My first thought was that this guy clearly doesn't know much about how businesses actually operate. Yes, IDW has had losses for several consecutive quarters but that has been lessening with each quarter since Howard Jonas took over management of IDW last March. Obviously, the types of losses IDW was experiencing don't turn around overnight; Jonas has clearly made some changes that are helping and the 2021 projections suggest that's the turnaround time Jonas' plans will take. Not to mention that it takes a good long while for a company like IDW to collapse -- it took Marvel two years to get to bankruptcy after making several huge and over-priced investments in a very short period, and then it took another four years to sort out the actual bankruptcy itself. And Marvel kept publishing that entire time! To say that IDW is going to close up entirely after even a couple years of losses that are nowhere near the level Marvel was at is ignorant at best.
My next thought was that he was going out of his way to gin up views by deliberately trying to be more incendiary. A headline that reads "IDW ON THE BRINK OF COLLAPSE!!!!" is obviously a lot punchier than "IDW Reports 2019 Losses." But I thought on it a bit as I watched the video, and I don't think that's the case here. A clickbait style headline is one thing, but this guy went off on IDW for his whole video. This was more than trying to be "edgy" by making some exaggerated claims; this was spewing bile for the sake of spewing bile.
Ah, but then I started scanning through the comments. Nearly every other one was a slam against IDW, and how they're all a bunch of SJWs with repeated refrains of "get woke, go broke!" The volume of anti-IDW hatred quickly suggested that this guy is deliberately fueling white supremacist rhetoric, even if he doesn't say it directly.
And, sure enough, when I looked to see what other videos he's posted, they're all rants about how Jo Martin was a slap in the face to Doctor Who fans, how The Rise of Skywalker was an abject failure, how Birds of Prey sucks, etc. I was surprised at how transparent they were with it, despite never (seemingly) outright saying "everyone but guys that are like me suck!" It attacked pretty much every bit of pop culture that didn't exclusively center and highlight cishetero white men. (This is why I'm not linking to the video!)
I am, myself, a cishetero white guy. Which means that I'm privileged out the wazoo and am never on the receiving end of such garbage. Even when I'm talking about inclusivity. In 2018, before I put this blog on hiatus, I spent the entire month of February posting about Black Panther every day. Many of those were expressly talking about how racism and bigotry come into play when discussing Black Panther (the movie and the character) and I got almost no comments at all, much less from anyone bashing me with their racism. I've posted over 200 pieces here specifically addressing any number of "-isms" and those also generated little feedback, none of which was negative.
I suspect a lot of folks who look like me see the same lack of reactions since we're not targets. But I want to take today's post to point out that those asshole are still out there, and they're still attacking folks who think that maybe equality isn't really a bad thing, particularly if the person saying that is a minority of some kind. You don't see ComicsGate show up in the news as much as a couple years ago, but they're still out there spreading their hatred of "the other." While their words and actions reveal them as pathetic, emotionally stunned tools, they're continuing their attacks.
Don't think just because you haven't heard from them in a little while that they've gone. (Obviously, this message is directed primarily at the cishetero white guys who don't see this shit thrown at them on a regular basis. I'm sure any POC, anyone in the LGBTQA alphabet, etc. get reminded of these assholes' presence far too often to forget.)
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