Looking forward to seeing what the wokeshit runners think is the biggest evil in-universe!
So the good news is they're not ruining the metaplot with wokeshit (at least not yet). In fact for one of the other major stories they're doing the exact opposite of what I'd expect from woketards. That's the good news, the bad news is while they're not ruining the plot with woke, they are ruining it with general dogshit writing. There are currently 3 major plotlines involving threats.
The first is the bugs are back. I mean I know they never technically left, but now they're back in a Bug City 2.0 kinda way. The tl:dr is Damien Knight, probably one of the canonically smartest/savviest normies in the setting, went full
Umbrella Corp retard and started trying to weaponize bugs. He hired Otto Hendricks (of Universal Brotherhood/OG Bug City fame) and put him to work. He even went so far as to start having members of Firewatch (aka the very people he created to fight bugs) geeked for not getting with the program. Eventually he unveiled his masterplan: Operation Latvian Gambit.
Under cover of a refit/upgrade cycle he pulled 80% of Ares Corporate Military Forces back to Detroit and declared a bunch of no-go zones where he positioned his forces. A while later a totally true and honest terrorist attack supposedly wiped out the rest of Ares board, so Knight took emergency control. He ordered an attack on a bug hive, and in news that should shock no-one it turned out to be a clusterfuck. It turned out that there were far more bugs than expected, also Knights fancy new "alpha merge" bug-infested soldiers were as prone to attacking friendles as they were foes. Cue giant shitshow and whole bunch of fighting in a 3 way fight between the bugs, Ares, and a bunch of randos led by Anne Ravenheart (of Firewatch fame). Eventually however it turns out Arthur Vogel wasn't killed in the terrorist attack and he resurfaced claiming instead that Knight was killed during the fighting, and that he was now in charge, and ordered his forces to stand down. He then blamed the entire thing on the UCAS government stating they hadn't done enough to help and promptly packed the entire fucking corp up and moved it to Atlanta instead.
So now Detroit is a bug infested hellhole probably worse than Chicago ever was, and the people who owned most of the city, and provided almost all it's services have buggered off. Shit's fucking fucked, yo.
Second major plotline is sort of tied to this one. When shit first hit the fan in Detroit all outside communications were cut off. The UCAS, not knowing what was going on, decided to send the Third Army Corps in. However in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, Pennsylvania the entire formation, along with a town of 25k people just straight up fucking disappears. UCAS sends in some National Guard troops for recon and they vanish too. Months later bodies of missing soldiers start turning up, except they're all fucked up in different ways, showing signs of weird changes. Eventually live soldiers turn up as well, and they're all showing signs of changes as well, including some mundanes showing random pseudo-magical abilities like shitty knock-off X-men. It turns out they stumbled through a rift to a creepy metaplane known as Dis, and no-one knows how or why. This isn't even the first time it's happened as at the end of 5e there was a plotline where a manastorm opened a physical portal to the Faerie Court. The threat here is twofold:
1)No-one knows how or why these rifts are opening. Traditionally travel to metaplanes was only possible astrally, and even then usually only to an Initiate level magic user
2)If people, even mundanes, can physically travel to metaplanes, it's entirely possible that shit from the metaplanes can travel here
The final major plot also stems from Detroit as well. Not happy with what happened, nor with being blamed for it, UCAS unilaterally decides to pull out of the Business Recognition Accords (the things that give megacorps extraterritoriality). A little while later the UCAS is absolutely crippled by a massive series of blackouts that hit almost every major city they have left. Hell blackout is underselling it because we're talking full shutdown: no power, no matrix, no electronic devices, even people's cyberware was affected. No-one knows who did it, but the leading speculation both in universe, and out, is it was the Corporate Court punishing them.
The problem is that demonstrates a level of power that shouldn't be possible in the SR universe. A cyber attack to shutdown the matrix, okay. An attack to knock out the power grid, also possible. But all the other shit like the cyberware/regular electronics stuff flat out shouldn't be possible outside of a massive EMP. The problem is SR explicitly runs on optical computing, which isn't vulnerable to EMP, and a lot of stuff is shielded against it anyway.
Finally there are a couple of smaller threads that may or may not go anywhere
1)The dragons are getting more active in sticking their noses in stuff. The Sea Dragon is stated to have orchestrated the independence declarations of both Seattle and St Louis.
2)The possible impending ghoulpocalypse. This is a plot thread from 5E but I love it. Turns out Asamondo has been wildly underselling their population levels (especially in regards to ferals). There's also something going that's affecting ghouls, with several reporting that their hunger is becoming "sharper" and harder to control. Combine that with a bunch of ferals going mad and slaughtering a bunch of Un inspectors (hey maybe they're not all bad), and revelations of the fucked up shit Asamando has been doing to non-ghouls, and wouldn;t surprise me if someone went full exterminatus on their ass.
