#industry meta

[oliveroctavius]

I keep thinking about a post going around about Gretchen Felker-Martin being very literally cancelled by DC over a Charlie Kirk joke. I didn't want to detract from the very real point that this was a targeted effect of transmisogyny and cultural ideas about "acceptable targets". But it ended with a sentence like "And she hasn't even been paid for her published work, which if that happened to any other creator, would be on the national news" and every time I hear by sheer word-of-mouth about another publisher finding a way not to pay writers and artists and blame it on the creator themselves, I think about what a blindingly optimistic view of things that post had

[starryalpacasstuff]

Thinking About Thame Po and LYKN

So. I just found out that MARS, the idol group in Thame Po is played by GMMTV's real-life group LYKN. I don't even know how I managed to miss this the entire goddamn time, but that's besides the point. While this may raise some concerns about Thame Po being treated more as marketing material for the group and ending up being poorly developed, I've been thinking about how this might pan out in terms of the group members careers, in particular William. I wonder if WilliamEst is going to continue as a branded couple, or if this is going to be more of a one-off thing tailored specifically for the show. Also, I know that acting in a bl isn't going to have even close to the same implications as it does in the kpop world, but it's still an impactful project these idols are taking up really early in their careers (it's almost guaranteed to earn them more attention, that's for sure).

This concept is quite similar to OnlyOneOf's Bump Up Business, which they only did after having already established themselves as a group and having developed their ties to bl with their bl singles project. Now, as a group under gmmtv, LYKN obviously has no need for the latter, but I will be interested to see how strong their ties with the bl industry remain after this show ends, again, particularly William. For example, while OnlyOneOf will forever be known as That BL Group (exactly as their marketing team would hope, I suppose), they're also able to successfully do music outside of that concept, in part I think, because they were already an established group before. Obviously, we're playing with a lot of different variables here, but considering that GMMTV is almost definitely banking on Thame Po to bring in more support for LYKN, it will definitely be interesting to see how the groups future endeavors pan out seeing as that support is irrevocably tied to the bl industry and its fanbase. It's also worth noting that their most successful single to date is the one that features Pond and Joong on it, so I'd be completely unsurprised to see that GMMTV plans to bring in support for these guys through the bl fandom

[oliveroctavius]

finding out that DC literally sued Fawcett out of existence over Captain Marvel only to buy up the rights once they'd folded and start referring to the city where Billy lives as "Fawcett City" as a cutesy nostalgic reference is really like

[oliveroctavius]

[oliveroctavius]

Even though I've come to feel affection for the superhero genre as a part of comics history I'm never actually going to be excited about news of what the big two are doing next unless they're collapsing. I just fundamentally believe that Marvel and especially DC should not exist

[oliveroctavius]

not the first person to notice this but the fact that a lot of the names on the list of people whose work was scraped by Midjourney are comic writers who have never drawn a line simply because when collecting the art they scraped only the first name in the credits, and guess who gets first billing,

[oliveroctavius]

[oliveroctavius]

while #comicsbrokeme is trending on twitter right now, talking about the conditions of perpetual overwork on comics creators, I'd like to remind everyone (regardless of how they feel about his art style) that John Romita Jr. doing 2 issues per month currently means at least 40 pages of art per month. Meaning at least 10 pages per week. Meaning finishing every page in under four hours if he's going to hit his deadlines within the frame of a 40-hour work week.