I'm investigating now. My gut instinct tells me this is browser specific since IE is always behind current standards, but I'll double check to be sure.

Is the mobile desktop version you're using also IE or is it something else?

@saypikapika - I double checked on IE as well as Edge, and it's definitely IE specific. After playing around with the console it has something to do with the way IE decides to render margins. While Edge, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all seem to adhere to a uniform (or mostly uniform) display, IE doesn't, for whatever reason, follow suit. What it looks like is that it doesn't like nested margins. If I disable the top margin property on the bending symbols, everything is fixed (though top-aligned instead of middle-aligned). If I add any sort of margin whatsoever, it exhibits the same behaviour. It looks like what it wants is for me to use markup that, as of HTML5, is deprecated.

This is actually a very common experience for IE and in the past many websites acquiesced to these differences. However, IE is rapidly becoming an obsolete browser, which is why I have not, and do not intend to, make adjustments to themes for IE. Prior to the release of MS Edge in 2015, it accounted for less than 7% of all internet traffic ever. As of 2016, that number has dropped to less than 5%, but those statistics are mixed in with MS Edge users so in reality it's even less. The amount of hoops you need to go through to make coding cross browser compatible with IE is borderline madness. For TARP specifically, less than 1% of all our traffic comes from IE.

If it winds up becoming a problem to the point where the forum is unusable / if you find multiple instances of overlapping content, I will work on IE specific coding, but the amount of work that would involve making sure other content is cross-compatible as well would be a significant task, especially in light of less than 1% of our users coming from IE.

Thanks for the help! And no, I use safari and it doesn't have that kind of problem. And it's not intrusive by any means. I just happened to see it on a computer that only has IE. It may be something to keep a record of for those who it is intrusive though.