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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24897 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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I enjoyed Battletech slop for the longest time. Then at some point the embezzlers at Catalyst Game Labs decided the only way to keep not paying authors was to lean into turning Battletech in a gay brand, and the rest has been history. Now the IP I've been a 30 year fan of is fake and gay at it's root source material.

Piranha Games doing a bang up job on the video games not withstanding.

The most depressing part about being a fan of anything male coded, is that for reasons that are beyond my ken, activist feel the constant need to invade the space and smash your toys right in front of you. The He-Man Woman-Haters Club or NO MA'AM aren't going to somehow seize the reigns of the Twilight IP and start "subverting" it by having Bella eventually chucked onto the street in the reboot for being a washed up ratchet whore, and dying of an overdose in the gutter. Only to be replaced by some boring new submissive eyecandy that raises the male main characters children while they go off on adventures to space.

And yet that is precisely what has happened with virtually every male coded IP, ever? I'm drawing a blank, truthfully.

I would love to support slop I can trust. I would love to have an IP I could point my little boy to, that I know won't break his heart around book 4 (or 40 RIP Battletech), when the crazies took it over and humiliated and murdered his favorite character.

Alas. They'll even pillage the estates of dead authors, just to keep the humiliation ritual going. Poor, poor Tolkien.

Battletech was my first introduction to table-top wargaming. I remember playing with it as a kid, with the battlemech setup sheets that, uh, were just a little bit litigatious.

Years later, when I finally get a bee in my bonnet and start looking into painting miniatures, I decide to cut my teeth by purchasing a box of Mechwarriors and start looking into see what's been happening with the IP lately...

...only to find that it's decided to go a similar route as Warhammer 40K and go woke and gay.

For fuck's sake. By this point having anything you love become widespread and popular is a curse rather than a blessing.

The He-Man Woman-Haters Club or NO MA'AM aren't going to somehow seize the reigns of the Twilight IP and start "subverting" it by having Bella eventually chucked onto the street in the reboot for being a washed up ratchet whore

I mean if I had a nickel for every time I found a genderswapped rewrite of the twilight series designed to cater more towards men I would have three nickles, of which one was given to me by Stephanie Meyer herself. (The other two nickels come from a smut fic on QQ and a male-oriented-romance fic on SB, both abandoned but otherwise very solid.)

...I always knew Stephanie Meyer was a basedlord. I just wish she put more energy towards though-provoking sci-fi than lowbrow romance-- The Host was actually kind of goated.

of which one was given to me by Stephanie Meyer herself.

She also said once that she had a nightmare in which Edward revealed that the "vegetarianism" was just a false front to lure humans in, and he actually eats humans like every other vampire.

I sort of wish we'd gotten that book.

Yet another banger sci-fi/horror idea from one of the GOATs, that we will unfortunately never see because she understands her target demographic.

Yeah, The Host was massively underrated.

I am beginning to think that retrospectively de-canonizing the Star Wars EU was actually one of the best things Disney ever did for that universe. Because it's now non-canon, they don't have the incentive to go back and inject this sort of nonsense into it all.

If anything, I almost wish they had de-canonized it earlier. I already pretend everything published after the Unifying Force in 2003 was just a bad dream (Shadows of Mindor excluded. Stover can never not be good). Jacen eventually takes over as Grandmaster and leads the Jedi into a new golden age, I don't care what Troy Denning has to say.

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