\n\n\n\nRelated: 1, 2"}\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIts been NINE YEARS and i still dont think anyone knows exactly why teen titans was cancelled
\nSame reason Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series were canceled: Girls liked it. Bruce Timm finally up an\u2019 said it out loud in an interview a while back when he was asked why in the hell GL:TAS had been canceled when it was doing so well on every front; DC\u2019s animation department has institutionally decided that feee-males don\u2019t/can\u2019t/shouldn\u2019t like superheroes, so even if a show is drawing in great viewership numbers and has great toy sales, once they find out that it\u2019s popular with women and girls, they pull the plug on it. Cartoon Network loved Teen Titans\u2014 two million viewers for new episodes will do that\u2014 and wanted a Season Six, and the production staff was already in the planning stages for it; they were going to have a big arc about Terra and why she was Living Normal, and do a lot more with the extended Titans team members.
\nThis is so fucked up.
To elaborate on this point a bit, the reason this happens is that modern television merchandising aims for total market segregation.
In a nutshell, it\u2019s much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.
This is why children\u2019s toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits they\u2019ve decided to use is \u201cboys versus girls\u201d.
Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? That\u2019s market segregation in action.
The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; they\u2019re viewed as \u201cstealing\u201d the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully \u201cowns\u201d it.
This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? It\u2019s not just artificial, it\u2019s deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying \u201cthis is the ways it\u2019s always been\u201d or \u201cthis is just what the market wants\u201d, they\u2019re lying through their teeth - this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.
(Interestingly, the reverse isn\u2019t always true: if a specifically girl-targeted show unexpectedly becomes popular with boys, sometimes rather than being cancelled, its merchandising will shift to court the male collector\u2019s market. TV execs are so sexist, even their sexism is sexist.)