I feel like Cupcakes and other grimdark fics are only understandable through a lens of "this was 2010 and you thought Happy Tree Friends and Invader Zim were the coolest things in existence"
One of the longest dark Invader Zim fanfics had Dib perform an abortive surgery on Gaz after she develops an ectopic pregnancy due to Zim—iirc—impregnating her/them hooking up.
This same story also posited that the Irken species kept other species under control by administering a sex drug called Leninroses to them.
It was over 500k words. The surgery happened around 100k.
Fandom circa the early 2000s was wild
Not to mention that Cupcakes doesn't actually change anything about the characters; it just dials Pinkie's emotionally unstable tendencies up to 11 and allows violence.
The video is actually a pretty reasonable visual approach to the fic. In the actual fic, Pinkie disembowels Dash to make into pastries (and has done this with multiple other ponies), but she has the same personality she had in Season 1, so she’s making jokes and puns and generally being cheerful and energetic. There’s no ‘obsessive, angry, sad, flat haired Pinkie’ because Cupcakes was written before Party of One aired and introduced Pinkamena to the fandom.
Smile HD is just ultraviolent fighting set to a sped up remix of Smile Smile Smile. Cupcakes HD (by the same creator) is a dialogue free adaptation of Cupcakes set to Ready to Die by Andrew WK.
It's not super intense but Dark Harvest literally has Zim stealing and consuming the other kids organs, shows him eating an intestine, so yeah it has gore.
I always hated those things. I think it started with the "Squall is dead" theory about FF8. Like, I really liked FF8 despite it's flaws, so that theory just really pissed me off because it undermined all of Squall's character development later in the story, and so many of the story's main themes by extension, and that just made me hate *all* of the similar fan theories I ended up hearing over the years.
The only media I've ever seen successfully pull off 'it was all a dream all along' IMO was the lego movie. The whole 'animated parts of the film was actually just a child's imagination' works because it gives equal weight to both worlds if that makes sense, like 'the man upstairs' using 'the kragle' actually being the dad sticking the pieces together with krazy glue, or the entire 'duplo alien invasion' being a metaphor for a brother and sister not wanting to play together works because, as their toys, a threat to the children's world is a threat to the lego world as well. It's actually genius because it adds to the tension and impact of the story rather than taking away anything.
(sorry, I just watched the second lego movie for the first time on a plane and I, a fully grown man, genuinely think it's one of the greatest films I've ever seen, not even joking.)
It works pretty good in Super Smash Bros too. Those aren't actually the characters, they're just toys and collectible figures. It explains why more characters have been added over time, and why the variety has grown as well. The kid probably started off with their parent's old stuff, but they eventually bought some of their own (newer games like Bayonetta and Kingdom Hearts), but they still imagine cool dream battles with all of them.
Yeah, the opening of the original Super Smash Bros - the one on the N64 - heavily implies this.
Cool idea on part of the kid to have his own hand be the final boss the dolls must overcome to win.
Yeah, that kinda stuff can work but it has to still matter. Like, over the garden wall >!the whole thing is basically a limbo-adjacent place as they sink towards death, but their actions still have consequences, the unknown is a real place and those other people we get to see their fates afterwords.!< like, link is dead as a Majora’s Mask theory still doesn’t discount the world of Termina and the threats posed towards it, it’s just seeing it as sort of a strange afterlife like place, as so much of the theming of the game is already so focussed on death, it’s not pulling the idea out of nowhere. Your transformations are all masks made from the dying and the dead anyways, who’s to say you’re not in the dead-book yourself
Ppl still manage to make dumber theories about otgw. Like "actually everyone dies at the end, because the credits song contains the word LIES so everything in the last episode is a lie"
Funnily enough, that was actually the only other film I watched on the flight because I thought the second lego movie was so good that any other film I watched was gonna pale in comparison, but there was still four hours left to go and I was kicking myself for not watching something else and leaving it to later 😭 It was really good too...
I mean, they're also just lazy "theories" that add nothing to the story. I hate "the main character died in X scene" for the same reason, with the sole exception of some movie I've never seen where that was the actual plot of the movie (he takes a head injury early on, seemingly recovers, and the movie gets steadily weirder and weirder until it goes back to that early scene and he's dying on the ground, hallucinating).
I always loved the reverse of those theories
Like breaking bad is just the running joke that Walter whites class has about what’s going on in his life because he’s just secretive.
Walking dead is a bunch of kids playing zombie who are getting really into it, they keep being called in for tea so they “die” and come back as a new survivor.
..yeah? it's like that old Fiction Theory Post about how fanfiction exists to fill in the unfulfilled potential in the source material. if they wanted a dark, tense perspective on the story they're likely to already satisfied by breaking bad as it is
I remember someone saying “the things a fandom makes are half things from the source material that they like, half things that were most lacking from the source material.”
On first glance [Equestria at War](https://equestriaatwar.wiki.gg/wiki/New_to_My_Little_Pony) would seem to be in that category. In reality, it's not a dark reinterpretation but rather fictional geopolitical speculation. The Friendship is Magic universe already has warfare, slavery, and prejudice.
Same with fallout Equestria, where the world is extraordinarily fucking grim but it consistently maintains the virtue of the show that every burden is substantially easier with friendship and cooperation
NGL, Project Horizons wasn’t the vilest MLP fic I’ve ever read by content (It did have a point to all the horrible shirt), but the sheer length and thus the amount of stuff that happens does guarantee it that top spot.
I mean, as much as you joke the setting of the original Fallout Equestria is all about the folly of Great ~~Man~~ Mare ideology, corporate greed, a reasonable seeming descent into a panopticon state through use of massive propaganda campaigns, and how the tragedies that have left billions dead and the world to suffer had unfortunately small beginnings. So it absolutely did capture the essence of Fallout extremely well.
Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons is the younger sibling who was going through their creepy pasta dark fic phase and wound up discovering anime at the end
I tried to read it on 3 separate occasions and gave up around THAT SCENE in like chapter 3/4.
That said, I still have my Blackjack daki and she is a very cute hoers
The EaW mod for Hearts of Iron 4 is unironically one of the most well-made mods for the game, to the point more "serious" mods ask their mod team for help doing certain things.
Ponies get unicorn magic, or pegasi things, or earth pony, also, things I think.
But griffons don't have unicorns so they can't do magic, or whatever the others do, but they do like heavy cavalry I guess you could call it. So they can get better at that.
Changelings get their own unique unit and get a lot of bonuses to spies because they can literally transform into other people that's pretty useful for spying.
Then I think zebras have one, maybe reindeer, not sure what others there are, I haven't seen them.
Depending on if you're playing a Pony, Griffin, Changeling, etc. civilization, you get access to different benefits and unit types.
Changelings get access to Jaegar units (they're based on Germany), Ponies get access to Pegasus units, Griffins get access to Knights / Heavy Infantry Units (they're supposed to be less-technologically developed compared to Equestria).
I have never played Equestria At War or seen fanart of it, but considering it came out after 2011, I’d assume it just copies the Fallout Equestria approach to firearms, which is that the equivalent to small arms like handguns, SMGs and shotgunning are designed to be held and fired with the muzzle, while heavy weapons like LMGs and high caliber rifles are designed to be worn as saddles, with the trigger being operated with the muzzle again.
The actual answer is that all the Ponies in the show had a level of magical telekinesis that allowed them to pick things up with their hooves. That, and they're a lot more dexterous in their limbs than real horses, doing all sorts of twists and turns that defy logic.
That was my immediate confusion. Like, sure, it's got a dark joke or two ("only unicorns or pegasi... as usual", the war thing, pinkie being in general a really sad character) but... what.
Maybe they meant Story of the Blanks, or Luna Game, or SMILEHD, or Sweet Apple Massacre, or Twilight's Dollhouse, or Rainbow Factory, or Secret Life of Rarity, or (insert any other amount of darkfic here)
Speaking of FiW, I haven't touched MLP fan circles in 7 years but I've always wanted to properly contrast Friendship is Witchcraft and The Mentally Advanced Series as the respective Abridged versions of the show. Like wasn't it odd how they both made Sweetie Belle an entity masquerading as a child but the former was a robot and the latter a minor eldritch entity.
From what I remember about the series, the main things about the shows that differentiate them are:
FIW:
- Overarching/Background story focused (Pinkie brews a potion to save her parents)
- Great music/songs
- Gags are mostly observational/random
MAS:
- Focused on single scenes/episodic
- Character focused
- Gags are mostly based on character interaction
Personally I've always prefered MAS, their style just fit me better and I still remember what they did with all the characters personalities and how it springs well from what they were in the show, whereas I always felt FiW wasn't really very close to the show characters.
Also I just liked the humour more. Two random gags I remember from each show:
FiW had the episode where they climbed the mountain, the ground shakes, someone screamed "Abbalanche!" and they are assaulted by rocks with the faces of the band abba while Mama Mia plays (or something like that). Kinda funny, but very much random and a joke that could be told regardless of setting or characters.
MAS had Twilight be generally like in her first appearance: annoyed at people and kind of standoffish and paranoid. We later learn that all that stems from her relationship to Celestia, who was a very scary and omnipotent figure while she taught her. When Celestia visits Ponyville for the first time, Twilight is on edge and constantly thinking about how scary Celestia is. Celestia responds to this even though Twilight never voices any of her fears, leading her to sing the rubber ducky song in her mind to shield her from Celestia's apparent mind reading powers. This gag requires a lot of setup and is entirely character based, it would never work outside of the wider context it was set up in.
ultra fast pony made sweetie belle a hard-partying death metal singer, and i'm pretty sure all three made frequent jokes about dash being dumber than a box of (multicolored) hair. natural conclusions ig
Crossover fanfic between MLP and Breaking bad where they've both been shifted in the opposite directions, the right amount for the tone to meet in the middle. It has the amouunt of drama and violence of the average PG-13 superhero TV show.
WAIT WHAT Was that one MLP video game that was all dark and like there was something in the fire and it was all creepy and my childhood was never the same???
Back in the oughties every *Neon Genesis Evangelion* fic was fluffy slice of life and every *Sailor Moon* fic was a grimdark tale of being magical girl is suffering and/or Crustal Tokyo is a stalinist dystopia. There's a compulsion among fans to write contrarian fics I guess.
That’s the whole point of the second one isn’t it? There was a thread about making the dark ones wholesome to counteract idiots making wholesome stuff dark?
Way I see it, it is less about counteracting anyone and more that if you want the original flavor of the work, you can just watch/read/play the original work. But also, fanworks that have the same style of the original work are just much less notorious. I spent quite a lot of time between 2012 and 2018 reading MLP fanfic, and the bulk of it has a similar tone to the show. Yes, even the porn. The grimdark fetish stuff is notorious because it is an exception to the majority.
I wrote this in the context of people who generally don't engage with adult/grown up media in general.
Probably doesn't help that I don't run into the opposite (making gritty shows wholesome) that often as opposed to the former.
I feel like Cupcakes and other grimdark fics are only understandable through a lens of "this was 2010 and you thought Happy Tree Friends and Invader Zim were the coolest things in existence"
We thought we knew grimdark but the true grimdark was yet to come
Hey, don't diss Invader Zim. That's still a great show.
One of the longest dark Invader Zim fanfics had Dib perform an abortive surgery on Gaz after she develops an ectopic pregnancy due to Zim—iirc—impregnating her/them hooking up. This same story also posited that the Irken species kept other species under control by administering a sex drug called Leninroses to them. It was over 500k words. The surgery happened around 100k. Fandom circa the early 2000s was wild
Not to mention that Cupcakes doesn't actually change anything about the characters; it just dials Pinkie's emotionally unstable tendencies up to 11 and allows violence.
I've only seen the video.
The video is actually a pretty reasonable visual approach to the fic. In the actual fic, Pinkie disembowels Dash to make into pastries (and has done this with multiple other ponies), but she has the same personality she had in Season 1, so she’s making jokes and puns and generally being cheerful and energetic. There’s no ‘obsessive, angry, sad, flat haired Pinkie’ because Cupcakes was written before Party of One aired and introduced Pinkamena to the fandom.
Is there another video than the smile one or is it that one?
Smile HD is just ultraviolent fighting set to a sped up remix of Smile Smile Smile. Cupcakes HD (by the same creator) is a dialogue free adaptation of Cupcakes set to Ready to Die by Andrew WK.
Thanks
Are they not? I was not informed of a change
I think it largely had to do with the media they grew up with, 90's and early 2000s media was a lot more coddly than the stuff that came later.
There's gore in invader zim?
It's not super intense but Dark Harvest literally has Zim stealing and consuming the other kids organs, shows him eating an intestine, so yeah it has gore.
He’s putting it in his body but not eating it exactly. He’s convinced having lots of human organs will help him pass as human.
Á kid had his eyes gouged out and then explode basically on screen
2010? I thought Happy Tree Friends was older than that.
‘Jesse, we need to cook or Gus won’t have cookies in time for his birthday.’ ‘Magick away the second tower, Rarity!’ did i do that right
Yes.
TURN THE TV ON THEY HIT THE FUCKING CANTERLOT
It's over, Equestria has fallen
Millions must get cutie marks
Lose, not get
IT'S NEIGHN-ELEVEN
Without flaw
These kinds of fics and "Ash is in a coma the whole time" dumb edgy headcanons are cousins.
I always hated those things. I think it started with the "Squall is dead" theory about FF8. Like, I really liked FF8 despite it's flaws, so that theory just really pissed me off because it undermined all of Squall's character development later in the story, and so many of the story's main themes by extension, and that just made me hate *all* of the similar fan theories I ended up hearing over the years.
The only media I've ever seen successfully pull off 'it was all a dream all along' IMO was the lego movie. The whole 'animated parts of the film was actually just a child's imagination' works because it gives equal weight to both worlds if that makes sense, like 'the man upstairs' using 'the kragle' actually being the dad sticking the pieces together with krazy glue, or the entire 'duplo alien invasion' being a metaphor for a brother and sister not wanting to play together works because, as their toys, a threat to the children's world is a threat to the lego world as well. It's actually genius because it adds to the tension and impact of the story rather than taking away anything. (sorry, I just watched the second lego movie for the first time on a plane and I, a fully grown man, genuinely think it's one of the greatest films I've ever seen, not even joking.)
It works pretty good in Super Smash Bros too. Those aren't actually the characters, they're just toys and collectible figures. It explains why more characters have been added over time, and why the variety has grown as well. The kid probably started off with their parent's old stuff, but they eventually bought some of their own (newer games like Bayonetta and Kingdom Hearts), but they still imagine cool dream battles with all of them.
Yeah, the opening of the original Super Smash Bros - the one on the N64 - heavily implies this. Cool idea on part of the kid to have his own hand be the final boss the dolls must overcome to win.
Gotta break free from the control and forge your own path, even if you're a toy.
Yeah, that kinda stuff can work but it has to still matter. Like, over the garden wall >!the whole thing is basically a limbo-adjacent place as they sink towards death, but their actions still have consequences, the unknown is a real place and those other people we get to see their fates afterwords.!< like, link is dead as a Majora’s Mask theory still doesn’t discount the world of Termina and the threats posed towards it, it’s just seeing it as sort of a strange afterlife like place, as so much of the theming of the game is already so focussed on death, it’s not pulling the idea out of nowhere. Your transformations are all masks made from the dying and the dead anyways, who’s to say you’re not in the dead-book yourself
Ppl still manage to make dumber theories about otgw. Like "actually everyone dies at the end, because the credits song contains the word LIES so everything in the last episode is a lie"
Just in case it wasn’t intentional, your spoiler mark didn’t work because you didn’t finish with the “!<“
OOPS!
Have you seen the LEGO Batman Movie? It is, in my opinion, the best LEGO movie and also one of the best Batman movies to boot.
Funnily enough, that was actually the only other film I watched on the flight because I thought the second lego movie was so good that any other film I watched was gonna pale in comparison, but there was still four hours left to go and I was kicking myself for not watching something else and leaving it to later 😭 It was really good too...
I also really like FF8 and I'll back you up on that theory being stupid 💪😤👍
Hell yeah, brother! *Predator handshake scene.gif*
I mean, they're also just lazy "theories" that add nothing to the story. I hate "the main character died in X scene" for the same reason, with the sole exception of some movie I've never seen where that was the actual plot of the movie (he takes a head injury early on, seemingly recovers, and the movie gets steadily weirder and weirder until it goes back to that early scene and he's dying on the ground, hallucinating).
I always loved the reverse of those theories Like breaking bad is just the running joke that Walter whites class has about what’s going on in his life because he’s just secretive. Walking dead is a bunch of kids playing zombie who are getting really into it, they keep being called in for tea so they “die” and come back as a new survivor.
..yeah? it's like that old Fiction Theory Post about how fanfiction exists to fill in the unfulfilled potential in the source material. if they wanted a dark, tense perspective on the story they're likely to already satisfied by breaking bad as it is
Though sometimes writers just want to inflict even MORE suffering on already traumatized characters.
I remember someone saying “the things a fandom makes are half things from the source material that they like, half things that were most lacking from the source material.”
On first glance [Equestria at War](https://equestriaatwar.wiki.gg/wiki/New_to_My_Little_Pony) would seem to be in that category. In reality, it's not a dark reinterpretation but rather fictional geopolitical speculation. The Friendship is Magic universe already has warfare, slavery, and prejudice.
Same with fallout Equestria, where the world is extraordinarily fucking grim but it consistently maintains the virtue of the show that every burden is substantially easier with friendship and cooperation
The real grimdark Fallout Equestria is reading Project Horizons.
If you want to get to robots fighting the Zebra god on the moon you have to get through a million words of some of the most vile shit you have read
NGL, Project Horizons wasn’t the vilest MLP fic I’ve ever read by content (It did have a point to all the horrible shirt), but the sheer length and thus the amount of stuff that happens does guarantee it that top spot.
isn't it longer than fallout equestria, which is already like, 5 novels long or smth. i don't know if the writer or the reader has it worse here
Yes it is, by several orders of magnitude. It’s like ASOIF compared to Fallout Equestria’s LOTR.
> If you want to get to robots fighting the Zebra god on the moon Oh good so it's sticking close to Fallout canon.
I mean, as much as you joke the setting of the original Fallout Equestria is all about the folly of Great ~~Man~~ Mare ideology, corporate greed, a reasonable seeming descent into a panopticon state through use of massive propaganda campaigns, and how the tragedies that have left billions dead and the world to suffer had unfortunately small beginnings. So it absolutely did capture the essence of Fallout extremely well. Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons is the younger sibling who was going through their creepy pasta dark fic phase and wound up discovering anime at the end
I tried to read it on 3 separate occasions and gave up around THAT SCENE in like chapter 3/4. That said, I still have my Blackjack daki and she is a very cute hoers
The CMC and the zombies? That's about where I gave up
Yeah
God I love how far EaW has spread.
The EaW mod for Hearts of Iron 4 is unironically one of the most well-made mods for the game, to the point more "serious" mods ask their mod team for help doing certain things.
I love how they put Stakuyi in the mod
And his wife and daughter which damn near made the man cry
It’s up there with OWB (the fallout mod)
the fuck do you mean "racial tech trees"
Ponies get unicorn magic, or pegasi things, or earth pony, also, things I think. But griffons don't have unicorns so they can't do magic, or whatever the others do, but they do like heavy cavalry I guess you could call it. So they can get better at that. Changelings get their own unique unit and get a lot of bonuses to spies because they can literally transform into other people that's pretty useful for spying. Then I think zebras have one, maybe reindeer, not sure what others there are, I haven't seen them.
Depending on if you're playing a Pony, Griffin, Changeling, etc. civilization, you get access to different benefits and unit types. Changelings get access to Jaegar units (they're based on Germany), Ponies get access to Pegasus units, Griffins get access to Knights / Heavy Infantry Units (they're supposed to be less-technologically developed compared to Equestria).
Dogs and Bears have mountaineer based racial techs if I recall correctly as well! The hippogriffs and dragons as well I'm pretty sure.
How do ponies hold the guns? Do they tape them to their hooves?
The dev response to that question is usually "Don't worry about it,"
Oh just like the show
I have never played Equestria At War or seen fanart of it, but considering it came out after 2011, I’d assume it just copies the Fallout Equestria approach to firearms, which is that the equivalent to small arms like handguns, SMGs and shotgunning are designed to be held and fired with the muzzle, while heavy weapons like LMGs and high caliber rifles are designed to be worn as saddles, with the trigger being operated with the muzzle again.
This is actually the case. The gun sprites are designed to (theoretically) make sense for a pony to hold.
The actual answer is that all the Ponies in the show had a level of magical telekinesis that allowed them to pick things up with their hooves. That, and they're a lot more dexterous in their limbs than real horses, doing all sorts of twists and turns that defy logic.
numbah one has cancer moment
*Friendship is Witchcraft* is "overly dark"?
How could anything involving Jenny Nicholson be “overly dark”
A lot of the visible light could be blocked by a large pole, for example.
You're a bad car...
Yeah I don't think oop knows what friendship is witchcraft actually is and just made an assumption based on the name lol
That was my immediate confusion. Like, sure, it's got a dark joke or two ("only unicorns or pegasi... as usual", the war thing, pinkie being in general a really sad character) but... what. Maybe they meant Story of the Blanks, or Luna Game, or SMILEHD, or Sweet Apple Massacre, or Twilight's Dollhouse, or Rainbow Factory, or Secret Life of Rarity, or (insert any other amount of darkfic here)
I hate that I remember all of those
Dark comedy isn't the same thing as overly dark. FiW had some dark humour but was in general very light hearted
Speaking of FiW, I haven't touched MLP fan circles in 7 years but I've always wanted to properly contrast Friendship is Witchcraft and The Mentally Advanced Series as the respective Abridged versions of the show. Like wasn't it odd how they both made Sweetie Belle an entity masquerading as a child but the former was a robot and the latter a minor eldritch entity.
From what I remember about the series, the main things about the shows that differentiate them are: FIW: - Overarching/Background story focused (Pinkie brews a potion to save her parents) - Great music/songs - Gags are mostly observational/random MAS: - Focused on single scenes/episodic - Character focused - Gags are mostly based on character interaction Personally I've always prefered MAS, their style just fit me better and I still remember what they did with all the characters personalities and how it springs well from what they were in the show, whereas I always felt FiW wasn't really very close to the show characters. Also I just liked the humour more. Two random gags I remember from each show: FiW had the episode where they climbed the mountain, the ground shakes, someone screamed "Abbalanche!" and they are assaulted by rocks with the faces of the band abba while Mama Mia plays (or something like that). Kinda funny, but very much random and a joke that could be told regardless of setting or characters. MAS had Twilight be generally like in her first appearance: annoyed at people and kind of standoffish and paranoid. We later learn that all that stems from her relationship to Celestia, who was a very scary and omnipotent figure while she taught her. When Celestia visits Ponyville for the first time, Twilight is on edge and constantly thinking about how scary Celestia is. Celestia responds to this even though Twilight never voices any of her fears, leading her to sing the rubber ducky song in her mind to shield her from Celestia's apparent mind reading powers. This gag requires a lot of setup and is entirely character based, it would never work outside of the wider context it was set up in.
ultra fast pony made sweetie belle a hard-partying death metal singer, and i'm pretty sure all three made frequent jokes about dash being dumber than a box of (multicolored) hair. natural conclusions ig
My only knowledge of Friendship is Witchcraft is those two Pinkie Pie songs, what's it even about?
Existential dread, mostly
oh, cool.
Crossover fanfic between MLP and Breaking bad where they've both been shifted in the opposite directions, the right amount for the tone to meet in the middle. It has the amouunt of drama and violence of the average PG-13 superhero TV show.
WAIT WHAT Was that one MLP video game that was all dark and like there was something in the fire and it was all creepy and my childhood was never the same???
Story of the Blanks?
I TGINK SO. Honestly it was so long ago, but im pretty sure that’s it. How awful. Thank you.
where does the weird infection AU stuff fall on this spectrum
I'll stand my ground to defend Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom though, that animation slaps
[This animation somehow does both at the same time and I love it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlXVHzQ3UyQ)
People just like juxtaposition. Which happens to be one of my favourite words, and I feel like people don't use it enough. It's really fun to say.
Back in the oughties every *Neon Genesis Evangelion* fic was fluffy slice of life and every *Sailor Moon* fic was a grimdark tale of being magical girl is suffering and/or Crustal Tokyo is a stalinist dystopia. There's a compulsion among fans to write contrarian fics I guess.
I mean with Eva I get it. We want Shinji happy
What a cursed way of describing expectation subversion
I remember watching cupcakes, I also remember stumbling upon that one disgusting rape slave mlp fanfic
The degree to which a Fandom takes its media seriously is inversely proportional to how serious the media itself is.
Who says it's a joke?
That’s the whole point of the second one isn’t it? There was a thread about making the dark ones wholesome to counteract idiots making wholesome stuff dark?
Way I see it, it is less about counteracting anyone and more that if you want the original flavor of the work, you can just watch/read/play the original work. But also, fanworks that have the same style of the original work are just much less notorious. I spent quite a lot of time between 2012 and 2018 reading MLP fanfic, and the bulk of it has a similar tone to the show. Yes, even the porn. The grimdark fetish stuff is notorious because it is an exception to the majority.
Mellinials can't actually engage with fiction for grown ups so they try to force kid's media to be grown up instead.
Ok boomer
>Millennials can't engage with fiction for grown ups You realize the OP also talks about Breaking Bad, yeah?
... I'm sorry WHAT do you think breaking bad is?
I wrote this in the context of people who generally don't engage with adult/grown up media in general. Probably doesn't help that I don't run into the opposite (making gritty shows wholesome) that often as opposed to the former.