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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • So I’ve noticed that there are a lot of streaming movies and TV shows that match a lot of these patterns:

    • IP is announced. Adaptation of extremely popular series with existing fanbase
    • IP is billed as “adult” with “mature themes”
    • Producer/Director goes on a podcast and compares IP to “Game of Thrones” a few weeks before release. Said comparison treats GoT as an ideal to aspire to instead of a cautionary tale.
    • Producer/Director also insults existing fanbase for some reason
    • IP is previewed to critics, gets amazing reviews
    • IP comes out, and gets high streaming numbers day one
    • Writing ends up being terrible
    • Plot ends up being surface level, with all the subtly of the original adaptation cut out. This somehow is true now matter how basic the source material may seem
    • Acting is terrible. There is at least one race swapped character, who they also butcher from a writing perspective
    • VFX is terrible, and expensive scenes are cut out
    • Costumes are terrible to the point where everything looks like shitty cosplay
    • There’s a few violent scenes that are extremely gratuitous. VFX and writing are so bad that it’s comical instead of jarring
    • There are a few random sex scenes thrown in. The sex scenes detract from the pacing of the story, and are blatantly thrown in so producers can brag about them
    • Sex scenes tend to focus on the female form. If men are involved, they all are hairless and look like boy band members
    • If it is a gay sex scene, it blatantly written by women and for women with an extremely limited knowledge of men as a whole
    • In a few days, the Internet erupts with needlessly vitriolic discourse about said IP.
    • A year post release, the show is essentially forgotten.

    In that context it’s no surprise younger people don’t like sex scenes. It’s basically a canary for a low quality show and extreme toxicity.






  • I want to offer another perspective.

    I knew someone who got married at 16. The groom was 18, they both came from religious families, and they ended up divorcing at like 22, which was basically a few months after they moved to a liberal area on the west coast.

    I don’t think any sane person would call this grooming. At no point was I given the impression that the husband in this situation was abusive. However the situation was fundamentally fucked in a way that was unfair for both parties. My friend felt pressured to be a homemaker while still in high school, while her ex felt even more pressure to be a provider despite having no real emotional or financial capacity for doing so. They also both tried to make it work much longer than they should have, which inflicted a further set of scars.

    We live in a world fundamentally more complex than what the average person had to experience 100 years ago. We don’t let teenagers do things like buy alcohol or smoke cigarettes. It is almost expected that 18 - 21 year olds in the US will be on some major level dependent on their parents.

    Even in cases where there isn’t abuse, we shouldn’t be letting minors get married. It is just an unfair position to put both parties in.









  • This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.

    There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

    Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.

    To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.

    Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.

    An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.

    The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.

    Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.

    Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.

    A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.