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Ionian vindication but feels poisoned

Feels a bit vindicating that with Yunara's VO riot on some level realizes that the lore they wrote for Ionia is orientalist/infantilizing af and seem to want to kind of change that. But also kind of a poison pill because they aren't actually changing Ionia to be not an orientalist mess of trauma fetishism.

They're just saying that Ionia used to not be a mess of orientalist trauma fetishism, but that everyone and everything we know in the entire region in the present are lame and stupid who all need to go through an arc to stop being orientalist trash. They're retroactively saying that Ionia/Ionians used to have agency and could accomplish great things without needing to always whine about how powerless they are, but still keeping everything currently which establishes that Ionian civilization is so worthless it exists solely to be a stepping stool for Noxus' regional plot developments.

which is... not really much of an improvement

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Mel stans be like "anyone who criticizes Riot's writing of Mel joining the explicitly genocidal imperialist state of Noxus must be a secret bad person"

Meanwhile my PFP is of Irelia which is hilariously ironic

Arcane-only's need to get some perspective and actually oppose imperialism even if it might make their fave look bad for supporting imperialism

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I don't really follow. Why does she need to know about Shiva's backstory? Cass isn't near s*icidal like she was 25 years ago over the nature of her nature, so she's not really pining for a broader context to help make her feel more secure in herself and where she comes from. I don't really see what getting information on her mom's life really does for her.

Gotta say, I really respect the batgirl series being willing to take so much time with the set up of Cass’ origin especially in a series meant to grab new readers. I know some people are annoyed with the focus on Shiva and lack of Cass but it’s obviously to give context for Cass existence and to catch new readers up on who her parents are. I feel like that’s important for a brand new solo series especially since it’s been a long time since her original one, and a lot has changed since.

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On Riven and Riot's baffling approach to what should be a simple story

Riven is a very odd character as Riot has "progressed" her plot. Her first narrative appearance, "Confessions of a Broken Blade", was fine. Nothing really that amazing, but serviceable and an okay start. I've read better fanfics that try to do the same thing, but the story is fine and it has a mildly good setup for Riven's character.

However, afterward Riot has continued to make extremely baffling choices that just seem to utterly miss the point of the extremely basic concept of her story as they themselves set it up.

Her basic story is piss-simple. Character a part of the Bad Place is involved in some limited capacity in a central Bad Thing that they did and is wracked with regret and guilt which then motivates them to do something about it. Sprinkle in a bit of The Bad Place screwing her over in the process and you've got Riven.

Deep Space 9 basically did an entire episode with this formula and is essentially the exact same Riven formula in "Confessions" but done actually somewhat well.

But Riot has just taken a bafflingly stupid approach to this should-be-easy to execute story.

Their first sin was in establishing during the short story, "Sisterhood", that Riven wasn't just some filing clerk or rearguard during the explicitly genocidal invasion of Ionia. Originally her lore was vague but gave the impression that she didn't actually do all that much during the war until the Big Bombing moment when Noxus used her and her unit as bait. "Sisterhood", however, establishes that she was indeed an active participant in the genocide, but that she doesn't really feel all that bad about it until Noxus screwed her over. The story has her feeling the "weight" of the sword but that's about it. It's really not an emotionally compelling or evocative showcasing of any actual grief or regret, rather just a kind of resigned burden.

(as an aside, the entire "Sisterhood" story is a paltry excuse of a story in general as it's basically just a slog fest of "the real victims of the genocidal invasion of Ionia were the people who were doing the genociding. The ionians are feckless losers compared to the cool and deep noxians.")

This "what did Riven actually do during the war?" is a very important distinction because it colors how much we as the audience should give her the benefit of the doubt and how she and her actions should be considered. In Confessions we can give her these things because she does come across as much more of a victim and is blaming herself for things she had little control over (again, see the DS9 episode which did something similar). The complete lack of any discussion in Confessions over her active participation in warcrimes is more palatable because at that time in the lore she hadn't actually done any. However, Sisterhood changed that. Now she was an active participant and not even a particularly regretful one (this is bar-on-the-floor requirements for a story like this).

Why this change completely undermines her story is that the narrative *treats her like she's a victim*. Even after they change her story to make her a perpetrator of genocide, she still gets treated by the narrative as if she's the real victim here and that she doesn't need to do anything. Lo and behold in all of her stories she doesn't do anything. She is utterly passive and just lets herself enjoy the "forgiveness" that Ionia has given her and never does anything to actually make amends commiserate with her actions. She has all this guilt about "what she did" but she never actually does anything about it whatsoever. Her inaction is rewarded by the narrative because the narrative is gaslighting us into believing that she was just some nobody that got screwed over by Noxus.

Riot then later doubled down on this weird decision to actually make Riven an active participant in genocide during the Sentinels of Light narrative event where she apparently did so many terrible things that she earned a goddamn moniker as the "Butcher of the Bay". Irelia confronts her on this fact that she is a war criminal and the entire event's response is "um but have you considered that she said sowwy and is sad?" which is a whole other can of worm of ?????????

The next sin Riot made again in Sisterhood was having Riven get captured and forced back to Noxus. This essentially ruins any actual point to her time in Ionia and should ruin any reason for people to give her any deference. Riven's story as it sits now is basically this:

Active participant in Evil Empire because it benefited her

Goes to Ionia to commit so many more war crimes she actually gets a moniker for it

Doesn't feel particularly regretful and mass murder doesn't change her behavior whatsoever

Gets screwed over by Noxus for once in her life

Suddenly is sad about it because for once she actually was on the wrong side of a war

Ionia "forgives her" because she didn't actually kill this one guy they thought she killed, and everyone I guess collectively ignores that she is a war criminal.

Lives a peaceful life on a farm with her new parents

Riven does absolutely nothing to make amends for the things she's done to Ionia besides some menial chores for her new parents and local village

Is kidnapped back to Noxus

What is this "character arc" that Riot is gaslighting me into thinking she went through with this? Riven doesn't learn anything in Ionia. She doesn't come away from it with any kind of deeper understanding or critique of Noxus.

Hilariously in fact, Sisterhood, again makes another stupid arse decision and has Riven be partially motivated to return to Noxus because she hears that Swain has "changed it for the better" and hopes its true. She thinks this even after her Sisters literally tell her that Noxus will never stop coming to Ionia to find her and kill her and anyone else they find in their way. Also we have multiple stories elsewhere in the lore about how Noxus is preparing a 2nd invasion and we, ostensibly at least until retcons come for it too like they came for Piltover and Zaun, even see a part of it in the Awaken cinematic. What "changes" in Noxus is she even expecting? Her sisters show up to her new home in Ionia and act the exact same way as Noxians always act, threaten to kill her father as Noxians always do, and then tell her directly that Noxus will continue to send armed forces into Ionia to come and get her and will murder all Ionians who stand in their way. Even with the obvious intent of Noxus not actually changing positively and Riven is in for a rude awakening when she gets there, this still barely works because I can't even tell what she's supposed to be expecting or what things she actually values as a person.

On a basic level she should value Noxus not killing Ionians first and foremost given the fact that it's her "home" now and the fact that they are still doing that should override any actual "oh but what if they've changed?" because why would any other theoretical changes matter to her other than that? But no, Riven's new lore is completely and utterly devoid of any actual critique of Noxus or even opinion on Noxus whatsoever other than "it did bad things in the past and that made me feel sad". This is a pretty big issue given that Riven's story is designed in a lab to be specifically about critiquing Noxus' behaviors.

The DS9 episode handles this better because Maritza actually is driven by his guilt (even though he was only a filing clerk) to do something. Not just to give the Bajorans a sense of justice that they were denied, but also to get Cardassia to confront its own actions and to try and force through positive change. We can empathize with Maritza because he was just one guy in a position of no authority but he is still taking a bold if tragic set of actions to try and make amends.

I know what Riot is trying to convey with Riven as I said this is a piss-simple story, but they have made a bunch of really baffling decisions that directly undermine that intent. Unlike what we get in the DS9 episode Riven-as-Maritza barely shows any real regret for her actions before or after (in part because I think Riot retconned how much of the genocide she was a participant in from "not much" to "she killed so many people she got a title from it"), she makes no efforts whatsoever to really make amends outside of helping the people that personally benefit her, she is painfully un-proactive in her *entire* narrative and is just basically ping-ponged around by random other stuff happening, she is never actually held accountable at all for her war crimes (well, not never, as Irelia tried to during the SOL event and she was portrayed as the bad guy for doing so...), and has weird and conflicting opinions of Noxus that are completely at odds with the actual things she's experienced from Noxus and any kind of impact Ionia left on her and her priorities.

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This suggests that Arcane is still not up to date with current lore cause many things have yet to occur in it.

That's an ex-post thing they've done now that Arcane is the main canon. There's no deeper thought process behind it and absolutely no lore written prior to 2024 was written with generations in mind. Prior to Arcane every champ was operating as their in-game version in relatively the same time period. That's the point I'm making. Things are now completely up in the air until they reestablish what is actually canon and it won't be a seamless effort because many champs are tied to broader worldbuilding that has now gotten changed. Camille alone has been completely deleted as she cannot exist in the lore in the same capacity she did originally because they completely changed all the circumstances that made her character work.

And we learn with the Rell retcons that Riot is now interested in moving around within the timeline

The Rell retcons were not moving around within the timeline. It was taking an established character and moving her into the past to be a supporting character in another champ's story that has now irrevocably changed her character from what she was intended to be.

There are no Singed Retcons.

There are. Singed never had a daughter before. That was a pure retcon both to his physical story and to his primary motivations as a character. Secondly, he was a well known supplier of chemweapons such that even Swain knew of him, but with Arcane there's no indication he ever worked for Noxus. Silco smuggling shimmer is indicative of nothing in particular given Ambessa's complete lack of knowledge about chemweapons even though she was instrumental in kicking off the invasion in the first place.

Doing so would require them to rewrite the lore for Kayn etc, and also risk messing with the timeline of the second invasion.

They've already done that. They've completely retconned the timeline of the Spirit Blossom event, the lores of multiple champions within Ionia, the ruined king game, and the Sentinels of Light event just by moving the SB festival to the end of the war rather than 7 years afterward.

The Spirit Blossom event shown here is the first after the Invasion.

The one in Perennial, yasuo's lore, and riven's lore was the first festival since the war ended (roughly 7 years). This was first two sentences of the SB festival lore:

So that will need to be edited and retconned however...

Yasuo leaves for Bilgewater during the festival after his reunion with Yone which takes place late 996 but now the festival is taking place close to the end of the war 7 years prior so most of the big events on this timeline gets moved around:

Heck, if Leblanc is to be believed, they are setting up the early stages for the second as is.

Don't know why we would assume that given that it's been one season since the end of the first war, Vlad mentioned that Swain would not do another invasion so soon, and LB said that whispers could get her darkin as opposed to a thousand swords.

You're assuming they're going to make the show about the first Invasion, but we don't know that.

I'm not assuming that but they also cannot show a child killing people so their options are limited with anything about Irelia's backstory. Riot can and has retconned champs for fewer reasons than this. See: Viktor, who was retconned because CL thought that a mage was more interesting than a cyborg.

There are ways to imply violence (even murder) without having characters get killed.

Riot already has a terrible track record when it comes to constantly sanitizing/excusing Noxus, so this would make me suspicious. Having to sacrifice the brutality of the invasion and the resolve of the Ionians to save the writer's fave region from looking too bad is not something I'd look forward to. Riot is in love with "moral ambiguity" but only really when it concerns Noxus seeming too mean.

Even Rell's retcons circled back to confirming her lore (she's a teenager who was experimented on, she's just more connected to Ambessa and set in the past).

Except the changes undermined her lore. They completely changed Rell's entire backstory but then kept the endpoint even though the changes they made go against that endpoint. Rell goes from actively engaging in Noxian imperialism, loving her new warlord mother, nearly being the heir to the house, and being completely deep in the Noxian kool-aid to... hating noxus after the rose kidnpapped and tortured her? The emphasis being the rose because unlike her old lore "Noxus" didn't willingly torture her, the Rose had to kidnap her this time. Before her parents willingly subjected her to these treatments because ideologically Noxus does not see children or people, only weapons.

Her previous lore was about how everything in Noxus completely failed her and failed all the children they turned into weapons. The state (Swain knew about the academy and let the work continue) and even her own family all were a part of the crime of what happened to her and the others. Now it's just the Rose who did it and in fact "Noxus" (Ambessa) tried to save Rell from this fate but just failed. Even if Rell doesn't know this, it's a massive change to her lore that undermines the point that Noxus did this and that everyone of power and consequence over those deemed "weaker" was actively complicit in it.

At best it's a "misunderstanding" and Rell will "learn" that Noxus didn't actually do this to her to set up some paltry Noxus Isn't Irredeemable theme even though that goes completely against her old lore that Noxus *did* in fact do that to her and would do it again in a heartbeat.

I can't really see this NuRell thinking like this snippet from her color story given her new lore where she was a posterchild for Noxian success until a completely random thing happened to get her kidnapped. I just don't see how this Rell squares with the new backstory of NuRell:

We have Confirmation of the timeline re: the Invasion of Ionia as how it pertains to Arcane

So context for my Arcane followers the Invasion of Ionia lasts about a decade. But the Invasion really gets to a Head in the last five years. The tides turn three years prior to the end - when Irelia, 14 years old, leads the Great Stand of the Placidium and unites the Ionian Resistance which in turn makes a concerted effort to ward off Noxus. This happens two years after, at the start of the 5 years I mentioned, she loses her family as Noxus begins really to destroy. Anyways why am I mentioning this?

The implication by this comic is that Xin Zhao arrives at Ionia with the flower he has because it appears as though the Arcane has woken up everywhere. Which likely coincides with what Leblanc tells Mel in s2 that the "Arcane is waking up." So!! We can start aligning what Kennen says her with what happened in the Invasion.

Presumably, if the Spirit Blossoms returned in s2 act 3 or so, or even the end of s2 (since it's all happening in short time anyways), then the Invasion of Ionia happened throughout the latter years of the s1 timeskip and all of post timeskip Arcane s1, and s2 act 1 and maybe some of act 2. Which would make Irelia's age currently about 17-18 at the time in which "Pilgramage" is happening. And she's a teen throughout Arcane. This technically isn't a retcon at all, as she was always around Jinx's age anyways. In other words - Riot really hasn't retconned anything with regards to the timeline (Rell aside).

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The wiki is giving dates combining the old lore pre-arcane and new lore post-arcane when there isn't anything at the moment that actually connects the Ionian timeline from before Arcane existed to the events we have now that Arcane is the pacing standard. The Singed retcons alone cast doubt what the new Ionian timeline is. Irelia was 24-ish in the "present" but that was with the 7 year gap between the present and the end of the invasion which is being largely thrown out.

Here are some old tweets from before he Laurie Goulding nuked his twitter:

The establishment of the SB festival happening a season (assuming a season is not some extremely long period of time) after the invasion invalidates the Yone-Yasuo cinematic, already retcons Riven's lore too as the Sisterhood story where Riven was taken back to Noxus was set during the SB festival 7-ish years after the end of the invasion, does weird things to the Ruined King Game timeline (in fact it completely messes with all events that even touch on Sentinels of Light), and invalidates the previous SB story Perennial.

They've already retconned one champ just a few months ago who was originally late teens and who is now 33 (Rell). Riot is kind of firing from the hip and is making whatever decisions to fit whatever story they are currently writing not caring about previously established canon. If we get a Demacia season next there are several ways that this little side-quest with Xin will completely implode that region's entire timeline.

We have Confirmation of the timeline re: the Invasion of Ionia as how it pertains to Arcane

So context for my Arcane followers the Invasion of Ionia lasts about a decade. But the Invasion really gets to a Head in the last five years. The tides turn three years prior to the end - when Irelia, 14 years old, leads the Great Stand of the Placidium and unites the Ionian Resistance which in turn makes a concerted effort to ward off Noxus. This happens two years after, at the start of the 5 years I mentioned, she loses her family as Noxus begins really to destroy. Anyways why am I mentioning this?

The implication by this comic is that Xin Zhao arrives at Ionia with the flower he has because it appears as though the Arcane has woken up everywhere. Which likely coincides with what Leblanc tells Mel in s2 that the "Arcane is waking up." So!! We can start aligning what Kennen says her with what happened in the Invasion.

Presumably, if the Spirit Blossoms returned in s2 act 3 or so, or even the end of s2 (since it's all happening in short time anyways), then the Invasion of Ionia happened throughout the latter years of the s1 timeskip and all of post timeskip Arcane s1, and s2 act 1 and maybe some of act 2. Which would make Irelia's age currently about 17-18 at the time in which "Pilgramage" is happening. And she's a teen throughout Arcane. This technically isn't a retcon at all, as she was always around Jinx's age anyways. In other words - Riot really hasn't retconned anything with regards to the timeline (Rell aside).

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Sort of kinda sort of. Technically we don't know how long a "season" is that Kennen mentioned, but more importantly I would absolutely not trust that the 5-year timeline for the war is still in play either. Heck, I wouldn't even trust that they aren't going to be messing with the ages of various Ionian characters in general. Already this off-hand mention from Kennen invalidates 3-4 different Ionian stories and timelines. Riot has played fast and loose with timelines and character ages with Arcane and I can't imagine that's changed (also Irelia was always 24-26 in the "present" in the lore so she wasn't really the same age as Jinx or Ekko).

Irelia is at high risk for a retcon right now due to this and also due to the fact that (as a riot writer who is now the head narrative director, and massive noxus stan btw, mentioned many years ago) Irelia fighting in the war at 14-17 conflicts with the age ratings allowable for several major IRL countries. This apparently made it very difficult to actually depict Irelia at any point prior to the present because you can't depict child soldiers in many countries without risking your age ratings.

Until Xin's story intersects with the LB darkin hunt from the last cinematic it's not even guaranteed that this isn't in the past at some point (although it is extremely likely that it will intersect).

We have Confirmation of the timeline re: the Invasion of Ionia as how it pertains to Arcane

So context for my Arcane followers the Invasion of Ionia lasts about a decade. But the Invasion really gets to a Head in the last five years. The tides turn three years prior to the end - when Irelia, 14 years old, leads the Great Stand of the Placidium and unites the Ionian Resistance which in turn makes a concerted effort to ward off Noxus. This happens two years after, at the start of the 5 years I mentioned, she loses her family as Noxus begins really to destroy. Anyways why am I mentioning this?

The implication by this comic is that Xin Zhao arrives at Ionia with the flower he has because it appears as though the Arcane has woken up everywhere. Which likely coincides with what Leblanc tells Mel in s2 that the "Arcane is waking up." So!! We can start aligning what Kennen says her with what happened in the Invasion.

Presumably, if the Spirit Blossoms returned in s2 act 3 or so, or even the end of s2 (since it's all happening in short time anyways), then the Invasion of Ionia happened throughout the latter years of the s1 timeskip and all of post timeskip Arcane s1, and s2 act 1 and maybe some of act 2. Which would make Irelia's age currently about 17-18 at the time in which "Pilgramage" is happening. And she's a teen throughout Arcane. This technically isn't a retcon at all, as she was always around Jinx's age anyways. In other words - Riot really hasn't retconned anything with regards to the timeline (Rell aside).

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FNV Comic opening

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I’ll never forgive the Riot writers for taking Lux, a character in an extremely central and influential position as a de facto heir to the most powerful non-royal family in Demacia, and deciding to have her just leave and run off to the woods such that her actually interesting narrative place in the setting is completely wasted.

Great example of making decisions about character direction based on internet moralities rather than what’s best for storytelling. You took a character in a very interesting place in the setting and chose to have her “assert her morality” by disassociating from everything that actually made her an interesting character to follow.

It’s funny that they then did the exact same thing to Sona as soon as they updated her lore.

Riot fundamentally does not understand how to use Demacia as a setting for storytelling and instead just uses it to soap box banal morality nonsense at the audience.

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Oopsie

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Look I love unconditional devotion love stories as much as the next person, but there's really something so deliciously raw about conditional devotion.

I have served you and I have loved you for decades, but I will not give up my principles for you. You cut out part of my heart and took it with you down that path that you insist on walking, but you walk it alone. Even when the bleeding, gaping hole you left in my chest kills me, I will not follow you.

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Riot didn't know how to actually use Demacia with what tools it had to begin with

Demacia is a very frustrating region for its lore because it really does feel like the writers just didn't like the region, but perhaps equally bad is that no one at Riot seems to have understood the tools that the region had to work with before they doubled down on a plot and various character direction decisions that ended up just kind of hamstringing the region and its characters to really boring and narratively damaging plots.

One place this issue shows up is in the motivations for most of the characters. Most champs, and I do mean most except literally just 2 champs (Fiora and Sylas), in the region have the exact same motivation for doing... anything. That motivation being that there is something unique and important about Demacia and its people that is worth fighting for. With basically little derivation, that's the main motivation for every champ in the region. Now, this motivation worked service-ably well in the old lore when Demacia was the budget Alliance from WoW. They got to represent generic goodness against the various forces of The Plot that were pretty unabashedly evil. Importantly, being the "good guys" afforded them a lot of opportunities for contrasts and things to work for. However, when Riot ended up retconning and redesigning the regions they tried to inject "moral ambiguity" into the lore and make the good regions more bad and the bad regions more good. For most regions this process was executed well enough (in one case too well *cough Noxus cough* and now the lore unabashedly is a propaganda tool for how imperialism is um actually a good thing).

HOWEVER. When it comes to Demacia they really flubbed this. In part because they didn't understand/were unwilling to change the individual characters from their old lores. Every champ still has the same motivation and largely the same backstory in general that they did in the old lore. But they did remove completely Demacia's broad status as a defender of goodness/justice/etc. against the forces of evil. So what we are left with is an ENTIRE cast of champions who have the same motivation for doing anything (this is bad on its own. It makes characterizations and plots much less interesting because of the lack of any diversity), but to make matters worse that motivation is now meaningless. Not just hypocritical. But meaningless. Riot took champions designed for a completely different setting and just threw them into this new setting without understanding how this new setting works against what actually works about these characters in the first place.

There is not a single story or a piece of lore anywhere in the new-lore age that actually establishes anything unique about Demacia let alone anything that would motivate the champion cast to be willing to sacrifice anything to defend it. Additionally, there is nothing actually threatening Demacia so even on a basic "This is my home, I want to see it and its people thrive" can't really exist very easily. This is already bad enough because it means that there is nothing interesting/unique besides maybe aesthetics to hook people into being invested in the region, but it also just plain makes every single champion unconvincing. When every champion explicitly (and I really do mean explicitly) is only doing things because they think there's something special about Demacia, but in fact the region just is a slog of unlikable and unsympathetic things that none of the champs support but are still following for lazy reasons, it massively hurts any kind of investment anyone could have in them. I don't know why I'm supposed to root for Lux, or Garen, or Quinn, or Sona, etc. They are all fighting for something that just isn't interesting and isn't sympathetic. Double-whammy of bad motivations.

And you might say "well they are going to create something that is worth defending" but not only are they not doing that, it's also not really feasible given that you still have to work with the foundation of Demacian culture that the characters already have. But as mentioned, Demacian culture has nothing in it. It has no unique ethos, no interesting social organizations/dynamics, or really anything that you could build off of that would make a "reformed" Demacia interesting. Even if theoretically Riot were to expend the resources and time to suddenly give Demacia interesting qualities that it never gave them in the last 10 years of lore, that would basically be admitting that we wasted 10 years of lore on a region that was written specifically to be boring. Why couldn't we just have these interesting qualities to begin with? What value did we actually get out of making every champion a slog to engage with and the region itself uninteresting?

The region as it currently stands is an awkward combination of X-men and Game of Thrones. But it lacks the colorful cast of characters and interpersonal, emotional driven storytelling of the former, while also lacking the depth and worldbuilding informed storytelling of the latter.

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They're calling her the greatest bat teammate ever known. Bonding skills 100%, social skills maxxed out. No one's doing it like her and her black lens eyes.

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The amount of elitist, chronically online neurotic assumptions in this post are truly staggering.

The average man without a college degree (the majority of men) in the US is an underemployed menial worker with no job prospects, has probably seen several of his friends get addicted to opiates/overdose/die, will probably never get married/have a committed relationship (though similarly women without a college degree will never get married either), and has a life expectancy about 10 years lower than the median.

The post above is talking about a niche, loud group of typically college educated, chronically online radicals. People who follow andrew tate aren't the guys working in a warehouse in a backwater part of a state no one on this website would know, they're the upper-middle class, college-educated professionals showing up on January 6th to attack the capital.

The actual, statistically provable trends when it comes to men especially in the US is that if you have a college degree you are doing mostly fine and if you don't have a college degree you are literally going to die 10+ years before your college educated peers from various deaths of despair (self-harm, drug, alcohol abuse, etc.)

"male loneliness epidemic" is misleading because it implies that men are suffering because they can't get girls when I feel like the actual problem is that pretty much any online content that's aimed specifically at men conceptualizes the masculine ideal as what I call the Buff Scammer. there are only two things in this world that matter, says the Buff Scammer: being jacked and making money. how you get to either of those things doesn't matter, you just need to be as rich and as buff as possible or you have failed as a man. Get into drop shipping. Eat nothing but raw meat. Rugpull a memecoin. Remove seasonings from your diet. Sell an online course. Go to the gym daily. Starve yourself so your body will achieve ketosis and start burning fat. Attend a seminar on real estate investing. Work 80 hours a week. Take steroids but don't let anyone know about that part. Flip a YouTube channel after 10xing the subs. Sell AI art on Etsy and AI audiobooks on Amazon. What's that? You're trying to do this to get girls? Why would you care about women? Women are all stupid whores who don't help you get richer or buffer. The only people you should be paying attention to are other rich, buff men. If you do hang out with women you should be pimping them out on Chaturbate so you can at least get an ROI off your time spent not thinking about men. Male friends? You don't have time for friends. You should be hustling and grinding 24/7 365. And if you absolutely do need to spend time around other men you should only be spending time with other buff scammers so you can collaborate on entrepreneurial ventures. Like Jesus Christ even writing this is exhausting I feel like trying to be this dude would be fucking miserable like not only did you turn yourself into a friendless, materialist, misogynistic asshole who can only conceptualize the world in terms of value extracted but you're NOT EVEN HAVING FUN DOING IT!!!!!!

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man reddit is so fucking annoying sometimes i just came across a post where a bunch of people kept bitching about how it "makes no sense" that irelia who is just 14 at the time could fuck up swain in combat when he's the war-weathered noxian general like yeah girl that's the literal literary point!!!! it's supposed to seem impossible and then happen anyway!!! shes the CHILD of the nation noxus is trying to crush and her victory at the placidium is part of the shock factor for both swain and the audience‼️‼️‼️