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The disappearance of sci-fi writing in the US is yet another clear sign of technological decline.
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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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I didn't realize they were doing harem slop (I've never looked at anything but a few directly linked threads) but I guess it makes sense. It sounds like a trashy shounen manga publication (or perhaps that type of seinen that's really still just meant for teenagers) where you don't even need to be decent at highly procedural drawing.
I couldn't help myself, and went and looked again. Here are some highlights of the titles from the past week:
I do see a lot of titles that sound like sci-fi, but it's a pretty even mix of that and what are clearly fantasy, and there's a bunch of obvious isekais too. A lot of the ones I listed showed up multiple times, too, and three of them are from the same author. I'm assuming a fair bit of it is AI word vomit too, but I really don't want to fry my brain by looking any closer.
That really is just an impressive volume of cookie-cutter trash. I do have some sympathy for reverse isekai though.
At least some of it, I think. I'd gone and looked at it again after the thread about the youtube videos that were just AI gibberish stories either lifted from old r/hfy posts or themed after them, and saw a lot of like "Going to a Magic School as a Human in Another World Where There Are Catgirls Chapter 63" (I made this title up because I can't remember the exact one, but I'm riffing on a specific one that was really close to that) sort of posts. Even morbid curiosity couldn't get me more than a few skimmed paragraphs in, between how terrible the writing was and also the fact that that was the actual length of those "chapters" lmao.
I assume there is still some of the old style sci-fi stuff too, but it felt like it had largely shifted away from the old one-off short story form "empty slop to trip up certain emotions relating to fear, pride, loss, and accomplishment" to serialized "empty wish fulfillment escapism" slop. I think I even saw a post complaining about exactly that change in the content lmao.
It's like the jankiest, lowest grade imitation of LN web publishing you could imagine. Like I think there are comparable English sites for doing chapter by chapter publishing for webnovels, although they may be less popular than that sort of thing is in Japan, but "a subreddit where you post like 500 word chapters several times a week" is just the worst medium for it.
Where's the polycule slop that I want? Where's the story where the protagonist has like 5 girlfriends but they each also have their own other partners and the whole thing is really about scheduling with a bit of drama sprinkled in here and there, where's that?
I think that's just Watanare, although I don't know where it goes past the first season of the anime because I haven't read it, nor watched the movie/5-episode continuation.