Ok, this gonna sound polemic and I’m gonna try to not use any adjectives. (Except for once)
The thing is that sometimes I feel like many stories try to appeal to a broad audience, but regardless of what they aim for, a lot of the time the audience ends up being (I’ll allow myself this just once) men rather than women. I’m not sure if this happens with the animated series of Avatar, but I do notice that with Star Trek, even though they try to make everyone feel represented, the reality is that the average viewer is, well, just that—the average person in the country where it’s broadcast.
In the case of Avatar, it’s criticized by some Japanese people because they associate it more with China, to the point that they label it as almost racist when it’s compared to Japanese animation (anime). What I mean is that no matter how much a series tries to appeal to a general audience or to please everyone, that’s never really going to happen; it will always end up having a group with shared characteristics that likes it.
But what do you think? Can there be stories that anyone—regardless of gender, ethnicity, or country—can enjoy? I think the closest thing to that is Harry Potter, and well, you know what the creator is like, but that’s not the point here.
It’s hard to explain, but this is more aimed at writers or any other creative producer: do you write with a specific audience in mind, or do you think that everyone will like what you create?
Ghibli might be a more interesting case study - Miyazaki repeatedly said that he did not write his stories with an audience in mind besides himself, but his movies quite clearly have universal appeal. His stories are quite clearly grounded in his own culture, but they touch on universal human experiences.
However, there are definitely stories with a specific audience in mind that do not have universal appeal (e.g., Transformers smut fanfic) though generally authors are aware of this.
I think there are also folks who write stories with an idea in mind of universal appeal, but do not understand themselves enough to actually do so - things they take for granted as “common sense” may not actually be human universals. Or, because they fail to say anything at all in their work, it ends up fading into the background. (I don’t believe in sociopolitically “neutral” works, we are all shaped by our beliefs and cultures).
These works aren’t necessarily bad, either- I think Andy Weir has said a few times in interviews that his works aren’t meant to be “political”, but the two that I’ve read (The Martian, Project Hail Mary) are both a sort of “sci fi optimism” about people from different nations coming together to solve a problem. That may be “common sense” to some people, but it is certainly NOT a universal (even if I do share the outlook that people of Earth should work together to help each other regardless of national boundaries).
From Studio Ghibli, the ones I know are mostly women—it doesn’t quite reach a fifty-fifty split, at least from my biased point of view.
Maybe that sci-fi optimism is different from other political way of thinking, right?