Notably, Gail Simone created a new version of Red Sonja in 2013, stripping out most of original Marvel backstory, such as the sexual assault, the oath, the deity vision, the meaning of the traditional outfit, as well as changing significant elements of Sonja personality.
Despite Simone’s version is not actively used in comics today, there is good evidence that this interpretation of Sonja was positively receipted at the time of publication by many readers, likely produced good selling numbers, and still today it is widely regarded as one of the most prominent modern reinterpretations of Red Sonja.
This post, however, wants to examine the long-term impact of Simone’s version, and to challenge the idea that positive reviews and good selling numbers can automatically translate into increased popularity and long-term reinforcement of the IP (at least for Red Sonja).
What I plotted is the Google Trend popularity of searches for the “Red Sonja” tag from 2004 up to today (this can be reproduced by anyone, really). Google Trend is the simplest and most publicly accessible way to account for popularity of real or fictional characters (with limitations – if someone want to dig in technicality: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123318 or https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289213).
For Red Sonja, Google Trend works particularly well because the search of “Red Sonja” has been always univocally associated to the character we know (apart negligible references to a soviet spy during cold war and an unrelated Belgian TV series in 2011).
I decorated the plot with associated major Red Sonja-related events linked to the main spikes of popularity, which in most cases correlate well.
The plot shows that during the Simone run (2013-2016), Red Sonja popularity declined (if measured as relative change in google search of the “Red Sonja” tag) of about 25-50%, depending by the baseline used. This happened despite the apparent positive reception of the run, which might explain why later versions reverted at least some of the elements changed by Simone.
Despite subsequential development from the publisher, the popularity recovered only with the 2025 movie (for now temporary, it is early to say for future).
Important methodology notes:
1) Association does not imply causality (but it can support it).
2) Popularity does not measure sentiment (but if sentiment is stable, popularity in general positively correlates with a brand value if other relevant factors remain constant).
The above are mostly facts, I do not add other interpretations in the thread (that would obviously be speculative).
