It depends very much on one's perspective. Diversity isn't just some aesthetic gloss put over movies to draw in the Tumblr crowd; the first six movies showed a world in which women and people of colour had been all but eliminated. And I'm not singling out SW here; nearly every big sci-fi universe imagines a future in which the only humans who survived whatever cataclysm occurred were, for whatever reason, white men. As an adult, I have a framework for analyzing that; a child does not. And children are the target market for these movies.
I went through my whole childhood liking nerdy things and not having an outlet to express them, until the internet became a thing, because everything in popular culture was telling me that I didn't belong there. You ever try having ginormous boobs and walking into a comic shop in the 80s or 90s? I don't recommend it.
Is it a toy commercial? Sure, they all are, as is all media marketed primarily at children. It's a pretty subversive toy commercial by mainstream standards, though. It's a smart business decision to market SW shit at something other than a shrinking demographic, but that doesn't mean that it ain't important culturally.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-12-29 02:04 am (UTC)I went through my whole childhood liking nerdy things and not having an outlet to express them, until the internet became a thing, because everything in popular culture was telling me that I didn't belong there. You ever try having ginormous boobs and walking into a comic shop in the 80s or 90s? I don't recommend it.
Is it a toy commercial? Sure, they all are, as is all media marketed primarily at children. It's a pretty subversive toy commercial by mainstream standards, though. It's a smart business decision to market SW shit at something other than a shrinking demographic, but that doesn't mean that it ain't important culturally.