#investment decision

[mementomoriwithacherryontop]

Thoughtful and heartfelt article written by Lacy Baugher about the cancellation of Dead Boy Detectives, and why the decision just doesn’t make sense for Netflix.

I could literally quote the whole thing. Instead, I’ll leave you with these three (lengthy) quotes and encourage you to read the article in its entirety. And you totally should. It’s worth the read.

Quotes Below:

“On paper, the Dead Boy Detectives has all the ingredients to succeed. Its cast is charming; its vibes are fun and accessible. It features a genuine connection to an established and successful genre property, but not one so deep that new viewers would find themselves overwhelmed by lore. Perhaps most importantly, it has so, so much heart.”

“The pieces were in place for the series to run multiple seasons with rich character dynamics between the core quartet and a template that allowed for all sorts of adventures for the living and the dead. If this had been a show introduced during the heyday of The CW, it probably would have run for the better part of a decade. Alas, that's almost never a possibility in today's streaming landscape. Even the most successful series tend to come with a built-in expiration date. (Five years, max.)

Netflix has something of a history when it comes to cutting promising genre shows off at the knees. In recent years it has unceremoniously dumped all sorts of series, from fantasy (Shadow and Bone, Warrior Nun), and supernatural (Lockwood and Co., First Kill, The Midnight Club) to sci-fi (The OA, 1899). Dead Boy Detectives is certainly joining a good company. But the fact that its main characters were part of the same universe as The Sandman makes the show's cancellation even more galling. What streamer doesn't want a franchise to call its own? The Sandman is still one of the most popular comic series ever, and Netflix is currently gearing up to drop the second season of its successful TV adaptation.”

“That Dead Boy Detectives wasn't given more time to build an audience — or a bigger promotional budget to let viewers know of its existence — feels particularly criminal because Sandman's second season would have almost certainly given the drama a needed awareness boost.”

[iam93percentstardust]

one of the things that really bothers me about modern franchises, and in particular over the last 5 years or so, is their refusal to commit. what i mean here when i say this is that it's not uncommon for a major franchise to make a decision, whether about the plot or the characters, that should have had huge, world-changing consequences... and then just never address that again or worse, immediately go back and undo it. and i'm gonna pick on star wars and the mcu here because those are the two big franchises i'm into at the moment (and i think they're kind of the worst at this), but i don't want you to walk away from this thinking that this is solely a disney thing. i've seen this happen with game of thrones and supernatural and plenty of other non-disney franchises. spoilers ahead, you've been warned:

in ant-man & the wasp quantumania, scott and hope make the life-altering decision to stay behind in the quantum realm and defeat kang instead of going through the portal to return to their world. this should have been a huge meta decision for the mcu, and when i first saw it in theaters, my immediate thought was wow, what is this going to mean for the mcu going forward? are we going to get a movie/miniseries about scott and hope helping to rebuild the quantum realm? how are cassie, janet, and hank going to react to the losses of their loved ones (in some cases, for the second time)? is cassie going to become the "first" young avenger because she has to take her father's place among the team lineup (and i only say first because as of this moment, none of the other young avengers introduced to the franchise are official avengers yet)? except nope, because less than 2 minutes later, cassie had fixed the portal that had broken way back at the beginning of the movie and brought scott and hope back.

and it felt like such a cheat. i was so disappointed in that theater, not as someone who was invested in these characters on a personal level (because yay, cassie gets her dad back!), but as someone who has spent years investing themselves in the story of the mcu. what was the point of wasting screentime on scott and hope accepting their new lives in the quantum realm if it was just going to immediately be undone? the entire scene could have been cut to scott and hope making it back bare seconds before the portal closed and it would have had the same emotional impact. there was nothing added by making scott and hope (and us) think that there was no way back only to rip the rug out from under us and go "gotcha! you really thought we were gonna give this movie a sad ending? haha! you're so dumb!"

and this isn't the first time the mcu has done this. one of the biggest complaints about endgame was the decision to set it five years in the future with no consideration for how that would actually change the setting of the mcu. characters were brought back to the exact place they disappeared from with no consideration for how things might have changed in the interim five years (like planes that weren't in the air anymore, buildings no longer standing, even just something as simple as a chair being unoccupied). and then the mcu didn't even really have the courage to address how this would have shaped the world other than a few jokes and making the bad guys in the falcon and the winter soldier people who cared about how the world had screwed them over during the blip.

and things like this happen over and over and over again. the accords are put into place in civil war, but by the time we get to she-hulk, they're gone with no explanation because, as best as i can tell, the writers didn't want to have to deal with the worldbuilding that went into the accords. gamora is killed in infinity war, but heaven forbid quill not have an emotional investment in a film he appears for maybe 10 minutes in so now she's back in endgame. steve got to go live in the past with his ex-girlfriend (which is in itself a refusal to commit after the mcu both gave her a different husband and had the woman herself tell him to move on) but we need to establish that messing with timelines is bad because that's what the entire next phase hinges on so actually his ending was predestined and it's only everyone else who can't change time. whoever took this entire town and also wanda hostage and forced them to live out a sitcom fantasy is bad and needs to be stopped but wait, it's actually wanda and she can't be the bad guy yet, we need her for doctor strange 2, so actually everyone's going to defend her now and say that no one else could ever possibly understand her grief. thor has decided to accept responsibility as king of asgard, but we can't use him for any more movies if he's stuck in asgard, so actually he's decided to pass it on to someone whose entire leadership capability is developed offscreen. i could list more examples but this is making me angry, so let's move on to star wars instead.

with star wars, i look at first the oft-quoted meme, "somehow palpatine has returned." yeah, i shouldn't really need to go into detail on how that counts as a refusal to commit but. the last jedi was a study in how johnson refused to commit to anything that abrams had laid down in the force awakens, but rise of skywalker was almost like abrams had looked at the franchise and said "screw you for taking it away from me, i'm going to come up with the most bullshit stuff just to spite you for doing that in the first place. and i'm going to start by undoing the most important plot point of the first trilogy: the emperor dies." and yeah, disney's kind of tried to salvage this by dropping hints into the bad batch and the mandalorian about cloning, but that only really works if you're watching the franchise chronologically and not considering that both of those series came out after rise of skywalker.

and then there's the mandalorian, my sweet summer child, who is, in my opinion, the worst at backtracking their plot points. i'm not entirely convinced that any of the higher ups for this show really knew what they were doing when they started working on it and i'm not convinced that they know what they're doing now. yeah, there's the tie-in to the last season of clone wars, but the mandalorian has managed to walk back pretty much every single major plot point it's had. din is this legendary warrior who can't be beat, but no one will watch this show if he defeats everyone too early, so he's constantly getting beat up (tbf, sometimes some of the fights he loses makes sense like the krayt dragon and the mudhorn, but a lot of them don't. at all). moff gideon is dead, no wait no he's not, now he's imprisoned, no wait no he's not, now he's definitely dead, you can totally believe us this time guys. grogu can use the force and must be placed with the jedi, but wait, the only person still actively teaching the way of the jedi is luke and all of his students will be brutally murdered ten years from now, and we can't have that, everyone will be mad at us for killing off such a cute character and no one will buy baby yoda dolls (and also we have to set up luke's character degradation from hopeful, believes-in-love cinnamon roll to "i'm going to kill my nephew") so in between seasons let's have grogu decide to go back to din (and don't even get me started on how frustrating it is that a casual mandalorian watcher also had to watch book of boba fett to understand why grogu is back). din has the darksaber now which makes him king of mandalore, that's totally going to be important and what the entire series has been building up to, right? wrong! he might have spent the first two seasons making connections, learning about the world outside his sheltered upbringing, and demonstrating the various qualities that would make for a good leader, but the entire third season will be about din realizing that actually he's super unworthy and the darksaber should actually go to someone who... saw an animal in the water.

and it's really, really frustrating as a viewer! because how am i supposed to get invested in any of these plot decisions when they almost always get reversed? why should i care that mj and ned have forgotten peter when ant-man 3 has shown me that they'll remember him the next time they're all on screen together? why should i care that tech is dead when half of the last season of clone wars was about how echo was actually alive? if none of these decisions have any permanence, then where are the emotional stakes? why should i watch your movie if all you're going to tell me is that nothing matters?

[bluecoolr]

The boys from Ambrose started a band and are looking for groupies.

[essektheylyss]

I know I joked about DVDs but in all seriousness, I'm really glad that there's an option for watching VODs that isn't on Twitch and YouTube. It's been mentioned a few times today, but both of the interfaces of these platforms have been increasingly enshittified. I simply do not use YouTube anymore because of how horrid the interface is. I caught up on campaign 2 entirely on YouTube (and sometimes via podcast) in 2019 with no issues, but it is straight up maddening trying to use it now, and I don't know that I would have made it through the campaign if I was trying to catch up today.

I absolutely understand being tired of additional streaming services and I am absolutely in the same boat, but I also don't know how many people really recognize how gutted media distribution has become in the last ten years in the name of convenience. We all kind of realize it, but it's hard to grasp just how extensive it is. We can talk about independent business choices separately, and we should, but when the only platforms on which you have the option to distribute your work are at best frustrating to use and at worst hostile to human life, when monetization services can censor anyone they please with little explanation and have been cracking down on any content they arbitrarily deem inappropriate, when it is not clear that centralized conglomerate social media sites will continue to exist in the next year let alone decade, it is genuinely crucial for independent creators to start building alternative avenues of distribution that they control now.

[mothills]

Shoutout to everyone trying to justify this but bro we're not hearing y'all out

[willosword]

i think mark was born to be a househusband forced to be a superhero tbh 😔

[benevolenterrancy]

this is a little belated by I saw @dayinthedeath's discussion about who in torchwood is most likely to be spiderman and I needed to join in with this proposal: it's a team effort in united nerdy idiocy

[thebirdandhersong]

I think the problem. the problem is that I have always been afraid of not being invited into the inner circle. and am always wanting to be part of the inner circle. inner circle being the circle of love and companionship and communion. of course being a TCK and a bit of a sheltered homeschooled oddball child has nudged this further along over the years. but I didn't realise how STRONG that desire still burned. to actually be wanted.

[safaridays]

hooved therians and taloned therians freaking out a little when their weird spongy feet hit the ground solidarity

[expatesque]

Well ladies (gn), it might have been unexpected but funemployment isn't starting off too bad.

[ilmhist]

some fiadhs, because much like the tadpole he now lives in my brain rent free

[creepyscritches]

Man it is worth pointing out that the ACA is a living piece of legislation. Like every year updated protocols and guidelines release to the whole industry from CMS (gov oversight) and I educate professionals in my field on the changes each time. It was built intentionally to be an evolving and improving system that can handle more and more people each year. The ACA is not a stone tablet; it's an arm of federally protected benefits like Medicare that is inherited and maintained and built up by sequential administrations. It is WORKING, it's so reassuring to see it become so intertwined with our American health care model that an entire wing of the industry is now dedicated to the ACA.

Yeah, we want a better health care system, of course we do!! That's why so many people dedicate their careers to supporting the ACA!!! THIS is the fish crawling onto land that can eventually become a health care system that treats us with dignity. We just have to keep evolving it into a more equitable and accessible option. I vote with my head mostly tuned into future health care + research policies and it makes my goals much clearer. Biden has spent 2 separate administrations leading the Cancer Moonshot research funding initiative that has contributed significantly to the boom in cancer breakthroughs. Trump suggested we drink bleach for covid. I trust one significantly more than the other to continue funding ACA and NIH initiatives and interests 🤷

[sevenines]

i’ve been listening to/watching many (many, many) reactions to steven universe (because that’s what you do when you become newly obsessed with something. see what everyone else thinks about it and drive yourself mad) and it’s so interesting to see all the unique ways people tackle it and the common threads between them all.

there’s podcast recaps (pressure to over-analyze) vs youtube reactions (pressure to overreact). everyone knowing the show (yay) vs fans guiding newcomers (interesting) vs everybody being blind (often disastrous). don’t mind silly fun? they love the first season and amethyst’s character. told about how ~deep~ it gets and expecting only that? they love pearl and have to be dragged through the beginning. even how they chunk the episodes affects things—in watching episode-by-episode, people go the most mad as they try to squeeze meaning out of episodes they can’t yet appreciate until later (or are just. bad at analyses.). in chunks of two, people assume su will have much more horror after watching frybo and cat fingers back-to-back. and chunks of 5 are completely different too!

this only skims the surface. i can watch any episode of su and point out which jokes usually make people laugh, what people pick up on, and how their opinion of the situation reflects on whether they have mommy issues.

[kintatsujo]

YOU'RE shipping them as a triad because you want to ship A with both B and C

I'M shipping them as a polycule because I'm genuinely interested in the poly dynamics, I respect you for taking that route but it's still not the same

[okkottsus]

bro are ppl who say nagi doesnt care abt reo or that hes manipulative blind or sth.... i know he can be clueless, not good at communicating and even cruel at times, but none of that is intentional. and i know that when u hurt someone its not only abt if u wanted to do it or not OBVIOUSLY, but i think intention is important when all is said and done. and nagi wasnt wrong per se to chase after their dream in his own way, plus we get small glimpses of him here and there that show he does feel bad and that his end goal has always been and will always be being the best in the world alongside reo.

[busybeesbuzzing]

the aesthetic of dishonored and dishonored 2 will always get me. the beauty, the plague, the jumping off of roofs and crawling through sewers and something something the literal lifeblood and well-being of the city being connected to your disparate ethical decisions.