Feel like bitching and don't feel like dumping this on my Discord contacts so into the Sheezy journal it goes lmao. While I'm on a Neopets kick, I constantly see people shop around Grundo's Cafe as a cool alternative, but it always leave a bad taste in my mouth considering that from what I've seen of it, they kept a LOT of the racist stuff from classic Neo and only made very minimal changes that don't really do much of anything to address the problems.

Like, they changed one or two Desert pet designs, but the Lost Desert as a whole is still "orientalist ancient Egypt land where everyone's dressed in loincloths and pharaoh getup". They got rid of the Tombola guy but Mystery Island as a whole still has the "tikis and luaus" aesthetic. Like, their whole daily where they have the random singing Kyrii who makes references to corny white Tiktok teen music and meme songs could've been a good opportunity to reference actual Native Pacific Islander artists and give them spotlight, but I don't think anyone on the team actually wants to go to that level of effort.

While regular Neo is no saint in that regard and has a lot of grandfathered-in issues, I still side-eye them for keeping a lot of this stuff in while constantly making a big part of their platform and advertising "Being Classic Neo but more progressive" to the point where it gets pushed as that CONSTANTLY, not to mention the fact that they don't have the same problems that keep a lot of this from being fixed on regular Neo! They're not beholden to keep/redesign a little over two and a half decades' worth of on-site content given that it's a fanmade ground-up remake and they can easily pick and choose what they want to keep, not to mention they don't have to worry about any item redesigns messing with people's expensive customizations and (presumably) any redesign backlash getting directed primarily at fans of color and not the staff, AKA the main reasons why we likely haven't seen complete overhauls on Neopets yet. Just, if you're gonna talk the talk and hype yourself up as the cool, progressive alternative, you should put in the effort, you know?

And granted, some of my bitterness is also directed to seeing lots of casual and not-so-casual bigotry from avid players so like. Bad associations might also taint this but still.