Hi ya'll --
Kinda noticed the thread was escalating just a bit, so I wanted to jump in and remind peeps to keep chill and vibe. If need be, there's never a wrong time to get up and come back to the convos at a later time or reread replies before sending.
Don't wanna close the thread since marketing (especially in terms of demographics) is a good convo to have, but just wanted to send out that reminder.
Have a night evening everyone!
Jenny
@NickRowler As an American in California, the word "woke" is a little different. Honestly the word is slightly different wherever you may be, but out here it's a word that means you are trying to cover up for your ignorance basically. It's not really a compliment to be called woke.
And, when used in the context of a large company, where it's most often used, it means that a company is trying to save face for all of the neglect they have done to their minority workers over the years by having an outward charity or maybe they'll spotlight minority workers for a bit (or maybe for an entire month in June)--while ignoring the fact that they still hire significantly less and pay significantly less to those workers and are not actually improving their lives where it matters.
Dunno if that explanation helps, it is a somewhat contextual term where it really depends on what you're talking about.
Where I live, there has been issues with teachers being harassed and books are being banned from school for being "too woke". Teachers don't want to work in the schools anymore because they don't want to deal with the death threats. I feel like if my work was published in print form, it would probably also be on the banned list for being "too woke". I think in some ways I want to just accept it and say "Yeah I'm woke, go cry about it". I don't think there is anything I could do to appease these people because me just existing is "too political" for some people even if I am not a political person.
Or, you could just write good stories that speak to you with well-developed characters, and ignore the idiots who would call you "woke" for exploring the subjects that are dear to you. Just sayin'.
Take the advice of an mental abuse survivor: don't ever let anybody else define you but YOU.
Right, I think I can understand where you're coming from a bit better with that context. Things are a lot worse where you live than what I'm familiar with, so your reactions to some people on these forums sometimes feel overblown to me to the point that I'm a bit scared of you sometimes. But reading your actual comics, you don't seem like a very political person at all.
Quick correction: for a blurb, it should often be the other way around. For everything else, key selling point first.
I think the discussion of how representation and marketing intersect is an interesting one. It seems like a lot of the frustration around how it's handled stems from how large companies do it. They run the risk of doing it in a way that comes off hollow and superficial, even for the people who benefit from being represented (like the LeFou example mentioned earlier.) In some cases, it's intentionally done to stir up controversy, which I feel like is really disrespectful to marginalized groups who already experience hate just by existing.
But it still works, and that's what matters here.
There's been a really big push to make corporate-produced media more diverse in the past 10 years or so, but no matter how many diverse stories are pumped out in the next few years, it's not going to compare to the decades of stories where certain types of characters were not included for one reason or another. (I don't think any individual stories are to blame here, or that they're even bad for not being diverse, but when there's an overarching pattern where some people are only represented in 'lesser' roles or not at all, that's where I can see people having an issue.)
This mainstream focus on diversity is still seen as fresh, and there's a section of the audience who will be content just knowing that there's a lead character like them for once. Even if they don't like the story, they may continue supporting it because if it's not popular, media makers could decide that "No one wants to read a story with a [insert identity here] character." I'm sure some very savvy marketers know this fear and capitalize on it to generate the most response with minimal effort.
I do agree that only advertising what marginalized identities are in your cast and saying nothing else about your work isn't the most effective way to advertise. In written advertisement, like what's often done on the forums, it matters a little more to give extra details, even if you're responding to a thread that's only asking for "Hey, show me some series with [identity] characters." Marginalized or not, people are going to want to know about the tone, the plot, genre etc.
But heavily advertising them is different.
In visual forms of marketing like commercials, you can get a lot of information without it really having to be said, especially if the thing being advertised is a pre-existing property (ex. In Jurassic Park, you know they're gonna be running from some dinosaurs.)
Most of what I've said so far has been in the context of bigtime corporate media. Two very important differences about Tapas are the creators and the readers. A large portion of both creators and readers here are marginalized in some way. It's less likely that a Tapas creator is going to use diversity as just a quick way to get readers. They're more likely to have diverse stories simply because they want to see more of them. Readers know this and want the same thing, and because of this, adding diversity is less likely to generate conflict here. Tapas creators tend to have a smaller reach anyway, so they're unlikely to start discourse big enough to gain the amount of readers for it to be worth it.
The identities themselves are very important to marginalized people in their daily lives. It affects how they're seen by others, which affects how they get depicted in media, and that creates a feedback loop even if it's not the only factor contributing to why they're discriminated against. So even if the identity itself doesn't influence much, and the story is just advertised as "Hey, this is sci-fi with a black main character," just that alone could be important to draw in a reader who really likes sci-fi, but never got to see someone like them be the protagonist.
In a different world, there would be enough stories for everyone to go around and factors like this would be too vague to hook people, but that's not the world we live in right now.
...I think that's all I had to say. Hopefully, this didn't come off too antagonistic to anyone. I just think it's an interesting topic, and it seemed like everyone was kind of on the same page and just saying it in different ways. So that's it.
I'm sorry if I come across as scary. I honestly don't think I am as intense as some people on the internet, heck look at my Twitter. I don't really go into my deep political views, because that isn't anyone's business. But yes, I do not align myself with a political party or group, I just do my own thing.
I do get a bit upset when people are unable to realize POCs, LGBTQ, and disabled people are just people living their lives. A lot of these types of people may want to write about themselves or the friends and family. Sometimes these people are judged more or labelled as being "too political" even if it is something as simple as two girls just holding hands.
I don't hate you, if that is what you are worried about. I am not really a spiteful person unless you are sending death threats or assaulting people. I do believe people can change for the good and part of that is challenging their views on the world.
Ohh yeah you're definitely not nearly as intense as some people out there (I wouldn't even be talking to them 
) I guess what I'm worried about is you thinking that I 'don't realize POCs, LGBTQ, and disabled people are just people living their lives' when I very much do, because from my perspective, the people who seem to upset you clearly do recognize that POCs, LGBTQ, and disabled people are just people living their lives but you think they don't because they used the wrong words. I do trust you're not a spiteful person; you're never really the initiator of any drama that happens and your comics are honestly less incendiary than mine XD
Huh, that might be why I tend not to get hooked on blurbs that feel like they follow 'standard blurb format' I've always found I get into stories easier if the author just gave me their vision straight - I can't tell you how many creators from these forums whose blurbs didn't catch my interest at all, yet I felt compelled to check out their work again after hearing them straight up talk about their vision in discussion threads 
in advertising we studied a concept related to that.
Market related activism: Joining a cause because it sells.....many companies often do that to either sell more or to get people to forget about their scandals. A classic example, is pride month.....and how quickly many companies remove the pride decoration as soon as it's over.
i would argue that this activism has been done long ago. Many series and movies in the nineties included minorities in important roles, including protagonists. Even really old sitcoms like Happy days took a stand against racism.
The difference now is that some companies and some folks are trying to act like they invented inclusion and end up dismissing all that effort that was done in tougher times.
Yeah, I added "still seen as fresh" to try to acknowledge the fact that this sort of thing technically has been done before, at least for certain groups.
So.... the thing is.... I'm not.
I've had that blurb since I was in the Action section of the site. I only moved my comic over to the LGBTQ+ section and made my blurbs and ads and things more explicitly highlight that my comic contains queer romance and characters after friends with much larger followings really urged me too. And frustratingly they were right. It did appreciably increase my series' profile.
See, I actually wanted to build an audience based on the objective quality of my comic. I wanted to tell a really fun story with characters you can get invested in and then for the fact that most of the cast are queer and there's romance to be a nice surprise! I thought that the aesthetics of the series evoking other series with similar themes would be enough... but it's not. There are a lot of people out there who really just want a clear answer to "is this about underrepresented people on more than just a token level, yes or no?" and "are the politics of this story ones that are close enough to my own that I won't come across stuff that pisses me off?" ...and I know some people will decry that as shallow behaviour, but honestly I had to suffer through a lot of sci-fi and Fantasy works with casual racism or sexism and weak justification for authoritarianism when I was a teenager, and sometimes you really do want your escapism to not devalue or question your existence or ideals like your real life does. I'm a huge Terry Pratchett fan, but I really can't say friends who don't read the Discworld books with Agnes Nitt in because of the aggressive fat shaming are wrong for doing so.
So I actually would love it if I lived in a world where I could market my work based entirely on my skills, and early on, my marketing leaned a lot more into that. "I'm a national prize winning comics creator! I've been published! Check out my new thing! It's a shounen manga with a twist!" etc. But it just wasn't as effective as saying "listen, I promise you, it gets gay later, okay?" "Look at all the different flags my characters have!" "My comic has an autistic character!" I don't actually like it, but the problem is, it works.
That Lord of the Rings series looks... bad. Personally I saw the trailer and was just like "...nah, this looks tacky and too much like a generic Fantasy Mobile game to evoke the work of Tolkien", and was really surprised by how much people were talking about it... and it was all around the diversity stuff. First Kill is the same; it's a bad show, it's literally just another dime-a-dozen live action paranormal show like you'd see on SyFy or Channel 5 in a non-prime timeslot. These series... actually benefitted by advertising themselves around their representation of marginalised people, because it's really the only thing that stands out about them, and it's a really easy way to get people fired up and talking passionately about something that otherwise is "just another show."
There may be a few savvy people out there who roll their eyes at a series being marketed on diversity, or will outright avoid it if it seems to lean too heavily on the representation angle, assuming it may indicate poor quality elsewhere. I know I did this with Gideon the Ninth, which friends told me to read only talking about the fact it was about lesbians, without mentioning that it's actually a really well written story with great atmosphere, rich worldbuilding and a fantastic unique magic system.... but of course, those friends... all of them actually did read Gideon the Ninth specifically because they heard it was gay. They're not even stupid people or anything; they're adult professionals in their thirties! That's just how audiences are these days. An awful lot of people legitimately will decide to read or watch something based on these factors alone, because there's enough choice now that they can. Plus... most people are not very good at appraising the quality of a piece of media and tend to judge "is it good?" on personal appeal a lot more than they might be willing to admit. I mean, that's presumably why I keep meeting people who think Rogue One is the best Star Wars movie; they all praise how "gritty" and "serious" it is, "Like a war movie!!" and don't seem that bothered by the paper-thin characterisation or flat main character whose personality and motivation sharply change halfway through the movie to make the plot happen! Personal appeal of a strong premise can absolutely beat the crap out of objective writing quality!
I would probably have a bigger readership on Errant if I marketed it more on the queer elements and featured them more heavily in the comic itself, and got to them earlier in the story. I don't really like that, and I wish it wasn't true... but it probably is, and a lot of successful Tapas creators I've asked for advice said the same thing. "Readers don't want to be messed around, they're tired of queerbaiting and vague hints, they just want to know 'is it gay? Y/N' and for there to be proof that it is ASAP." This aligns with how popular series on the platform are structured. A lot of comics and novels here launch right into the catalyst story beat almost immediately and then backfill the setup clumsily with narration; no slow building of atmosphere or setting up the character beforehand, just BAM! HERE'S THE PREMISE!... it drives me nuts, and I hate the idea of writing that way, but that's how people compete in an attention economy.
I understand that one example a rule does not make, but I want to tell a story cuz I think it's relevant. My mother is from a traditional rural Korean family and has a strong distaste for fast food, especially chains like McDonald's. Additionally, she has a very archaic - for lack of better term - music taste mostly comprised of [lazy umbrella term] classical music.
Point is, she doesn't like fast food and doesn't listen to more modern music. Some of you may know where this is going.
Last May McDonald's had a BTS meal release in the US. Nothing terribly special, just some arguably special sauces with chicken nuggets and fries and a generic coke. Yet my mom rushed out of her way to get one and proudly displayed the bag. Just because the representation itself mattered to her.
Reading this thread made me think of a King of the Hill episode - Life in the Fast Lane, Bobby's Saga. For a quick recap, Hank wants his son Bobby to learn the value of a dollar and gets him employed at a racetrack concession stand for the summer. However, the employer turns out to be a bit abusive making Bobby want to quit. This leads to this cycle of Bobby going to his dad for work advice, Hank giving arguably great advice, but Bobby misusing the advice and making things worse for himself.
These quick guides are great, but I often found advice is only useful if you understand it's caveats. For instance from the episode Hank tells Bobby to 'find something no one else wants to do (or can't do) and get really good at it. This is good advice, but only if you understand your own worth, otherwise like Bobby you could easily allow yourself to get into abusive situations.
The diversity point isn't bad advice but I think two unfortunate things happened here:
1) the caveat isn't really explained (the OP goes into the point of tokenism, but not really representation - I think this important because as much as tokenism is a problem, so is using these character traits simply for 'plot')
2) the last thing you leave us with is the point on woke/activist types
The second point has two bits of fallout imo. First, because it's been used for the coveted last sentence portion of a section, it sticks with the reader more so. This gives the impression that the message if that section is to not use diversity as a selling point unless you are want to alienate a larger audience to get in with the 'wokes' - a term many have pointed out already is kinda meaningless and mostly negative nowadays. A sentiment that runs the risk of people jumping to the thought that if someone likes diverse content, they are a woke activist by default. Note, I'm not saying this is what you meant, I'm saying based on the positioning of your statements this could easily be what's taken away.
Second, since the OP mentioned Star Wars and The Rings of Power, I think there is some nuance for this advice regarding new vs old IPs. Granted, despite being a writer on Tapas I consume an ironically low amount of media so I might just be out of the loop. It seems to me that most knee-jerk negative reactions I've seen (also granted there seems to always be the small group that knee-jerks anyway) are from established IPs changing established characters or shoehorning in new ones. With established material doing this can often easily come across as shallow 'baiting' rather than genuine representation. Especially since you run the risk of coming across as disrespecting the source material. Even still, if the characters are done well and with care, no one really minds (I'm thinking Morgan Freeman's character from the Shawshank Redemption for example, and from what I hear, Elliott Page's character transition in Umbrella Academy was done pretty well too).
Okay that was probably too long, have a good day everyone 
I don't usually get into topics like this but I found it interesting. I think the whole issue with this is tokenism, not representation. I know as someone who is black and disabled ( hard of hearing), I know it's hard to find stories that have genuine representation rather than a cash grab. What's unfortunate that some of these genuine representation stories do get tagged into "woke" or just marketed the wrong way.
I'm not a marketing expert or whatever. But I believe that even diverse stories deserve to be more than just 'token characters' for the audience to relate to.
Sorry, I'm not making sense but I just wanted to touch on that.
I once came up with a two-part test to see if a character is diversity done properly or tokenism:
Should the race/sexuality/religion/etc. of the character matter in the story?
Does the race/sexuality/religion/etc. of the character matter in the story?
If the answer to both is the same, it is properly done diversity. If they are different, then it is tokenism.
I definitely agree with you, a bit of poorly rushed wording on my part (ironic given my post). While the OP does go into going beyond tokenism into making fully developed characters I don't think the post goes really into the important of diversity of representation if that makes sense.
And I think that marketing on this point can be a useful and important tool if done in good faith. It was kinda the point of the story about my mother I started with: that the hunger for this exists, even in areas we don't necessarily think about.
Thank you for the reply!
Sadly, it wouldn't have made a difference - I've been watching this trend develop for around 14-15 years.
I really wish that I could say that leading with diversity wasn't tapping into a poisoned well outside of places like Tapas. I won't lie - @darthmongoose's information was a surprise (and don't get me wrong - I'm glad that what she said is true). Very clearly there is a community here that responds favourably to diversity as a leading marketing point.
EDIT: I'm going to add that I was WRONG in the case of Tapas, and that makes me VERY happy.
EDIT #2: I just added a revision both to the original post and the entry in my Writing Quick Guides to clarify that the discussion of the poisoned well is in regards to marketing to the general public, not to Tapas.
But, outside of here, the evidence of a poisoned well is mounting:
Disney sequel series Star Wars toys do not sell (http://www.rebelscum.com/story/front/Rebelscumcom_Presents_The_2020_Gentle_Giant_Ltd_QA_186744.asp). Further to this, I am the publisher of a book on Star Wars, and I can confirm that since The Last Jedi, demand for the book had dropped to a lower level (and this demand was steady for years beforehand).
Marvel Stage 4 has underperformed, and there is a downward trend of actual ticket sales for these movies (https://cosmicbook.news/thor-love-thunder-box-office-underperforming-eternals, https://www.fastcompany.com/90694476/why-eternals-underperformed-and-what-it-means-for-marvel, https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/08/04/interest-in-superhero-movies-drops-poll-finds-worrisome-trend-for-disney-amid-marvel-slump/1). Since around Iron Man, a Marvel movie succeeding was just a given, and that is not the case anymore. Spider-Man No Way Home stands as a notable exception, but it notably wasn't marketed based mainly on diversity.
CBS' revived Star Trek performed so poorly that CBS's production partners tried to pull out of their funding contracts (I can't find the coverage at the moment, but I remember reading the articles on it, and it was one of the reasons why Netflix didn't carry Star Trek: Picard). Strange New Worlds may be their first unqualified success, and it's a throwback to the original series, and was marketed as such.
These are the three biggest examples. But when you see this many things with established fan bases whose only overlap at times is general genre that should be guaranteed successes under-perform and see decreasing returns, and the only common thread between them is diversity-based marketing...well, that's a clear indication of a problem with the marketing. One in decline, sure - Star Trek in the early 2000s got pretty mediocre, and it didn't need a poisoned well of marketing to lose an audience. Doctor Who under Chris Chibnall had such a low general standard of writing that I became embarrassed at the thought of showing it to my daughter - no poison well needed for it to lose its audience. But declines in performance across the board? There's too much correlation there.
If I had to venture a theory as to why the well is being poisoned, I think it's just two factors:
Attacks on fan bases. This baffles me - I never could have imagined attacking the people who are most likely to spend money on your product appearing as part of a marketing strategy, but here we are. And the problem isn't just that it happened across multiple properties - it happened across multiple MASSIVE properties, and was pretty much always associated with diversity marketing. So, the public in general saw repeated cases of diversity being pushed in the PR, followed by some fans saying "wait a moment - that's not how that character was written/we remember it/etc.", followed by attacks on those fans for racism/misogyny/etc.
Erasure of past successes. One of the things I've noticed about the modern trend is that the marketing for something like, say, Star Wars or Star Trek has to present what they are doing as the first time this diversity has existed. So, when Star Trek Discovery was first being marketed, Michael Burnham was being presented as the first black lead of a Star Trek show. This was nonsense - the first black lead of a Star Trek show was Avery Brooks as Benjamin Sisko in Deep Space Nine back in the 1990s (this was later revised to "first female black lead"). When the Obi Wan Kenobi show was being marketed, the claim was made that there had been no people of colour in Star Wars prior to the show, which was, again, nonsense.
Now, it should be noted that none of this is diversity's fault - this is the fault of people doing very public PR in what is sometimes likely to be bad faith. But claims of diversity is what it stuck to, and this isn't the first time something like this has happened:
There is a type of fedora called a trilby, which is known for having a thin brim. During the late 2000s and 2010s, this hat became associated with reactionary right-wing men's rights advocates, who tended to wear them while making videos and gathering in conferences and the like. This then associated the fedora as a whole with this sort of advocacy (not the hat's fault).
The Men's Rights Advocacy movement started out as advocacy for father's rights in family courts, where there was (and as far as I know, still is) a bias towards granting custody to mothers based on their sex, rather than their fitness as a parent (and quite a few children suffered as a result of this). This attracted virulent misogynists who very publicly used the label to identify themselves when they attacked women in general. The name "Men's Rights Advocate" became associated with the misogynists, forcing the actual father's rights advocates to abandon the term.
Now, everything I've seen about the public as a whole suggests that they don't care that much about the sex, race, or sexuality of a character so long as that character is well written. I don't remember anybody complaining about Forest Whittaker in Rogue One in the 2010s, or Wesley Snipes as Blade in the 1990s. It's the marketing that people seem to be having a knee-jerk reaction to, and when you look at the attacks on fans combined with the erasure of past successes that has been going on, it's hard to blame people for that.
As I said, I'm glad the well is not poisoned here on Tapas. But, out there, all the indications I'm seeing is that it's a very different story.
While there are folks who are actively looking for representation and may read stuff just because of it, one can stand out more if they ALSO share the story/character hooks like you did.
One can reach more people if they share the storytelling and character hooks too. After all, people like you may not read something JUST because it was gay.....like your case with Gideon the ninth.....
Diversity can be a tertiary or even a secondary hook depending of the focus of your story, but relying solely on it is a can only take a story as far.....it made that Lord of the rings series more visible, i agree with that.......but......are they talking GOOD things about it?....... did it attract a relevant audience?......will people still talk about it when it becomes old news?
Another key variable is the audience you are promoting to.....the emphasis of certain hooks can vary depending on the site and target audience. Also, for you, promoting the diversity elements works because they come from a genuine place and you make solid characters on their own.....if you were to do things in a pandery kind of way, it will undermine what hooked to many of your readers.
I like to compare diversity as salt in a dish, it makes stories richer, but you can rely on it alone in marketing or narrative terms, just like one can't just rely on a dish that is exclusively salt, despite the fact that it makes many dishes tastier.
