u/Potential_Ease9346

It's turned into a thing where they're so angry, confused, and politically adrift that they're desperate for anything to grab onto. Any photoshopped, ai generated, out of context, or maliciously clipped video/soundbite instantly gets believed and circulated to the entire resistance because they want to believe it so bad they don't even care whether it's real or not

The worst instance I saw of this was probably the Liz Cheney 'firing squad' situation, which WAS, in all honesty, one of the single most diabolically misconstrued things I've ever seen. They made it out like Trump was saying she should be put up against the wall, when the actual context of what he was saying was nowhere even remotely close to that, and this got major mainstream publication. Every single liberal media site, comment section, new outlet, was on some genuine gaslight shit here, they literally thought he was publicly demanding her execution

This was in his peaceful dove arc when he was calling her a war hawk who should go face the guns herself if she wants to declare one so bad, because he's the biggest anti-war boy ever and he would never do anything like that. As we've all seen in practice now of course. But of course wasn't wrong about her either, it's a really common thing for people to say about politicians, especially ones named Cheney

If I was a conservative watching that, I would absolutely never shut up about fake news liberal media ever again, because that whole saga and many others like it verify everything they've ever claimed about it and then some

In no particular order

• Lack of characterization in the crew. This is the one everyone knows about, so I won't labor the point. Water 7 was goated because the interpersonal drama on the crew allowed everyone's individual personalities to shine, each and every one of them got to develop, bounce off each other, and show what they were made of in a make or break moment. Now they don't even feel like people anymore. There's no more internal conflict, personal development or storylines for individual crew members, just hype moments and aura occasionally, and incredibly tired bits like Usopp being a coward and Zoro and Sanji getting shark teeth and yelling at each other. A missed opportunity for me, as an example, would have been Sanji marrying Pudding and going from an annoying gooner to an annoying Wife Guy like Maes Hughes from FMA. He grew up, how endearing.

• Lack of interaction in the crew. What is Franky and Jinbe's relationship? Who the fuck knows. Oda's main problem is that he likes the IDEA of things, like a large main cast of crewmates AND a large side cast of tertiary characters, which creates problems in execution when he fails to balance all that, and all those characters fail to justify their inclusion in the story. He's like George Lucas, he needs a strong editor to rein in his creativity into an actual functional story, but he's gotten so famous and successful that all he gets now are yes men. The Straw Hats feel like background characters in their own story, and this grand journey they're on feels completely hollow because we don't even know who they are anymore, and the sense of camaraderie is completely hollow. The dynamic never recovered from the hard reset it got during the timeskip.

• The entire plot collapsing around the singular figure of Luffy, as every shonen eventually becomes some messiah bullshit that makes everyone else irrelevant. This shrinks the world tremendously and feels like it retroactively destroys the entire story, because the original premise was that anyone could theoretically find the One Piece if they were lucky, gutsy, fearless and capable enough. Turns out you not only have to be someone chosen by fate to have conqueror's haki- which was actually salvageable, if anyone theoretically COULD awaken it but only a vanishingly small minority of strivers realistically ever would- no, you have to be this one specific destiny child who was chosen by an ancient god fruit to fulfill an ancient prophecy. I have a feeling Buggy is going to subvert this, but that won't be anything more than a meme.

• The World Government collapsing around the singular figure of Imu, where before it was a faceless, decentralized, global bureaucracy of morally grey characters where the evil and agency came from institutional obligations instead of the individual mustache twirling designs of one Great Man of History. There's still time to do something interesting here I suppose, but Oda has been moving away from what made the WG and Marines so interesting for a long time. That is, that they're an institutional enemy, not one that you can punch. Turning them into literal demons feels so on the nose that it breaks it for me, this whole part of the story was much more interesting when it was made up mostly of well-meaning or simply corrupt agents of a broken system. The Admirals were incredibly interesting characters for that reason, they never seemed cartoonishly evil, they were different types of cops who had compromised their own morals to different extents in different ways in order to square their position in this system.

• The power-creep going too far and making too many people irrelevant. Haki did have a place in the story, but it was taken too far to the point where devil fruits feel like they barely even matter anymore. Now everyone everywhere else in the world is just a meaningless nobody. These last three points specifically hurt, because this was something that One Piece used to be unparalleled at, giving you a sense that this really is a huge world where interesting and important things are happening all over the place.

Leaf blowers are usually used to perform a generally unnecessary task, clearing fallen leaves from your big stupid American driveway, which can be perfectly well accomplished with two of the first tools humans ever invented, brooms and rakes. But those don't make any noise, don't bother the shit out of everyone in a half mile radius, don't smell awful because they're not gas powered, and they require you to invest the most miniscule amount of physical effort, so Americans naturally require something better.

With our new invention, you can be a lazy asshole shirking any amount of physical toil, you never have to touch those low-tech WOODEN peasant sticks, and you can boorishly spit in the face of public decency by waking up every neighbor you have at 7am blowing all the unwanted detritus of nature into black plastic bags that you throw in the garbage for some reason

Cultural norms are downstream from ruling class status-seeking behaviors. The values of the ruling class are reproduced by people in the lower classes aspirationally copying them to seek status themselves amongst their own peers. Good things are literally called 'classy' and bad things are 'classless'. Bourgeois culture, particularly in America where it's the strongest, base their norms on far more anti-social behaviors than the social contracts that existed before capitalism. The absolute root of bourgeois cultural incentives is LITERALLY anti-social, as in breaking down, abusing, exploiting, taking advantage of, and ripping off society to get ahead in your own individual business pursuits, the people who are most rewarded within this system are the people who can do that most successfully and with the least scruples. This is why Trump is literally the perfect American president.

That's where you get this phenomenon of upper middle class suburban shit-kickers, there's an aspirational incentive to take up space (quite literally, when it comes to their 'trucks'), disrespect your peers and surroundings, and be shamelessly transgressive of the limitations of communal existence. Because those things are not obligations that you have to respect and pay deference to, as in the case of feudal noblesse oblige, they're obstacles that you have to trample and step over in order to get ahead in a system of individual winners and losers. Obligations to other people are an albatross around your neck, that sort of moral anchor will prevent you from making the decisions necessary to succeed in business. Everyone who is in that game recognizes this, so in order to rationalize it to themselves and each other, they turn anti-social transgressions into virtues. Never acknowledge, accept, or respect limitations on yourself. Be your own man. Do what you want regardless of the signals you're getting from society telling you to stop.

Again, Trump is not only the perfect representation of all of this, this is the REASON he's president. He's the final, inevitable expression of this. This slice of American culture is all a big pathological circlejerk for status seeking climbers to rationalize the inherently anti-social nature of the system they're climbing. Trump being president is the ultimate permission for this, it's the ultimate sign that doing things like using a leaf blower to wake up all your neighbors blasting your heated driveway so your monster truck can leave your mcmansion to take up 4 parking spots at the bar at 2pm is not just okay, it's cool and good and makes you a cool guy.

I'm not talking about all the Indian subreddits they keep making, like idk why they need teen_india, realteen_india, indian_teen, teenindia_cars AND indianteenagers, but this is a separate thing

Like there is no way a subreddit full of people is going to somehow materialize to discuss some nebulous bullshit like 'coherence physics' posting generic ai politics slop organically

Other religious narratives have larger than life allegorical figures like the Pandavas, the Homeric heroes, or ill-fated kings of God's chosen people like Solomon, Saul, and David

Christianity has this random Roman backwater bureaucrat that gets preserved forever in an incredibly dramatic and world-reshaping religious earthquake. Just an otherwise completely inconsequential, historically meaningless imperial salary man who was probably rubbing his eyes the entire time he was dealing with these weird Jewish hippies. The son of God himself being persecuted in this massively important cosmological miracle by the governor of Rhode Island.

This isn't happening right now for the record. I couldn't pull because they had a strong veno that was dominating the jungle and I would get dumpstered if I went anywhere near him myself.

'I'm very progressive'

Of course there are evil individuals INSIDE the institutions, but they're carrying out the larger will of that institution, think Rob Lucci. That's where the systematic problems that the heroes end up opposing comes from- not a big bad moustache twirling evil guy who simply chooses evil for no particular reason like Muzan or whatever. The World Government was an overgrown institution that was led into evil actions due to the internal logic of it's own system. The inherited privilege of a decadent class of aristocratic parasite failsons that were too entrenched to be dislodged, an overgrown military that acted as a hammer seeing every problem as a nail, an overly centralized state bureaucracy ballooning out of control as it fails to curtail problems that it itself was creating.

That works so well, not just because that's how it works in real life, but because everyone thinks they're doing the right thing and you can see where they're coming from. Akainu makes perfect sense. So does Garp. Sengoku. Lucci. Not sympathetic, but guys like this absolutely exist in real life, they see a greater good and slowly compromise their values and brainwash themselves to continue pursuing it. EXCEPT the evil shitbag pirates, but the real genius of One Piece was that our character is on team shitbag pirate. Not that there is a team pirate of course, that's what defines someone as a pirate, there is no institutional obligation behind their actions. Until you get into New World politics, but that's another excellent piece of world building, the stronger the pirate crew gets, the more they just basically turn into another government. I've always loved the theory that the 20 WG families were actually 20 pirate crews. It's just pirates all the way down, state power, legal morality, and authority are all arbitrary contrivances built around a monopoly on violence, power is the only thing that really matters, there are no cops, only robbers of varying levels of success, fantastic theme.

Unless Oda is planning to use Imu as a subversion of this character archetype of the scheming puppetmaster villain controlling the events and institutions of the story from the background the whole time, that's 20 years of excellent worldbuilding down the drain with the addition of a single character

The Frenzied Flame is one of the absolute coolest and by far the most misunderstood thing about this game, and I think it's a huge shame that most people look at it and just see 'everything die lol'

Monism is an idea that ranges from Spinoza to Hinduism and beyond. Saffron flames, saffron robes, they even put Midra IN the robes. tl;dr, everything in the universe is made up of the same thing. Constituted by one universal substance or essence, which is God.

Outer Gods are an extrapolation of the concept of divinity to even higher universal forces. One way to interpret deities are as forces of nature like the sun, love, the sea, to something more abstract like fate and the cultural reproduction of violence, turned into guys that are fucking around with our lives personally. From Amaterasu to Odin, this is how we tend to conceive of divine beings. Because it makes it easier for us to culturally contextualize these forces that we can't explain in more mundane terms. Additionally, as Miyazaki is a Japanese guy fond of Shinto-Buddhist themes, animism is an easy leap to make from this. Stars, rocks, etc are all alive in Elden Ring, Astel is literally a star for instance. One of the most important elements of Elden Ring lore and cosmology in my opinion.

>...glintsone contains residual life, and thus the vitality of the stars... glintstone sorcery is the study of the stars, and the life therein -Sellen

> We study the stars, and examine the life therein -Count Ymir

The Frenzied Flame is the animistic deity of Chaos, and the Greater Will is the animistic deity of Order. Incomprehensible cosmic beings that want to reproduce themselves in the universe but have to do so by taking ground from the other because they're diametric opposites. FF is the part of the universe that wants to turn everything back into tv static, and GW is the part of the universe that wants to carve everything up into distinctly divided categories that define themselves by not being something else. Hence why chimeric beings like Misbegotten and Omen are to be slaughtered on sight, their mere existence is a transgression because they're humans, and yet they have horns, wings, and tails, which are things that humans by definition do not have. The Golden Order is the material, worldly expression of this, a genocidal, hierarchical, theocratic supremacist nightmare that keeps defining narrower categories that leave more people out to be pogromed.

Dark Souls was entropy contextualized through the lens of like, ancient Greek style PIE paganism, and this feels like runoff from his thoughts from making Dark Souls. Frenzied Flame is entropy, Greater Will is disparity.

'Madness' is the moment of ego death, framed as a dark sort of Buddhist enlightenment (Miyazaki is a very syncretistic worldbuilder) as your mind is overwhelmed by chaos and you suddenly have some maddening realization brought on by being forcibly exposed to it. This could be multiple things, and I think it's all of them: Chaos is inevitable, as the Frenzied Flame will eventually win due to entropy and everything that exists as you know it will inevitably end. You might as well get it over with and just do it now. Actually, there is no 'you' to begin with, because the One Great is still the only substance of which the entire universe is made, you are it and it is you, and all these 'distinctions and divisions' are completely arbitrary contrivances that don't really exist on their own terms, that is as separate phenomena. That's WHY the universe is animistic, everything is possessed by the eternal spirit of our father, the ball of sentient space gas, the One Great.

"Tranquility follows in it's wake", as the Frenzied Flame Pot description says, because after the initial pain and shock of losing your sense of self once you've succumbed to madness, you realize it's actually not all that bad. In fact, floating around as a giant ball of yellow smoke experiencing itself once the flame burns everything away, re-unifying your splintered consciousness with the mind of God, sounds kind of chill, tranquil even. Certainly more than being chained up and tortured in a dungeon or buried alive in a subterranean tomb in the sewers. How are you possibly supposed to reconcile yourself with the people who did that to you?

> All that there is came from the One Great. Then came fractures, and births, and souls. But the Greater Will made a mistake. Torment, despair, affliction... every sin, every curse. Every one, born of the mistake. And so, what was borrowed must be returned. Melt it all away, with the yellow chaos flame. Until all is One again. -Hyetta

> Long ago, we began as stardust. Born of a great rupture far across the skies. We too, are children of the Greater Will

And, to do as the Greater Will has done and violently carve the world up into strictly defined boxes and binaries- distinctions and divisions- causes tremendous pain when we could all otherwise be the One Great, the true, original, and inevitable form of all matter in the universe. It's a matter of perspective still, but not one that you can really judge until you've had the same experience of ego death, and if you're a 'truly downtrodden' whose life has been nothing but pain, humiliation, austerity, and persecution, it would be objectively better and that's not nihilistic. If you think it is, I really think you fundamentally failed to understand what Miyazaki was cooking here.

I really want to stress that when I say 'woke crusader', I do NOT mean someone who believes in and fights for something like trans rights. I mean someone who is annoying about it, and comes to unhelpful conclusions about how to affect change, like trying impotently to yell at and browbeat the culture in a way that has the opposite effect because, as any good leftist (these are usually liberals, after all) should know, you can't actually affect the deep, deep structures of ideology by doing that. You have change material conditions, inputs and outputs, and THEN follow up by giving people a more progressive alternative to reactionary narratives they won't be so tempted by anymore. Like reducing the most visible and upsetting impacts of poverty, homelessness, drugs, crime, will give people less reason and incentive to turn to reactionary narratives like 'immigrants are coming into your communities to do crime and sell drugs'. The homeless will be homed, the immigrants will have a pathway to citizenship that integrates them into society and will be less high-strung themselves, there will be less incentive for everyone to turn to crime, and there will be less despair to feed addiction. None of that involves being an annoying wokescold about privilege.

The second part of my take is that being an obnoxious reactionary culture warrior is ALSO offputting to the general public, as Felix Biederman said, if you're a terminally online RWNJ and you try to scaremonger normal people about litterboxes in school bathrooms, they will look at YOU as the weird one. "Why are you showing me this?" I think most of us know that though.

There's a third layer here which is that, even if you're not a wokescold radlib, and you think you are normal and separated from toxic social media sewers, you can still succumb to the siren song of the culture war and become a radioactively annoying weirdo just by taking it more seriously than it deserves to be. Which is a pitfall here because Hasan's job has him frequently covering people like Asmongold, who you should under no circumstances in your entire life bring up in conversation offline, I am begging you. Normal people, non-voters, the terminally offline don't want to hear about any of this shit. Please do not associate socialism with any kind of weird internet narratives or conflicts whatsoever. At a certain point, if you take gamer chuds, ragebaiters and engagement farmers on twitter, and/or professional reactionary gadflies seriously, you become the annoying one for the same reason. Why are you showing me this? Why does any of this actually matter?

It goes back to one of my own personal central theories of the moment which is that orienting your entire politics around what your opponent is doing or saying is a fatal error that only puts you in the same drain that everyone else is circling in. You don't have to correct the record or counter the misinformation. Just keep your eye on the ball and be normal, which means not treating guys on twitter photoshopping Witcher Ciri to be 'hotter' as the central issue of our time.

I want to have an open and frank discussion about this because to be honest, from where I stand it feels like a loser of an issue mainly because it's functionally redundant under a socialist program.

It generates reaction, not just from the usual suspects who we shouldn't be trying to win over anyway, but from poor people of other groups who ALSO need help, and feel alienated by the idea that they're not getting it because someone else is being given special treatment. We can't be cowed by reaction, but we also should be aware that it's an inevitability that can be minimized to our benefit, and this is a good example because I don't really see an upside when the most practical plan for instituting reparations is just... socialist policy, which is an ACTUAL rising tide lifting all boats

Universal healthcare, childcare, community college, public transit, and affordable housing would obviously be a transformational change in the lives of millions of poor Americans, without needing to specifically microtarget any one demographic- but, it would automatically have the effect of disproportionately uplifting black and brown Americans who are disproportionately represented amongst the lower ranks of the working class. The reparations are built into the program we're already working towards.

My only questions then are,

1. What is the point of picking this fight? Reparations feel like a liberal thing, because they don't have a socialist program and are beholden to the market economics reproducing racial inequality, but they recognize the issue of it so they have to come up with a solution within the bounds of liberal capitalist politics. The only solution they can even think of then, without the benefit of a larger, more inclusive plan to enrich and enfranchise the poor working class in it's entirety, is to inelegantly brute force it by suggesting we somehow subsidize black America specifically.

2. What are some more concrete plans that I'm missing? Is there a specifically leftist anticapitalist plan for reparations that I didn't catch wind of? I'm not talking about an argument, or a moral position, I mean a PLAN, something better than liberal bs like subsidizing black-owned businesses or HBCUs, which mostly just has the effect of funneling money towards middle class black Americans who need the help the least.

Some of you are already feeling it. Leftist culture is increasingly finding a more genuinely spiritual footing than any other political coalition in this sort of materialist, Spinozan post-theist pantheism. We've gone far beyond the question of whether God exists or not. That's a boring question because the answer is both yes and no in equal measures, any further argument you can come up with on the subject does no service to the philosophical project of religious ontology and drags us backwards into stagnant discourses that are incapable of producing satisfying answers because they're so fixated on a meaningless and superficial question.

Where I personally disagree with Spinoza is that I do believe in teleology, not as a matter of logic or reason because that part of my brain does understand them to be false, but as a matter of faith for the same reason I consider China to be communist- because it doesn't matter one way or the other what I personally believe, and having faith in something makes me happier. And anti teleology people often take it too far and get really obnoxious about it to the point where it feels like they're arguing that anyone who expects future events to transpire at all is indulging in a 'teleology'. Yes, there will be a future left wing revolutionary rebirth for our species that redeems everything bad that we've ever done and that's ever happened to us, it will complete the circle and return us to a Gattungswesenized post-scarcity primitive communist equilibrium with God, nature, and each other. Because those are all the same thing. No, it won't happen all at once, just like capitalism took hundreds of years to Ship of Theseus itself into world domination one plank at a time, something similar will probably happen with socialism, a generational project slowly assembling itself on top of the rotting wood of a crumbling capitalism, and different people in different parts of the world will encounter the process at different stages and form different relationships with it.

The reason I believe so firmly that a communist horizon is inevitable because it's the only possible way for humanity to continue existing, which means it's the only possible way for events to continue transpiring. Which we have to take as a given, because it's the only reason we do anything, and 'humans be doing things' is the fundamental core of Marxism. It's an undeniable reality that capitalism is an inherently unstable system riddled with irresolvable contradictions that, according to the fundamental laws of the universe, must succumb to entropy and eventually even out. Or, we could somehow get thrown backwards and go back to post-apocalyptic agrarian feudalism, but that only kicks the can down the road and sooner or later we'll just be back here again. Class is the destabilizing catalyst, that's the ingredient that must be removed to stabilize human civilization into something permanently stable, and that, by definition, is and results in communism. If we all get evaporated by a meteor or global climate apocalypse, it's the same thing, eventually another intelligent species is going to evolve out of the ashes and we'll be right back here in another billion years having the same discussion.

Marxism will usher in a religious revolution, naturally, as it will revolutionize every aspect of society the same way Capitalism did. The only difference, as is usually the case, is that this time around the revolutionary carousel, we're aware of it BEFORE it happens. Capitalism was a purely autonomic process where even the people building it had no idea what they were actually doing, it was all just conditions unfolding, reading Education of Henry Adams you see that the most powerful men in revolutionary America were openly beefing with banks as if that sector of society wasn't the central beneficiary of their entire project. Religions will continue to exist but will have to adapt to new circumstances and conditions, and that's exactly what Spinoza was all about. He will be our posthumous Martin Luther, because his or at least something LIKE his ideas on God are the only way to square the religious instinct with the scientific realities of a disenchanted sci-fi world. He was the last prophet.

Much like culture, the economy, and every other aspect of civilization, the Great Awakening will be a leftist event because the left is the only 'team' in the entire political arena that is able to imagine a future. Religion will continue to erode in it's current state as it drifts further and further from the conditions that originally created and sustained it, it will become a more and more obsolete, vestigial relic of a world that stopped existing hundreds of years ago. And yet people will still, as they always have, yearn for the spiritual enrichment, comfort, and heuristic ability to reconcile themselves to Chaos that religion provides. The right wing reactionary religious instinct is a lot like Dark Souls-reheating the same leftovers over and over and over again, feeding the ashes and burnt kindling from the last fire into the kiln to desperately try to keep it lit, but every time you stoke the thing it loses a little more juice. They'll continue going through the motions, but everyone will on some level understand that this is a hollow performance of something that lost it's meaning a long time ago. And it's all been captured by despotic sycophants of the old dying order who turn it into a propaganda mill for their own interests, twisting and corrupting it away from any profound spiritual meaning it ever had in the first place.

It'll be the left that transcends, redeems, and fixes this, for the same reason that's true in every other case. That's the only direction things can possibly go in.

But has to get put forward as one by both liberals and conservatives who don't have class conscious politics and have to come up with different battle lines to draw. Which almost always end up being cultural, particularly because after decades of red scare propaganda, it's the only thing we know how to argue about

The problem with cultural politics is that you can't legislate or litigate them. You can't pass the 'be nice to black people and women' act, you can't force people to think a certain way, you can only nudge them slowly in the right direction by changing the material inputs and outputs of society, relieving stress and pressure on the great mass of society to the point where they're able to let their guard down and not feel a sense of directionless angst that needs to be blamed on someone. Which leads to this downward spiralling blame game that only makes things worse and more unpleasant, more necessity for blame. All because the actual root of the problem is going unaddressed, and just as importantly, undiscussed. Leftists are significantly less neurotic than liberals about this, because we can be serious and materialistic about problems and their solutions and not uselessly beat our heads against the culture wall over and over and over again without realizing that it's not doing anything. Patriarchy isn't going to be dismantled by telling enough men to 'do better', that's just going to trigger some deep-seated insecurities they got from life as an alienated capitalist slop hog and make them resent you even more, they feel powerless and miserable, they don't feel like they can 'do' anything and you're sure not fucking helping. We do live in a patriarchal society, but it was nobody's idea and nobody is actively, explicitly upholding it, we've just inherited thousands of years of the built up consequences of class society, and the only way to resolve that problem is to start taking down... class society

A question that may naturally arise out of talking about this, is 'why are you using this position to critique women/feminists and not men?' well, because the only meaningful political struggle that does exist is the one between left and right, again not to dismiss whichever other struggle you think matters, just that the left/right struggle is the only vehicle where any of this gets moved anywhere on large scale- i.e. advances in the women's movement have been accompanied and precipitated at every step by economic development and changing labor relations, and the most successful and important anti-racist institutions in America are labor unions.

I am a leftist, feminists by default fall onto the left wing of the spectrum, radicalized chuds who get really into Andrew Tate and turn their insecurities into evil are by definition on the right. They're not on my team, I'm not responsible for them or what they say, do, or believe, because I think the right needs to be completely smashed and scattered as a political coalition until they have no power whatsoever, and 'men' are not a coherent class of people in any remote capacity. It's the same reason Palestine protestors only ever yelled at Democrats- What would the point be of lobbying Zionist republicans for Palestine? As a leftist, I take more issue with toxic radlib feminists because they're ostensibly on my team. And I want them to stop fumbling this bag for us, as a young man myself I know from personal experience that the messages young men get from 'the culture' DO deeply alienate and aggrieve them, AND that they ARE fully capable of embracing difficult conversations and left wing ideas if you're not such a fucking dickhead about it. Don't hit them with right wing personal responsibility arguments, victim blaming them for their own problems, don't approach them, their concerns, or their issues any differently than you're approach a mixed race non-binary pansexual hijabi amputee, don't tolerate or engage in hurtful language that you wouldn't tolerate or engage in with anyone else, and they will be happy to have these conversations. It's so fucking easy.

Left and Right have different win conditions, different strategies, different things they have to do in order to accomplish their goals. Leftists have to do better. They have to be more responsible, more thoughtful, more careful, more attentive and responsive to people's problems and needs, and less inclined to needlessly alienate. This means feminists have to be all of those things a lot more than 'manosphere' chuds do, because the whole point of the right is to be a pathological transgressive asshole. That is not something to envy, something to draw a false equivalence to, or something to 'whatabout' about, because it's a dead end, pure reactionary lashing out, the only reason that is their method of political expression is because they have no vision, goals, or project, just meaningless nihilistic bitterness. The fact that the left has a higher standard should be a point of pride, we have to uphold that standard because we're the only ones who can actually positively affect change.

I've been looking forward to this server for the many years it's been in development, but after getting access to the beta, I have to say it seems like it's gone in a direction I don't like. The first thing that immediately jumps out is the use of gen AI for icons and art, which is more than enough on it's own to immediately put me off from ever playing it if it's final. Not even as some kind of principled stand against AI, more just that it looks like absolute dogshit that does not fit or represent the Warcraft vibe at all. One of the charms of the early era of WoW is the hand drawn comic book style skill icons that often get shuffled around and re-used, and the charm of it's unique semi-toony art style that you see in talent backgrounds and loading screens. The uncanny valley high res slop look of these clearly AI generated images sticks out like a sore thumb and makes the end product look like low rent amateur hour garbage.

Secondly, I'm not an Ascension player, so my outside looking in diagnosis is that there's a boiling frog effect going on here. Those who have played Ascension for years may have become slowly acclimated to the level of gaudy mobile game dogshit that has inundated the entire experience to the point where they don't realize how offputting it is or how much it harms the experience anymore. The AI stuff is really part of a larger problem I have with the overall experience, which is that it feels like an incredible cool project served on a plate of slop. Like taking a prime rib and soaking it in a packet of powdered gravy you buy for a dollar at a gas station. I'm not sure what can really be done to salvage this short of totally removing it from the Ascension model, but I don't know what else to say, I can't play this shit and I'm a little bummed that my expectations resulted in this

Lastly, and this is where I'm least confident because I haven't gotten far enough to truly say, I feel like there's been some homogenization of all the classes. Everyone has a buff, everyone interacts with the game in the same general way, everyone is designed around 'rotations' and button pressing, every weakness is covered and every strength is smoothed down. The reason Classic has such a hold on people is due in large part to the truly different experience that each class brings to the table, if you're a Rogue, you are playing a fundamentally different game than a Mage. You have the ridiculously powerful game defining skill that is stealth, which turns WoW almost into another genre, but you also have the glaring weakness of basically only being able to fight single targets with almost no AoE, and you're a selfish class that has no group support or buffs.

Maybe it's my expectations that were wrong this entire time, but as the game stands right now, it's just not for me and I'm disappointed that it went in this direction, because I won't be able to play this for any length of time once it finally releases in six years

EDIT: I forgot to add to this complaint fest that I just don't like the way the classes are designed. There's too much 'press button to instantly do damage' abilities, leaving every class feeling like a piano spec that tries to entertain you by constantly giving you a button. Resources like cooldown and energy exist for a reason, to prevent you from being able to just mash your fingers against the keyboard, which this game seemingly WANTS you to do. To glaze Vanilla a little more, you almost never see instant cast, no cooldown, direct damage abilities for very good reason. It can lead to something like Paladin which gets criticized for being an auto-attack simulator, but I prefer that to the design philosophy of CoA because it feels a lot more reserved and interesting