@Omnium Ultimatus isn't fully wrong here, but he's missing something critical: These projects keep happening despite being massive moneysinks and gigantic marketing failures. You will never see a profitable toyline made off of HGS. You will never see an HGS movie. It's just one more terrible creative endeavor pandering to the exact same audience that doesn't actually watch or support much of
anything.
All of that is a direct defiance of the paradigm you talked about, where only profitable shows get made. No one is buying this shit - as is usually the case with blatant trash in the same vein. Which, in turn, necessitates the obvious question: "Well, if it's not profitable, why are they doing it?"
The short answer is that pushing the messages matters more to them than anything, including making a profit. The longer answer is a bit more entertaining though, so I'll get into it here:
One big reason shit like HGS keeps happening despite not being successful is because of a phenomenon that's hit a lot of creative circles. I've covered it a few times in the past, but it bears repeating here: this is the end result of when industries get idologically captured. You can see this with a lot of fields (especially tech fields, in recent years), but it's really visible in creative outlets, and many of them have the exact same hallmarks: a need to push "diversity" and "inclusion" over any quality writing or world-building, a hatred of merit and achievement, and a willingness to do
anything to make these works happen, no matter how much it involves betraying and/or alienating an existing customerbase or fanbase.
The creators of HGS are cut from the same cloth as Chuck Wendig - in that they have almost no real talent in writing or animation, but yet have been handed a massive amount of money and carte blanche to do what they want to make their vision happen. This has happened because of blatant Entryism, whereby ideologues get into an industry and gradually, push out talented and capable people (who are filthy wrongthinkers) in favor of people who are true believers (no matter how incompetent they are). This is a critical aspect of how these people work: in their worldview, someone who pushes the message but can't do anything of value is more inherently virtuous than a thirty-year veteran of their field with multiple awards that tangentially disagrees with them.
Their staffing choices ultimately reflect this and it doesn't take long for an industry to resemble
SBNation's infamous Doomsday Player Class: Because only adherence to the ideology matters, not talent, skill, or creative potential, you wind up with creative industries who don't have a single person who knows how to tell a story effectively or do worldbuilding worth a damn. The landed ideological gentry have chased off everyone talented, and actively oppress newcomers to prevent them from establishing themselves, because anyone with actual talent showing up will quickly show exactly how untalented they are.
All of this is exactly why
@I Love Beef has an excellent point: their entire ability to maintain this is leveraged the same as it is in Television, Comics, and Hollywood - on the ability to control what does and does not reach market. The problem (for them) is, there's plenty of ways to sidestep, circumvent, and ignore them entirely.
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