A long time ago, there was a guy my then-group of friends knew that got a Subaru Impreza. He was one of those guys that at the time, nobody really cared a tremendous amount about, but nobody really had the heart to tell him to fuck off. Plus, as long as he felt included in the group, he could always be relied upon to bring food and/or snacks to any sort of arranged gatherings.
Anyway, aside from the fact that he bought an automatic transmission, we often passive-aggressively clowned on him for his car, because that’s what a bunch of Initial D-inspired auto enthusiasts did amongst each other. Other points of ridicule were how he got his car literally months before the WRX was unleashed, how he got a huge speeding ticket in Pennsylvania for driving like a retard, and the time he wrecked because he thought AWD made him invincible.
My favorite method of trolling him was that I often times told him that he made a mistake getting an Impreza, and that the real coup of coolness would’ve been if he had gotten a Forester instead; the Impreza’s dorky but more utilitarian older brother. Sure, the Forester was definitely more of a family car, but it was always fun to glorify the cargo room and the utility of the Forester over his Impreza.
The best was when we discovered the existence of a Forester STI, that Subaru released overseas, which was a jacked-up high-performance variant of the Forester, which not only retained all the utility of the original Forester, but had all sorts of performance upgrades that made it like two classes above what this guy got in his automatic Impreza. That’s the car he should’ve gotten instead.
Needless to say, since then, I’ve always carried somewhat of a positive connotation with the Forester, even if it stemmed from ironic, griefing purposes.