I wonder how many people realize that the best way to support the cartoons they love is to… buy the merch?
The official merch.
It really is that simple. It’s why Transformers and My Little Pony keep coming back. It’s why there are so many Barbie movies. Why Kevin Smith’s Masters of the Universe failed but the 3D animated He-Man is thriving. Why Pokemon is the biggest money making franchise of all time and will never not have an anime. Why Bluey, Cocomelon, and other little kid cartoons are having money poured into them while other studios are being cut off ruthlessly. It’s why Frozen and Cars got fucking sequels while The Owl House was reduced to 3 specials for its final season.
Because, for those IPs, people buy the official merch.
Parents aren’t going on Etsy to get a hand-crochet plush of Bluey or Bingo. They’re picking one up at Target. The Transformers collector isn’t buying small batch stickers from a fanartist on redbubble, he’s buying an official hasbro figure at the comic store and his kids a sticker sheet at Walmart. Hand painted cards are never going to replace the Pokemon TCG.
And that’s where companies make their animation budget back. Not through advertisements. Not through subscriptions. Merch.
And it doesn’t matter if the fan stuff is better made. It doesn’t matter if you can commission exactly what you want. As much as it sucks, fan merch is copyright infringement, and the animation companies don’t see a single red cent from it.
You can sign all the petitions you want. You can stream every single one of these cartoons in the background on a repeat to falsify watch numbers, you can post all the fanart and fanfiction you want in an active fandom of millions and it won’t save your show. So long as the cartoon isn’t justifying the expense of animation from official merchandise sales, the companies have no incentive to keep making them.
I’m not saying those actions never work. But the surest way to make sure these companies stay invested in your favorite cartoon, is to make sure their investment in your favorite cartoon pays off.
Edit: it’s in a reblog, but I’m adding it here too.
I’m aware that these companies aren’t making that much merchandise for some of these shows. Definitely not at the level a bunch of shows from my childhood were. In which case we need to be asking three important questions:
Why do they not think these shows are marketable?
Why are they making these shows if they don’t think they are marketable?
How do we let them know we will buy official merch in a quantity that will get their attention?
Money talks to these corporations, so why are they cutting off their ears?
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The hardest, but most important, part of my transition has been untangling what my personal dysphoria is, and what is more a result of cissexism.
What I mean by this is that I learned that I am not dysphoric about certain aspects of myself, my body, and my life, but my discomfort in these aspects was influenced by the cissexist culture I live in which told me I couldn't exist as myself.
It's definitely a slow process, but I have found that it helps me self-actualize and actually see myself instead of what others demand of me.
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That goofy and unserious personality that annoys his peers is the same personality that Geto found endearing and immediately connected with. Despite everything Geto loved Gojo the way he was. Not diluted, not as the strongest but just as his pure annoying self.
Some people find hard to understand why after 10 years Gojo couldn’t find it within himself to let go of him. But it’s hard to let yourself being seen and it’s harder when someone sees you and accepts you. After Geto no one has accepted Gojo in the same way and he knows that.
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Prompt 99
Tucker feels like tearing out his hair and screaming until reality warps.
Visit Gotham, they said. They have great scholarships, they said. It’s not that bad, they said. Yeah well they can go shove it, because he bets that they didn’t have a bunch of golden-eyed not-ghosts following them around like Cujo does with Danny!
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We don't talk enough about the fact that Amelia Pond, s5 Amelia Pond, before the timeline is reset, isn't just a normal orphan. Her parents didn't die, didn't abandon her, and didn't send her away. They never existed in the first place.
And if her parents never existed, then Amelia cannot exist. She is a causal impossibility.
"People fall out of the world sometimes, but they always leave traces." A photograph. A face carved into an apple. Yes. Sure.
A child.
Now that's too big, surely.
But that's what she is. She is exactly the same as these things. A trace. An echo of something that could never be, never was, never could have been.
And the universe should never allow it. A whole person, that's just too much. She could not have continued to exist indefinitely, in normal circumstances, after her parents never existed.
In normal circumstances.
Because the Doctor didn't just save her from things coming out of the crack in her wall. He saved her from going into it. And he didn't just save her from the threat of going into it simply because of its vicinity.
No, by arriving when he did, he interrupted a process that was probably already in motion. And then by arriving again only moments later on a cosmic relative timestream (too quickly for the process to complete) and yet in the local relative timestream, years later --- years of a potential future caught midway through the process of rewriting -- he solidified that existence. Amy is a creature from another timeline, caught in amber. The Doctor prevented her from never existing, but only after she could already never exist.
And so, no one around Amelia thinks about it. Neither does she. There's some kind of consciousness block, because if you thought about it, really thought about it, for two seconds you'd realize she cannot exist. And the human mind can't deal with that. So, to protect itself, everyone's brain simply slides off it before ever noticing. They just assume that her existence makes sense, and don't question it, and don't notice what they don't question, that is staring them in the face.
But of course, to some extent they do notice. They can't think it, but they notice subconsciously that there's something they can't think. They notice there's something wrong with her, something uncanny. And they don't like it, and they alienate her even more because of it.
"Does it ever bother you Pond that your life existence doesn't make any sense?"
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Remembering Anne Rice on the second anniversary of her death:
What does the word "vampire" mean to you? The vampire for me is a metaphor for the outsider, the outcast, the predator in all of us --- the lonely one, the heart and soul that feels immortal even when it knows that we all die. Vampire characters help me to talk about reality. They always have. When I'm with Lestat, and Armand and Louis, and Gabrielle, I'm in the real world. All colors blaze bright and music soars to Heaven and I'm not lonely for a while, I'm safe. And that's why I write about them and through them and with them.
X
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