Cyber Bowling
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2017
I mean, being malicious towards something you like isn't exactly uncommon in fandoms, least of all online ones. Hell, even a lot of the fans who actively purchase stuff end up being pretty malicious towards the comic. Look at all the people who were rage buying Hydra Cap or all the people who talk about how much they hate an event comic in the beginning because they are just stupid gimmick comics where nothing changes, but they then continue to buy all the issues and tie-ins and help make said events popular and high selling, which leads to more issues coming out.
Linkara is a gigantic sperg. I cannot possibly stress that enough. He might influence a few of his fans, but if we're being incredibly generous, and I mean very over the top generous, I'd say he at most influences a couple hundred potential comic buyers. Just taking a glance at his channel, his most popular video is well under 500k views, and if you sort by popularity, it's mostly power ranger stuff and very popular old comic storylines. Now, if we're being super generous again, the best thing someone like Linkara could do is maybe influence a few hundred people that don't normally read comics to pick up those older titles. But Linkara doesn't really review current comics. Linkara could spend the rest of his life preaching about how bad the Clone War saga is. It doesn't change the fact that storyline is over 20 years old. The writers and artists were paid for it a long time ago. Marvel's success does not depend on how well that comic sells. The only thing he is influencing is whether they make a few extra bucks from people buying old volumes. And even then, said interested parties might just buy the trades used off of Amazon or Ebay or any other second hand source as opposed to buying from the company directly.
He only has 112,000 and change subscribers. That's fine for the type of thing Linkara is trying to do, and it seems like he's gotten by alright doing this as a full time gig, minus recent tax troubles, but let's be real, even people who work traditional jobs have financial troubles sometimes. It happens. But in the grand scheme of actually influencing an industry, that's nothing, especially when you consider how many dead subs most YouTubers have.
I'll reiterate I'm in no way trying to defend Linkara. If anything, I'm trying to point out he's too much of an insignificant manchild to have any impact on anything whatsoever. And I do 100% agree with him being manipulative, I just don't think he actually succeeds at manipulating anyone to any serious degree. I have a feeling most of his fans are people who were never planning to purchase comics in the first place, or diehard comic fans who have been purchasing comics for years and will continue to do so even if it is just to hate-read something.
At the risk of veering too off topic from Linkara and getting spergy myself about comics, I think one of the biggest mistakes Marvel makes in regards to comics is overestimating how much outside factors influence comic sales. Look at Black Panther. The movie sold great, and it is a huge hit with the #woke audience. Marvel decided to launch what, 4 or 5 Black Panther related comics. Shuri had her own thing, there was the angry lesbian comic, pretty sure Killmonger got his own comic, then Panther's own title and I think there was another generic Wakanda title. I might be mistaken, but I think outside of Black Panther's titular comic, all the others were cancelled or are in the process of being cancelled. Same deal with a lot of Marvel's other attempts to cash in on the #woke crowd. The Marvel movies have been running for years. They are popular, hell, I might even go so far as to call them iconic. Despite that, comic sales for Marvel haven't skyrocketed because people being interested in comic properties doesn't mean they are going to buy comics. If a gigantic movie franchise that has been running since the mid 00's isn't having a significant influence on the comic industry, a chubby YouTuber trying to fit into a green ranger costume waving around cheap plastic toys pretending to fight Silent Hill monsters on his spaceship isn't going to have anything resembling a significant influence on anything at all.
