
Report: Star Wars toymakers were directed to exclude female characters - runarb
http://www.hypable.com/star-wars-toymakers-specifically-directed-to-exclude-rey/
======
geofft
This is why I'm not such a huge fan of "but the market wants it" arguments, at
least in our current society. The market has high barriers to entry (only one
entity can make a Star Wars film, and very few can make a Star Wars-scale
film) and is run by people who, evidently, have no idea what they're doing,
and are _still_ profitable and have no need to seek maximum profit. Their own
jobs and raises are not threatened by the possibility that they could have
been ten times more profitable, because there's no way for their bosses to
know that. Rey action figures aren't on the market, so there are simply no
numbers for how profitable it would be.

Same goes for startups. Given the barriers to entry in the software business,
which are low but still very much nonzero (hence the need for VC), and given
that VC can't fund all the possible ideas that want to enter, what's in the
market is what non-consumer participants have decided in their wisdom that
consumers will probably like. Which may well be very profitable, but is
unlikely to maximize profit.

Which leads to a simple reply to PG's claim, "When you accuse Silicon Valley
of x, you're implicitly saying x works well, which doesn't seem smart if
you're against x." No, I'm implicitly saying that x works rather poorly,
because Silicon Valley works rather poorly and is still profitable. It could
be much more profitable.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Here's the money quote (literally):

> "maintain the sharp boy/girl product division"

You're assuming what they're doing is unprofitable and irrational. But a
majority of families with two or more children have children of opposite sexes
and a cultural taboo against different sexes sharing the same toys means
parents need to buy more toys. It isn't hard to believe that this strategy is
profitable on net.

So it's really showing the other thing -- not that the market isn't efficient,
but that it can be efficient/profitable for the market to be sexist.

But that makes the analogous thing in tech that boys are encouraged to be
programmers and girls are encouraged to be nurses. Which is a thing that
happens predominantly in schools and at home and it isn't clear how the
software industry would be a beneficiary of that -- which is perhaps why we
hear many calls to do something about it. The profit-seeking behavior is to
change it.

~~~
foolrush
“So it's really showing the other thing -- not that the market isn't
efficient, but that it can be efficient/profitable for the market to be
sexist.”

“The market” is not some natural occurring phenomenon, but rather a complex
mix of political and ethical choices.

It is our responsibility to be acutely aware of this and make “the market”
accountable to our cultural aspirations.

That is, we must use whatever tools available to make “the market” not
profitable when it encultures sexism or is overtly sexist. Find the people
responsible behind these decisions and make it clear to them, and the
companies that enable and protect them, that it is absolutely unacceptable.

~~~
dawnbreez
The solution is simple: vote with your wallet. Encourage others to do the
same.

~~~
foolrush
The idea that all things should be reduced down to a quantization of money is
a chunk of the toxic rhetoric that led to this.

We could apply the same hollow catch phrase to the election of government and
reveal how ultimately toxic the trope is.

Quote from article, that brings up the trope:

“For far too long, fans searching for merchandise of their favorite female
characters have been told that the onus is on their wallets. “Buy the toys
that are out there,” the message has echoed, even as fans scour the unyielding
shelves for a green-skinned assassin, a black-clad Avenger — and now a
fearless young woman who hums with the power of the Force.

It is time to reverse the conversation. Toy and merchandise companies must
stop taking a character’s gender into consideration when including them in
products. Put Gamora with the rest of the Guardians. Leave Black Widow on her
motorcycle. And when Star Wars: Episode VIII finally arrives, don’t make us
ask “Where’s Rey?””

~~~
dawnbreez
Yes, it'd be nice if we could be heard for more than our money.

But these people only listen to money, and even when they listen to people,
there will always be someone who only listens to money.

The theoretical beauty of capitalism is that it uses greed against itself; in
theory, the best way to become rich is to make something truly valuable. In
practice, we're pretty easy to manipulate and we've unwittingly ensured the
destruction of the very parts of capitalism that make greed work for its pay.

So yes, we do need to vote with our wallets, and we need to do it ASAP,
because it'll only get worse if we keep buying it.

My recommendation would be to buy every goddamn Rey toy you can find. That'll
make it clear that Rey is what sells. A broad boycott won't tell them
anything, other than "we're angry".

~~~
foolrush
We can vote with our cultural ethics.

Putting this on the front page of HN so that other media outlets pay attention
is one such technique.

Conversely, by voting with wallets, we show support for the very minds that
enabled and legitimized this toxic decision.

~~~
dawnbreez
One, HN is not something I expect most media outlets notice.

Two, short of a march held in front of Mattel's doorstep (or the doorstep of
whoever refuses to make Rey toys), voting with "cultural ethics" is not going
to be noticed by the kind of person who says "no boy will want a toy with a
girl on the front".

Three, "cultural ethics" is a vague term in and of itself. Are you referring
to the culture of expecting boys to like boys' toys? Or are you talking about
taking that culture and replacing it with another? What's the difference
between cultural and personal ethics, and if personal ethics exist, then how
do cultural ethics have an effect?

Fourth, voting with our wallets beats the corps at their own game. By
consciously deciding to only pay for products that fit our ethics, we force
companies to follow our ethics (or, at least, the ethics of the masses). If we
do not buy, they don't make money, so what we buy directly affects their
decisions.

Finally, I don't understand the "toxic" label you keep using. What is toxic
about it? An idea can't be poison; ideas do not inherently do anything. Only
actions can be harmful--or helpful. Voting with our wallets is only as toxic
as the thing we decide to vote for.

------
faitswulff
> “I’ve spoken with Disney people, and they were completely blindsided by the
> reaction to the new Star Wars characters,” he tells Boehm. “They put a huge
> investment into marketing and merchandizing the Kylo Ren character. They
> presumed he would be the big breakout role from the film. They were
> completely surprised when it was Rey everyone identified with and wanted to
> see more of.”

...they thought everyone would identify with the whiny, emo bad guy?

~~~
stupidcar
It might seem insane, but from the limited and prejudiced perspective of these
Disney executives, it makes sense. They won't be Star Wars fans, or consumers
of their own company's output in general. They'll be business people, who are
probably privately ignorant or contemptuous of Star Wars and science fiction
in general as an art form, and who think of it only as a franchise from which
the maximum profit should be extracted.

Their conception of the Star Wars fanbase will be based on the worst cliches
you can imagine — a homogenous mass of awkward, nerdy, unsophisticated
adolescent white boys and young adults — and be informed by a crude and
cynical view of marketing psychology. Basically, they have no intuition
whatsoever for what Star Wars fans want or think, so will fill in the gap in
their knowledge by assuming the very worst.

All the above leads the executives to believe that the nerdy white boys who
are dumb enough love this Star Wars crap cannot and will not identify with any
character except the one who most resembles themselves. A moody, caucasian
man-child with a cool mask and superpowers? How could they _not_ love him? Any
objections about him being a rather unsympathetic villain will be waved away
as so much noise. “After all, Vader was a villain or something, and we sell a
shit-ton of merch with _his_ face on it, right?”

To these same execs, the characters of Finn and Rey won't be viewed as
anything other than a bone thrown to potential black and female fans. A way of
expanding the franchise's appeal beyond its typical demographic. But they will
still look at that homogenous mass of white nerds and say “These losers are
the target of our marketing and merchandising efforts, and they will never
identify with a female character, or buy merchandise containing one. We don't
need to prove this, because we're top execs and our success demonstrates that
our intuition is correct.”

~~~
detaro
I think an important part is that the typical "profitable" Star Wars fan isn't
a kid anymore: they are in their late 20s to 40s. Probably white and male. Now
with enough disposable income to buy a lot of stuff, and kids they'll take to
the new film and buy toys for.

But what appeals to them isn't necessarily what appeals to kids, and while the
parents _pay_ for the toys, the kids _pick_ the toys. Their market research
might have indicated that this is what the typical Star Wars fan wants (or
maybe wanted a few years ago, due to changing perspectives in the past decade
that weren't apparent during the last rush), but they aren't selling toys to
the people that are already Star Wars fans.

(Toys as in kids' toys, not "Collectibles")

------
jballanc
It wasn't until I had children of my own that I realized just how _UTTERLY
EGREGIOUS_ sexism is in the toy industry. When people talk about needing to
tackle inequality at every point along the pipeline, this is where that
pipeline starts.

I understand the argument behind "vote with your dollars", but when an _entire
industry_ is on the wrong side of the issue how can you possibly "vote"?

(BTW, as unlikely as it might seem, we've found the best gender neutral toys
are at Ikea.)

~~~
jakobegger
I've made exactly the same observation.

And people like us are voting with our wallets. Its just that noone (except
Ikea and some small "alternative" toy stores) seems to want our money.

------
sandworm101
Lol, For all the research, disney doesn't understand the market. This isn't
the 1970s. Little boys don't want female characters. That's not odd. It's the
difference between playing with "action figures" and "dolls". Disney's market
research with little boys would show this. But star wars fans are not little
boys. Most of them, myself included, are well over the age where girls are
"icky". We want to see girls/women/heroines represented. For us these are not
toys but collectables.

Disney is also in a tough spot re depictions of female characters. Any 3d/toy
depiction will subject them to complaints re body type. A gold-bikini leia is
not acceptable today, but any distinctively female profile will be judged
harshly. The real character/actress may be a traditional rail-thin model,
several inches shorter and 1/2 the weight of her male counterparts. That's
what sells tickets. But that same profile in an action figure will be judged
harshly. I understand why they might want to avoided the debate.

------
gaius
They blocked Rey with a lighsaber for 1 month so as not to spoil the movie, is
the story I've heard, and it seems reasonable. By the way BB8 is female.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/star-wars-the-force-
awakens/...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/star-wars-the-force-
awakens/bb-8-droid-girl-female/)

~~~
Steuard
That's an excellent explanation for why they didn't sell Rey toys with
lightsabers early on. To my eye, it falls a bit flat as an explanation for why
they didn't sell Rey toys _without_ a lightsaber (since Rey didn't have one
for 95% of the movie).

~~~
gaius
I'd imagine the manufacturing process for Rey toys is 99% the same and it
doesn't make sense to not make all the variants in a single line.

------
a3n
I thought Rey was the main character.

------
dawnbreez
The irony here is that studies have shown that there's more boys that are
willing to take a product with a girl on it than there are girls that are
willing to take a product with a boy on it. They're more than halving their
market share, and risking flak over excluding women (again), for a statement
that isn't true.

------
gamesbrainiac
I sense that there's some media manipulation going on here.

------
alexvoda
Time and time again, western media corporations prove they have no fucking
idea how to market their productions to fans.

Problem:

Western corporations treat the consumer as some sheep to whom you show some
advertising and then they are supposed to react accordingly and purchase their
stuff. You show the advertisement for the movie and then consumers are
supposed to pay you to watch the movie. You show them the movie and then they
are supposed to go buy the toys you make available on store shelves. They
treat the consumers as a simple black box with an input for advertising and an
output where money comes out. And time and again people prove they are not
this simple revenue generating mechanism. And whenever they prove this,
western companies are baffled, unprepared, and ultimately blame it on the
consumers by starting anti-piracy crusades and trademark protection crusades.
Many pages could be linked here to prove the utter stupidity of these
companies, but maybe in a grandchild post. The market and these companies are
not efficient. They just barely manage to make a humongous profit. This is
typical of any monopoly. The market is inefficient, the market actors are
inefficient and the monopolizing actor makes a profit (most often not as much
as an actor could possibly make if the market was healthy) to the detriment of
all other actors.

Solution:

They are even more pitiable when compared to the state of affairs in places
like Japan. The media industry for anime, manga and all related things
understands there needs to be a symbiosis between the source (usually or
eventually a company) of original content and the fans. Once a company
releases something it becomes part of an ecosystem around that content. They
are no longer the sole provider in that ecosystem. And this serves to keep the
ecosystem healthy. Fan content keeps the community active and buzzing during
the periods between releases by the original source.

Let's take one company acting in such ecosystems for example. More precisely
one range of products(Nendoroids) for one year(2015) from one company (Good
Smile Company). For those unfamiliar, Nendoroids are high quality posable
figurines (with a few articulations and interchangeable parts) of super-
deformed(chibi) versions of characters. For the particular issue of gender
representation of characters a rough count leads to around ~125 female
figurines and ~50 male figurines released in 2015 which results in a ratio of
about 5/2\. Note that the target audience also isn't segregated into male or
female. The target customer is simply Japanese.

To showcase their agility in the ecosystem let's take a much more narrow
example. The Mikudayo figurine. This is a figurine with a lot of fan history
behind it. It starts with Hatsune Miku who started as the box art mascot for a
voicebank for the vocal music synthesis software Vocaloid. Fans in turn
created an entire character around this one picture sparking an entire
phenomenon that spread through the entire world (I may write a tangent
explaining a bit the Miku phenomenon). Good Smile Company crated a Nendoroid
figurine for Miku in the specific style of the line. Eventually, a fan based
an entire costume on the Nendoroid version of the character and wore the
costume at a convention. The result was rather grotesque, but the sheer
discrepancy between the cuteness of the Nendoroid figurine and the eeriness of
the life size costume version sparked a phenomenon around this new version of
the character that turned into a new character of its own called Mikudayo.
Subsequently Good Smile Company released a figurine of exactly this new
character.

Such a chain of events is mostly unthinkable in the west.

\- The Mikudayo figurine would never have been launched because of the
murkiness of the trademark issues.

\- The Mikudayo phenomenon would have been squashed and people sued for
infringing the original trademarks and misrepresenting the character.

\- The Hatsune Miku phenomenon would have been squashed and people sued for
infringing the original trademarks by creating fan content that mislead people
into thinking Miku was anything else than a piece of software (People new to
the phenomenon usually mistakenly associate Miku and Vocaloid in general with
the hologram not the voicebank and the software. Trademarks were designed to
prevent exactly this.).

\- The Vocaloid software would never have been made or would never have
succeed, because the very idea of making your voice available for everyone on
the planet to create songs with is baffling and outrageous to artists in the
west.

And yet the ecosystem around this phenomenon (Miku) is healthily spreading and
growing and all actors are making a profit even if there is rampant copyright
and trademark infringement.

The only western company that seems to get it a bit is Hasbro. They aren't
really actively targeting their fanbase but at least unlike others they aren't
cracking down on fan content too hard. (And it's a good thing they are not
targeting their fanbase because their biases around what the demographic of
the fanbase would want would make them change the content and abandon the very
strengths that made people fans in the first place) Hasbro has on their hands
a completely unexpected phenomenon of an unprecedented growth and scale. This
phenomenon is called My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the volume and
demographics of the fanbase is something Hasbro could never have anticipated.

Looking at the length of the comment maybe I should turn this into a blog post
of it's own. But it's not like I said anything new. Maybe I should end this by
saying that we should make these companies that treat consumers as a money
spewing black box fail. Alas, it may actually have no effect since there
actually are a lot of sheep that will just buy what is given to them, and any
of our efforts ignored with the decrease in sales blamed on piracy.

------
JanezStupar
Yes a noble sentiment. Let's shove stuff down people's throats for greater
good.

Let me ask you a simple question - who gets to decide what stuff should or
should not be shoved down people's throats?

Because it may so transpire that you might find yourself quite soon in a
position where you are going to say: "To save this village and its villagers
we have to slay everybody and burn it to the ground."

~~~
geofft
> Let me ask you a simple question - who gets to decide what stuff should or
> should not be shoved down people's throats?

The people whose throats they are being shoved down, i.e., the consumers.
Right now you have a situation where Rey action figures are _unavailable_ to
consumers who want to buy them, because some marketing executives thought they
knew what people wanted better than the people themselves.

Did you even read the headline? (I'm not even going to ask about the article.)

~~~
burntsushi
> Right now you have a situation where Rey action figures are unavailable to
> consumers who want to buy them

What are you talking about? How did you arrive to the conclusion that they are
unavailable? [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-
alias%3D...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-
alias%3Daps&field-keywords=rey+action+figure)

> because some marketing executives thought they knew what people wanted
> better than the people themselves.

Isn't that pretty much what marketing is in the first place?

~~~
captn3m0
"rey action figure star wars" \- 199 results "kylo ren action figure star
wars" \- 341 results

Most of Rey figures were announced after the backlash. Anecdotally, I went
around shopping and was able to find everything SW, except for a Rey figure.
They even had action figures for minor characters in the Rebels series, but no
Rey.

~~~
burntsushi
I just don't understand the certainty on your part. Was it because of the
backlash or because they wanted Rey's prominence as a character to not be
spoiled? Either seem plenty reasonable to me, and until there's evidence of
the contrary, I don't really see what folks are on about.

------
waspleg
An anonymous source... must be gospel.

------
no_wave
When did supply-side economics become a core tenet of feminism?

~~~
alexvoda
This has nothing to do with feminism. This is idiocy on the part of Disney and
toy makers. Not releasing toys with the main character of the production when
you release toys with other characters is plain stupid.

This has everything to do with the fantasy demographic biases in the minds of
the executives of toy making companies.

