the people who make it I certainly wouldn't be posting on this Dungeons & Dragons website, but let's not fully deny reality in order to defend somebody who needs absolutely no defending, not the least of which because they live in a frakking castle

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I agree with your point, but the works of Tolkien are in a sort of different category at this point than a lotmof "media properties": has Shakespeare peaked, or Homer...?

Yes and yes.

 

[Gradine]

Also, and not to put too fine a point on it, but for a group of people who fell in love with a property that told its protagonist (and thus, vicariously, its reader) that they would need to choose between what is right and what is easy, when confronted with that choice in the real world with actual consequences for real people some of y'all couldn't slam that Easy button fast enough.

 

[Parmandur]

Yes and yes.

Shakespeare is still widely, widely performed, so I'm going to hard disagree with that assessment.

Mediocre stuff like Harry Potter comes and goes, but some things are classic.

 

[Gradine]

Shakespeare is still widely, widely performed, so I'm gookgntonjard disagree with that assessment.

Mediocre stuff like HarrybPotter comes and goes, but some things are classic.

Do you smell burning toast right now or are you just on your cell phone?

 

[Parmandur]

Do you smell burning toast right now or are you just on your cell phone?

Fat thumbs, plus mediocre Samsung spellchecker.

I actually don't have a sense of smell, never have.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Shakespeare is still widely, widely performed, so I'm going to hard disagree with that assessment.

I have an English degree and love me some Billy Shakes, but his cultural importance isn't what it was even 50 years ago.

And "peaked" doesn't mean "irrelevant."

 

[trappedslider]

It wasn't a point I understood you to be making.

In any case, "the franchise is still doing great, because the old cow is still giving some milk" isn't something particularly impressive, IMO. You can buy Big Trouble in Little China merchandise to purchase nowadays, but some Funko Pops are hardly the sign of a thriving IP.

Well considering how you fee l,i doubt anything will impress you about the ip

When Legacy launches on the switch later this year, I expect it to make money then there will be Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions when it releases (maybe later this year) I expect it to have the same launch as Legacy had: record breaking, twitch records etc. with her comments being a "by the way" in various articles just like there were when Legacy launched.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Well considering how you fee l,i doubt anything will impress you about the ip

I haven't said anything about how I feel about the IP itself. I am just objecting to the weird notion that Harry Potter (or the works of Shakespeare or Homer) is anywhere near its peak, creatively or culturally. It's just ... not.

Now, it's possible to claw back into relevancy. Lord of the Rings did it with the Peter Jackson movies. Dungeons & Dragons did it with third and especially fifth edition. Star Trek is doing a good job of it currently.

But one has to acknowledge that, in the mid-1980s and 1990s, Lord of the Rings was no longer the buzzy fantasy series everyone cared about. In the late 1990s, plenty of people assumed that D&D was going to go out of print and die. And the Star Trek series has effectively died more times than Spock has.

Today, Gen Z kids snicker at Millennials for all knowing their Harry Potter house and view it as cringeworthy that they think it's worth inserting those references into their online dating profiles. The IP is demonstrably less cool and popular than it was when it was omnipresent and dominated the cultural conversation.

In each of those periods, there were still die-hard fans. But their existence didn't mean that the IPs were anywhere near as relevant or successful as they were at their peak.

None of this is a value judgement. It's just business.