As many beloved franchises flail about, abandoned by their base, excuses appear left and right to blame the problem on everything except their plummeting quality. Uninteresting people write themselves in first person and anyone who correctly points it out as terrible writing face waves of accusations of the most vile insults. Today’s laughable insult: “your masculinity is fragile.”

No, your audience is fragile. No matter what you produce, soft drinks to video games, if you make New Coke, you eventually have to admit that New Coke sucks. Your audience trusts you to do one or two very narrow things. If you falsely believe your audience trusts you to do 10 others, you will be standing in the graveyard of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

The first rule of comedy is to know your audience. You work the crowd. You don’t tell drunk people 5 minutes stories with a zinger about Mozart running late to deliver a sheet of music but still keeping proper time. You don’t tell the knitting circle poop and fart jokes.

You don’t take Willow, a story about the fate of a world resting on a baby and a Nelwyn learning his true purpose, and then retool the heroes to be self important teenagers, who speak like modern high schoolers, learn nothing, and mispronounce the beloved character “Airck” as “Er-ic”.

Creating something special is like catching lightning in a bottle. The analogy is used to explain how hard it is to catch it twice. It was supposed to go without saying that you don’t open the bottle and try to put it in a bigger jar. Now we are witnessing the lightning spill out.

Like a flank steak, analogies aside. Let’s talk about the audience.

No audience to an established franchise is tuning into the new product because of the expectation of originality in the new product. They have built their expectations off of brand loyalty. Whether the comics, the films, or the “whatever” is even still for sale or not, the brand started there. They don’t like superman because of his new dialog, they like superman because he can fly. The design of any new product exists only because of the direction of the original.

That direction can change. Superman can not only die and come back from the dead, he can start wearing his underwear on the inside and audience members can stick with him. The core character cannot. A long hair superman with a dark personality fighting a giant spider was universally panned and cancelled long before some fans took a liking to what could have been. Since that small fan resurgence the hubris of Kevin Smith has become unlikable again.

That defines exactly where modern changes to franchises can stop. If a writer’s hubris is bigger than the core direction of the character, the project will have terrible quality. You can walk through hated movies from beloved franchises and find creative hubris at the core.

The Island of Dr. Moreau was ruined by Brando and a former director sabotaging the project. The 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie was ruined by writer and director believing they knew an adult themed cyberpunk world was better than the game franchise. Speed 2 was ruined when a director had a dream of a boat crashing into a hotel, and thought he knew better than anyone warning of such major rewrites so late. Your favorite comics are ruined because a 30 something thinks they can fit their own personal memoirs into Spiderman dialog. Hubris of a creative is bigger than direction of the characters in all of these failures.

Audiences are not forgiving. This has been known for a long time. Their interests are fragile. You don’t kill a dog and you don’t kill a baby. You do make an explosion fall in love with a lens flare and give them a fairytale wedding at the end to a cheesy Smash Mouth song. There is no secret that there is a formula, it is unoriginal, and it makes money.

So why do we collectively all accept those guiderails, and not others?

Why create vile insults to break other guiderails? Like not race or gender swapping a character that hasn’t changed since 1926. Or how about keeping Rule 34 away from children by not sexualizing Velma to match fetish videos. Here’s a good one, children like to see Mom and Dad in their cartoons because they are going to pretend the toys are Mom and Dad anyway, don’t remove families from family content.

We can all watch the same 3 plots repeat over and over in every film and television show we ever watch because being financially “safe” is good. But the second a politically motivated quality destroyer enters the frame, “financially safe” is argued as just suits trying to silence the masses.

It’s classic Double Think. Both cannot be valid, yet anyone who disagrees with the low quality film of the day has fragile masculinity, is some kind of “-ist,” and also is a caca poo poo doo doo ugly face.

Do not fall for the excuses for bad quality. Audiences are already looking for reasons to exit. They just want to spend time with others (families, friends, significant others) doing something they can enjoy. They don’t want surprises in that. They want to trust something will match expectations for a short time and then to get back to their lives. If you kill the dog, preach, or write yourself into a scene, they’ll just as happily go back to their lives sooner. Let’s go to a movie and then get dinner. Never mind, let’s just get dinner.

As a creator of content, you have to humble yourself. Your audience found something good in your work. It probably doesn’t match what you think is best. Discover what they find is core, and make it important. If you focus on the part that bores the audience, you’ll eventually stop including the core they love. Look at your work through their eyes. Stop making them look at their most hated things through yours.