This was a great read! Lots of good insights into the "invisible" younger demographics of the fandom, for sure.
Like I mentioned when we chatted last week, if you run a project like this again you're welcome to pick my brain about survey design and data analysis. Stuff like that's been a part of my job for over a decade now!
As the Transformers themselves are something of a literal metaphor for adaptation and change, so too is the brand itself, through constant revision, something of a figurative metaphor for fluid-yet-concrete identity.
I've said this before, but I feel like this is more an expression of what
was than an evaluation of what
is. Hasbro seems to be playing things as safe as possible ever since the big "high" of the first couple movies passed, and your ouroboros metaphor seems to describe the official output these days even more than it describes a segment of the fandom.
The comic featured no female-gendered robots
Not true! The comic featured
an astonishingly sexist take on the one female character Furman was obliged to use.
This series also introduced the first girl robots that would actually get toys in Western markets: Blackarachnia and Airrazor.
Now, as far as a diversity of representation goes, these characters are good examples of the standard practice for a long while: mostly unexplored concepts of sexless gender despite its now more consistent presence (although Blackarachnia totally does have her simp boyfriend, Silverbolt).
I was actually discussing these two with someone just a couple weeks ago! I feel like the two of them embody two polar opposites when it comes to portraying female characters in this franchise.
Airazor's gender is purely an informed trait. She calls herself a she, so I suppose she's a she, but that's literally the only way that she differs from the other Maximals. Her identity was so utterly irrelevant to her portrayal in the series that the Japanese dub made her a guy, and no one thought anything of it until her last few seconds of screen time (when the writers had her suddenly being romantic with Tigatron, more or less out of the blue).
Blackarachnia, on the other hand? I don't think a single episode passes by where her gender isn't a factor. To start with, Tarantulas very clearly reprogrammed her protoform not just to make her a Predacon, but to make her his dream woman come to life. Her interactions with the male cast are constantly fraught with sexual tension, flirting and outright harassment. She's frequently the target of gender-based insults. Tarantulas often acts like a creepy stalker around her, absolutely
loses his shit when she breaks free from his control, and outright tries to murder her when she chooses Silverbolt over him.
We can debate which one makes more sense as a part of the Transformers' universe, but there's no room for debate when it comes to which one of them the fans and writers connected with.
The first question is age. For TFW, the forum is 60% north of 25 years old, whereas the Botposting group is 60% under 25 years old.
I'm
stunned that there's people under 25 on Facebook for anything other than talking to their older, out of touch relatives.
(Sidenote, there's nothing
wrong with those age groups but coming from the industry that I work in, they cause me physical pain to look at.
)
The third question is about trying to find the bumps for various series to see if they’re correlated with kids returning as adult fans. It’s… hard to say, as we have more variables to account for, but in both cases the 2007 movie provides a good partitioning point. Here, the question had an open answer, which was a mistake on part! It meant that I had to tally all the results manually.
A mean or median for either group might be an interesting metric here. If you had more data you could calculate the standard deviation and come up with a "bracket" that captures the bulk of both sets, but your sample sizes are probably too small for that to be really useful. Sadly, it's really difficult to get TF fans to actually contribute to a project like this...we only got around 90-100 votes back when we did our "30 Greatest" poll way back when, and the fandom was easier to target in those days.
Surprisingly, TFW has quite a few recently active fans (five years or less) even though it skews older.
This doesn't surprise me! I was talking about that in the exchange you quoted at the start of your essay. Anecdotally, there seems to be a whole lot of late 30s/early 40s fans who've only started collecting Transformers over the last few years. The impression I've got from reading their posts is that a lot of them are media-first fans who may have collected other lines like Marvel Legends or DC figures, but who weren't previously interested in Transformers figures at all. Those new fans have crossed over and become active TF fans as the toyline shifted from trying to sell cool toys to trying to sell merchandise based on cool characters, if that makes sense.
The group that likes new designs is less interested in the figures, primarily.
I think this is treading into ground that the survey didn't cover, but I'd suspect that a large slice of this is because of how Hasbro has actively tried to reposition Transformers as a media property first and foremost over the last decade and a half or so. When you or I were kids, the toys were the only thing that
really mattered to them and everything else only existed to sell them. But since 2007, it's been just as important (or more so?) to drive people to buy movie tickets. I bet that shift in focus has created a
lot more media-only fans in the younger generations than you'd have seen in 80s and 90s kids.
MTMTE and LL contribute to that as well, because they brought in a whole new demographic of fans who were comic readers first and foremost -- many of whom didn't care about the toys in the slightest.
How much do you like reworked visual styles? Inter-related to the last question, this has more to do with making different series distinct from one another at a glance.
As someone who has read more than a few threads in the TFW toy forums, the results here
shock me. I never would have guessed that a majority of posters there would be this open to different visual styles.
Denyer wrote: ↑Fri Mar 25, 2022 7:29 pm
Sometimes. Social media is mainly amplification of particular away-from-centre loud voices, itself a bunch of feedback loops. As you say, there's an immediacy with comics production, second only to comments on unlicenced fanfic, but comic sales continued and continue to demonstrate ongoing bleed-out. It gets more complicated factoring in later sales at lower collected prices, and with a bit of viability restored by digital sales, but Occam's razor: fanservice when done frequently is often desperation to stem that bleeding out, or to press the button and receive a pellet of adoration, rather than effective market research.
This line of discussion is right up my alley.
Social media feedback is explicitly
not representative of the overall public, or even the overall readership. Any reader who is going onto social media to comment about MTMTE is, by definition, far more engaged than the average consumer. Their opinions, likewise, by definition are going to be a lot more extreme than the average reader. They're engaged because they either
love the product or
hate it. In either case, their feedback probably isn't going to help you sell to the less-engaged masses. The "silent majority" is a real thing in this case, because the majority of TF comic readers just don't care that much about the product and don't go out of their way to engage about it online. But there are
way more of that kind of reader than there are people posting about the book on forums or Twitter, and the less-engaged readers are the ones you need to convince to keep buying the book. The ones who love it aren't going to stop buying over the short to medium term, and the ones who hate it have either already stopped, or they're completists who won't ever stop.
If a business wants to do effective market research that can help it make good decisions, selecting the right sample frame is one of the most important part of the process. You need to get opinions from a cross-section of your entire target market, not just the ones who already care about your product. That's the reason why a survey of randomly-selected telephone numbers will do a better job of predicting election results than an open web poll on a newspaper's website -- the people answering that web poll are self-selected, and the sample will inherently skew towards people with stronger opinions than the average. But IDW basing creative decisions on social media feedback would actually be even worse than that! It's more akin to a political party surveying nobody but their own donors' list, then being shocked when they don't win 99% of the votes in the election.
The incidence of comic book readers in the general population is
higher than I'd expected based on these US numbers...around 15% seem to be regular or semi-regular readers. So there's a large enough population to make robust market research feasible, if they were of the mind to. I'd be surprised if a business like IDW is doing much quantitative research, though. Their financials never exactly seem to be too rosy, and market research is one of the first things that struggling companies cut from the budget when they see their numbers go into the red.
The best way for them to get useful information would probably be to take a two-pronged approach: surveying known customers (people who've bought a TF comic on their app in the last 12 months, maybe?) on the one hand, and a random sampling of general comic fans on the other (probably through an online panel provider). I think they'd see some pretty interesting contrasts between what the current buyers like and what the overall market wants. But, again, I'd actually be pretty surprised if IDW were investing in that kind of research right now.