If you're in the Aphverse fandom and you don't know what that title is referring to, you might want to sit down to read this. It's not... the best.

I want to use this post to both compile all the information I have from my own sleuthing, and express my thoughts and nuanced opinions in one place. I'm incredibly depressed by this whole situation, and I think everyone who's ever been a fan of anything made by this team deserves to sit with this uncomfortable truth with as much information as they need for as long as they need it. So lets get started.

I don’t mind all the darker and grittier content, but I’m specifically disturbed by how they’re often written with a lack of care and tact, and knowing that their target audience is/was children for a really long time. That, along with the way characters like Aphmau are simultaneously infantilized and hyper sexualized.

In general there’s a very sexual tone to a lot of the series (characters being knocked out and stripped down, love potion shenanigans, the way characters talk about their bodies, etc). It’s all very disturbing for me knowing how many little kids were watching these things, and knowing they were the intended audience. That Jesson even profited off of it with merch sales and whatnot. I haven’t really kept up with what’s going on now, and I know they’ve made an adult channel, but for most of the time they’ve been doing this the audience has been kids.

Anyways. Just my own thoughts. You can ignore this ask, I was just curious if you had any thoughts

When I tell you that reading this ask made me cackle with joy, I mean it. These are the questions I always enjoy answering.

I too am a person who is not skeeved out by most stories getting into darker material. I have my limits as everyone does, but generally I'm likely to walk with a work to whatever uncomfortable pier it asks me to. However, I will always be checking the quality of the planks as we walk, because how well constructed the walk is will make or break my ability to work with the subject matter. And to be frank, basically every time an Aphmau property gets into darker subject matter all of the planks are rotting and I've fallen into the ocean.

There is, as you said, very little grace or tact given to these darker subjects when they are presented. They knew the audience for these shows skewed younger, yet they put in some rather difficult subject matter with no real exploration or care necesarry for them. There are two big examples I can think of, one in each of the biggest series. In MCD there's the pregnancy pendant plotline, a plot where Kiki is given a child under dubious cricumstances and there is more emphasis placed on whether or not she going to keep this child who she did not ask for, rather than exploring the emotional turmoil that this might have caused Kiki.

In MyStreet there is the famous example where Season 6 gives the viewer the implication that Ein and Aphmau, people with a long standing romantic plotline between them central to one of their characters, were actually half siblings. This implication is in a single line, which does not even address the elephant in the room, and is probably going to be retconned anyways. The show leaves the implication of unknown incest on the table, but neither of the characters involved ever find out about it, so it's not like we had a single chance to explore the emotional ramifications of this truth coming to light. The creators probably had no interest in exploring that at all, I'm convinced they threw that line in there just to get people to stop shipping Einmau and it only kind of worked.

As for the highly sexualized elements of plotlines and framing in general, this is where things get a little mirky. When it comes to the darker subjects these series often feel like they are not putting these plot points in with any interest to explore them, just for the sake of some other larger goal. But the sexual nature is almost baked into the show, and that is a little worrying when you know that the audience was primarily children.

However, this is something I give them the slightest benefit of the doubt on, and here's why. Jess and Jason were not writing this show for anyone else, they were writing it to be the show they wanted it to be. And one of the biggest inspirations in their writing is Fairy Tail, a series aimed at teenagers and young adults which is so horny that it's the only thing some people know the show for. So when Jess and Jason are writing their ideal show, it is as horny and romantically messy as the works that inspired them.

I do think it was a bad idea to do this to MyStreet especially, because at that point they knew what kind of audience they had, but I think Jess and Jason truly did not care. What that says about them is up to the individual, but to be frank, they have always put something above their audience. Whether it is their perverted creative vision, or the ability to profit, or the ability to clap back at their haters, these creators have always put their audience lower on the priority list than they are willing to admit.

The stuff they put on the ASMP channel and the fact that they use Generative AI to create it is proof that they simply do not care about the children watching these videos. They do not care if they are actually engaged with what they are watching. They care about the style of content that has gotten them the most views. They rebranded Aphmau Stories to be the new roleplays channel, but that was the channel known by the older fans they desired to win back as "the channel where roleplays go to die". They also cared more about their branding and numbers than they did about older content, because everything that was once on that channel only exists in playlists as unlisted videos. Any day they could decide to get rid of those playlists and Dreams of Estorra and MCD Season 3 would be in danger of becoming outright lost content. And I could see them deciding to do that if they thought it would somehow "strengthen the brand."