Its been NINE YEARS and i still dont think anyone knows exactly why teen titans was cancelled
Same reason Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series were canceled: Girls liked it. Bruce Timm finally up anâ said it out loud in an interview a while back when he was asked why in the hell GL:TAS had been canceled when it was doing so well on every front; DCâs animation department has institutionally decided that feee-males donât/canât/shouldnât like superheroes, so even if a show is drawing in great viewership numbers and has great toy sales, once they find out that itâs popular with women and girls, they pull the plug on it. Cartoon Network loved Teen Titansâ two million viewers for new episodes will do thatâ and wanted a Season Six, and the production staff was already in the planning stages for it; they were going to have a big arc about Terra and why she was Living Normal, and do a lot more with the extended Titans team members.
This is so fucked up.
To elaborate on this point a bit, the reason this happens is that modern television merchandising aims for total market segregation.
In a nutshell, itâs much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.
This is why childrenâs toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits theyâve decided to use is âboys versus girlsâ.
Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? Thatâs market segregation in action.
The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; theyâre viewed as âstealingâ the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully âownsâ it.
This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? Itâs not just artificial, itâs deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying âthis is the ways itâs always beenâ or âthis is just what the market wantsâ, theyâre lying through their teeth - this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.
(Interestingly, the reverse isnât always true: if a specifically girl-targeted show unexpectedly becomes popular with boys, sometimes rather than being cancelled, its merchandising will shift to court the male collectorâs market. TV execs are so sexist, even their sexism is sexist.)
It gets worse.
Paul Dini, a writer/producer said this on a podcast: â Thatâs the thing, you know I hate being Mr. Sour Grapes here, but Iâll just lay it on the line: thatâs the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, itâs like, âwe need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boysââthis is the network talkingââone step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as boys, but right there.ââ
Cartoon network and Warner brothers deliberately made the conscious decision to dumb down their female characters because they want to push female viewers away. In fact, Tower Prep was cancelled because it had too many female viewers because the writers made too many well written female characters.
So shitty representation of girls isnât something that just happens. Itâs the result of deliberate planning just so the execs can make more money.
And itâs not just cartoon network. I mean, why do you think Nick fucked over Korra so badly? Remember them telling Bryke they didnât want a female Avatar? Why do you think there are no Korra figurines or action figures?
Source: http://www.themarysue.com/warner-bros-animation-girl-market/
What the fuck
This ties back to my âgender exists because capitalism says soâ post
