First, of course they can, but obviously the fans of the franchise are going to say what they like and don't like about the thing, including using it as a vehicle for ideology. And Sci fi / fantasy fans are notorious for going ape #### about their most treasured franchises... there's a lot of gatekeeper built into these arguments. So the response is totally unsurprising.
As for what the actual goal is, it's definitely money. Not at all the first time some profit-seeking entity has coopted a political ideology to make a buck, and it won't be the last. That said, that isn't straightforward either - there are definitely a ton of people working on these things that are subscribers to identity politics, in some cases right up to the original author of the material (Sandman is what I'm thinking of here).
__________________
"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
|