And of course every car there is a suburban assault vehicle too.

The best part was that it was always just the fact we were all terminally online and saw the same frontpage threads as everyone else. It was (almost) never an actual brigade, just the result of having a bunch of very active posters with better politics than the average redditor. That’s all it took to make the worst people on reddit over being unable to consistently silence people with better opinions than their own.

Hot take: any sort of competitive pokemon tournament should require completely fabricated pokemon built in save editors under certain restrictions (like they get however many perfect IVs, and a static distribution to do the others in). The idea that it should be both pay2win and based on grinding perfect stats is absurd. Let everyone throw together whatever optimized team comp they please within whatever restrictions the tournament wants, regardless of monetary or time investment.

It’s ok. The earlier half of the season was better, I think, because Haruka and Michiro are more interesting characters when they’re being people instead of standoffish edgelords without a fraction of the conviction they claim to have, and they get worse about doing that after the season’s turning point. The fact that the story’s being driven along by poor communication on all sides is also more frustrating than anything and brings the story down a bit - the back and forth between Haruka’s “grr I’m so edgy and brooding, no one has my strength of conviction! I would sacrifice anyone and anything to save the world!” and Usagi’s “Noooo that’s bad actually!” just feels kind of hollow in the context of the main characters all literally dying in the first season and Usagi in particular having sacrificed her life no less than three times already by that point (well, I think she actually only died twice and the other time she just nearly died, but still). Chibiusa is also just an extremely grating character, though Usagi’s character growth in starting to actually act like her mother is sweet and the one redeeming part of her inclusion in the story.

I have not gotten back to it yet, I’m still working my way through Sailor Moon and nearly through the third season.

I think there’s generally three fuzzy categories problematic content can fall into in mainstream works: presents [bad thing] and condemns it, clearly establishing that it’s bad; presents [bad thing] and shows that it’s harmful but takes no overt stance, leaving the audience to infer for themselves that it’s bad; and presents [bad thing] and really revels in how the spectacle of it being awful in a crass and gratuitous way.

Made in Abyss is a fourth category altogether: presents [the worst shit you’ll ever see] and revels in it, and narratively treats it as normal and ok. It transcends the whole “showing things are bad vs making a crass spectacle” spectrum by becoming a de facto endorsement of what it’s showing off.

Fuck, I really need to find something to take my mind of this and hope the brain poisoning from engaging with it wears off soon.

I compulsively consume problematic slop, and was even worse about it a decade ago when I was in the process of rebuilding my schema from the ground up after dismantling twenty years of calcified repression brainworms, which is around when I read part of the then-incomplete FOE:PH specifically because of its reputation. Made in Abyss has to be the only thing that’s actually made me sick to watch, however. I can’t emphasize enough how even the people who condemn it undersell just how vile it is; it’s in a league of awful all of its own. Like I feel even my “Made in Abyss is the worst thing anyone has ever made” rant is too soft, because I couldn’t stomach really dredging up the specifics.

It predates it, but it is similar in tone and grotesqueness. Although thinking about the full depth of the problems with Made in Abyss that I covered exhaustively in a post last night, FOE:PH isn’t as bad. It’s a gratuitous, edgy spectacle that handles problematic themes poorly, but it’s merely making an exploitative spectacle of them while Made in Abyss is even worse. AFAIK most of the characters in Project Horizons are adults though, though I think there’s some nonce stuff in there too.

The most infamous of those is the one I mentioned, Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons, but the original Fallout Equestria was also pretty bad just much, much more tame than FOE:PH was.

Love that politics is just two ultranationalist parties sobbing and breathlessly accusing the other party of being insufficiently nationalist.

Remember that a big chunk of the historical fandom was weirdo fascist edgelords who wanted to fuck the ponies and wrote horny violent fanfics about them. One of the longest fanfics about anything (FOE:PH) is basically “Made in Abyss but it’s ponies and set in a post apocalyptic wasteland.”

I’ll always have a soft spot for it because it was a cute and happy show that I watched during a very dark and isolating time in my life, but goddamn if it doesn’t have just the absolute worst fucking values in retrospect. It’s not the worst thing liberals have made, certainly, but it is exactly what you said: just peak liberal fantasy where monarchism is fine as long as it’s nice and a horribly inequitable society is charming and happy so everything’s fine.

No, it’s literally just a call to stop the active conflict. That happens by letting the settlers keep all the land but giving the buffalo a stipend of food. Like it’s so absurdly egregious that there’s no soft reading of it in context.

It also establishes the situation with the land use as a dichotomy between the settlers making productive use of the land vs the buffalo just leaving it barren and stomping around in it for fun. It does basically everything wrong, right up to its conclusion being that the buffalo stop resisting and just accept that the land isn’t theirs anymore, but they get a little bit of food thanks to the “productive” use of their land by settlers. It is basically a manifest destiny storybook narrative.

Fuck I had that exact same thought when I saw this. I had to go look it up: Biomutant is the latter one, while the former one is “Mutant Year Zero.”