I don't think the new She-Ra really appealed to younger kids or 1st generation fans for the most part.  Sure there was some, but it seemed like most were from segments within the 20 something and 30 something crowds.  I don't think they'll come back to He-Man or She-Ra unless the new shows have a heavy dose of what She-Ra did.  They are more into shows & movies that are very similar, so they are more likely to watch the latest Stevenson project or something like Owl House than MOTU.  Go to Twitter accounts of fans of the show and you'll see their interest isn't in all things MOTU.  They seem more interested in the latest ships.

@firefly So in your observation much of that fandom gravitates to new LGBT content instead of an actual fictional universe. A fandom that jumps from brand to brand but never plants a flag in a particular universe and declares it home. Interesting!

I absolutely love She-Ra & The Princesses Of Power, I just wish the last two seasons were available on DVD! 😀 

We have some amazing knowledgeable fans in our community of She-Ra 2018 ( @catra @costume-n00b @thenerdwithasuit ), the latter whom made an amazing video essay, that may want to chime in on this topic. 🙂

As someone who identifies as a hetrosexual male (with the added bonus of being in a biologically male body. What's the term for that these days? Cissexual? Default settings? The boring one?), I don't really care about whether a character is homosexual / bi / etc. I'm more concerned about whether the character is actually well written and interesting (which can be said about most of SPOP's main cast). I also agree that diversity (race, sexuality, etc) is important, so long as it doesn't get in the way of telling a good story (nothing worse that story being sacrificed for political agenda).

@thenerdwithasuit did an excellent video essay on many of the reasons I think SPOP is good (watch it if you want the details).

That being said, I get why alot of the longtime fans wouldn't be into SPOP. It's such a radical diversion from the original.

However, any fandom is doomed to fail if they're not doing anything to add any new content (and therefore, find new fans). For example, my sister's husband tried to get his kids (from his first marriage) interested in the OG He-Man. However, they had no interest. Unfortunately, seems to be the case with quite a few kids these days. There's alot more choice to what fandom one can join these days. Not to mention that the internet makes it easier to find the fandom that's "just right for you".

One other thing is that He-Man has had a presence even after the OG series finished. The 90s had new adventures, and the 2000s had the reboot. Very little had to be done with the formula to make it work.

Nothing had been done with She-Ra for years. Except a few appearances in the comics (but that was more "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe with special guest She-Ra"). Not only that, most versions start off as being a spin-off of He-Man, something they couldn't do here with the seperate ownership issues. Any remake was going to need to be made for a completely new generation of fans (not just the OGs). And that means making a few changes. 

Overall, I agree that maybe half of SPOP fans aren't here for the overall MotU experience. Which is kind of unfortunate. But, to be fair, it did seem to bring some new fans to table. Which is still very much a win. I'll take "some new MotU fans" over "no new MotU fans" any day.

Posted by: @costume-n00b

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Overall, I agree that maybe half of SPOP fans aren't here for the overall MotU experience. Which is kind of unfortunate. But, to be fair, it did seem to bring some new fans to table. Which is still very much a win. I'll take "some new MotU fans" over "no new MotU fans" any day.

A gain in fans is a good way to appraise the success of a new series other than viewership. Net gain may be better. There was much controversy surrounding this show. Did any of the original She-Ra fandom walk away from this fandom turned off by a new interpretation of this character? We estimate that loss and gain together and we have our final very unscientific conclusion.

@elder you have a point. Wonder if there's a way to actually get some numbers?

@elder Okay, so I logged backed in after working out, and...this is going to be long and I may delve into some treacherous waters here, BUT, I think it should be heard. Hey, those after episode PSA's told us to be brave, right?

So, the short version is, no, I do not believe the reboot turned the vast majority of fans away.

The long version? Well, as of now I am doing an essay on the Tri-Star Godzilla remake, and then I will do one on Spider-Man: Lotus, then I wanna do another video on She-Ra (both old and new), and then after that a video essay on reactionary backlash. I think that the vast majority of people who made bad-faith arguments against the reboot or were crying fowl about it weren't even Princess of Power or MotU fans. Now, don't get me wrong. I think there are a decent number or MotU and PoP fans who didn't care for it, but that's the thing. They just didn't care for it, or they simply admitted it wasn't made for them, or they had just moved on from wathing shows in general. In contrast though, the people who were acting like it was an insult to the original that betrayed them and made videos about it for three years straight? Yeah, I think they were riding off of trends and framed themselves as defenders of a franchise they never cared for.

One of the original backlash merchants of the reboot admitted in his first video he loved He-Man but never even saw Filmation She-Ra. And even then the way he talks about the He-Man part seems shallow. I also remember during the early backlash that people were complaining that apparently Adora wouldn't realize she's a princess in the first season and they were claiming this was part of some sort of "agenda" BUT they didn't seem to know Adora in the original also starts off not knowing she was a princess because she was kidnapped by Hordak. And then there's the other stuff that seems sus. One channel that sticks out to me is ClownfishTV and tons of their videos put out the idea that gay energy and gay couples is "innapropriate" for the show, and when one of them on the channel descibed He-Man, they dsecribed him as a pargon of their strict ideas of a man. But, as I like to joke, saying gay energy doesn't belong in a MotU show is like saying anti-nuclear messages don't belong in a Godzilla film.

Idk if this is a hot take here, but Filmation's greatest contribution to the franchise is how flamboyant and gay they made everything. Yes, that part is true. Erika Scheimer, who voiced multiple characters and was a producer came out as a lesbian in 2007, and she admitted Filmation had tons of gay animators and writers working at the studio. It was a haven for them during the moral panic of the eighties. And she even has said stuff indicating Lou Scheimer himself may have been bi. That's why all the rainbows, the attention to designs that seem more what people say is "butch", or "pride material" (FABULOUS SECRET powers), or the fact they introduced or fleshed out the idea that out heroes were literally living double secret lives (there was no Prince Adam or calling upon the power in the original He-Man stories before the cartoon)...yeah, none of that was accidental. Even the original shows got tons of backlash for that. Hell, there's even episodes of the originals that have more overt political message to today's climate. Just two days ago I saw a She-Ra episode where the main conflict is stopping the Horde from lying in the school system and trying to prevent them from burning books that teach the truth. She-Ra and friends must prevent the Horde from teaching their sanitized history to students that leaves out all the atrocities. It's flat-out called Book Burning. 26th episode. What's more interesting is that while that is an issue everybody can care about, it really hits big when you realize the people making episodes like that were part of the LGBTQIA community themselves, and a huge part of the discrimination they experienced throughout history was having their literature, their poetry, their historical records, and their research burned by opressive regimes.

So while this all may seem disconnected, I think when you step back and look at everything, how countless rage merchants built their outrage based on a hatred of "agendas" or not seeming to ever talk about the shows they like if it doesn't involve them attacking other material? Yeah, to me it reeks of projection and pretending to care. Now, to make sure I'm clear here, it is not wrong to be new to a franchise or to not know that much. Everybody has to start somewhere. I've only been a MotU fan for five years. Just two if you count only the He-Man side. My main issue is when people throw rocks from glass houses. Ie if you're going to build so much of your personality, and your presence to the public as a supposed defender of the originals, you better make sure your resume holds up to scrutiny. So to see these people get mad at the stuff they get mad at, it leads me to believe they either are not really into the franchise to begin with, or their understanding of it is so surface level, the people they accuse of being "infiltrators" ironically probably know more about the material than they do. Sometimes, even having new members can do wonders. From what I've gathered the quote people have brought up to prove Kevin Smith was "never a Masters of the Universe" seems to leave out context, as really he's stating that he got into it later in life. And even if he's a new fan, he certainly did his homework. Way more than a lot of outrage merchants I've seen. He worked in the Subternia and Preternia stuff into the mix, he introduced ideas from the original MotU Bible and the 200X series in the mix, and he even made some lines and elements from the infamous 1987 movie work.

That leads me into my final section. ND did his homework too. He wasn't alive to see the original when it was new, but he did do everything he could to understand it in order make older fans happy. While making it its own thing. I would highly recommend the reboot. Even though I love Revelation it's still my favorite MotU story. It's the most thematically potent, it has the best fleshed out characters, one of the most expressive styles, and it's just a good story regardless. And they mixed all that and fused it organically with the subtext being all about a story of liberation alongside a touching story of escaping abuse, qeustioning broken systems, and finding peace amongst gay lovers. A lot of the outrage merchants claim they just "want good stories" and don't really care about the stuff they still cry about regardless, but everytime I try to see more legitimate big complaints about the show they still tie it back to points that are staunchly against LGBTQIA people. Just don't listen to that group. Listen to people who review it as a story and aren't bothered by the existence of people who aren't them. Yes, listen to them over those merchants even if they don't like it either.

The complains seemed to be all about the change in aesthetic but I think that misses the point. First of all, not only do I find the new aesthetic lovely, but She-Ra is like any other piece of art that works as art. It was always a story about introspection, liberation, the struggles against fascism, the heroism of LGTBQIA people, and rebellion. It's about the themes and ideas. And in the new one, they explored those ideas excellently, and were able to be more open about it. My essay is here if people want a rundown that, while still long, I think may be a good introduction:

Anyway, I hope all that will explain why my next video essay on She-Ra will be called "She-Ra Was Never Pure (And That's Good)". Thumbnail is attached. Typed too much. I'm gonna get ready to continue Owl House with my bestie.

Posted by: @costume-n00b

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@elder you have a point. Wonder if there's a way to actually get some numbers?

Not likely mate. As you can tell I take pleasure in asking the impossible to answer questions. They are fascinating yet futile.

@thenerdwithasuit

Lovely post mate. Backlash merchants is new terminology to me. I'll have to store that one in the memory banks. I should have stated from the beginning that I would never factor in those social media influencers that peddle outrage when discussing genuine fans and their reactions because most do not come from a place of authenticity.

While most everything you say about the Filmation show is accurate to varying degrees, the one I feel compelled to challenge is the original shows received tons of backlash. I was alive and well and recall no such backlash. I do believe if it was released today it would be a different tale.

Inauthentic complaints aside there were legitimate complaints made by legitimate fans towards the new She-Ra, Revelation, and the CG series. Do I believe some walked away from the fandom at least temporarily feeling betrayed? Human nature says of course.

I digress. This thread's inquiry asks how many of these brand new fans integrated with the existing fanbase. Since the CG series was aimed at children we may not know for years. With Revelation it seems substantial. With the She-Ra series it didn't seem as obvious to me and became the topic of this compelling discussion. Yes She-Ra undoubtedly created new fans but did they integrate into this community? Perhaps the answer is no simply because this fandom tends to be He-Man centric.

That must be Rikki Roxx...

@durendal If it's not someone needs to invite RR here quick. This thread could become legendary.

@elder I think I should have calrified on that part about the backlash during the Filmation era. See, a lot of the backlash (in many ways similar to today) didn't necessarily come from within the fanbases, it came from puritan mindsets who were upset with a lot of things back in the day.

Some may not know this, but even though a lot of people are really into eighties nostalgia, the decade was just like any other in terms of having intense periods of unfounfed fear, paranoia, and prejudice. There was a Satanic Panic exclusive to the eighties which tried to convince more puritanical mindsets that everything popular in nerd cutlure from DnD (probably the most famous case), to video games, to movies, to even cartoons were full of some sort of unholy or demonic influence. It was the standard vague fear of some sort of dirty or dangerous force trying to destroy "traditional values" or the perfect idea of suburbia. Now, during those days EVERY popular cartoon with a toyline got hit by those fearmongers from the Ninja Turtles to Rainbow Bright, but both Masters of the Universe and Princess of Power got hit the hardest due to the usual accusations ON TOP of their queercoding. So it was seen as especially heinous to those eras of outrage merchants. I found an upload of the VHS tape which has some of those people recording themselves warning parents about both shows, and I will certainly be using that in my video essay. In fact, some research I made suggested that a reason for the after episode PSA's and the Christmas Special wasn't just so that Mattel could say the shows did teach kids some morals so they weren't just toy commercials, but they were also done to appease puritans who thought the shows were Satanic in some way.

Though in terms of the inquiry of whether or not the new show or brand integrated into the existing fanbase? Well, I think that first part leads into that. See, I do think that while MotU had what we may call a "golden age", a lot of the history of the franchise has some more cracks than one may think looking ot the nitty gritty. Not just the fact it was perceived as Satanic by a loud vocal section, but the fact Mattel had plenty of issues mismanaging the brand after those golden years of the eighties. They made She-Ra when they found out a third of He-Man fans were girls, but when it came time to make the Princess of Power brand and market it, Mattel didn't seem to want to make it a flat-out official extension of the Masters of the Universe franchise. They put it in a seperate brand that resembled usual Magic Girl crossed with Barbie moreso than anything else. A lot of people to this day argued they were better off bringing attention to the fact She-Ra and friends were part of the "He-Man franchise" in the toylines. And a reason for that was that apparently the CEO's at the time couldn't fathom the idea that there would be a good amount of gender crossover in terms of how customers would buy their products. IE they couldn't imagine the idea a lot of girls would buy a He-Man and a Battlecat, and that a lot of boys would buy She-Ra and Swiftwind. So while the Princess of Power brand did sell well initially, apparently as time went on there was some sort of confusion with how people looked at the two franchise. And then of course the final nails in the coffin were how Mattel couldn't help too much as Canon's production of the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie turned out to be a nightmare later on, leading to that film flopping, and their problems with the New He-Man Adventures. And it persists to this day. Mattel sort of gave up on marketing the 200X reboot, and they just kind of sat on She-Ra for years even when they originally had plans to introduce her again in said reboot. Then of course there's the ongoing saga of the inability to get the cinematic He-Man reboot off the ground. Ontop of the premature cancellation of the CGI reboot.

I think the reboot did do a good job of introducing newer fans to the franchise as a whole. I know plenty of reboot fans who later saw Revelation and also the original. Though I think the main heart of the issue when it comes to She-Ra fans of all sorts and He-Man fans of all sorts trying to connect more with the reboots has to do with Mattel's frozen way of thinking that's sadly the norm with tons of properties. In case some don't know this yet, companies have always had huge issues properly marketing and getting merchandise and attention out there for girl-centric action based shows. I already brought up their questionable way of marketing PoP in the eighties, but it extends beyond this franchise. Mattel gave up on putting out toys for the reboot and we barely got any figures or dolls for that, there's shows like Totally Spies not getting a whole lot of merch even though that series was arguably perfect for tons of gadget toys, Sailor Moon got left behind here in the states in terms of merch, My Life as a Teenage Robot got treated unfairly by the network, and do I even have to mention Owl House and how little it got? Hell, even if a show is simply more gender-neutral often times it will barely get any attention for its marketing and merchandising to the public. Avatar: The Last Airbender was a critical darling for animated shows, and even though it is merchandising potential galore by all means, it still got peanuts. They only offered a few figures, Lego sets, and plushies, and if you wanted a toy of a female character you loved from the series (Katara, Toph, Azula, Suki, Ty Lee, Mai, Yue) you were out of luck. Then there's also Young Justice. And this isn't just me saying this. When interviewed by Kevin Smith, Paul Dini, one of the main creative leads of Batman: The Animated Series, told Smith that apparently when in talks about merchandising, executives and people in charge of big decisions will flat out tell you that they don't expect girls to buy toys. It's also a running joke with the Todd Macfarlane line that the man will approve thirty different versions of Batman and Joker, but there still doesn't seem to be a single decent vanilla Wonder Woman.

It all may seem disconnected and related, but I think this all makes a point that in order for parts of the fandom to really integrate and be more unified with the old and the new, Mattel needs to commit to getting word of these shows out there. They should have commited more to marketing and getting word out there for the She-Ra reboot instead of giving up on bigger level campaigns to spread word about it in mid-2019 and leave it up to good word of mouth, animation fans, newer She-Ra fans, and the smaller set of older fans to carry it out to make sure it ended its story naturally with good numbers. They need to get rid of these mentalities that girls can't get into action franchises and boys can't get into more elegant slice of life franchises and understand the overlap of demographics is what makes MotU so appealing in nerd culture. And it goes without saying but they should also embrace the queer energy of the whole thing. What Filmation did with those adaptations was unique for its time and that's why it stuck. I Mattel leans into that I think it can be a good thing to integrate fans into certain sects of the franchise easier considering how the shows have always had them in mind. Companies need to stop making baffling decisions like giving Rebecca Sugar only so much time to conclude all of Steven Universe when she decided Ruby and Sapphire would be married on screen, or doing the same to Dana Terrance with the Owl House when she decided Luz and Amity would be together for half the show.

Caring more about the potential of unifying sects of the fandom and understanding why MotU is so appealing to begin with? To me, that can go a LONG way.

@thenerdwithasuit I read through the remainder and it was a nice post mate. You took a path less taken with actually offering a constructive solution. Cheers!

Gamesmaster (Flint Dille's autobiography) is worth a leaf through for anyone interested in the conditions 80s shows were created in, ditto The He-Man Effect (which isn't particularly to do with He-Man despite the name, and is a quick read as it's done in comic panels). Plenty of creators from that period have also written memoirs. Lots of crossover with RPGs emerging in the 70s and 80s, and that history.

I enjoyed the new show after an episode or two solidified that besides names and themes it has little to do with original POP characters (which was a show that as a kid I generally preferred the writing on to MOTU and stood out as a good example of balancing mature and safe with storytelling). It wanders away from the overarching plot a lot and can't get away from the same sort of issues that similar shows such as Iron Man: Armored Adventures have -- mainly where are the adults most of the time and why are they leaving everything to their kids? It's especially jarring when the basic scenario is planet invaded by slavers.

But make an effort to suspend disbelief and it's fun. Particularly enjoyed Entrapta being coded as autistic and a POV character even if at times some characters were a bit OTT. Would definitely re-watch and probably skip some of the side story episodes. Definitely more inclined to re-watch than Revelation, which was too kill-happy and I really disliked how Randor was written as a plot convenience plus how Preternia was introduced quickly as a concept and equally quickly discarded. There's a lot of fanfic stylings and tropes in all of the new stuff, and I'd say they were better used in New POP and the Netflix MOTU kid show.

Where are the fans? Tiktok, Insta, Discord, and to some extent Facebook. People running their own servers, sites and forums is less of a thing now. Facebook (and to a lesser extent now Tumblr and Livejournal spinoffs) is possibly where generations meet most -- there are definitely Facebook groups with younger fans drawn in by the IDW MTMTE series, for instance, and who are going through the experience with memes and DeviantArt accounts and fic on ArchiveOfOurOwn. Those platforms are where a critical mass of users are, even assuming the various audience demographics have time and inclination to talk about stuff.

Revelation seems to mostly be existing fans, i.e. people now in their 40s and 50s. Watched more widely but there's not enough material there to spark much nostalgia in twenty years time, and people collecting the toys are largely doing it as representations of characters from their childhoods, not specifically of a new series. That era of MOTU will probably die with us. And that's okay, Batman isn't much like the character as introduced in the 1930s either. The main revival is now, an echo of a 200x revival, like the main revival of The Phantom in most of the world was 1980s DotE, or Doc Savage was the Bantam paperbacks in the 70s.

I think New POP will get as much discussion when it reaches its revivals as some of the second-tier 80s stuff. Happily history tends to stick around more when more people can copy and preserve it.

Posted by: @denyer

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Where are the fans? Tiktok, Insta, Discord, and to some extent Facebook. People running their own servers, sites and forums is less of a thing now. Facebook (and to a lesser extent now Tumblr and Livejournal spinoffs) is possibly where generations meet most -- there are definitely Facebook groups with younger fans drawn in by the IDW MTMTE series, for instance, and who are going through the experience with memes and DeviantArt accounts and fic on ArchiveOfOurOwn. Those platforms are where a critical mass of users are, even assuming the various audience demographics have time and inclination to talk about stuff.

This is an extremely good point mate. 

I am definitely a proud SATPOP Fan! 😀