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A few things which irritate me about the LitRPG genre and web fiction in general. You may picture me as comic book guy for purposes of this rant.
I could go on but I feel better getting at least this much off my chest.
There was this one story where it was like a dungeon/system apocalypse sort of thing. Dude ends up in a world where monsters and dungeons are gradually expanding in power and humanity is being driven back further and further, the population dwindling over the course of centuries as the monsters continue to gain in power.
And then the characters make some offhand comment about a magic spell that lets you switch gender which certain people who were "born in the wrong body" use to cure their condition. And then MC from Earth explains how in our world those people are oppressed and everyone shakes their heads about how unenlightened that is. Now, on an object level it makes sense that if such spells were available people with gender dysphoria would want to use them. But the language was very obviously dated as 2010+ progressivism, which would have no way of being the same in some fantasy world. And more importantly there is no way a world on the verge of extinction with massive attrition due to a constant multi-generational war against monsters is going to end up progressive, especially with regard to gender roles. They are going to want women pumping out as many kids as possible so they don't go extinct. Or rather, any subculture which chooses to be progressive in any way that reduces birthrates (as opposed to some free-love variant that encourages promiscuity but discourages birth control) will quickly die out and be replaced under such strong selection pressures.
I made a comment to this effect, to which the author replied "my world, my rules". So I stopped reading.
I recall something similar in another web novel. It was otherwise quite an interesting story, blending cyberpunk with a fantasy litrpg: earth was a cyberpunk dystopia, but got visited by aliens who gifted them access to a shared litrpg world.
Now, you expect some progressive politics to insert themselves in cyberpunk just by it's nature, but it was the fantasy litrpg part which embarrassed the novel. One of the aliens was from a race which was agender until a certain age, when they would become male or female. This was a great excuse for the author to show his MCs progressive bonafides, referring carefully to "them" and acting shocked when other characters - including other alien races - didn't.
But this was alien race. Calling a woman "sir" or vice versa is insulting for humans with a large amount of sexual dimorphism, but it makes zero sense that this race would have the same issues. To them, it would be completely "alien" to worry about someone using different pronoun.
Even worse, they weren't even speaking English. Every race had their own language filtered through a perfect universal translator. Did their language even have pronouns? Would the translator not just switch anything to the correct pronoun? It was a complete failure of world building
The litrpg space and progression fantasy genre is weird, it feels like the audience is vaguely right-leaning (lots of male video game nerds) but there are author cliques that purity test each other. And in order to succeed on Royalroad or Amazon, it really helps to get bootstrapped by other authors. For example the progression fantasy subreddit has a year-round pride flag, and it's run by a clique of authors who chase off anyone outside their political window of acceptability.
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