When Did Hermione Start Dating Cloud Strife?

Ever since I stumbled into the strange, eerie world of vertical dramas, specifically AI shorts, I've started noticing a few… recurring patterns. And by "a few", I mean the sort of repetition that makes you wonder if it's all cranked out by one guy, alone, fuelled by energy drinks and a low-grade grudge against women. Let’s start with the women. Nearly all of them seem to be spat out of the same cursed mold: somewhere between Hermione Granger and Bella Swan after being left out in the rain. Delicate as birch trees, wide-eyed like they've never once operated a lung on their own, gasping on cue. They don't even seem to have interior lives so much as a standing reservation for whichever catastrophe, billionaire or shirtless psychopath wanders into frame. The men fare no better. Imagine if the poster boys of the Third Reich were thrown into a tumble dryer with Cloud from Final Fantasy. The result is a parade of suspiciously symmetrical CEOs, mafia bosses, billionaires and heirs, all nursing anger management issues that would get a lesser man institutionalised. Their hobbies read like a trap sheet: buying women, selling women, blackmailing women, imprisoning women, marrying women against their will, or torching entire companies because someone dared look at them for too long. They also appear to be equipped with anatomically impossible penises. So impossible, in fact, that the female leads spend half the episode struggling to walk afterwards. Which, apparently, counts as romance. The plots follow the same logic. - The ugly duckling becomes a stripper to take revenge on her ex. - The innocent girl accidentally signs a marriage contract with a billionaire. - The maid discovers she's secretly the heir to an empire. - The poor girl is auctioned off. - The nanny falls for the mafia boss. - The assistant is forced into a contract relationship. - The virgin accidentally sleeps with the CEO. It's less a genre than a taxonomic catalogue of increasingly elaborate ways to strip women of agency before handing it back as a reward in the final episode. Now, remember – these stories are overwhelmingly made and/or targeted for women. They're marketed as female fantasy, female escapism, female empowerment. But hardly any of them actually positions women as subjects. The women are almost always acted upon rather than acting, and their value lies in being exceptional objects within a male hierarchy, not autonomous people with ambitions, contradictions, humour or genuine power. It's Fifty Shades of Grey reproduced endlessly through increasingly absurd variations. Sometimes the tyrant is a ruthless billionaire. Sometimes it's a merciless female executive. The costume changes, but the architecture remains remarkably familiar: domination, submission, ownership. Because despite all the talk about women finally getting stories made for women, so many of these narratives still revolve around the oldest fantasy of all: proximity to power rather than possession of it. To be fair, I understand why they work. They're fast, emotionally efficient, melodramatic, impossible to stop watching and brilliantly engineered to deliver dopamine every ninety seconds. Turns out you can hand humanity infinite creative freedom and we'll still choose to jerk off to the same patriarchal fairy tale we've been spoon-fed since Eve took the fall. Cool. Cool cool cool. See, I don't know what that says about us, or about how far we've actually come. Maybe it's just Audre Lorde's old line: the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. But it feels like such a small ask, just once, to get women as subjects instead of trophies. Now THAT would have been genuinely radical.