What research did you do for this story? Did you learn anything that surprised you?
Angela Liu: I looked up new products/collaborations and remakes for series I loved in the ’90s and early ’00s. I liked analyzing which ones I wanted to watch/buy and which ones left a bad taste in my mouth. Over the past decade, there’s been a huge movement in making “live-action” versions of popular cartoons and anime, and whitewashing has been a problem for many of these “nostalgic remakes” (the Death Note and Ghost in the Shell live-actions being the two more egregious examples of whitewashing). This got me thinking about replaceability and what people consider vital vs. nonvital parts of the original. How superheroes are regularly replaced when a series is rebooted, how the person inside the costume matters less than the costume itself. How sometimes people are replaced just to inject some new life into a franchise. This idea of replaceability became the emotional backbone of this story. {read interview}
Is branding, marketing, virality, and merchandising a way to share the magic or to consume it? {read short story}