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Sources for Somerton's Plagiarism from Hbomberguy's Video (as much as I could get)

I went back through Harry's video, focused entirely on the sources James Somerton pulled from in the hopes of creating as much of a comprehensive list as I could--though my Google-Fu is not very strong. I did however find something I thought was forever lost and that made me very happy--specifically the magazine Midlands Zone containing the column by Steven Spinks that Harry poignantly used as an illustration of gay erasure... while Somerton uses it to sound like HE is waxing remorseful about the very subject.

This is not a complete list, I'm sure. For one thing, I was only able to attempt to pull sources that Harry himself mentioned in the video. Surely there's so very much more out there. I expect there to be a great deal more internet archeology to unearth just how much writing and culture Somerton has stolen like he's the British Museum of Natural History but for gay people.

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Harry's list of mentioned youtubers:

Alexander Avila - https://www.youtube.com/@alexander_avila Matt Baume - https://www.youtube.com/@MattBaume Khadija Mbowe - https://www.youtube.com/@KhadijaMbowe Lady Emily - https://www.youtube.com/@LadyEmilyPresents Shanspeare - https://www.youtube.com/@Shanspeare RickiHirsch - https://www.youtube.com/@RickiHirsch VerilyBitchie - https://www.youtube.com/@verilybitchie

Harry created a convenient playlist of videos by these and other people he wants to bring to everyone's attention.

Please give them your support.

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Midlands Zone Magazine - Column by Steven Spinks

After a great deal of searching, I found an archive of the "Midlands Zone" magazine, where you can read through past issues dating all the way back to February 2014. I have also found the issue from which Somerton took Spinks' poignant discussion of gay erasure: Overall archive Specific Issue - Pages 16-17

It will not allow you to download it, but you can read it exactly as it appeared in print form.

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My best effort to find the exact book or article Somerton lifted from to be able to get attention to the original writers

Tinker Bells and Evil Queens By Sean Griffin

The Celluloid Closet By Vito Russo Wikipedia article about the book Wikipedia article about the documentary My weak google-fu could not find where you can access the book or documentary. Check your local municipal or university library for book or documentary, or if you know a good source for one or both, please reblog with it added

Camp and the Gay Sensibility By Jack Babuscio

The Groundbreaking Queerness of Disney's Mulan By Jes Tom Personal site with links to social media accounts

Why Rebel Without a Cause was a milestone for gay rights By Peter Howell

Why "The Craft" is still the best Halloween coming out movie By Andrew Park

Opinion: From facehuggers to phallic tails, is 'Alien' one of the queerest films ever? By Dani Leever

Women and Queerness in Horror: Jennifer's Body By Zoe Fortier

[Pride 2019] We Have Such Sights to Show You: Hellraiser and the Spectrum of Queerness By Alejandra Gonzalez

Revealing the Hellbound Heart of Clive Barker's 'Hellraiser' By Colin Arason

Queering James Cameron's Aliens (1986) By Bart Bishop

Demeter and Persephone in space: transformation, femininity, and myth in the 'Alien' films By David Greven

Fears of a millennial masculinity: Scream's queer killers By David Greven (Scholarly site, unable to access original work, offers a way to request a full copy of the text in PDF)

Queer Subtext in Stephen King's It - Part 1: 'Reddie' Character Analysis By Rachel Brands Rachel is the very unfortunate lady who found out she was being stolen from because she supported Somerton through Patreon and saw one of his videos early with her writing--lacking any form of citation or credit

How 'It: Chapter Two' Leaves Richie Tozier Behind By Joelle Monique

When Horror Becomes Strength: Queer Armor in Stephen King's 'IT' By Alex London

Why Queer People Love Witchcraft By Amanda Kohr

'The Favourite' Queers The Past And The Present By Giorgi Plys-Garzotto

(Wuko) Crush (Mako x Wu) By MoonFlower on YouTube

5 Terrible Movies With Awesome Hidden Meanings By J.F. Sargent

The Radicalization of Sexuality: The Queer Casae of Jeffrey Dahmer By Ian Barnard

Netflix's 'Dahmer' backlash highlights ethical issues in the platform's obsession with true crime By Shivani Dubey

The Possible Disturbing Dissonance Between Hajime Isayama's Beliefs and Attack on Titan's Themes Original Article by "Seldom Musings" (Author has made all posts not related to Attack On Titan private and has retired from the blog)

Everyone Loves Attack on Titan. So Why Does Everyone Hate Attack on Titan? By Gita Jackson

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The following people are otherwise named in the video. There are no direct citations of articles or books by them in said video. I am unable to guarantee that I have identified the correct individual.

Darren Elliott-Smith Michaela Barton David Church Claire Sisco King Amanda Howell Jessica Roy

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Telos announced and cancelled a film likely based on this book: The Final Girl Support Group - By Grady Hendrix

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I refrained from including certain sources.

First off only focusing on Somerton's work.

Secondly not including anything that might be visible enough to not require amplifying their voice (I cannot speak for all of those I have found links to, but journalism is frequently a thankless job).

Thirdly any source that is of a nature that is antithetical to the very existence of the queer community, such as the right-leaning source that didn't make it into Somerton's video, but Harry was able to identify as a source he had considered using.

If you feel I have missed a mentioned source--or you know of a source from material that was not covered in Harry's video--please do not hesitate to reblog with added details.

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Please share this information far and wide, and please add to it if you find more material that can be positively identified and linked to the creator/writer.

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Stream schedule for 9/18/2023

The more you stream, the more you realize that trying to find a best-fit schedule is a PERMANENT process.

Art by @/u_nagidon Schedule by @/orihimeVT

info/news: #ZenerCast art: #LushenArt

Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lushenzener YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/lushenzener

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"humans are naturally selfish and evil" factoid actually just statistical error. former united states president ronald w. reagan,

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FINALLY BACK FROM EVO

GOD WHAT A TRIP

Let's stream soon and talk about it.

THOUGH OF COURSE WE GOTTA PULL FOR KAFKA TOMORROW

Art by @/teke_oekaki Schedule by @/orihimeVT lushenzener.carrd.co info/news: #ZenerCast art: #LushenArt

youtube.com/lushenzener

twitch.com/lushenzener

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I can, in fact, unhinge my jaw like a serpent.

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AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH EVO'S SO SOON

Streams this week is all fighting games again I SWEAR I DO OTHER THINGS WHEN IT ISN'T EVO SEASON

Streams: Twitch YouTube

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THREE GAME GRIND THIS WEEK

Art by teke_oekaki

Schedule by OrihimeVT

Streams: Twitch.tv Youtube

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Weekly zatsu stream waiting room up! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8m-QwpwcqU

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Disregard my schedule post this week. Work’s a bit hellish atm and I’m playing catch-up. I’ll try to make sure to get some SF6 in this Friday evening. :/

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ANOTHER WEEK ANOTHER SCHEDULE

Art by @/u_nagidon

Schedule by @/orihimeVT

lushenzener.carrd.co

info/news: #ZenerCast art: #LushenArt

streams: twitch.tv/lushenzener youtube.com/lushenzener

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Ahahaha... wouldn’t it be funny if...

fighting game player who is resisting the urge to start all of their SF6 streams with this clip

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Running late! Needed food. 9 PM CST.

About damn time I work through my gunpla! But also prepping for the next local GGST monthly.

lushenzener.carrd.co

info/news: #ZenerCast art: #LushenArt stream: twitch.tv/lushenzener

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About damn time I work through my gunpla! But also prepping for the next local GGST monthly.

lushenzener.carrd.co

info/news: #ZenerCast art: #LushenArt stream: twitch.tv/lushenzener

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Drabble - CJ

Requested by cj_gopamine

Yoooo what’s up? Finally got some time off. Remember that thing I was talking about? Yeah, hah, it definitely got out of hand for me.

Oh yeah, last week – I know you saw that pic of me at the tour stop with that band. Naw, you don’t gotta ask, I already got your merch stowed in the trunk of my car.

Hey, congrats, by the way. I’ll meet you at the usual place and you can tell me about it. No, yeah, I can just hit up your Discord, but then how are you gonna cover the tab for me--

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Reflecting on my work in 2022

As this official Hell Of A Year™ draws to a close, I guess it is appropriate to both reflect on what I've been doing this year, as well as do a bit of plugging for work which I am proud of.

So here's a list of some of the videos I made this year, along with some thoughts on their creation and how I feel about them, some self-criticism, some behind-the-scenes, and a little self-congratulation where it is appropriate.

I struggle somewhat with memory and a clear sense of time - to me, time is more of a continuous stream than a series of delineated moments. This is often frustrating - I get lost in it, and when I look back on a list of my work and activities, it is less an experience of "oh yeah, ha ha, that happened" and more of a "wait what do you mean that happened then? And before that other thing? But after that one? What the hell?"

Worst case scenario, it can be kinda distressing, honestly. It feels out of control, anxiety inducing, like I don't have a handle on my life.

... which is an absolutely fantastic tone to strike for a New Year's list of my favourite videos. 2023, woo!

The Boss Designs of Bloodborne Finale (February)

It took me nearly three months after the penultimate episode of the series to finally put this video out. My The Boss Designs Of series is some of the best work I've ever created, at least I think so. It's certainly some of the most creatively fulfilling work I do, and some of the most challenging too.

I try to walk a line between providing a fresh perspective on the games I've played for the series, but not getting contrarian or off-the-wall just for the sake of it. With Bloodborne, I do think I managed some really good critical contributions to the readings of the game, like my reading of the Blood-starved Beast as a self-sacrificing martyr for the beast community of Old Yharnam, which was apparently quite novel, or my crackpot Parasite Theory of Bloodborne's madness.

And I do think I've gotten better and better at editing gameplay footage too, I think I've managed to learn a good balance between joke-edits and continuity and story editing. I always kinda fret on the one hand that the gameplay footage and my live commentary is too boring to stand on its own, and on the other hand that editing in too many jokes and gags would just be obnoxious and tedious to sit through.

The thing Bloodborne nails more than any other horror game I've seen is the sensation of the nightmare. And not just in its visuals or its monster designs or the surface storytelling, but in the push and pull between extremely specific imagery and story beats and complete ambiguity the moment you scratch at the surface. Bloodborne is on the one hand a fairly obvious story about the abuses of organized religion and unethical science, but then underneath that there's also this deep obsession with the violence done to women's bodies specifically, and how that violence spills out and caustically eats into the humanity of everyone who is complicit in it.

And then underneath that there's an exploration of birth trauma, where the Great Ones are parental figures as incomprehensible to the player as parents are to a newborn child, pushing you here and pulling you there and inflicting incomprehensible violations of your bodily autonomy out of apparent sympathy.

And underneath all of that... it's also about how cool it would be to transform into a werewolf, actually. The themes of self-creation and transformation and claiming monsterhood as self-empowerment are incredibly queer and especially apt for trans readings.

It all flows together in this soup of imagery and meaning that I cannot crystalize into a unifying Theory of Bloodborne, no definitive reading, no comprehensive hot take. Which is frustrating when you're trying to create a video essay, but infinitely compelling when trying to think about it.

I don't know that I managed to capture all of that in the The Boss Designs of Bloodborne finale, but I do know that I tried to, and I'm proud of that.

Melina, the Maiden - Boss Designs of Elden Ring #1 (March)

Staying with The Boss Designs of, here's a video about which my feelings have become decidedly mixed. Not because of anything that is in the episode, mind you, but out of a certain disempowered bitterness I've developed about Elden Ring over the course of the year.

I cannot overstate how excited I was for Elden Ring, and how desperately I enjoyed finally getting to play it back in March. It's a brilliant game, an incredibly immersive world, and one which I badly want to return to.

... and then I didn't get to play the game for nine months. It was partly my own mistake - I tried recording an absolute ton of footage for episodes early, playing as much of the game as I could while it was still fresh, hoping to put out a lot of episodes of the series early while the game was fresh and Relevant In The Algorithm™, and also just out of sheer excitement. In so doing, though, I ended up shooting myself in the foot, because as I began to edit episodes together I also found myself feeling more and more distant from the experience of playing.

The pile of footage in front of me, begging to be converted into episodes, became a roadblock of work looming over me, a source of guilt and stress and frustration, that put extra stress on my mind every time I tried to make any other video and which stood between me and getting to play more of the game I have anticipated more than any other for years.

In 2023, I will get back to Elden Ring, I swear to god I will, but in the meantime I am quite happy with how the three episodes I've made of this series so far have turned out.

Also, the new intro song I commissioned from @trewatsonmusic absolutely slaps.

What's the deal with Zeri and Neon (June)

My ambition for the What's the Deal videos has always been to expand them beyond League of Legends (and I have done videos on characters from other things), but being a YouTuber is also my job, and League of Legends is the moneymaking subject on my channel, at least for now.

Not that I resent that. For all that League deserves the criticism it gets, I still insist that it has one of the greatest casts of characters in modern gaming, underserved and ignored though most of them are by Riot Games. There's so much to talk about once you get even a little bit under the surface, and I do feel like I've been doing a better and better job at doing that in the What's the Deal videos over 2022. Zeri, for example, is a fantastic addition to the class warfare dynamics of Piltover and Zaun, especially in her conflict with Renata Glasc and the themes that could be explored through that conflict. And it's not lost of me the extent to which she was a direct response to the xenophobic attacks on Asian-Americans that have surged out of American politics in recent years, either. There is value to proclaiming that someone like Zeri belongs in the worlds of big pop culture institutions like League of Legends, even if (as always) it is the workers at Riot Games making that proclamation, and Riot Games Inc. allowing it because it serves their commercial goals.

I brought in Nickyboi for an assist on this one as well, which is something I want to do more. I want to do more collaboration. First of all because it's nice to offload work to someone else, but also because this job is fundamentally kind of lonely. I'm just a guy in his office making videos 99% of the time, and collaborating with a fellow creator feels like being part of a creative community in a way that solo work and shitposting at each other on Twitter simply doesn't.

And I am proud of the little fanfiction snippets I've started writing in the The Future segments. One of the points of the What's the Deal videos is to communicate to an audience why I'm excited about a character, why I feel like they're worth giving a shit about, and I think those fanfiction segments have done a better job at getting that across than almost all of my character design and animation chatter. Plus, it's nice to flex a bit of creative muscle in that way now and then.

Speaking of which, I still need to write that happier ending for Kai'sa and Taliyah, don't I? I have A Plan™ for that, it's just about finding the time to make it real...

The 15 Most Beautiful Splash Arts in League of Legends (September)

This one is easily the biggest surprise of the year for me. In the latter half of 2022, I took quite a lot of sponsorships - first of all because they were offered (good lord there was a rush of them in August!), but also because I really wanted to save up and pay down debts.

One of the consequences of that was the extreme delay of Elden Ring, but another was that all of a sudden I had to get content out on a very set schedule. Most of my work is done on the steam of Whatever Catches My Creative Attention At The Time, but with a deadline hanging over my head, suddenly I had to find video ideas whether they presented themselves naturally or not.

I feared that a list-video would be a turn-off for my audience, I feared that it would be seen as shallow and tacky, like a 2010s Buzzfeed listicle. I feared that people just wouldn't be interested in the kind of art analysis I like to do, or would find it pretentious to seek meaning in what is - let's be real - commercial artwork meant to promote game cosmetics.

The benefit of a sponsorship is that the video has already made a profit, whether it does well or not, and I thought that in making this video, I was being self-indulgent and "ignoring" the desires of my audience.

Instead, it's one of the best performing videos ever on my channel, and people have cited it as a favorite among my videos quite a number of times.

Which was really... encouraging, honestly. I didn't expect it, but this video really did give me a confidence boost that the things I care about and find interesting do have an audience, even extra-nerdy rambling about League of Legends cosmetics.

Building a Better Soraka (September)

Building a Better is a series title I sometimes regret a little bit, because no matter how much I try to explain in the videos themselves that there is no such thing as a perfect character design and that my revisions and ideas are not meant to be definitive in any way, I always get comments from people accusing me of declaring myself The God of Character Design and sitting in holy judgment over the work I'm critiquing.

To an extent, I guess that's unavoidable on the internet, but... maybe the series title was a bad gamble on that front.

I do stand by, though, that my designs have a reasonable argument that they are improvements over the originals. Arguments that can be interrogated and criticized, but valid, reasonaed arguments, not mere polemics.

Building a Better Soraka was an experiment in creating the series, as instead of working with a single artist to iterate on design improvements, I ended up commissioning more than a half dozen people for artwork and using different renditions to make my argument. It did hurt the coherency of the video a little, I feel, but it did open me up to a much more flexible way to produce videos like it in the future, which I'm happy with.

Plus, I really do like what I came up with here, and I adore the ways that @sabtherobot, @sinizade and @lekyrin executed my ideas and brought their own visions of the character. Soraka is a character who deserves a lot better than the basic design she's stuck with, and whose story can do so much more visually than Riot is willing to allow it to do.

"Not Without You" - the story of Nasus and Renekton (November)

Of all the writing I did this year, this is by far what I am most proud of.

The video itself did not perform very well, nor did I expect it to, but the reactions I saw from the audience on this piece... yeah. That filled a very hungry part of my heart, I'm not gonna lie.

Writing a novel is a life ambition for me, as it is for many people. Actually writing it is a lot more elusive, though, in part because I struggle to feel confidence that my writing would ever hold up to the scrutiny of an audience. I struggle to feel that I would ever be able to connect emotionally with people, that I would be able to make what I feel sensible through writing.

This story proved that I can. Not to a big audience, perhaps, and I certainly don't have any delusions of genius or grandeur. I do not ever expect to be a famous or fêted writer, nor an important one. But... I do feel like with this story, I proved that I can at least be a competent one, which is frankly all I want.

And Nasus and Renekton were grateful subjects, too. Their story is naturally deeply emotional, albeit strangled by Riot's chronic indifference towards their most compelling narratives, and a lot of what I ended up exploring in there did come from a very genuine place in myself. It was nice to touch that part of my soul, and make something out of it, even if it's only silly fanfiction for a silly video game.

I am cautiously optimistic about 2023

Looking back over the videos I made this year, while I have a lot of work that I am proud of, I also see a lot of videos that I think I made less out of a desire to make them and more out of a fear of not making them. Videos that I made because I felt like the audience expected it, because the algorithm demanded it, because rent is always coming due and I am petrified of ever being broke again.

This is normal and natural, it is to some extent just the nature of the creative process under a capitalist market system where your work must always have some sort of price tag. But... I don't want to keep doing it. If I have an ambition for 2023, it is to make more of the videos I want to make, more videos that I only I can make. To give myself a little bit of a break and ease up on the self-recrimination and stress.

I have so many projects I want to get to, and being in my 30s I am becoming more and more conscious that while I (hopefully) have something like twice my current lifetime left to create the things I want, time is a finite resource, and spending it trying to please a website algorithm probably won't do me that much good in the end.

Anyway, some other things I did which I am quite proud of:

Played through God of War: Ragnarök while telling stories about the mythology of my childhood.

Ran around the world of Eorzea, accompanied by some of the funniest, silliest and most generous FFXIV players a man could dream of.

Finished a Pokémon HeartGold Nuzlocke with possibly the most nerve-wracking finish I have ever had to a Pokémon game

Reviewed every single Gen 1 Pokémon

Finished Great Ace Attorney Chronicles 1, probably the let's play with the most voice acting I have ever done. Some of it is even good!

If you've read this far, thank you so much for your time, your attention, your interest and your indulgence. Your 2023 be a good year, and may the tides of history wash gently over us all.

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Closing Thoughts, 2022 Edition

I think 2022 was the first time in FIVE fucking years that I haven’t felt like a charred burned-out remnant of who I used to be, creatively.

So, in these final hours of this wild and wacky year, let’s talk.

I started as a vtuber later into life than most in this scene – a cause for Radiohead’s “Creep” to play on loop in my head, over and over – but not so late that the growing pains for this scene, or the talented individuals in it, are unfamiliar to me, or distant memories with the day-to-day urgencies of it and the struggles experienced faded by time and age.

No, rather, I still have the scars, and I still feel the weight. In fact, I got into vtubing in part because of that weight – a mask, an avatar, a new name, and a fresh start. An act of self-hypnosis, in a sense, to become something other than the “me” that’s been defined by the last few years of struggle, in hopes that I can reclaim… something important. Something that was taken from me over the years.

And by “taken,” I do mean through agency.

A handful of years ago, I was working under conditions that… matches the experience, I believe, that some of you are going through – and the rest of you think you might want, or be able to handle. It was a job that entailed relentless 24/7 pressure and the most public kind of scrutiny – and one that was literally all about the numbers, as my supervisor at the time repeatedly stressed. We used every trick in the book, ethical and otherwise, to drive up the eyeballs on us, every strategy and approach to get as large an audience as possible.

The promise was that we just needed to hit a certain metric to be self-sustaining – it was a lie, of course, but given my instincts for a certain aspect of that work met a perfect storm of the scene’s conditions at the time, it almost seemed like I could do it. Despite the desperately limited resources at my disposal, I was able to match even the established veterans of the scene beat for beat, and surely if I worked just a bit harder, just pushed it all a bit farther…

...then, one morning, they took the audience I built for them, pivoted towards an entirely different industry and service, and told me to file for unemployment.

The company went bankrupt soon after. Fuck them.

So, for the rest of you, here’s what I learned from those years and my experience at the knife’s edge of content creation:

You’re going to feel like you’re failing, a lot. You’re going to be told by metrics and bar graphs that you need to work harder. You’re going to know, or think you know, that you should be optimizing your content, your presentation, making daily TikToks, sticking to a constant schedule and pace, to really succeed.

But you’re going to learn too late that none of it was for your own personal sake when you finally flame out.

This isn’t some feel-good parable about how your value as a human being isn’t represented by the numbers. This is a grim reminder, going into 2023, about what those numbers actually are.

Every one of those metrics, every last percentage and trendline, is only truly meaningful to somebody else – not you. They represent the demands of the platform, the agency, the company, the MBA degree wielding suit dictating how much of a share you get to keep from the value you bring to them. They represent the amount of money you’re making for somebody else – somebody that doesn’t have to deal with the creative and public pressures you’re going through to realize and make tangible that idea, that dream, that you had in your head when you started all of this.

When those metrics are telling you “that isn’t enough,” what it’s actually saying is that they want to take more from you. And that you’d better work harder, work more furiously, work more in a way that plays to what they want, if you want to have anything left after their share.

What I hope more vtubers, and more creators in general, will also learn to understand is that you can feed the beast everything you’ve got, and all it’ll leave you with is the same perpetual hunger it’s cursed with. It will never be sated. It will ALWAYS tell you that what you’re offering isn’t enough.

It will tell the sweetest lies to make you believe it.

But what you have built is worthy. What you have created has value. It doesn’t matter how amateurishly, or clumsily, or inadequate it might seem by the standards set by your peers and your aspirations. It has, at minimum, the value of the hard work and effort you’ve committed to learn the skills necessary for it, and the sweat involved in bringing it to fruition.

Don’t lose sight of that. Hang tight onto that fact – that the effort alone has made it more worthy than the empty void that once stood where your work now exists. Rest most assuredly in that fact as others, recognizing its value, negotiate and bargain with you for a share of it.

But never, never forget. And never let them make you forget. You’re doing this for yourself – first, foremost, and above the concerns of any other party.

You’re doing this because there’s something in you that wants to see the light of day. That yearns to breathe free.

And you have the right to do so, as your work has the right to exist, no matter if it comes before a million eyeballs or just your own.

And you are never a failure for not satisfying the bottomless demands of that species of hungry ghost we call corporate executives.

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1K Short - Leishen

Requested by Leishen

There is a city. It hardly matters where. It was large enough to host a diverse population, with a dizzying array of interests, and sometimes enough people of a shared interest wanted to get together and needed a place large enough to play host to their masses. And because enough of them got the word out, people outside of that city that also shared that interest also wanted in on the fun.

And so what was once just a local convention of fellow nerds and geeks turns into a massive organized yearly affair – one that needed food and drinks stationed, security ensured, tickets processed… and, of course, something for the cosplayers.

A lot for the cosplayers, actually.

The cosplay industry, if that’s what it can be called, has gotten serious over the last few years – the natural oneupsmanship of the scene combined with the growing interests of gaming and animation businesses has made it deeply competitive—distressingly so for the con staff, who were tearing their hair out trying to figure out accommodations in the face of a heat wave forecast.

Clear and sunny skies, temperatures in the 30s Celsius… What might be considered good weather, if a bit warm, for the average con attendee was a nightmare under a few considerations. One, even water-resistant makeup will run if you sweat hard enough; two, your photographer would MUCH prefer it if the album book they’re selling on your behalf wasn’t washed out by strong sunlight; third and perhaps most importantly, absolutely nobody wanted to have a heat stroke on stage or in the middle of a skit, just because they were wearing every single layer of canon-specified plate armor.

So they got into the habit of praying. Every morning meeting. Every day for the month leading up to the con. “Give us clouds, give us clouds, give us clouds…”

Leishen wasn’t in the habit of visiting the mortal realm. Gods of nature rarely bothered – and their’s was the station of thunder, of storms, of the material heavens.

But, especially in recent centuries, it was getting hard for thunder gods to ignore humankind. Lightning was drawn to the steel-laden works of mortals, and where lightning resides… thunder will, of course, eventually follow.

The cosplay division’s prayers were answered. It was an overcast day, a sudden squall from the southeast pushing a pack of clouds overhead, leaving them a balmy but workable 28C and lower than that in the shade. The photographers were happy, the cosplayers taking advantage of every single even slightly picaresque architecture in the city, and things were going about as smoothly as a massive event staffed by amateur volunteers can expect to go.

Which is to say, still chaotic as hell.

“I need a break,” murmured a volunteer staffer after herding out the attendees of an industry panel. She now sat on the stairs of a small brick amphitheater facing the back of the main con hotel, an ice-cold water bottle in hand. It was a somewhat out of the place location, relative to the convention hall itself, making it a perfect place to catch her breath for a moment.

She was halfway to nodding off in the heat, and didn’t notice the approach of company. “Young mortal.” Bleary eyes saw a blurry form; a free hand rubbed the sleep out, and the shape of somebody dressed in ancient regal formality, in white-and-purple silks and gold and fur trims, sharpened into focus. They stood, half turned from her, wondering at the spectacle across the street. “Young mortal, if you will. What… festival… is it that they’re celebrating over yonder?”

Her first impression was of somebody… supernaturally beautiful. A depth and weight of presence in their posture and expression, a completeness and quality in their costuming, that left a part of her wondering if she was still dreaming. The cosplayer’s hair and robes alike flowed unbelievably smoothly in the slight breeze.

This, obvious at first glance, was a real pro – and never mind their archaic speech and mannerism. Cons attracted all sorts, and the sort of cosplayer that really inhabited their role for the weekend wasn’t even unusual. She could chuuni it up a bit for their sake, if that’s what they wanted.

“Ah, my liege, you catch me at a disadvantage,” she said, scrambling up and fixing into her service voice. “I am afraid I’m unfamiliar with your…?”

“Hmm…” murmured her guest distantly. “I am Leishen, God of Thunder, master of clouds and storms. The winds have carried word to me – a request for my presence. But I find myself unfamiliar with these lands.”

“Then, if it pleases, allow me to guide you for a short while,” she said. A foreign visitor, clearly – the front desk should know who to talk to for out-of-country resources. “We’re just across from the main convention hall,” she said as they walked, the cross signal conveniently switching as her guest calmly progressed through the crowds. “As you can see, the fountain makes this the most popular location for photoshoots and gatherings; we’ve cordoned off the section over there, with the stands, for hourly meet--”

“Oh SHIT.” She was interrupted by an exclamation from the pack of photographers that were swarming over a young girl posing in a dress drenched in faux-blood. “Holy CRAP that’s an amazing cosplay!”

“Yo, yo, look over here!”

“The makeup is immaculate! How do you even...”

Her guest’s brow furrowed – as did that of the cosplayer whose attention they’d accidentally stolen from. “Hey, hey, y’all know how this works!” said the volunteer, raising her voice over the din of enthusiastic nerds. “No crowding, not without permission, and cosplay isn’t…?”

“Yeah, yeah, consent,” murmured the disgruntled pack of lensgeeks.

“Exactly! Now please get out of the way; the Lord of Thunder needs to be seen to.”

“...huh. I dunno that character, actually,” said one of the photographers as they passed.

They shrugged. Who could keep up with every new release?

Still, you had to admire that godlike craftswork.