I am not entirely sure how to best explain the problem here. I have a website that is using PHP to print out stuff from a MySQL database, and for some reason Chrome and Edge are hanging on this specific sequence:

in the database i have this stored in a text (latin1_swedish_ci) column of a table.

You may choose the order of these effects:<br><br>
If the target has Frightened, they must gain one Stress or use Walk as an extra action to move away from you.<br><br> 
You may destroy one Basic Gear when you use this action. If you do the target must gain one Stress or use Walk as an extra action to move towards you.

the php runs this on that text:

str_replace('<br><br>', '<p style="line-height:10px;margin:0px;"><br></p>', $abilarray["ShortCard Description"]);

the php works fine on the other 1k+ entries on the database, and it works fine in firefox, but when chrome/edge tries to load this it just stalls, and sends cpu load up to the sky, and then eventually crashes. here’s the weird thing. if i put another

anywhere else in this entry, it works. i ended up changing the text to this

You may choose the order of these effects:<br><br>
You may destroy one Basic Gear when you use this action. If you do the target must gain one Stress or use Walk as an extra action to move towards you.<br><br> 
If the target has Frightened, they must gain one Stress or use Walk as an extra action to move away from you.

and somehow that made chrome happy. so the thing is, yes i found a bandaid, but i don’t understand what the issue is, and i was hoping someone could explain it so that i can avoid it in the future.