I don’t think that has never not been a thing… Read memoirs/letters from earlier times and you’ll see plenty of it too. The big shift was probably admitting the children don’t yearn for the mines, but we seem to be heading back that way (eta: in the USA anyway I won’t paint other countries with our fuckery lol).

If they’re trying to do an animated spin off of the live action Barbie movie they have grossly missed the point. People who saw the Barbie movie aren’t going to watch an animated movie to see if Ken is finally “kenough”. Honestly not sure why they wouldn’t stick to the animated movie prescription of promoting their latest line either. It’s a toy they can sell and frankly not all of those movies are even terrible. They’re not going to win Oscars, but the animated Barbie movies wouldn’t have to up their game much to be in the running for animation awards as they’re generally pretty meta making them fun for all ages. They had an animated online series (dreamhouse) that was well-acclaimed before the live action movie and actually seemed to inform how some of the live action movie was done.

Really sounds like sitting on a gold mine and then trying to steal the workers’ bathroom because suddenly it got the “right” interest via controversy.

Sometimes they just make up whole new stories (Bleach) or say fuck it and go their own way (Fullmetal Alchemist). I feel like the more accepted recent approach though is having a mini-series of an arc which has normal pacing (actually even often accelerated pacing cause they only get 12 episodes) and then just putting the show on hold.

And then you have when the anime affects the manga and the manga starts stretching the story out for “content” (feel like this happened with My Hero Academia and Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun). If it was a novel that’s being published on a pay by chapter platform you’re just completely fucked because they (generally) follow the Mark Twain model of pay per word so once a story gets popular that shit absolutely gets milked into the ground. If you’re lucky they waited to do the anime until the comic adaption was half done at which point the novel will hopefully be done…

I also thought no one used facetime until I worked retail recently… The amount of people I saw come in on a facetime calls where they both just had their cameras pointed at the ceiling was bizarre and boggling.