u/Successful-Ear977

Genuine what-if: how different do you think online pop culture discourse would be if GamerGate never happened?

Obviously not in the sense that toxic fandom, sexism, anti-SJW stuff, or reactionary media outrage would have magically never existed. A lot of that was clearly already there. But GG felt like one of the big moments where it all got organised, branded, and normalised as a permanent part of gaming/movie/TV discourse.

Do you think we’d still have ended up in basically the same place, with every major game, movie, show, casting choice, trailer, female protagonist, race swap, LGBTQ character, etc. getting dragged into culture war nonsense?

Or did GG genuinely accelerate the whole thing and give a lot of these people the language, networks, and grift model that still defines this space now?

I honestly don’t mind when studios announce games super far out.

At least then we know what they’re actually working on. The alternative is years of complete silence where everyone starts assuming the studio is doing nothing, mismanaged, cancelled everything, or just sitting around wasting time.

And let’s not act like fans are going to be reasonable either way. If a studio stays quiet for too long, people start whining that they’ve gone missing. If they announce early, people whine that it’s too far away. There’s basically no perfect option.

Obviously it gets annoying if they announce something and then show absolutely nothing for half a decade, but I still prefer knowing a game exists over being completely in the dark.

For big first-party studios especially, it’s helpful. These games take forever now. If a studio is going to disappear for 5–7 years between releases, I’d rather have some rough idea of what they’re building than spend years guessing based on rumours, leaks, and fan panic.

When I finished Vol 13 I was actually surprised by how much I liked it. I do get why some people might find it slow, because it’s not exactly a huge plot-moving volume, but that’s kind of what worked for me because it actually had the restraint to just let us sit in Rudy's normal life for a bit.

Seeing his day-to-day routine, his friendships, his relationship with Sylphie and Roxy, and just the general rhythm of the world around him made everything feel way more grounded. It wasn’t rushing to the next big dramatic moment and it just let the characters exist, and I really liked that. I think it’s the kind of volume that makes the world feel lived-in rather than just a backdrop for plot events.

Really hoping the anime captures that side of it properly and doesn’t cut too much, because for me this quieter stuff is a big part of why MT works so well.

I like God of War, so this isn’t me saying the franchise is bad or that SSM should abandon it completely. But at this point, I do find it disappointing how locked into one universe the studio seems to be.

People often criticise Insomniac for having so much Marvel in its pipeline, but I’m more forgiving there because Insomniac already spent decades proving it could make different IPs: Spyro, Ratchet & Clank, Resistance, Sunset Overdrive, VR projects, etc. They have a long history outside licensed superhero games, so them focusing heavily on Marvel for a while feels different and well earned.

SSM, on the other hand, has basically been the GoW studio forever. And now we have the God of War trilogy remake, God of War: Sons of Sparta, and reliable leaks pointing to Cory Barlog’s long-secret project also being tied to the God of War universe rather than being a totally new IP.

Again, I’m not saying any of those games will be bad. The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset obviously makes sense from Sony’s perspective. God of War is successful, prestigious, and safer than gambling on a completely new IP but that’s also exactly what makes it frustrating to me. At some point, “if it ain’t broke” can turn into creative stagnation. SSM is one of Sony’s most talented studios, and after this many years, I’d really like to see what they can do when they aren’t attached to the GoW brand at all.

I assume however people are mostly fine with SSM sticking to God of War as long as the quality stays high though...

Just seems all this anti-woke gaming discourse around censorship is wildly selective.

Like if a localisation changes a joke, a woman in a game is slightly less sexualised, or a studio makes a character less conventionally attractive, it becomes proof that progressives are destroying media?

To be clear these companies absolutely do make bad decisions sometimes but the point here and what these people never acknowledge for some reason is the right has a much stronger record of actually censoring media.

The Hays Code shaped Hollywood for decades. The Comics Code gutted comics. Conservative moral panics targeted D&D, violent games, sexual content, queer material, libraries, schools, and now online porn access. This is all REAL institutional censorship, backed by law, pressure campaigns, school boards, and political power. Yet culture warriors and anti-woke gamers mostly talk about censorship as if it means “progressives touched my hobby.”

I'm sure this is obvious to most here but I really don't think a lot of these people actually oppose censorship. They just oppose progressive influence. When progressives pressure media, it is tyranny but when conservatives do it, suddenly it becomes “protecting children,” “community standards,” or “fighting degeneracy.”

Gaming discourse needs to stop pretending these people are consistent free-speech defenders. Most of them only care when the pressure comes from the left. They have no clue the "enemy" they are fighting is literally on their "side" 😂

I’ve noticed that when a man says he’s happy being single, some people immediately read it as cope, failure, or pretending for some odd reason.

I get that some men are single because dating hasn’t worked out for them which is fine but I don’t think that automatically means every man who says he chose being single is lying to himself.

For men here who are genuinely content being single, do people usually accept that when you say it, or do they assume there must be some deeper reason?

And for men who are sceptical when other men say this, what makes you doubt it? Is it based on your own experience, what you’ve seen from other men, or something else?

Blocking someone should mean they disappear from my line of sight. I don’t want their comments collapsed with a little “blocked user” label. I don’t want a reminder that they are still there. That defeats the entire purpose. This current version feels pointless.

I think one BIG issue I have with a lot of harem stories is that they are better at creating romantic competition than resolving it.

To be clear I’m not saying every harem has to end as an actual harem. A one-girl ending is fine if that is the story the author wants to tell but if you build the whole story around multiple heroines being treated as serious romantic possibilities, then I think you are obligated to give them proper emotional resolution.

The Quintessential Quintuplets is the obvious example for me. I like a lot of the series, but the ending feels more interested in revealing the answer than properly sitting with the consequences of that answer. Once the choice is made, the emotional fallout for the other sisters feels rushed compared to how much time the story spent making the audience care about all of them.

These stories spend dozens of episodes building up these girls, fleshing out their feelings, their flaws, their insecurities, and their relationship with the protagonist. Then once the winner is chosen, the others often get treated like loose ends to be quickly tied off.

I don’t think that is good enough. If you are not willing to give emotional resolution and closure to all these heroines, then I honestly think you should not bother writing a harem in the first place. Otherwise, what was the point of asking the audience to invest in all of them?

So I don't think the issue is not that one girl wins (though I do prefer the multiple girl endings) but that the story gives full narrative weight to the winner and then acts like everyone else can be handled with a short scene, a time skip, or a vague “they moved on” implication. Its just not enough in my opinion.

The way people say “uncircumcised” or “uncut” as if circumcision is the default state and everything else is the variation.

I get that “uncircumcised” is the standard medical term, so I’m not pretending the word is literally incorrect. The annoying part is the social framing. A penis with its foreskin is the original, unaltered NATURAL version. Calling it “uncircumcised” makes it sound like something was supposed to happen and just didn’t.

I’d rather people just say “intact,” “natural,” or even just describe circumcised penises as circumcised and leave the default alone.

We shouldn't be treating the modified (mutilated) version as the baseline.

The most obsessive sports fans I’ve known tend to be people who don’t seem especially proud of their own lives and I know that sounds harsh, but I do think there’s something real there because a lot of sports culture is built around talking like you personally achieved something because a team you support won something. “We won the league.” “We have more trophies than you.” “We’re the best.” But you didn’t win anything. You watched other people win something, usually while sitting in a pub, on a sofa, or arguing online.

Obviously casual fandom is fine. Enjoying sport is fine. Having a team is fine. This is about the people whose entire emotional life seems to revolve around a team they don’t play for, don’t work for, and have no real connection to beyond geography, family habit, school loyalty, national identity, or branding.

For some people, sports fandom seems less like entertainment and more like a replacement identity. The team’s success becomes their success because they don’t have much else to point to. The trophies become emotional compensation. The rivalry becomes purpose. The drama becomes meaning.

And yes, this applies to non-sports fandoms too, but sport is one of the clearest examples because the language is so revealing. People genuinely say “we won” when all they did was watch.

A lot of extreme sports passion looks less like love of the sport and more like people outsourcing pride, status, and meaning to athletes because their own life doesn’t give them enough of those things...

I know this has been discussed before, but that’s kind of the problem: the correction clearly hasn’t stuck.

The “How a Turtle Accidentally Created the Perfect AI Streamer” video did a lot to introduce people to Neuro and Evil, but it also helped spread one really sloppy idea: that Neuro is “trained by Twitch chat” and therefore ethically separate from other LLMs which is just straight wrong.

But I get why people cling to it. It is a very convenient piece of misinformation for anyone who wants to keep a hard anti-AI stance while still enjoying Neuro without feeling like a hypocrite. If Neuro is framed as the cute, community-raised, ethically clean exception, then some fans do not have to confront the fact that they are still enjoying an LLM-based project with the same unresolved issues as every other chatbot.

Neuro and Evil are still LLM-based chatbots. Twitch chat may shape the persona, humour, filters, feedback, and maybe some fine-tuning, but that is not the same as training the base model from scratch on Twitch chat logs.

Unless the base model and dataset are fully disclosed, nobody should be using “trained by Twitch chat” as a moral shield. The twins are as ethical or unethical as the model, data, fine-tuning, moderation, guardrails, and tool access behind them.

The project is interesting enough without fans laundering normal LLM issues through cute community branding.

Lets be honest. Ecchi is one of those genres where half-measures rarely work. Obviously I do not mean every anime needs fanservice because plenty of shows are better without it. I mean shows that are clearly built around ecchi appeal, marketed to people who want ecchi, adapted from source material where fanservice is part of the identity, and then the anime acts weirdly nervous about actually delivering it.

At that point, who is the adaptation for?

People who hate ecchi are not going to respect the show just because it sanded down the fanservice. The premise is still fanservice-driven. Meanwhile, the audience that actually came for the ecchi feels short-changed.

That is why something like Chained Soldier season 1 disappointed a lot of people. The reward system is part of the hook, not some random side gag. If the action is not strong enough to carry the show by itself, and the ecchi is too restrained to satisfy the core audience, the whole thing ends up feeling limp.

Compare that with Gushing over Magical Girls. Whatever someone thinks of it taste-wise, the adaptation understood what it was selling. It committed to its identity instead of acting embarrassed by it, and that is probably why it landed much better with its target audience.

And that to me is the broader issue with modern ecchi and why its been in decline. The genre feels much less visible than it was in the late 2000s and 2010s, and I do not think the audience simply vanished. It feels more like production committees are stuck between two bad options: toned-down ecchi does not excite the core audience, but going all-in can create controversy, distribution problems, or reputational baggage. So instead of committing, a lot of the industry just avoids the genre.

I think that is a shame, because ecchi has a place. Trashy fiction has a place. Horny comedy has a place. Not everything needs to be prestige storytelling. But if an anime is going to exist primarily as ecchi, it should stop treating ecchi like an unfortunate stain on its own premise.

TL;DR: If a show is built around ecchi appeal, watering it down usually satisfies nobody. People who dislike ecchi still will not respect it, and the audience that came for fanservice feels short-changed. Ecchi adaptations work better when they actually commit to what they are.