queerhedgehog:seananmcguire:bigscaryd:seananmcguire:Hey knitmeapony you were saying about the cutest

queerhedgehog:seananmcguire:bigscaryd:seananmcguire:Hey knitmeapony you were saying about the cutest She-Hulk ever?Tell me this is in the parks and not LE. Please.Sadly, not just LE: SDCC exclusive.  :(AGH and there’s a squirrel girl. Those are so cute.So, something that pisses me off whenver I see female characters in exclusive sets, and drives me absolutely nuts; excuse me while I rant a little:There is, in pretty much most awesome geeky products, a lack of good female merch. There’s five billion products for Batman, but far, far less for say… Wonder Woman. And then half of THOSE products are horrifyingly objectifying or sexist or what-have-you. I can’t, unlike Batman merch, just go find a different action figure, different lunchbox, different t-shirt… because it doesn’t exist.And then you have shit like this. Where a company bothers to make a female character merch, it’s well done and very different from what else is out there… and then it’s exclusive, or prohibitively expensive. As much as I generally love the company, Lego is horrifically bad about this. You can pick up a 10-25 dollar set with male characters, but to collect the female characters, you better be willing to fork out $75, or even more. While they’re generally getting better about this with their own lines (I was delighted to see the new Pirates theme has women characters in some of the $20-30 sets) the licensed lines are still pretty bad. Gamora, for example, was only available in the Milano set, which had a MSRP of $75. In the recently released Scooby-Doo sets, you can nab Shaggy, Fred, and Scooby for $30, but to get Daphne and Velma, you better be willing to fork out $50 for the set Daphne comes in, and fucking $80 for Velma. From when I look at action figures, I get the same thing; I can get four cheap ass but decent Thor figures at Walmart for $10, but a decent Black Widow figure, if I can even FIND it, is double the cost, minimum, and I better hope the SINGLE FIGURE they released is decent, because they certainly didn’t make more than one option.I get the point of exclusives, and for putting wanted characters in sets/toys that cost more, in order to market them. But I find it distressingly common that the exclusives, the hard to get, are too often major female characters that are underrepresented in the normal venues. There is a consumer want for products of these female characters, because female geeks WANT these things, and companies depend on that want of representation to gouge the shit out of those consumers. That is bullshit. Exclusives and high priced items should not be the only venue to get characters that share the same face time as others, but happen to be female. So companies, please, continue to make exclusives. They’re cool, it’s fun for collecting. But make those exclusives of things that you would normally not make otherwise. Make it a well loved or really cool side character that you wouldn’t have the opportunity to do otherwise (like the SDCC GOTG “The Collector” lego minifigure), or a variation that would be AWESOME to get hands on, but there are other options (like some of the cool comic book exclusive covers) but DO NOT make one of the main characters from a franchise who have little to zero merch out there something that the average nerd-consumer cannot get short of selling their first born. Especially when those characters are female, or of a minority group. Because then that moves from the realm of “shitty to your fans” to “out right sexist asshat.” -- source link
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