Things I Don't Like

 Some very random things I don't like... because why not?! ⚠️WARNING: Negative Zone⚠️

Characters that just exist to be the female to a male counterpart or have a romantic subplot
  The white dragon from the How to Train Your Dragon Sequel. The pink Stitch. The terrible ugly horrible female chipmunk abomination creatures from Alavin and the Chipmunks. Apparently a lot of Disney direct-to-DVD sequel plots.. TV Tropes calls this trope a "Distaff Counterpart", and boy am I glad that this isn't as common as it used to be. Do you ever watch older movies and shows and are annoyed at the terrible and useless romantic subplots? And characters like this in animation? But I still see terrible love interest characters everywhere in everything, especially in stuff like generic shounen.

 I also don't like when female cartoon characters all wear clothes while the male characters are naked with apparently their cartoon dongs hanging out... like in Sonic. I guess even in cartoons female nudity is a taboo while males aren't thought about in that way. So they live in male nudist societies.

When every American movie is in LA / some other huge California city or NYC for no reason
  Please. There are other places in the world. Not everyone knows or cares about LA-specific references like stupid pink donut boxes or whatever.

Any VERY OVERUSED weird Tiktok words (ESPECIALLY ones around gender) and topics [mini-rant]
 Including but not limited to: I'm just a girl, girl dinner, girl math (loathe this), boy mom, coquette, anything-ize (especially when talking about unserious subjects, fetishize, romanticize, sexualize), OvErConSuMpTiOn, BeiGE FLag, DeLuLu, GoOnEr (especially when it's overused like calling a generic romance book a gooner book), calling everything a cult, calling asshole a narcissist, incel / femcel, weird overused therapy terms, CoRn, EsSaY, AlpHa / OmEgA, ThE PrObLeM WiTH [XYZ], ToXiC, MiLLeNniAL whatever. My mother taught me very early on not to act stupid or self-infantilize myself; it makes me sad other young women seemingly haven't learned this lession. I also remember first seeing "#boymom" on a bumper sticker and getting extremely confused why would be proud of a 50% chance outcome. Why does it have to be BOY mom or GIRL anything?? Why not just MOM?

 I don't have Tiktok, but I can tell which words and topics are trendy through YouTube. Video essay YouTubers in my recommendations will make really lazy low-hanging fruit topic of the week videos about whatever moral panic is going on from Tiktok. What do I mean by this?? WELL, it's 5/20/25 as of writing this. I can see by looking at several popular channels when certain topics cycle through. Last year it was almond moms, abusive van life parents, then it was carnivore diet people, then it was 10 year olds at Sephora, beige moms, disney adults, booktok / dark romance, etc. Right now it seems to be discourse over blindboxes and Labubu. (I do think Labubus are cute and would look great on a bag, but I wouldn't collect blindboxes.) I'm not even singling out a channel in particular; most of these commentary channels all have the same thumbnails with someone's face over the same pictures from TikTok about the topic... the YouTube will make a disgusted judgemental face like (ㅎ.ㅎ). The text on the thumbnail or title will say something like "THE DARK SIDE OF XYZ" or "THE PROBLEM WITH OVERCONSUMPTION".

  This whole cycle fascinates me in a way because the topics people discuss always seem to be quite safe and uncontroversal. For example, I'm sure most people can be critical of blindbox practices, right? It feels like every 2 weeks there's a new discourse that sweeps through before getting forgetten about and most commentary doesn't really even add anything besides "obvious thing bad!!". I'm not even anti-discourse since I complain about stuff like Gatcha models on this site a lot and enjoy discussion. But I am fascinated with what safe discourse topics will come next this year. Any predictions?! I'm guessing there will be discourse around waifus / husbandos / self-shipping if there hasn't been already. Maybe discourse around uhhhh, I don't know? How commerical holidays have become or Christmas stuff in October?

 I guess the td;lr of this ramble is that I wish everything didn't feel so same-y and reguritated online sometimes

Color-blobs / overly-clashing designs
 Sorry Smile girls. I dislike designs with overly-clashy one-note colors. Cure Peace (the yellow one) is the best example. She's just a yellow blob with nothing to break up the yellow. I can be picky about character designs in general, because I want the character to be easily "readable" visually, I don't like overcomplicated designs (like lots of VTubers), and I want color to be broken up in different hues / values / saturation.

Big-nosed dorky socially-awkward male character in western animation
 This trope is everywhere in kids shit. Usually this character will end up with a beautiful competent woman who was sick of him at first. I think that writers think that it's progressive to have a dorky guy end up with a woman who is more competent than him, but it's so overused at this point. I couldn't find it, but there was a meme that said that this kind of character was the Western cartoon version of a generic Isekai protagonist. A lot of people online have also pointed out quirky female Disney characters are overused at this point too.

Pop-culture references / humor

 One of my least favorite types of humor. This makes media age like milk. I like Gintama, but the amount of references makes it a tough watch at certain points.

Extreme pessimism / "doomerism"

 Self-induced psychic damage.

"Now a [movie / TV series]!" sticker on book covers

 Nobody in the entire world likes this! Stop it please, book publishers! This makes book covers ugly and age terribly (a theme that comes up over and over again here). Why would I want an AD on a book I paid for?

Side mouths in art

 This includes anime too. I feel weirdly anal about making my anime art look 3D or how a figure would look... or at least try to. Side mouths made Ken Penders art look especially hideous. After googling for an example, at least it seems like my opinion is not unpopular. I have been seeing side mouths less and less in recent anime.

Ukelele background music in YouTube videos

 Please stop putting ukelele music in YouTube videos. Anything else or silence would be better. I keep having to mute craft DIY videos because the music above makes my ears bleed.

Pep rallies

 Sometimes I really wish I was European. My school forced everyone to attend these dreadful pep rallies with the teachers blocking the doors. We literally had screaming contests. Was this supposed to make me like high school?!

Prophecy tropes

 This is one way for your story to completely stop being interesting. I remember HATING Kung-Fu Panda 2 and the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland as a kid for this trope. You have told me the hero wins no matter what. WHY would I watch to watch a show after that? It just seems unfair. I don't even like seeing self-aware or lamp-shaded "chosen one" tropes.

Overuse of the word "niche"

 See above meme I made. An actual ~niche~ anime would be like a shitty OVA from the 80's nobody gives a fuck about.