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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Yeah that's fair. The thing is that disney owns many of the highest grossing media franchises and we may quibble about how much that correlates to "large media franchise" but it's really hard to find other measurements and this one is an easily accessible wikipedia page. of the 17 that are bigger than $20 billion 7 are from disney. of the 10 that are not Disney franchises

3 are japanese (Anpanman (Yeah wtf is that), Pokemon and Hello kitty)

2 are toy brands (Barbie and Transformers) (is transformers Japanese it originally is but the main seller now is Hasbro the american company, I'd probably count it in Japan but hard to say)

2 are western video games (Candy Crush, Call of Duty)

2 Warner bros Franchises (harry potter, Batman)

1 Korean Video game (dungeon fighter online)

basically once you exclude disney you're looking at a group that is 50% east asian franchises anyway, (counting transformers as Japanese). If you estimate like me that roughly 1/3rd of the media landscape is woke to some degree then the 2/3rds that are not are going to lean more heavily in the direction of the 1/3rd of the media landscape that is not western.

I'd say Transformers pretty much belongs to Hasbro now. For a decade-plus, they've taken the initiative on Transformers media, on top of printing money with the toys. It's not like the old days anymore, where they could rely on the Japanese side conveniently making content for them.