I hate merch.

Alright, that's not entirely true. I like putting stickers on my laptop. I like the occasional band tee. I like buying stuff to give away to other people who actually like the various other trinkets on offer. Even still, I could do without "merch".

By "merch", I mean the merchandise sold to justify a piece of media's existence. I love an art fair, or an indie band's merch stand that the musician themself rushes back to at the end of their set. Art fairs are great because you meet the actual artist who's allowed to be more independent, and potentially more risque if you're into that sort of thing, than a corporation. You can buy anything at an art fair. Merch culture is the corporate assimilation of the art fair, the trinkets without the character, the purest form of "buy buy buy", all the desires of a child marketed to adults by a faceless company.

Before I continue, I want to tell you about where I'm coming from. The fandom communities I grew up in didn't have the same culture around merch. I am, of course, referring to Homestuck, a webcomic started in 2009 and finished in 2016 with various spinoffs continuing to this day. Homestuck's merch stores were treated as an afterthought until fairly recently; if you wanted Homestuck merch, you would have to use your own skills and creativity to make it yourself, leading to one of the most enthusiastic "DIY" subcultures from a pop-culture fandom I've ever seen. I haven't seen that degree of initiative replicated elsewhere yet; it almost feels like an import from the broader spheres of punk.

I, specifically, was a part of a subculture within that subculture that, for a variety of self-inflicted licensing and legal reasons, cannot make merch to sustain itself. There are zero dreams of profit from that project. Those thoughts were smothered in the crib. I prefer it that way, it keeps us focused on making what we love without feeling like we "owe something" to other people, but that's not a sustainable way to make large-scale art. You have to fund it somehow. That's fine, but the merch is getting ridiculous, and I'm partly convinced I can see through the merch haze because I didn't grow up with it.

I used to go to conventions. I don't anymore, because I have other things I want to do more, but I used to walk around the couple of conventions in my area for a few years just to admire cosplayers and meet the occasional voice actor. I paid dozens of dollars to go to the convention, I got inside, and what I didn't understand until I went to my first one is that the main activity inside the convention is spending dozens of dollars more... on merch. You spend money to go spend more money.

I'm not broke anymore, so I don't have to pirate media, and I'm going to tell you that if you like a show you should probably watch it the legal way, so you can show marked interest without having to buy plastic trinkets. Even when piracy wasn't taken as a given, cartoons were cancelled just because they couldn't sell enough merch. Young Justice, Sym-Bionic Titan, Green Lantern, arguably Infinity Train, though that's just "didn't have a child entry point" and not explicit like the other three. Because of this, which audiences are now aware of because studios ran their mouth and made it explicit, some corporate merch is sold out of an obligation to "display interest for the show". Now, some indie studios even go as far as to release pilots for free online, and then measure interest by the amount of merch sold.

Glitch Animation, an indie studio, released a pilot for a new animated series called Knights of Guinevere directed by Dana Terrace, known for The Owl House, alongside two of her former cowriters John Bailey Owen and Zach Marcus. The short film depicts an entire planet polluted by disposable junk and the environmental effects of its production. The producer of this disposable junk is an interplanetary stand-in for Disney running a flying theme park that cares none for the ground below, chewing up exploited workers and spitting them out. It's a scathing critique of the waste and dehumanization of the entertainment industry.

Take one guess as to how it's funded.

Let me take merch to its logical conclusion for a bit. Imagine a great short film comes out with a promise for a full series given enough interest, and interest is measured by the volume of merch sold. You go to their site, and the one thing on sale is a 25-dollar plastic circular token, approximately the size of a poker chip, that says "I SUPPORT ART" on it. Do you buy the token? Do you have that plastic chip shipped from some warehouse in Malaysia to your doorstep? Do you want to see more of that show, or do you want to see the dreams of those dozen animators dashed? Do you support art?

What if we just paid for the art we wanted to see in the world directly instead of propping it up through plastic tokens? I hate articles and posts online that tell you what to buy, or what not to buy, if you want to be "ethical". I can't tell you what to do, because collectively not buying merch just means zero new indie animation and no more trinkets for the people that actually like them. I still think that if "good animation" is so expensive that it has to be propped up by corporate merch, then we need to collectively lower our standards as to what constitutes "good animation".

Let's bring it back, full circle. My friends are musicians, and they sell merch at their tables. Band tees, stickers, pins, the whole usual collection. The merch is paying the bills for them too, because local live music itself isn't particularly lucrative unless you subsist solely off tickets for free drinks, but their merch is more unique than any corporate merch because they're the ones designing it. Yes, I'm biased toward my friends. If I buy their t-shirts, it's because they're cute and funny and occasionally I need a shirt. Their merch sells itself on its own merits; they can at least pretend it's not some strange transactional gambit to make them keep playing music. I also pay the price of the ticket for entry, and they're making some fraction of that. Are they loaded? No, but it's clearly still worth it. Make art that sells itself.