People who are easily offended tend to be very easy to piss off, whether independently minded women or Alfred the mechanic. Gender has very little to play in ones ability to be offended at something. In my experiences some people look to be offended just so they can put on the show, laughably sad but unfortunately true. I don't think these decks are going to actually piss anyone off, I could be wrong and someone may be having a melt down because they called the campaign Foil Femme. I also find it very odd that they went with Foil Femme by the way, it's just weird as hell haha. In all seriousness though, it doesn't matter what they call the campaign. People are either going to back or not.
I've seen some chatter about not wanting to back because they're not different enough from their previous foil back campaign, just a recolor. This is something I find far more interesting than what the named their campaign. Everyone has their reasons for not supporting this or that, sure. One reason is just as good as any other, but this one just blows my mind.
How many collections have expensive bike recolors in them that aren't foil backed at all? There's so many it's pretty much impossible to count. Going with what could be considered small ball in comparison, how many collections have expensive recolors of Tally-Ho's? They're not as popular as bikes still, loads of collections have them. Not many of these two decks which come in a plethora of colors see a foil back treatment. I find it very curious where this double standard comes from and why it persists.
We all get that some people simply seek to be offended. However, in an age where terms like waitress, stewardess and actress are going the way of the dodo bird, calling a color selection "femme" would be seen by many as a swipe at gender equality.
It's very understandable that some people find a simple recoloring to be a boring release, not worth much time or attention. Yes, many collections ended up with umpteen different colors of Bicycle Rider Backs in them - and a fairly large percentage of collectors learned from that and stopped buying them. Furthermore, I'd differ with the opinions that the recolors are "expensive" - they're more than off-the-shelf Bikes from Walgreens or Walmart (or off-the-shelf Tally Ho decks from wherever you can find them outside of New York City), but they're also cheaper than most custom decks sold today on Kickstarter, not including shipping.
People flocked to them initially because in both cases, you're talking about a major name brand that's been on the market for well over a century and, in both cases, they were among the first custom versions of those decks available in this century, period. To this day there aren't more than a handful of different Tally Ho decks out there, and most are recolors of existing off-the-shelf Circle Backs or Fan Backs. Bicycle is a different story, but look at the earliest Ellusionist decks from the middle aughts (that's the decade of the '00s in a given century, for those not familiar with the word in this context) - recolored versions of Bicycle Rider Backs or Tally Ho's two backs, resulting in the Black Tiger, Master, Ghost/Black Ghost and Viper lines of playing cards.
In this instance, though, we're talking about a company that's been around a handful of years at best, a product line that's not quite a year or two old, and already they're putting people to sleep with new colors instead of new designs. While there's a certain amount of demand for color variety, it's also the laziest way to "innovate" in your product line - take an existing, successful design, open it in Illustrator, fiddle with a few color sliders and voilĂ , you have a "new" design, done in less time than the typical smoke break. It's not even necessary to fiddle with the faces - the backs alone will be fine, making it even simpler still. Give it a cheesy name to attempt to set it apart from what came before, and this is the end result.
Think of that as nothing more than a double standard if you want, but there's far more to it than such an oversimplification. A release of a new color shouldn't be met with retitling and fanfare - it should be a simple, quiet product announcement alongside whatever real innovations a company happens to be producing. Shouting to the world about it like it's a big deal is overhyping it, and these days, people have more keenly tuned bullshit detectors for this sort of thing.
Why do you think Theory11 no longer trumpets brands weeks before release, clubbing people over the heads constantly with blurry, "sneak preview" images? Because when the Monarchs were initially released and ended up being a lot less spectacular than people initially thought they'd be, they had a lot of egg on their faces. They turned out to be a good deck, but they hype led people to believe it was the Second Coming of decks - no product can live up to that much hype. Now, they release their products a lot more quietly and, oddly enough, seem to be getting more positive attention for them because for the most part, it's all quality - more steak, less sizzle.
A FORTY-FIVE-DAY Kickstarter project for something that's nothing more than new colors on an existing design is as exciting as watching water evaporate - and that's exactly what this project is. If anything, the trend is for SHORTER projects these days, to capture more attention initially and keep up momentum to the end rather than watching them languish through the middle weeks with hardly any dollars coming in. Not one of those Tally-Ho recolor jobs you mentioned had a Kickstarter project a month-and-a-half long - they had a brief ad campaign around the time they hit retail and that was it, no begging people for backing. MPC isn't a poor, impoverished artist - they should have simply released the new color on their website and moved on to something NEW for Kickstarter. Kickstarter at its core is about innovation, and brother, this ain't it.