As someone who tried getting into Overwatch 2 before Blizzard revealed it was all a sham 6 months before the “sequel” even dropped, this looks pretty interesting! I’ll probably give it a shot.
YouTube Kids is/was notorious for having awful content that’s often the laziest, lowest effort product that kids will sit through (aka the most obnoxious combination of repetitive sound effects and visuals you can imagine), propaganda trying to get em while they’re young, or some combination of both. Unfortunately a lot of people let their kids have unfettered access to it because it’s the only way they can get them to be relatively quiet and preoccupied for 30 minutes… Partially because algorithm-driven tech is like crack to brains, especially developing ones.
There was a whole thing about YouTube kids being filled with content about Spider-Man impregnating Elsa, there being lots of unhealthy portrayals of relationships as normal such as abusive dynamics between Mickey and Minnie mouse, and generally weird/inappropriate content featuring poo, pee, farts, stinky feet, blood and needles, or whatever else content mills thought they could get kids to click on. Most of these channels popped up because YouTube showed ads to kids at the time and it was some of the most lucrative revenue streams to be found on the platform for the effort required—kids will watch almost anything after all.
There were so many bots making algorithmically generated sludge to put in front of kids that it was literally too much to go through and curate out… Everything was getting infinitely re-uploaded across hundreds of channels to the point where if you let a kid watch YouTube on auto play, they’d be all but guaranteed to run into that sort of content eventually and get kind of sucked into it like a vortex.
It was known as ElsaGate and, in classic fashion, a lot of the legitimate issues people took with the situation also got bundled up with weird New World Order/right wing conspiracy type shit. As is known to happen.
YouTube is still as described above with kids content to a degree, but the company has taken a bare minimum effort to make those videos more difficult to monetize (and also taking anything vaguely kid-approximating down with it… Lots of animation aimed at an adult audience also gets flagged as for kids all the time).
I have a very young brother who had an obsession with Siren Head at one point from watching YouTube kids for who knows how many hours. My mom even asked at one point if I could make a video of Siren Head using the toilet as a potty training aid for him. I did not end up making the video but that’s a little beside the point.
Anyways there’s also a non-zero number of kids out there named Elsa by their parents. Yay Disney parents!
I understand the sentiment but there’s a lot in the image that’s arguably gender essentialist and/or not accurate.
Some thoughts:
Titties. Self-explanatory
Indeed they are, but they’re not a necessary condition to being a woman.
Decimate your fapping addiction
I think my main issue is the implicit assumption that the viewer has such an addiction to begin with. Also estrogen has ways of compensating for a lowered libido, such as a reduced/eliminated refractory period (of course ymmv). Source: guess ;p
Ability to wear adorable clothes
Boys can do this too!
ditch your angry, masculine mannerisms
This kind of just assumes that men have angry mannerisms, and is what I take most issue with tbh.
The path to anger management is primarily through introspection and/or therapy. Estrogen will not magically overhaul your personality, habits, and tendencies; there are things it changes, and it’s helped my mental state immensely—I wouldn’t give it up for the world and it helped facilitate the changes I needed for myself—but there’s so much extra work involved to in self-improvement and actualization than just acknowledging your gender identity and taking hrt.
One thing to consider too is scheduled events. Imagine a couple towns get together and throw a fair along a route that connects them, and you get to see celebrations and games and vendors who might sell trinkets that are hard to track down otherwise. Perhaps the local monarch goes on a hunt with the massive party of servants and knights that might entail, with different practices for different cultures. A band of cultists clears an area for several days leading up to their yearly ritual. It’s migration season for a certain species of animal/monster. There are so many possibilities!
Even just vendors passing through can be made more interesting. Do they carry their wares via backpack or cart? Are they being attacked by bandits? Wild animals? Are they trying to smuggle goods or services somewhere?
It all has to be programmed of course, which is the main holdup on what makes it so hard to flesh out those parts of the world.
I do also see weight in the idea that, past a certain point, traveling is just boring, especially if the only thing of importance is the Main Story Quest. Travel is also often boring in real life too but we can tune it out, or find little ways to pass the time and entertain ourselves during the more mundane moments. We’re not frequently afforded that luxury in games. When you’re playing a game and dealing with the downtime going from point A to B, often there is literally nothing to do except hold down the movement keys and deal with the occasional path change/obstacle.
The point of games is to be engaging, and if there’s nothing to do while traveling but look at the scenery and surroundings it will eventually get boring. Even if the travel gets interrupted occasionally for an encounter, I think it’s arguable to say that the content is literally not travel anymore and in fact papering over a bad travel system (if the only thing interesting is the stuff you find that you have to stop and take care of). Adding more unique/transient stuff along routes is only half of the battle; work has to be put in to make traveling enjoyable in and of itself for players to want to do it instead of skip it.
But as always, the best solution to our problem is to simply add more trains.