Korra isn't "free" -- it's funded by advertisement, which means it requires large audiences to bring in profit just the same as if it were funded by direct sales. If anything, funding-via-advertising is less pure than the direct sales equivalent, since it's at least possible for the latter to exist outside of the control of networks/publishers (though that's obviously not true for Mass Effect =P ).
Fair enough, it is technically 'sold' to the producers I suppose. (Nickelodeon was apparently fine enough with it though to allow the series as it happened) but in terms of what the viewers can rightly expect it is free to us. It wasn't artwork that we've technically commissioned through our own wallets (as per instance, a video game)
Video games are "sold" to their publishers, too -- the only games that could be argued to be commissioned through their fans' wallets are crowdfunded games (which, ironically enough, probably have the most freedom out of anyone). The publishers are the ones who decide what they think will sell, which may or may not be the same as what will
actually sell (publishers are known to be significantly more wary of female protagonists than audiences are, for instance). From their perspective, having their investment repaid through an ad-money-per-view scheme rather than a money-per-copy-sold scheme means little except insofar as the payments themselves differ.
To be fair, outside of ASN, admitting to such powerful unqualified dislike of the ending that you'd rather it never happened is rather dangerous. =P
Exactly... which is why you haven't seen any movement to the contrary, but that only sorta indicates that the general reception as a whole isn't all that negative either.
I'm not sure it's possible to tell how much the silence reflects a lack of negative reception and how much it reflects people choosing not to put up with some really virulent harassment, though. Someone who dislikes something but isn't invested in expressing that dislike will likely react very differently depending on the dominant position -- for a Mass Effect, where hating on the ending is in vogue, they'll probably be louder about their dislike than they might otherwise have been, whereas something like LoK, where hating on the ending can mean a campaign of harassment, they'll probably find something better to do (or somewhere better to be). =P Unfortunately, it's really hard to measure those sorts of effects.
Mass Effect was rather uniquely bad, from what I heard. >_>; The dislike for LoK's ending was probably more comparable to the dislike for Harry Potter's epilogue than the complete disaster that was Mass Effect.
You wouldn't know it from some of the posts you read here, I would quite easily compare the reception to Korra's ending to the reception of Mass Effect's ending based on ASN's reaction alone... but in terms of the globe your example is more apt... though I never understood what anybody found wrong with the epilogue tbh.
I'd be glad to explain if you moved this line of conversation over to a more relevant thread.
