#2021 writer review | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

221loislane · 2 years ago

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An Account of the Current OTW/AO3 Allegations

You may have seen talk flying around about drama going down with OTW (the Organization for Transformative Works) and AO3. There isn't a clear write-up of the situation on Tumblr, and since the allegations in this case are serious and OTW Board elections are coming up, I thought there should be a resource for people to get some basic understanding about the events.

This account is a burner, because the topics here are deeply charged, and I don't want to become a character in what's happening. I am not a member of or volunteer for OTW; I am not affiliated with End OTW Racism; I am not affiliated with Dreamwidth; I do not personally know any of the people involved in these events, or have personal knowledge of the events themselves. I am only compiling the publicly available events, allegations, and discussion into a convenient format for Tumblr. I will be heavily referencing the the similar compilation put together by Dreamwidth user Synonymous, but I am not Synonymous, nor do I know who they are. I am not, however, completely without bias; for one thing, I am writing this with the clear understanding that I believe OTW's treatment of its volunteers and policies on content moderation are both deeply troubling. If I did not believe that, I wouldn't have bothered writing this post.

This write-up includes events relating both to allegations about volunteer abuse and improper handling of CSEM moderation by the OTW, and to arguments made about the OTW's handling of racist conduct and about End OTW Racism's ties to the writer known as Stitch. I am including both of these threads because they are deeply related both causally and in the arguments of many of the people involved, and because volunteer abuse, CSEM, and racist harassment are all deeply serious problems.

This situation has not resolved, and therefore you can likely expect more to occur, probably relating to all of those topics. I have not yet decided whether I will continue updating this timeline, but it should at least give you a grounding in what's happening.

Heavy Content Warning for discussions of child sexual abuse material; abuse, harassment, and stalking; and interpersonal and systemic racism. All language in this write-up is non-graphic and high-level, but some links include more detailed descriptions.

The Events

June 24, 2020: In the wake of George Floyd's murder and in response to pressure from people including Black writer Stitch (of the blog Stitch Media Mix and Teen Vogue) and fan studies academic Dr. Rukmini Pande, the OTW makes a statement promising to review their policies and procedures and take steps to protect users from racist harassment. The specific promises they make are:

Giving creators more control over the comments on their works.

Improving collection searching and filtering.

Improving admin tools for responding to Policy & Abuse reports.

Reviewing the Terms of Service to potentially allow Policy & Abuse to respond to more kinds of reports.

Reassess the required Archive Warnings and consider adding more.

Continue working on user muting and blocking.

They also say that they are considering "reaching out to an external contractor or partnering with an advocacy group," i.e., a diversity consultant, to help with reforms.

August 8, 2021: As part of their July newsletter, the OTW announces that it is creating a new officer role in the organization to research options for diversity consultants.

May 7, 2022: The OTW makes a public statement on their website that an unknown attacker has sent CSAM (child sexual abuse material) to some of their volunteers' email addresses, that they are working with authorities to find the attacker, and that response times may be slower than usual, as they have "shut down a number of internal tools" in order to protect their volunteers and the investigation.

May 8, 2022: Dreamwidth cofounder and former head of LiveJournal Trust & Safety Denise (rahaeli on Twitter, synecdochic on Dreamwidth) posts a Twitter thread urging any current or former OTW/AO3 volunteer who has provided the organization with their real-life name ("wallet name") to contact their local police department and let them know that they are at an elevated risk of swatting. She also provides advice on disabling image auto-loading in emails and dealing with trauma and anxiety from being exposed to CSAM, and mentions that she has contacted AO3 to offer help.

June 16, 2022: As part of their April newsletter (delayed several months due to the CSAM attack), the OTW announces that a Diversity Consultant Research Officer has been appointed.

May 10, 2023: The Tumblr account end-otw-racism publishes its first post, End OTW Racism: A Call to Action. In it, the anonymous authors call on the OTW to implement the changes that they promised in 2020, especially:

Hiring a diversity consultant within the next 3-6 months.

Updating their harassment policies and protocols to address on-site and off-site coordinated harassment.

Creating a content policy for content that is abusive in a racist manner.

As part of their background establishing the problem of racist abuse and harassment in fandom, they link to several articles written by Stitch on their commentary blog, as well as a couple of posts from other fans. In their FAQs and other posts, the organizers of EOR clarify that they are not calling for the removal of any racist fic, but fic that is written specifically with the intention of perpetrating racist harassment or abuse. They also urge supporters not to berate or harass anyone for disagreeing with or failing to support their campaign.

May 17, 2023: An anonymous user asks about the End OTW Racism protest on the anon-meme Dreamwidth community Fail Fandom_Anon (FFA). As part of a tangent in that discussion, an anonymous former volunteer member of the OTW's Policy & Abuse Committee (PAC) mentions that they handled CSEM (child sexual exploitation material) tickets as part of their work, and that the OTW did not provide sufficient resources or expertise in dealing with them either emotionally or logistically. They describe themselves as being traumatized, burned out, and overworked during their time in PAC. They also mention that there was an earlier CSAM attack, targeted only at PAC volunteers, prior to the one that the OTW announced; that they were the volunteer who handled reporting to law enforcement; that the PAC chairs urged Legal and the Board to prepare for more attacks, but that nothing was done; and that the OTW did not provide any mental health resources for volunteers after the CSAM attack. (Here is a link to the user's top-level comment; read down the thread for more.)

May 20, 2023: Dreamwidth user chestnut_pod posts an entry called Be More Democratic, Be More Autocratic, OTW. The thesis of their post is that the OTW fails to adequately respond to racism on AO3 because of structural problems within the organization that amplify biases and make change difficult to achieve, and that in order to address racism and other problems more effectively, the organization should create a clear and straightforward command structure. They also advocate for creating some paid roles within the organization. The comments of the post become a kind of referendum on OTW's organizational policies, and some former volunteers show up to say that chestnut_pod's description of the problems with the org's structure tally with their experience.

May 23, 2023:

An anonymous user links to chestnut_pod's post on FFA. In response, the same former OTW volunteer describes various details of how the Policy & Abuse Committee (PAC) made decisions during her time there. (The description covers a lot of comments, so with one exception I'm linking to Synonymous's overview rather than the individual comments, but you can find all of them either through Synonymous's links or by reading down the FFA thread.) The upshot is that PAC often found it difficult to address racism, abuse, and harassment due to roadblocks and micromanagement from OTW's Legal Committee. In particular, the user mentions that they wanted to remove photo manipulations of real-life minors engaging in sex, as well as ambiguously-sourced explicit gifs from underage fics, and were told that they could not by Legal. (I have described the user's objections at as a high a level as possible, but the language used at the link is much more detailed and explicit.) A subsequent, current OTW volunteer says that since the first user left, the policy has changed to allow PAC to remove similar gifs.

Denise leaves a series of comments on chestnut_pod's post saying that the PAC policies described there run counter to industry best practices for Trust & Safety. In response to a commenter asking whether she could advise OTW, Denise says that she has offered several times, and only heard back from the organization once: after she posted her Twitter thread in response to the CSAM attacks, "at which point it immediately became extremely clear the person in question was more interested in protecting the external reputation of the organization than in listening to any advice I had to give and the only reason they'd contacted me was to pressure me to remove my Twitter thread."

In response to Denise's story, Dreamwidth user azarias reveals herself to be the anonymous former PAC volunteer on FFA. In a series of comments on chestnut_pod's post and FFA (bulk of the information in this comment, but see Synonymous's compilation or read up and down the thread for more), she relays the following story: On May 6, 2022, shortly after the CSAM attack, azarias was kicked out of the OTW volunteer Slack with no notice and no communication. When she realized several days later that this was not an organization-wide shut down, she emailed the OTW Board, Legal, and the PAC chairs asking about the situation, and whether she was a suspect in the attack. The chair of Legal, Betsy Rosenblatt, responded, apologizing for the lack of communication and saying that the shut-out was at Legal's request because they thought azarias' account may have been compromised, but she was not a suspect. On July 22, 2022, having heard nothing further from the OTW, azarias emailed again asking about reinstatement, and Betsy responded that they had just that day started that process. (EDIT: Azarias clarifies that her original stated date of July 22 was an error; she checked on her status July 4, and Betsy responded July 6.) All of azarias's accounts had been deleted, so she returned to the OTW with new accounts, and was informed by her PAC chairs that they were not consulted or informed about her suspension until it happened, were not told why she had been suspended, and were ordered not to speak to or about her during the suspension. Due to awkwardness, trauma, and burn-out, azarias quit volunteering soon after.

May 30, 2023:

On FFA, an anonymous OTW volunteer (not azarias) comments that the OTW Board has posted an update to Slack addressing azarias's story (though she is never named in the update). The update confirms that Legal made the decision to suspend azarias, and says that the Board was not consulted on or informed about the decision to either suspend or reinstate her. A statement from Legal is also attached. The statement does not in any way dispute azarias's timeline of events, and outwardly apologizes to her for the distressed caused, but it also contains several strong insinuations that the letter-writer believes that azarias was responsible for the CSAM attack.

In response to this letter, Denise posts a statement on Dreamwidth and Twitter recommending that any person currently volunteering for the OTW should resign for their own personal safety.

June 3, 2023: Azarias (now posting under her real account, which FFA allows people who are players in the events being discussed to do) comments on FFA that she has consulted a lawyer regarding Legal's insinuation, and has been advised that she doesn't have anything to worry about, legally. She explains some more of the details behind the situation, and discusses some of her guesses about the current situation at the OTW. (For clarification, the Heidi she's referring to is Heidi Tandy, a longtime member of OTW Legal. During the heights of Harry Potter fandom, Fandom Wank coined the term "Heidipology" to describe what they believed to be Heidi's pattern of making insincere, backhanded apologies.) In the comments, anonymous users discuss the fact that OTW's Legal team is made up entirely of IP lawyers, and not lawyers who have expertise in criminal law, nonprofit governance, or Trust & Safety. (Link goes to Synonymous's compilation.)

June 12, 2023: The OTW publishes a statement addressing the End OTW Racism protest. They thank the organizers for holding them accountable, list the steps they've already taken in addressing racism (mostly muting/blocking abilities and similar), and reiterate that they are working on hiring a diversity consultant and reviewing PAC policies. They also say they will improve transparency and communication.

In the comments, azarias (and several others) push the OTW for a retraction of Legal's letter. Azarias also pushes the OTW to make real progress on racist abuse, rather than paying it "lip service." Azarias reveals that she was the Board's original pick for the Diversity Consultant Research Officer, but dropped out. (Further comments later and earlier at FFA clarify that she dropped out due to the OTW's one name policy, which requires that all work that a volunteer does for the OTW be done under a single name; officers are required to serve under their wallet names, and azarias wanted to do her PAC work under her fandom name and not link that to her wallet name, and when OTW didn't let her, she resigned. Link to Synonymous's more thorough compilation of this story here.)

Also in the comments, several users respond to the OTW's statement by posting racist abuse and racial slurs. The OTW leaves the comments up for several days before finally screening them.

June 15, 2023: Denise posts a thread on Twitter, shortly after compiled on her Dreamwidth, laying out what she consider's the OTW's "absolute failure" at Trust & Safety. Among other things, she claims that:

Photomanips of minors in sexual situations, "however terrible or obvious the Photoshop job is, qualifies under the third definition of 'child pornography' as given in 18 USC §2256(8)(C)."

She believes that the OTW may not be in compliance with legal obligations to preserve information about reported CSEM, due to its policy of deleting author information about orphaned works.

In this post, Denise also elaborates on the story she told in the comments of chestnut_pod's post. She says that in May 2022, before the OTW made its statement about the CSAM attack, several volunteers reached out to her for advice, and she learned that the attack emails included threats to expose identifying volunteer information to, among other places, Kiwi Farms, a site whose users have previously swatted many people. In response to this, after the OTW's statement, she published her Twitter thread advising volunteers to alert their local law enforcement, and also reached out to the OTW to offer resources, contacts, and advice. In response, OTW Legal member Rebecca Tushnet called her and spent half an hour pressuring her to remove her Twitter thread.

At the end of the post, Denise briefly touches on the End OTW Racism action that began this conversation, saying that she appreciates their work, but believes that their proposed solutions will not be effective, both because the OTW's organizational dysfunction makes it impossible for them to moderate racist content, and because PAC must moderate "conduct, not content." She says that she "firmly disagree[s] with the foundational work their campaign was built on."

June 16, 2023:

In response to several people asking for clarification on her statements about End OTW Racism, Denise posts a follow-up Twitter thread (which has not at this time been crossposted to Dreamwidth). She says that a diversity consultant will not effectively address abuse because the current OTW culture is resistant to change, and that reviewing TOS policies will not be effective, because the current TOS already allows for moderation of abusive conduct, but PAC has not been empowered to enforce it. Instead, she claims that progress on moderation of racist abuse can only truly be made once the organization's systemic issues have been addressed. She also believes that End OTW Racism's messaging is counterproductive, "because of its repeated failure to differentiate between content and conduct." In particular, she argues that, "by citing so heavily to the foundational background work by people who *have* repeatedly called for bans on work that 'reflects racist and bigoted stereotypes', and by failing to differentiate the two except in passing, the campaign has positioned itself in such a way that it will be, and I'm certain has already been, dismissed by the OTW." She does not mention Stitch by name, but it is clear by context that it is the citations of Stitch's work that she is referring to.

After someone DMs her to request she take down her clarifying statements about End OTW Racism, and various people supportive of EOR on Twitter denounce the statements, Denise posts a follow-up statement to Dreamwidth and to Twitter. She says that she has been contacted several times over the past few weeks by Black fans who have been harassed and abused by Stitch in racist and racialized ways, and who showed her screenshots of these interactions, which Stitch has since deleted. She says that because these fans are afraid to speak up for fear of further harassment, she offered to relay their concerns about a campaign based heavily on Stitch's writing. She does not provide the screenshots, in order to prevent the fans from being identified. She reiterates that she agrees with Stitch and with EOR that the OTW is failing to respond to racist abuse and harassment, but that she disagrees with their approach and proposals. (For what it's worth, as I said up front, I am not personally acquainted with either Stitch or Denise, and have no personal knowledge of events, but Denise is not the first person to accuse Stitch of racist harassment. There has been a great deal of discussion on FFA, both well-sourced and not so much, detailing Stitch's past behavior. I am linking to this round-up so that people can find it, but with the exception of those that directly link to the evidence, and one or two that reference Stitch's public writing, I do not know the accuracy of any of the claims, and I do not know the source of some of them. The allegations listed also vary wildly in their degree of seriousness, ranging from "actually harassed someone" to "said something distasteful," to "is friends with a known serial stalker and harasser.")

The OTW posts a newspost addressing Denise's original (June 15) thread and allegations. The say that they are in legal compliance with CSEM reporting procedures, that they provided resources to volunteers following the CSAM attacks, and that "the Legal Committee has always worked closely and cooperatively with the Policy & Abuse Committee, and continues to do so." They do not reference azalias's accusations or Denise's claim to have been pressured by Rebecca Tushnet. In the comments, azarias, Denise, and many other users, both anonymous and signed, express outrage at the OTW, and push for answers, apologies, retractions, and in some cases the resignation of Legal and/or the Board.

End OTW Racism posts a statement acknowledging the OTW's acknowledgment, and calling for supporters to donate to the OTW so that they can vote in the upcoming Board elections.

June 16-18, 2023: A group of people on Twitter, Tumblr, and Dreamwidth post individually and in conversation about Denise's comments on Stitch and End OTW Racism, defending Stitch and arguing that Denise's claims about them and disagreement with their and EOR's work are racist, unfounded or overblown, and a derailment from EOR's mission. Some of these are the same people who are in the comments of the OTW's response to Denise, pushing for the OTW to respond to azarias's allegations. (These are not inherently contradictory positions; I just want to note that both the personal and ideological stances here do not necessarily line up neatly into, say, pro-OTW and anti-OTW.) See, for instance, naye's Dreamwidth post, fiercynn's Dreamwidth post, or pearwaldorf's Tumblr post.

June 18, 2023: Denise posts a Twitter thread going into much greater detail about the number of fans of color who reported to her that Stitch had harassed them ("a number greater than five and less than fifteen"), and the severity of their claims ("Several of them said the harassment they experienced was so severe and pervasive that it caused them to change screen names, leave fandom, or otherwise restrict their conduct online.") She also gives a detailed, step-by-step outline of how she went about verifying their claims to her own satisfaction. She continues not to give out identifying details to prevent further harassment.

[Updated June 19, 2023 to correct language around the attack on OTW, which was a CSAM attack, not a CSEM attack.]

#otw #ao3 #organization for transformative works #archive of our own #abuse #harassment #racism #cw csem

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sillygoblinantics · 3 months ago

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I CANT TAKE IT ANYMORE

I’ve held my tongue for too long about my feelings on madhouse but fucking hell!

Unless by some fucking act of arceus or universe hands me the fucking concept art that went into this horrible webcomic- I got room to rip and tear!

This is:

Goblin’s Valid Autopsy of Lily Orchard’s PokéMadhouse

Before we go forward!

Hi. I’m Gobbo or Bri (pick ya poison), I’m a current student at Savannah College of Art and Design (as for campus I ain’t saying nothing) Im working on my bachelors in Animation and minoring in Creative Writing. My Concentration starting as 2d animation later switching it to Story and Concept in animation (back in 2021). I started in 2019 and it’s… 2024 now. Don’t judge me! I’ve been mentored by comic artist, storyboarders and many more in the industry! I’ve taken storyboarding and a plethora of writing classes to have enough qualifications under my belt to properly discuss the shit writing, lacking worldbuilding, disorganized plot hole ridden lore/arcs and horrible inconsistent art. So let’s not waste another moment and dive fucking in!

Story:

I’m not using Lily’s self review tvtropes to cover this. It’s disingenuous ego stroking at full blast.

We follow the highs and lows that are the “will they won’t they” relationship between the stated as sisters, Lily and her Gardevoir, G (yes that’s her fucking name). In a Sunday newspaper comic page esc structure. With bits and pieces of trivia and lore that rarely comes up if not to push and pull sympathy points for lilys self insert as she gets assaulted and violated in physical and mental ways. An arc being called “Violate” and later following the would be time span for gestation of a baby that would then become the labeled cryptid child.

I’m gonna be real there’s no point in reading it because the moment something big happens out of the blue there wasn’t a page missing to explain it which god fucking dammit Lily do I need to give you one of those brainframe sheets or outline templates if you decide to write a story? Because I’ll gladly provide them!

How do you consider yourself a fucking writer at all with your fundamental lack of care for lore and story like- for fucks sake woman it won’t kill you!

Characters

Lily

Mikayla

Marah

Bonnie

Mismagius

Other hardly seen or used Pokémon that get thrown away out of nowhere

Countless stolen ocs

And Dr Ponytail (yes that’s the fucking name of one of the “antagonists” and I’ve reread it so many times and found nothing!)

Lily has her “antagonists” being either ex friends or partners or someone who tries to call out bullshit! Fucking hell, the way Lily has g written it’s hard to not see HER AS ONE!

You have all these characters and you neglect so many of them to focus on making your favorite Dollies kiss and scissor or do nothing!

You don’t punish actual rapists either like legit what do you do when your Pokémon who’s been raised like a sister your whole life admits to mindfucking you in a weird soul bond type deal (that you wrote the explanation of yourself), then out of fear swaps dna of a Pokémon of her CRITICALLY ENDANGERED SPECIES can match with to save it with your own dna to baby lock you to staying together, what’s the thing you decide to write?

Case in point: stick an entire cactus up your urethra Lily.

I need a break from this… I’m moving on to the art misdirection.

Lily you are the one commissioning these panels from Mikayla. Meaning you are telling her how to draw these making you the literal art director of this shitty comic!

You want my advice?

USE MODEL SHEETS

Like holy shit. I need to copy paste my spiel about what it is one second:

Make a turnaround for your character(s)!

(Excluding front and back you need to make left and right versions of the rest!)

Front

Back

over-the-shoulder

3/4 view

profile

expression sheets

color pallet reference

(if it’s online/digital rgb if it’s for print it’s cmyk)

include the hexcodes for artists if it’s a small production!

lineup for height and scale for comparison to:

other characters

backgrounds

props

etc.

elements of the world + floor plan in small settings

action poses

hair guide (trust me it’s important)

these are the elements every artist who wants to tell a visual story be it animated or comic always needs:

✨A PITCH BIBLE✨

And Lily, if you’re making any story that is

A. Tied to an existing property

B. Has real world/geopolitical/historic relation

C. Needing a basic understanding to science

Do everyone and yourself a favor

AND DO YOUR FUCKING RESEARCH IN MLA FORMAT INSTEAD OF SOMEONE ELSES OPINIONS AND YOUR ASS OF HOLDING BULLSHIT!

Class

Dismissed

Your homework is to get these books:

#sillygoblinantics #lily orchard��s pokemadhouse #lily can’t art direct #lily orchard is a bad writer #analyzing madhouse

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reilemon · 24 days ago

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⋆𐙚₊˚⊹♡ 2024 fics in review ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹♡

♡ thank you @rose-tinted-kalopsia for tagging me - you can view her post here ♡ i'm tagging @acciotaitlynn @nanamiscocksleeve @hesperisms @poisonf0rest + any writer who wants to join. and no pressure ofc 💕

Total number of fics: 16 Total word count: just under 82k

Chronological Breakdown:

April - ❄Cool Off * ✩Under The Stars May - ଳLove Don't Be Shy * ✩Xavier, Xavier, Xavier * ଳIridescent Scales June - ✩Passion Star Martini July - ✩My Everything August - ♪Ambrosia October - ❄Tight Spot * ଳBeneath The Abyss * ✩Velvet Night * ♪Possession * ❄Beneath The Collar * ❄ଳAmore Immortale♪✩ December - ♪Surrender❄ * ♪Return To You

Overall Thoughts:

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted?

I didn't expect to write at all! I wrote some fics back in 2020 and 2021. After deleting them, I thought my writing days were over. But, Love and Deepspace resuscitated my love for writing.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?

Obviously, didn't expect to get attached to Love and Deepspace so much!

What’s your own favorite story of the year?

Beneath The Collar

Did you take any writing risks this year?

Writing Amore Immortale has my braincells working overtime, since it's supposed to be a slow burn that leads to polyamory.

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year?

To finish, or at least to be close to finishing Amore Immortale.

From my past year of writing, what was…

My best story of this year:

Beneath The Collar

My most popular story of this year:

Cool Off (2.8k notes) - i still don't understand why 😅 it's my very first fic for this fandom, and also the first fic after not writing smut for like three years. Ofc I'm grateful that people like it, but I cringe every time I remember the setting lol.

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:

Beneath The Collar. Honestly, I expected it to be the most popular or at least second most popular during Kinktober. But the people who did like it were very invested in the story, so that makes me happy. And @gattapotatta made this beautiful artwork inspired by it.

Most fun story to write:

Amore Immortale. That one is the balm for my soul.

Story with the single sexiest moment:

I have no idea omfg

Most “holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story:

I think that everything I wrote was pretty tame. But I guess personal sacrilege in Beneath The Collar can be considered wrong lol. And some people were apparently taken aback by the dvp moment in Surrender.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:

None.

Hardest story to write:

Possession. I'm currently working on the sequel, and it continues to be the bane of my existence.

Biggest disappointment:

Xavier, Xavier, Xavier. For me, it's so bland, I almost didn't post it. Also, Tight Spot - Zayne is a little ooc there.

Biggest surprise:

Not to copy Roxie, but I'm so surprised by the love everyone has shown my fics! Without your support I'd probably just stop writing again.

Most unintentionally telling story:

There's the reoccurring theme in my fics where the Reader has run away to start a new life. 🤨

Highlights + Wrap-up:

I don't have that many fics to have 5 favorite opening, and closing lines. Or 5 favorite lines from anywhere. So I'll just write some randomly -

"Poor little bunny." - opening line in Amore Immortale, ch. 1.

He’s just a man now—just Zayne. - line from Beneath The Collar

Fic-writing goals for 2025:

Write more fluffy smut and more unhinged smut.

#love and deepspace #zayne love and deepspace #xavier love and deepspace #sylus love and deepspace #rafayel love and deepspace

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months ago

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Richard R John’s “Network Nation”

THIS SATURDAY (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

The telegraph and the telephone have a special place in the history and future of competition and Big Tech. After all, they were the original tech monopolists. Every discussion of tech and monopoly takes place in their shadow.

Back in 2010, Tim Wu published The Master Switch, his bestselling, wildly influential history of "The Bell System" and the struggle to de-monopolize America from its first telecoms barons:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/01/the-master-switch-tim-net-neutrality-wu-explains-whats-at-stake-in-the-battle-for-net-freedom/

Wu is a brilliant writer and theoretician. Best known for coining the term "Net Neutrality," Wu went on to serve in both the Obama and Biden administrations as a tech trustbuster. He accomplished much in those years. Most notably, Wu wrote the 2021 executive order on competition, laying out a 72-point program for using existing powers vested in the administrative agencies to break up corporate power and get the monopolist's boot off Americans' necks:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

The Competition EO is basically a checklist, and Biden's agency heads have been racing down it, ticking off box after box on or ahead of schedule, making meaningful technical changes in how companies are allowed to operate, each one designed to make material improvements to the lives of Americans.

A decade and a half after its initial publication, Wu's Master Switch is still considered a canonical account of how the phone monopoly was built – and dismantled.

But somewhat lost in the shadow of The Master Switch is another book, written by the accomplished telecoms historian Richard R John: "Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications," published a year after The Master Switch:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088139

Network Nation flew under my radar until earlier this year, when I found myself speaking at an antitrust conference where both John and Wu were also on the bill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VNivXjrU3A

During John's panel – "Case Studies: AT&T & IBM" – he took a good-natured dig at Wu's book, claiming that Wu, not being an historian, had been taken in by AT&T's own self-serving lies about its history. Wu – also on the panel – didn't dispute it, either. That was enough to prick my interest. I ordered a copy of Network Nation and put it on my suitcase during my vacation earlier this month.

Network Nation is an extremely important, brilliantly researched, deep history of America's love/hate affair with not just the telephone, but also the telegraph. It is unmistakably as history book, one that aims at a definitive takedown of various neat stories about the history of American telecommunications. As Wu writes in his New Republic review of John's book:

Generally he describes the failure of competition not so much as a failure of a theory, but rather as the more concrete failure of the men running the competitors, many of whom turned out to be incompetent or unlucky. His story is more like a blow-by-blow account of why Germany lost World War II than a grand theory of why democracy is better than fascism.

https://newrepublic.com/article/88640/review-network-nation-richard-john-tim-wu

In other words, John thinks that the monopolies that emerged in the telegraph and then the telephone weren't down to grand forces that made them inevitable, but rather, to the errors made by regulators and the successful gambits of the telecoms barons. At many junctures, things could have gone another way.

So this is a very complicated story, one that uses a series of contrasts to make the point that history is contingent and owes much to a mix of random chance and the actions of flawed human beings, and not merely great economic or historical laws. For example, John contrasts the telegraph with the telephone, posing them against one another as a kind of natural experiment in different business strategies and regulatory responses.

The telegraph's early promoters, including Samuel Morse (as in "Morse code") believed that the natural way to roll out telegraph was via selling the patents to the federal government and having an agency like the post office operate it. There was a widespread view that the post office as a paragon of excellent technical management and a necessity for knitting together the large American nation. Moreover, everyone could see that when the post office partnered with private sector tech companies (like the railroads that became essential to the postal system), the private sector inevitably figured out how to gouge the American public, leading regulators to ever-more extreme measures to rein in the ripoffs.

The telegraph skated close to federalization on several occasions, but kept getting snatched back from the brink, ending up instead as a privately operated system that primarily served deep-pocketed business customers. This meant that telegraph companies were forever jostling to get the right to string wires along railroad tracks and public roads, creating a "political economy" that tried to balance out highway regulators and rail barons (or play them off against each other).

But the leaders of the telegraph companies were largely uninterested in "popularizing" the telegraph – that is, figuring out how ordinary people could use telegraphs in place of the hand-written letters that were the dominant form of long-distance communications at the time. By turning their backs on "popularization," telegraph companies largely freed themselves from municipal oversight, because they didn't need to get permission to string wires into every home in every major city.

When the telephone emerged, its inventors and investors initially conceived of it as a tool for business as well. But while the telegraph had ushered in a boom in instantaneous, long-distance communications (for example, by joining ports and distant cities where financiers bought and sold the ports' cargo), the telephone proved far more popular as a way of linking businesses within a city limits. Brokers and financiers and businesses that were only a few blocks from one another found the telephone to be vastly superior to the system of dispatching young boys to race around urban downtowns with slips bearing messages.

So from the start, the phone was much more bound up in city politics, and that only deepened with popularization, as phones worked their ways into the homes of affluent families and local merchants like druggists, who offered free phone calls to customers as a way of bringing trade through the door. That created a great number of local phone carriers, who had to fend off Bell's federally enforced patents and aldermen and city councilors who solicited bribes and favors.

To make things even more complex, municipal phone companies had to fight with other sectors that wanted to fill the skies over urban streets with their own wires: streetcar lines and electrical lines. The unregulated, breakneck race to install overhead wires led to an epidemic of electrocutions and fires, and also degraded service, with rival wires interfering with phone calls.

City politicians eventually demanded that lines be buried, creating another source of woe for telephone operators, who had to contend with private or quasi-private operators who acquired a monopoly over the "subways" – tunnels where all these wires eventually ended up.

The telegraph system and the telephone system were very different, but both tended to monopoly, often from opposite directions. Regulations that created some competition in telegraphs extinguished competition when applied to telephones. For example, Canada federalized the regulation of telephones, with the perverse effect that everyday telephone users in cities like Toronto had much less chance of influencing telephone service than Chicagoans, whose phone carrier had to keep local politicians happy.

Nominally, the Canadian Members of Parliament who oversaw Toronto's phone network were big leaguers who understood prudent regulation and were insulated from the daily corruption of municipal politics. And Chicago's aldermen were pretty goddamned corrupt. But Bell starved Toronto of phone network upgrades for years, while Chicago's gladhanding political bosses forced Chicago's phone company to build and build, until Chicago had more phone lines than all of France. Canadian MPs might have been more remote from rough-and-tumble politics, but that made them much less responsive to a random Torontonian's bitter complaint about their inability to get a phone installed.

As the Toronto/Chicago story illustrates, the fact that there were so many different approaches to phone service tried in the US and Canada gives John more opportunities to contrast different business-strategies and regulations. Again, we see how there was never one rule that governments could have used if they wanted to ensure that telecoms were well-run, widely accessible, and reasonably priced. Instead, it was always "horses for courses" – different rules to counter different circumstances and gambits from telecoms operators.

As John traces through the decades during which the telegraph and telephone were established in America, he draws heavily on primary sources to trace the ebb and flow of public and elite sentiment towards public ownership, regulation, and trustbusting. In John's hands, we see some of the most spectacular failures as more than a mismatch of regulatory strategy to corporate gambit – but rather as a mismatch of political will and corporate gambit. If a company's power would be best reined in by public ownership, but the political vogue is for regulation, then lawmakers end up trying to make rules for a company they should simply be buying giving to the post office to buy.

This makes John's history into a history of the Gilded Age and trustbusters. Notorious vulture capitalists like Jay Gould shocked the American conscience by declaring that businesses had no allegiance to the public good, and were put on this Earth to make as much money as possible no matter what the consequences. Gould repeated "raided" Western Union, acquiring shares and forcing the company to buy him out at a premium to end his harassment of the board and the company's managers.

By the time the feds were ready to buy out Western Union, Gould was a massive shareholder, meaning that any buyout of the telegraph would make Gould infinitely wealthier, at public expense, in a move that would have been electoral poison for the lawmakers who presided over it. In this highly contingent way, Western Union lived on as a private company.

Americans – including prominent businesspeople who would be considered "conservatives" by today's standards, were deeply divided on the question of monopoly. The big, successful networks of national telegraph lines and urban telephone lines were marvels, and it was easy to see how they benefited from coordinated management. Monopolists and their apologists weaponized this public excitement about telecoms to defend their monopolies, insisting that their achievement owed its existence to the absence of "wasteful competition."

The economics of monopoly were still nascent. Ideas like "network effects" (where the value of a service increases as it adds users) were still controversial, and the bottlenecks posed by telephone switching and human operators meant that the cost of adding new subscribers sometimes went up as the networks grew, in a weird diseconomy of scale.

Patent rights were controversial, especially patents related to natural phenomena like magnetism and electricity, which were viewed as "natural forces" and not "inventions." Business leaders and rabble-rousers alike decried patents as a federal grant of privilege, leading to monopoly and its ills.

Telecoms monopolists – telephone and telegraph alike – had different ways to address this sentiment at different times (for example, the Bell System's much-vaunted commitment to "universal service" was part of a campaign to normalize the idea of federally protected, privately owned monopolies).

Most striking about this book were the parallels to contemporary fights over Big Tech trustbusting, in our new Gilded Age. Many of the apologies offered for Western Union or AT&T's monopoly could have been uttered by the Renfields who carry water for Facebook, Apple and Google. John's book is a powerful and engrossing reminder that variations on these fights have occurred in the not-so-distant past, and that there's much we can learn from them.

Wu isn't wrong to say that John is engaging with a lot of minutae, and that this makes Network Nation a far less breezy read than Master Switch. I get the impression that John is writing first for other historians, and writers of popular history like Wu, in a bid to create the definitive record of all the complexity that is elided when we create tidy narratives of telecoms monopolies, and tech monopolies in general. Bringing Network Nation on my vacation as a beach-read wasn't the best choice – it demands a lot of serious attention. But it amply rewards that attention, too, and makes an indelible mark on the reader.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/18/the-bell-system/#were-the-phone-company-we-dont-have-to-care

#pluralistic #books #reviews #history #the bell system #monopoly #att #western union #gift guide #tim wu #richard r john #the master switch #antitrust #trustbusting

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mariacallous · 13 days ago

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In 2019, the American chattering class was atwitter about “cancel culture”: The New York Times reported on its popularity among teenagers; in 2020, Harper’s Magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” whose 153 world-renowned signatories—academics, writers, and artists—worried that a lack of “open debate” over police reform and other issues of social and racial justice was yielding to “dogma or coercion.”

Outside legacy media, cancel culture then became part and parcel of right-wing political agendas, with the End Woke Higher Education Act—which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Sept. 19—marking one of several “anti-woke” initiatives launched by Republican congressional lawmakers.

A heavily reworked version of a 2022 German book, The Cancel Culture Panic by Adrian Daub offers a historical analysis of the so-called cancel culture moral panic that spread from the United States to the rest of the world. Daub argues that cancel culture is but the latest iteration of discussions of political correctness that emerged in the United States during the administration of former President Ronald Reagan.

Daub’s goal isn’t to catalog. Rather, he wants to reorient our attention and demystify fears in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, as he believes that “[p]eople talk about cancel culture so that they don’t have to talk about other things, in order to legitimize certain topics, positions, and authorize and delegitimize others.”

Ultimately, Daub argues, hysteria over cancel culture keeps “us from finding solutions we desperately need” to widespread problems “of labor and job security,” the “digital public space,” and “accountability and surveillance.”

Daub begins by arguing that accusations of cancel culture obscure a widening gap between the “objective frequency of the phenomenon and its media presence.” Fears of alleged censorship, of excessive identity politics, and of “wokeness” are, Daub says, disproportionate to verified cancellations.

For example, the individuals who are often affected—for instance, professors at U.S. universities—have lost their jobs not because of cancel culture, but a specific academic or professional dispute. One example: “In 2021, Truckee Meadows Community College in Nevada moved to fire [math professor] Lars Jensen, citing two consecutive unsatisfactory performance reviews that accused him of ‘insubordination,’ among other things.” Specifically, Jensen had distributed “fliers at a state math summit that criticized the college’s math standards—a move Truckee Meadows administrators said disrupted the meeting.”

Cases of real “canceling” in America’s colleges and universities are thus in fact quite low; Daub notes, for example, that “[f]or the year 2021,” his research indicates that just a “total of four” professors “experienced what we would likely see reported in the press as a classic cancel story.” This, despite the conservative National Association of Scholars listing hundreds of cancellations.

Daub argues that “the persuasiveness of cancel culture warnings results from the fact that it insists on suddenness while actually drawing on well-established truisms and conventions.” Historically, he links the panic over cancel culture to fears over political correctness, which—reacting to feminism and the diversification of workplaces and universities—spread in the United States in the early 1990s, above all during the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

But Daub identifies a deeper discursive background: conservative narratives, which first emerged in the 1950s, that imagine U.S. higher education—really, the eight universities that make up the Ivy League—as bastions of “anti-Christian” bias and “anti-individualistic” ideologies.

In these narratives, which Daub argues were produced by members of “think tanks and nonprofit foundations set up by wealthy conservative donors” beginning in the 1970s, leftist academics insidiously swap canonical works—by William Shakespeare, Plato, Homer, and so on—with literature supposedly focused on identity and ethnicity, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

Intersecting with this backdrop, a wave of mainstream publications about political correctness’s apparent tyranny in the academy swept through the United States. These presented the concept sensationally, with “the flavor of the courtroom,” even if those presentations were “nowhere near the truth.”

In fact, Daub argues, a certain type of anecdote about cancel culture—imprecise, brief narratives from questionable sources with a punch line—are told as credible and received as plausible. For example: Psychology professor Jordan Peterson once reported in a viral video that a client of his was a bank employee who spoke of how their bank decided to cease using the term “flip chart” because it could be used “pejoratively to refer to Filipinos.”

Particular features of this and other cancel culture anecdotes develop, disappear, or are replaced with new details; in fact, this anecdote has been circulating since the 1990s, and sometimes features a Filipino gang member at a community panel meeting. Regardless, the more frequently that a cancel culture anecdote is referenced and recounted, the more that it gains credibility, and the more that it further inflames the moral panic over cancel culture.

Daub expands his analysis to our age of globalization—one in which, he argues, cancel culture anecdotes have helped produce moral panic in different global settings, becoming invariably linked to particular national issues, discussions, and societal anxieties.

In Germany, fears intersect with the concern that “left-wing censorship” and “identity politics from the left” will culminate, as theorized in political scientist Josef Joffe’s March 2021 Neue Zürcher Zeitung essay, in an imagined violent and wholesale cultural revolution. In the United Kingdom, cancel culture arrived after Brexit and became, in Daub’s assessment, “at least in part a crutch for managing the shambolic aftermath of the decision to leave.”

And if Europeans obsess about U.S. universities, in Russia and Turkey, Daub writes, “the focus is on popular culture and social media.” In March 2022, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared the West’s reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to the supposed cancellation of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling for her views on transgender people.

In his conclusion, Daub interrogates how “calls for a defense of liberal values” against critical race theory, the so-called woke campus, or cancel culture in publications such as Le Figaro, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic can morph into—or at least indirectly contribute to—illiberal political-governmental restrictions on speech and institutions.

For instance, following the flurry of articles on cancel culture in 2019, Florida Gov. Ron Desantis signed the Stop WOKE Act into state law on April 22, 2022, and positioned himself as a 2024 presidential candidate in part by whipping up hysteria about cancel culture.

But, more broadly, Daub sees the anti-cancel culture movement as advancing a dark and illiberal vision of institutions and society. For him, “figures like the Le Pens [of France], the Trumps [of the United States], [Austria’s] Jörg Haider, [Italy’s] Silvio Berlusconi, [the United Kingdom’s] Boris Johnson, and [Brazil’s] Jair Bolsonaro … retain a certain conservative institutionalism, while they simultaneously participate in the populist/authoritarian degradation of institutions,” and they do this in part through using the tool of the cancel culture panic.

For these leaders, universities teach junk to students; companies go woke and go broke; the military is weak due to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; and experts are politically correct drones. All while casting themselves as liberal and tolerant, these illiberal figures construct straw man arguments from the legitimate concerns of minority perspectives and dismiss them as cancel culture; this allows for the powerful and privileged to reinforce political and social hierarchies, uphold majority rule, and crush opposition.

The fact that the cancel culture panic spread to other countries indicates how U.S. soft power remains operative. Nevertheless, despite Daub’s insights into the moral panic in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, he does not, for example, engage with its occurrence in China, where competitive social media platforms, streaming and video platforms, and state-run media outlets drive a “real” version of “cancellation.”

In 2021, for example, there were a series of high-profile celebrity cancellations in China; some transgressors were imprisoned, others not. The latter group included actor Zhang Zhehan, though, in his case, being “canceled” meant losing work and removal from social media platforms: in August 2021, Zhang was “canceled” because of old vacation photos showing Zhang posing with cherry blossoms, which had been taken in the open park area of Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese war criminals involved in the atrocities of World War II.

Furthermore, the intense public concern about cancel culture in the United States seems to have modulated itself. One reason might be related to changes in perceptions about the political alignments of Big Tech and social media companies. According to a 2024 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, Americans are overall inclined to see Big Tech corporations as more aligned with liberal than with conservative views. But these views now run up against the reality of Big Tech’s political donations in this year’s U.S. presidential election. “Silicon Valley,” as reported in The Guardian, “poured more than $394.1m into the US presidential election this year,” and most of that—$242.6m—was given by Elon Musk.

Americans’ perceptions of Big Tech corporations also now collide with how changes in the ownership and operation of Big Tech and social media companies have affected platforms, their attention economy, and the way that they circulate information.

It was announced after Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022—which he claimed to do because he wanted to protect “free speech”—that the rechristened “X” would discontinue its policy prohibiting COVID-19 misinformation; at the same time, algorithm changes led to X’s promotion of false viral information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Center for Countering Digital Hate issued a November 2023 report declaring that 98 percent of misinformation, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other hate speech vis-à-vis the Israel-Hamas war remained publicly viewable on X after a week of notice was given to the social media site.

Meanwhile, in 2023, Twitter—like Meta and Alphabet, the parent companies of Facebook and Google, respectively—dumped a significant number of its content moderators. While Gizmodo reported in 2016 that Facebook workers routinely suppressed conservative news in the “trending topics” section, a recent study published in Science and Nature showed that “[a]udiences who consume political news on Facebook are, in general, right-leaning.” And as reported in El País, 97 percent of links to what Meta’s fact-checkers deem to be “fake” news “circulate among conservative users.” (It’s fair to wonder whether cancel culture memes figure prominently among these links.)

Cancel culture panic’s newest inflections might also be related to a shift in who seeks to do the “canceling”: Rather than only cultural left—which prompted the era of #TimesUp, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter—the cultural right also now commands public attention. In 2023, conservatives in America “canceled” Bud Light because of a social media promotion by TikTok personality and transgender woman Dylan Mulvaney, and the new Star Wars TV show The Acolyte, because it centered women and people of color.

Will U.S. citizens become fed up with the ways that Big Tech and social media feed panic on both sides of the country’s political divides? According to the aforementioned Pew Research Center study, large majorities of Americans believe that social media companies as possess too much political power and as censor political viewpoints that they reject.

But political will appears to be lacking in the United States to do much about it. In contrast, in August 2023, the European Union enacted the Digital Services Act, which aims to curb online hate, child sexual abuse, and disinformation.

Still, the panic about leftist cancel culture hasn’t so much faded from Americans’ consciousness as it has transformed. The idea of “wokeness” was the primary axis on which U.S. President-elect Trump oriented his latest campaign rhetoric. “Kamala is For They/Them. President Trump is For You,” voters were told in one prominent anti-woke campaign advert.

Now an anti-cancel culture president and his anti-woke cabinet are chomping at the bit. Stephen Miller, Trump’s nominee to become his Homeland Security advisor, launched America First Legal in 2021, filing more than 100 legal actions against “woke corporations” and others. And Musk, who vowed in 2021 to “destroy the woke mind virus,” along with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote the 2021 book Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, were named by Trump to lead a department that aims to “delete” aspects of the U.S. federal government deemed too costly.

One shudders at the possibility that other liberal democracies will follow the path of cancel culture panic as far as the United States now has.

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ao3feed-piltovers-finest · 19 days ago

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CaitVi a03 rss feed update Jan 2025

Okay, this has been a long overdue PSA, seeing that S2 came and went and, regardless how any of us feel about it (or because of it, seeing the amount of fix-it fics?) it left an amazing power of inspiration, seeing that there are.. .70-100 new fics being posted every day? Now, since the very beginning, back in Dec 2021, the point of this place was always the convenience, as well as to connect all those talents out there to a hopefully wider audience - while at the same time sparing everyone from the problematic stuff also being written/posted (that most of us would like to avoid) so therefore, for the overwhelming number of the new followers – here are some basic house rules:

CONTENT: It is at this point absolutely impossible to read everything, so we can not offer guarantees about any content quality. So it goes without saying that, based on what’s presented from descriptions and the tags - it’s your choice to peruse, or respectfully move on. It is the responsibility of both author and the reader - the first one of creating the content (and of course marking/tagging it appropriately) and the latter one making their own choice about consuming and engaging.

TAGS: To prevent any unpleasant situations, ALL posted fics must have pertinent, unambiguous tags - main, as well as all the additional ones. The content itself is naturally writer’s prerogative, but the issue of the reader’s choice to engage or not is also non-negotiable, and then everything is simple: if forewarned about the content, one can still choose to give it a shot, or not. Insufficient or inappropriate tagging may lead to misunderstandings and/or dismay, and that’s exactly why everyone out there usually does abide to the common tagging courtesies. On the other hand, if a fic has been tagged with something possibly problematic only as an act of cautiousness - while it does not really contain any graphic content like that - it might still be posted, upon careful screening. In that case, all readers are still advised to use their blacklists.

BLACKLISTS: People create these spaces to present their content and all the safewords and blacklists are unfortunately a necessity, ultimately to protect ourselves as well as everyone else. As stated in the initial post - we will be filtering all extreme content (rape, underage, gore, incest, beast, etc) but please use your own regular blacklists for anything else. If there are any other discrepancies or inconsistencies to this rule, please inform us and we shall review accordingly.

MISSING FICS: With the overwhelming number of fics, there’s also a problem of cross-posted stuff that does not belong here. Namely Jayvik or Timebomb (M/M and F/M) where Cait/Vi are tagged regardless of being just a background ship, or barely present as characters. Due to the limitations of the RSS feed app we utilise here (and no, they are not free - in case anyone cares) the conditions, as broadly defined as we tried to make them - category, relationships, specific additional tags - simply HAD to be set. Therefore with such filters, some fics may not pass. In which case, if it’s your fic – and you feel it still belongs here, let us know and we'll see what we can do about it. But if you do, please act immediately as we cannot go through hundreds of month-old posts.

FIC SEARCH: Unfortunately this page is NOT a "can you find a fic for me" page. We tried to facilitate that in the beginning - but alas, not a lot of you were interested in partaking - and helping others. And we here do not (and can not, physically) read everything, nor we keep libraries. So, if there's a general interest we can still set up a tag, or start a community with that purpose - fic search or general fic chat. But again, there would have to be an interest from a lot more than the few of us here - for that thing to work. In the meantime, you have "AUTHOR-FIC-TAG-POST SEARCH" option on the non-dash version of ao3feed-piltovers-finest.tumblr.com main page if accessed from your browser, and not the app.

DISCUSSIONS: Not really here to facilitate discussions (be it about systemic issues, encroaching the spaces of others - or authorial egos and other similar nonsense) nor to arbitrate personal issues and conflicts - this page is here ONLY for the fanfiction, good vibes and (hopefully great) stories about the characters we all love. So if you feel inclined to, only fanfiction reviews, recommendations, suggestions and proposals will be encouraged.

FIC RECS: Occasionally, per request - we did provide some fic recommendations in the past. Not sure if/when it might be occurring again - but as always, do feel free to share your own. As posts, comments and/or submissions, but with brief or detailed reviews, please. And we will all be grateful.

That’s it. Keep enjoying the fics, and if you do… as always - make sure to let the authors know.

Cheers! 🌈

#caitvi #violyn #caitlyn x vi #piltovers finest #piltover's finest #vi x caitlyn #vicait #arcane (league of legends) fanfiction #mod post #PSA #pinned post

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chemicallady · 1 year ago

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Heyyy, would you possibly be able to do a Noah Sebastian story that is like a brothers best friend dynamic? I live eat and breathe this stuff lol

I WANNA FEEL LOVE AGAIN

Couple: Noah Sebastian x Fem!Reader

Content Warning: slight mention of sexual intercorse. Nothing too deep, I'm saving it for next Chapters

Summary: you're a real mess, your life is turning into a living hell, so your brother Matt convinces you to move in with him in LA and start working for the band he's taking care of

A/N: I dont wanna spoil to much in here, because... Well, you' ll see. English is not my native language and no one peer review this ff. It's gonna be a world of fun, I already know it!

Important! I don't know Noah or Matt or any of the real people portrayed un this story. This is fictional!

Enjoy then 😏

Ouch, I've lost myself again

You've always been around, unseen. Having a brother like Matt could be a blessing and a nightmare in equal parts. You were feeded with stories about gigs and musicians while grow up with your older brother, who is dear to you in a way that actually you cant explain. Matt as always been your twin flame even if you are younger than him. You grew up looking at him with a lot of respect and it broke your heart when he left Texas, moving to California. At the time you werent ready for the big change and your brother's friend were still a bit mysterious to you.

You were used to spend as much time as possible in his company, but with this fresh start for him, you just fell into the ordinary. Nothing against your life, by the way; your parents always supporting, best friends ready to drive you to the closer pub and deliver the best night possible, a lovely boyfriend who adored you in any meaning.

You loved the shit out of Shawn. He was your person, the one always there when you were in need. Your high school sweetheart. Maybe he wasnt your first kiss or your first fuck but he was the one who made you feel like it was worthy, living for someone else. The one who pushed you to improve yourself for your own sake, that helped you in finding a job for the local tattoo shop as a piercer when the school was over.

You did everything in your power to be the best girlfriend possible. You decoreted your shared flat in the warmest way possible. You turned down a good scholarship for that college in Montana, pissing your parents and brother for this lost opportunity. You gave up to your dream to be a writer because he had to stay in Texas and take care of his mom. You helped him through the loss, when she die.

But it wasn't enough.

You loved the shit out of Shawn and he loved you in return, but it wasn't enough.

Your relationship suffered a slow, agonizing death with multiple attempt of reanimation. Vacations togheter, a bigger flat, a cat.

Nothing compensate the distance between the two of you and he was the one brave enough to call it for a quit. You knew was gonna happen but it didn't hurt you less. Moving back to your parents, while quitting your job just to avoid to meet him everyday, took you to the bottom. Then the shutdown decided to kick you while you were already down, spending days in bed just listen music or watching anime whitout any chance to go out with your friends or for just a walk.

Everyone was really worried about you. You lose weight and that energy that always marked you.

And you stayed there, drowing in your own misery until Matt decided that enough was enough.

《 Pack your shit, you're moving in with me to LA. You're done making mom and pops that upset.》

The end of fall 2021 signed your rebirth. Matt found a bigger apartment for the two of you and Lucifurr, your vicious black cat which has an obsession in chewing cables and destroy everything paper made. You have always want to leave nearby the ocean and Malibu had a ton of opportunities to offer you. You started a yoga class the same week you moved, in order to make some new friends. Accoding to Matt, there are a lot of things to do around the band he is working with, Bad Omens.

You offer yourself as a merchgirl, but since you're a good writer an even better in tolerate people bullshit (you have to be karmatic, all the teens who came to get a piercing to the shop have always made a scene in front of needles), you could be perfect as a PR/assistant for the band. You remember them barely because someway somehow, these are the guys who steal all the time Matt has. Time that you never get.

You remember this four guys with long hair, basic metalheads, except for the drummer. You remember when you gave him the nostril after a show in 2015, maybe 16, and he took it like a champ whitout complaining. You remember the singer, this slenderman type of guy with beautiful long hair that looks like silk. You've never felt more envy of someone else hair like that. And also the other three guys were nice, especially Vincent. The only one who you can connect to a familiar face because you two got a nice conversation on tattoos when you visited Matt, three years ago.

They are nice.

You've heard stories about them at every phone call.

But still, thieves of precious moments that you want have again in your life again between you and your brother.

All the missing birthday, all the call postponed due to technical issues. He wasn't there to pick up your pieces when Shawn get a rid of you.

And Matt wasn't supposed to, but being selfish, you wish he was there.

But he is now and this is enough to bring the light back to your life. The long talks after dinner, movie nights, everything is back to the normal between you two since you moved and it's restoring.

With this wave of good mood, even if you havent forgotten Shawn yet, you enroll to gym, so you can work out after yoga.

And is in this specific place that you meet Eric.

The first time you caught him lurking at you you were running on the thremill.

There is something familiar in him but still, you dont know anyone in LA. You were the one who actually landed the first conctact with this new alien subject, so introvert to avoid your eyes.

《 Today is hot as hell, right?》

Talking about the weather is the easiest card to play. He smiled a bit shily to you before answering. 《 Don't tell me, I hate how hot is in here. Are you new? I've never seen you around》

《 I just moved in with my brother, actually. 》

《 You're a southie for sure. I like your accent.》

You giggle at his words, while he gets some confidence, passing a hand through this short hair. 《 you got me. You don't sound californian as well》.

《 Maybe because I'm not》. There was a moment in which he seemed to be doubtful, like he changed his mind and he didn't want actually to talk with you. He looked at you with a weird expression, like he realised something was off. 《 What's your name?》, he asked then, almost suspicious.

And then you lied. You rarely give your real name to strangers. A self defence mechanism for girls. 《 Vanessa. You?》

He looked more relaxed, 《 Eric.》

《 Nice to meet you Eric... Do you know a nice bar around? 》

《 Maybe I know a place 》 he reflected, smiling a bit malicious. He was definitely flirting. 《 Can offer you a beer or something? Just to welcome you in town.》

You are not ready for a new story yet, but after almost a year after you broke up with Shawn, you needed at least some human conctact. Eric was nice with you since the beginning. He invited you to this dive bar after the gym a couple of times, not far from your place. He paid for you a couple of cocktails while having a real nice Conversation. A superficial one, about the tattoos that covered him. About living in LA. You mentioned your brother a couple of times and he talked about his roomates and all the crazy things they have done during the pandemic.

He told you he is a Producer and you told him you're still unemployed.

One way or another, he got closer to you in a matter of days. And when he kissed you, you obliged and kiss him back. One thing leaded to another and the two of you ended fucking in the back of his SUV. And oh boy... you needed it so much. It was a quickie, but he seemed to be promising. His long fingers stimulated you untill you cried out for pleasure. His mounth divoured you inch by inch. And his cock....

He knew how to use it, let's say that.

After, he gave you his number and the two of you planned to see each other by the end of the week, at the gym, after your yoga class and his class of jujitsu....

The morning after you're fresh and relaxed like you weren't in months. Matt tends to be overprotective so you didn't told him about Eric while you were having breakfast. You need to know this guys deeply before accept that you know have a situationship. And your brother doesn't need to know about you screacting you itchies.

He has a hot temper when someone looks at his dear little sis.

After breakfast you got ready to meet the band again after almost three years.

《 I can't believe Vincent quitted. He was the nicest.》

Matt sighs while driving to the guys' house, mentally focused on the traffic. 《 youll see him when we'll be in Virginia, don't worry. 》

Your eyes slip on streets and houses, wards and parks but you still feel like You're in a new country. You don't know how much it will take to get used to California.

《 here we are》 , Matt says, parking. 《 let's refresh the rules.》

《 Oh c'mon, I'm not twelve anymore》

《 y/n 》

《 alright! I don't have to embarrass you while you're free to be mean on me. I don't have to embarrass myself talking shit just because I'm nervous and if the music sucks, I can't tell your precious Noah.》

《 You can do better but, more or less, that's it. Lets go. I need another coffe and maybe something sweet before start to film the music video. 》

It's so weird filming inside a house and not in a proper set but all this low budget bullshit are quite the normal for small bands, you think.

You have to be their assistant and eventually a PR- so Matt can stop to bitching on twitter all the time- and you know nothing about bands.

According to Matt, you're going to learn quick.

According to Matt. You know that he picked you up for the job so he can force you to write what he wants.

And continuing to bitch around through you.

The guitar player greets you at the door and introduces himself again as Jolly. The rest of the guys minus Noah are in the garage. It's marvelous how Orie, one of the guys who lives here, a director, reorganize the space with tubes and flashlight.

《 What's the name of the song, again? 》 you ask to Nick Folio, whos already youre favorite.

《 Artifical Suicide》 it's the answer, while he takes his place back behind the drums.

《So emo》 it's your honest observation that makes him laught. Matt looks at you in a way that if he could, you would be incinerated where you're standing. You're already embarrassing him.

Nice.

You regret nothing.

It's a lil sister job to make her brother in troubles, that's what pops always says.

Mike brings you a coffe that you accept with a smile, than tells everyone the news about the singer that is still not here.

A diva, of course. That's your first thought. Every singer is a natural diva.

《 He is still looking for the glove.》

《 He would lost his head if it wasn't attacked to his neck》 , a solid comment arrives from Ruffilo, immediatly followed by an annoyed reply from behind you.

《 I can ear you motherfucker. You are- what the fuck?》

You turn in time to face the famous singer and almost choke with the coffe.

《 Yo Noah, do you remember my sister, y/n?》

You see Noah turning pale for a second while trying to say something in return.

You're also speechless for a second, before putting your shit togheter so Matt wont finds out in the first five minutes. 《 Howdy! You... you cut your hair. Nice. I didn't know》

You didn't.

That's why was so easy for Noah to be Eric for almost a week. For a hook up with you. His best friend sister.

....Splendid.

You're fucked.

#noah sebastian #bad omens #noah sebastian x reader #noah sebastian imagine #bad omens imagine

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beomcoups · 29 days ago

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˗ˏˋ ♡ ˎˊ˗ aeris's 2024 tumblr wrapped˗ˏˋ ♡ ˎˊ˗

I noticed that Tumblr isn't doing their wrapped thing with your stats like they used to (looks like the last one was in 22') and I was tagged in one by @petrichor-han so I figured I would do my own.

Thank you to everyone who has liked, commented, and reblogged any of my fics. It means a lot to me, especially with engagement continually dropping. I love creating things and sharing my thoughts on things and it's even better when people talk to me about them (respectfully). Here's to a good 2025 🥂

My Most Popular Fic of 2024

₊⊹⁀➴ F.U.C.K— posted May 15. 2024, Seungcheol, 974 notes

review: "i'll try not to sound bias but i really enjoyed reading this fic. maybe its me being single for a minute and being through a pretty decent breakup, but i felt this from both ends of this couple. the feelings of uncertainty and the future. i teared up.

but that playlist though...and that one particular scene..." (posts spongebob chef's kiss gif) @beezyinthetrap

My Last Fic of 2024

₊⊹⁀➴ Loving Jun Is Fun— Dec 19, 2024, Jun, 86 notes

review: "#a hug like that from jun would quite literally fix my entire life i think

#flowers and a movie and popcorn and jun :((( when is it my turn" @junkissed

My Longest Fic of 2024

₊⊹⁀➴ Food Wars pt. 1— July 10, 2024, Mingyu, 552 notes

review: "#this is good#i love the characters and their dynamics#the kitchen environnement and how it works is relatable " @lilylikesthat

My Personal Favorite

₊⊹⁀➴ The Athlete— Sept 4, 2021, Soonyoung, 3041 notes

why it's my favorite: It's one of the first fics I wrote for Seventeen that I feel like I had the best energy for. There was no rush of a deadline, I did my research and I got to fall in love with the story. I come back and read this story often because it's become a comfort fic for me. In fact, I recently put up a poll asking if I should turn this into a universe with other characters and 86.3% of you said I should. So that will be coming in 2025 :)

My Favorite Fics that I Have Read in 2024

✮⋆˙ After Hours by @hannieween (OT13 SVT x reader) ✮⋆˙ Carousel by @yoonia (Yoongi/BTS x reader) ✮⋆˙ Racer!Reader x Racer!Mingyu 一 Rivals to Lovers by @hoshifighting (Mingyu/SVT x reader) ✮⋆˙ The City That Never Sleeps by @petrichor-han (Beomgyu/TXT x reader) ✮⋆˙ What's Your Favorite Scary Movie by @onlymingyus (Vernon/SVT x reader) ✮⋆˙ Freaky Friday by @aaagustd (Yoongi x reader) ✮⋆˙ Disgraceful Dreams by @shadowkoo (Wooyoung ft. Yeosang/Ateez x reader)

My Top Tracks Of 2024

↪ We Might Be Falling In Love- Victoria Monet ↪ Teenager- GOT7 ↪ I'll See You There Tomorrow- TXT ↪ Bed Chem- Sabrina Carpenter ↪ Pado- NCT U ↪ Can't Get You- Jaehyun ↪ Diamond Days- Seventeen ↪ Plastic Love- Mariya Takeuchi ↪ Toroka- Christian Kuria ↪ Baby- Jay B

Goals for 2025

⊹ Write. More. Drabbles. ⊹ Finally get my Ateez series off the ground ⊹ Interact with other writers on here :) ⊹ Do more things for me and my well-being ♡

Tagging my moots: @hobeemin @aaagustd @wooahaeproductions@hannieween @haologram @gyuhao5 @yoonia @kiestrokes+ anyone else who wants to do one

the template was created by @anahilation and reblogged on @psd-tutorials :)

#aeris talks ๋࣭ ⭑#aeris' tumblr wrapped

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absolutebl · 9 months ago

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Hi ABL! I was wondering if you have recs for bl couples where a younger seme/top aggressively pursues an older, initially-unwilling uke/bottom?

I realized this trope was my absolute JAM when I fell hard and fast for Wei Zhiyuan x Wei Qian, Sun Boxiang x Lu Zhigang, and Yongjie x Xingsi. Bonus points for age gap, stepbrothers trope or the older uke being endlessly indulgent?

I mainly watch China and Taiwan bls, so I’ll love anything from there. I’ll take recs from other countries too, they might become my first foray into non-mandarin bls

I know this is a somewhat specific request so thank you sm if you manage to come up with anything! I really appreciate all the work you put into this blog ☺️💜

Oooo MY FAVORITE!!!

Hyung Romances! (wrap-up post)

I call these hyung romances because that's like noona romances but gay.

Specifically you said:

younger seme aggressively pursues an older initially-unwilling uke

I am utter TRASH for this! YES PLEASE!

Minato’s Laundromat

Japan 2022 GaGa

AKA Minato Coin Laundry AKA Wash My Heart! AKA Minato Shouji Koin Randorii AKA Minato Shouji Coin Laundry

Younger seme older uke, very clearly yaoi derived dynamic, 10 year age gap. I love this show so much. This is by far the best long running example that really dwells on this trope, Shin is very much the aggressor also very much still a high school kid. Minato is very much NOT.

Old Fashion Cupcake

Japan 2022 Viki & GaGa

Also from Japan, another 10 year gap, and a flipping genius version. This time both parties are older, so there’s less of a stigma around the age gap, but there is stigma about the one being the other’s boss.

This show had me from the moment they broke the egg yolk with the chopsticks in the opening credits for episode one. It’s about a younger man with a long cherished crush on his boss (ten years older and going through a mid life crisis) who decides to save and seduce said man with pancakes. It’s wholesome, comforting, sexy, and a very necessary narrative about still having hope, interests, and openness to affection at any age. It’s coming of age/queerness packaged in a subtle critique of expectations around masculinity and love and loneliness... and it’s beautiful. Full review.

Lovely Writer

Thailand 2021 YouTube

Sib is quite a bit younger than Gene and defines aggressive pursuer. Gene is out of university and established in his career, Sib is still in college.

Thailand criticizes itself and the BL industry while simultaneously giving us classic seme/uke with great chemistry in a one-two punch of “we love it, but are we supposed to? and must we think this hard, yet enjoy it SO MUCH?” This show won’t appeal or make sense to those who don’t already have at least some Thai BL watching experience. What Lovely Writer does, at heart, is reexamine Thai BL has done to queerness, but in a very gentle way that has more to do with Thai BL growing up than any actual queer authenticity. It’s not parody or pastiche, but it is self reflective and trying to correct for some chronic mistakes. Whether it is ultimately successful in this matter is going to depend on the watcher’s relationship to BL and queer identity. But that’s what makes this show beautiful, interesting, and thought provoking. And I, for one, applaud the effort even if I didn’t personally connect to the characters.

Oxygen

Thailand 2020 YouTube

Thailand’s first real stab at this dynamic as a main couple and it so worked for me. There are many who find this BL too slow and wooden, but I loved it.

I think of this as a paragon of Thailand’s softer BL style, since Oxygen uses every BL trope in the playbook for one of the gentlest lowest angst BLs ever made. This one showcases how far Thailand is moving BL from its yaoi roots, and is a prime example of the sweet “new BL” model for which Thailand is the main advocate (Korea is liking it a lot these days too, tho). My first watch along.

SOTUS

Thailand 2016 YouTube

Guess who started this trope in Thailand? Yeah, sometimes I forget too. But they are not just classic sunshine/tsunder but classic younger/older. Just not by much.

This is the BL that launched a hundred BLs. No literally, it was SOTUS’s international success that pretty much built the Thai BL industry into the juggernaut it is today. People have baggage around SOTUS, I have nostalgia. Trigger warning on bully hazing. Review here.

En of Love: Tossera

Thailand 2020 YouTube

Younger boy wants to court older boy and does and… that’s it. No really that’s the WHOLE STORY. There is actually no angst, drama, or, indeed plot. But are they the softest bois ever to BL as a main couple? Yes they are.

*pulp warning*

Private Lessons

Korea 2020 GaGa

A BL short from Strongberry that I love, it's age gap and teacher/student (catnip por moi). The chemistry is slightly off though, but stil I do love this one for the dynamic. Certainly worth watching especially if this is your trope since it's like 8 minutes long and very stylish.

MingKit MarkKit

2 Moons (VERY side dish) YouTube 2 Moons 2 YouTube (major side dish) Gen Y (leads) Gen Y 2 (sides again in LTR)

Thailand’s premier version of this dynamic I just lumped them all into one category. Only in 2 Moons 2 are they played by different actors, otherwise it is all KimCop, and who can complain about that? If you want to watch specifically for this dynamic than go for Gen Y. Trash watch here.

SIDE DISH CORNER

Not Me (DanYok)

DanYok is an age gap, but it isn’t really the point or the plot of their romantic arc

Don’t Say No (LeonPob)

Leon and Pob qualify. That’s all I have to say about that.

HIStory 3: the BL that shall not be named (BoXiang & ZhiGang)

Also appear in HIStory 4: Close to You

The side characters in H3:MODC (and cameos in H4) BoXiang & ZhiGang have a huge age gap, 12 years, and it is a big deal for their relationship. When they start out BoXiang is a desperate himbo high school kid and ZhiGang is a small business owner. BoXiang’s friends tease him more for his lust over such a much older man than for being gay.

Bonus on this one, there is some very high (and it's Taiwan so) very well done heat. That said, the main couple will, in fact, wreck your psyche for life. Proceed with caution.

THE THAI PULPS

You’re My Sky (SanAei)

Side could (and only good part of this show) SanAei are a classic uni age gap pairing. San is a bit of a spoiled rich kid jock who identifies the older nerd character as HIS and is just like, MINE. That’s MY elder gay.

Brothers (KhunKaow)

This is not a good show, but side couple Khun & Kaow are great in it. Khun is in university and Kaow has a small baking business.

Top Secret Together and Love By Chance both have sub plots of high school boys pursuing college ones, but the one didn’t go anywhere and the other went very very bad, so yeah… no. Although I would personally LOVE to see this done well.

BONUS POINTS ROUND

Stepbrothers trope

HIStory 4: Close to You (sides)

YongJie is quite a bit younger than XingSi, not sure on the specifics but he’s in middle school when XingSi is in high school and still in college when XingSi has his own business.

Addicted has the stepbrothers trope but not the age gap.

Older uke being endlessly indulgent

Future

Thailand 2023 YouTube

Based on a y-novel by Faddest (En of Love) about an engineering student and a dentist (shocker). This is just a soft sweet cotton candy fluff piece about a younger boy who pursues an older boy and then manufactures silly gay drama. Nothing wrong with that. But I don’t think this style of BL really appeals to a very large market share. Will I rewatch it? Sure. Will anyone else? Nope.

If you want your endlessly indulgent older gay, this is the you crack, they made if for you.

*pulp warning*

Manner of Death

Thailand 2021 WeTV

It’s not really relevant to the story, but Tan is younger. Not only that, he’s Bun’s friends younger brother. Bun is very indulgent, but in a grown up way.

I like MoD a lot but I’m conflicted over it being actual BL. It’s a great gay romantic suspense, although the mystery element is its weakness. MaxTul, the Kings of chemistry, are, of course, perfect and perfectly cast, but their romance thread is more a distraction than an addition. Still, I could watch them make-out the phonebook. Watch along here.

Seven Days

Japan 2015 grey

AKA Seven Days: Monday-Thursday AND Seven Days: Friday-Sunday Japan

Seryou kinda counts as the pursuer, but the dynamic is very very weak in this one. Still the way he asks to use Yuzuru’s first name (so CHEEKY) and the way he says “senpai” in SUCH a cute way makes me so happy. And Yuzuru is NOTHING is not indulgent, it kinda defines his character. I mean he just LETS him call him by his FIRST name... right away.

Never doubt my ability to recommend this show. One of the best live action yaois ever made, with perfectly structured angst, fantastic characters and acting, and no problematic tropes (rare in Japanese BL). The leads have excellent chemistry although it’s low heat there’s still some really cute mutual kisses.

Just Taiwan

HIStory 2: Crossing the Line

2018 Viki

Seme uke is VERY weak with this one but the younger character is certainly the pursuer. It’s SO GOOD.

Lin Pei Yu directs this is a sports romance (volleyball) with a good boy/bad boy pairing, and mu favorite of the HIStory franchise. There is no clear seme/uke. Ostensibly it's high school set but Taiwan doesn't care about age appropriate actors. It's a very soft sweet romance with some ridiculously easily overcome conflict. There's great kisses but it's medium heat. The side dishes are the stepbrother trope but they’re very tame, and there’s no other triggers. It's not just my favorite of the franchise, it’s one of my favorite BLs with a perfect happy ending.

Kiseki: Dear to Me

2023 Gaga

The mains are a major age gap, but I always forget because they def don't look it. Also, Taiwan, so very weak seme/uke. Still there is age gap, he's in high school and our gangster is out of college and in the workplace.

The plot is totally ridiculous and slightly unhinged, but that’s normal for Taiwan. It involves all the tropes under a very casual framework of gay mafia gangs + food = love. Absolutely every character is queer. There’s a gum-ball machine of cameos, elder gay rep, great chemistry from all pairs, and a KILLER side couple. As a result Kiseki is a poster child for Taiwanese BL, and I happen to love Taiwanese BL. Bonus? They also managed to END IT WELL, which we cannot expect from Taiwan.

(Triggers for knife play, child abuse, lingering trauma.)

Unknown

2024 YouTube

Unknown is a wonderful BL with a pitch perfect portrayal of long term pining, age gap, and the stepbrothers trope. The acting and chemistry are ON POINT (especially from the leads) which made the resulting characters very believable. When it dwells in intimate family drama, it's stunning. It's slightly less successful when it leaves the home and goes gritty. Still, those are mere quibbles. This is an excellent show, one of Taiwan' s best.

As you see above I mostly had to take you to Japan and Thailand for this one. Considering your preferences try Japan first, it's closer in DNA to Taiwanese stuff, but it won't go as high heat. If you want the heat, you'll need to try the Thai stuff (or the ones from Taiwan you haven't seen). I would start with Lovely Writer.

Okay I think I have given you enough and, unless I miss my guess, I may have tempted you to try some Japanese BL.

Comes to the weirder (and weird hair) side. We have pancakes.

Yeah I think you should watch Old Fashion Cupcake.

EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH OLD FASHION CUPCAKE!!!

(source)

This post dated May 2024, not responsible for hyungs that sling after that date.

#bl with age gap #bl stepbrothers trope #bl younger guy pursues older guy #japanese bl #Minato’s Laundromat #old fashion cupcake #lovely writer #oxygen the series #That Bl #sotus #en of love #private lessons #strongberry #koeran bl #Manner of Death #future the series #seven days #HIStory 2: Crossing the Line #unknown the series

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haveyouseenthisskeleton · 1 month ago

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UNDERTALE ASK BLOG - PRESENTATION (2024 UPDATE)

Hello! I’m Myfanwi, 27 years old and adoptive parent of two chinchillas, Thor and Mjöllnir. I have ADHD and I'm currently struggling to have my autism diagnosis.

I’m a French writer (she/they, I don’t care), so my English might be weird sometimes, but I’ll do my best. I’m currently looking for a job in France, and failing it a lot.

I started this blog on February 3rd 2021, and we're still here and active. I'm taking Undertale (canon and AU) headcanon requests from people and answering them with my characters.

The askbox is always open so don't hesitate to participate!

I also write Undertale French fanfiction here and here.

1 - You can ask whatever you want, except heavy sexual things. If I'm not comfortable with an ask, I will say it. You can send as many asks as you want. The askbox is always open, I don't close it.

2 - I’m ok with angst and touchy subjects. I’m also very very LGBT+ friendly (I’m aroace and enby btw).

3 - I don’t do match-ups except during some rare events. I don't do RP interactions (= answering people asking things to the characters directly), only headcanons (= writing things ABOUT the characters).

4 - Please, select a maximum of 12 characters per ask. The character list is right under this section. By default, if not mentioned, I’ll go with the main skeletons: Undertale, Underfell, Underswap, Horrortale, Swapfell & Fellswap Gold Sans & Papyrus.

5 - You can ask for interactions between several of my characters too, even if they are from different alternative universes. For convenience, they are magically all living in the same world. You can have more info right here [The link is coming soon, I'm reworking on it].

6 - I'm fine with personal questions and asks about my fanfictions too!

7 - Fanarts and fanfiction are welcome. Don't hesitate to tag me so I can reblog your art!

8 - If you find a spelling mistake, don't hesitate to point it out. I prefer these comments on recent posts, as I have more than 2000 posts on my blog and can't physically review them all.

Click on a name to get more info about the character!

If there's no link attached to a character's name, please refer to this old post for a small description. The character sheets are currently being rewritten, but it takes time.

Undertale : Sans, Papyrus, Toriel, Asgore, Undyne, Alphys, Frisk (Adult), Chara (Adult), Mettaton, Gaster, Grillby, Muffet, Burgerpants, Asriel, Flowey, Gerson.

Underfell: Sans (Red), Papyrus (Edge), Undyne (Storm), Alphys (Amy), Grillby (Ash)

Underswap: Sans (Blue), Papyrus (Honey), Undyne (Abigail), Alphys (Savage)

Horrortale: Sans (Oak), Papyrus (Willow), Toriel (Old Lady), Grillby (Ember)

Horrorswap: Sans (Nugget), Papyrus (Pumpkin)

Horrorfell: Sans (Copper), Papyrus (Chief)

Horrorswapfell: Sans (Bear), Papyrus (Tiger)

Swapfell: Sans (Nox), Papyrus (Rus)

Fellswap Gold: Sans (Wine), Papyrus (Coffee)

Outertale: Sans (Moon), Papyrus (Sun)

Dancetale: Sans (Rambo), Papyrus (Salsa)

Dancefell: Sans (Rumba), Papyrus (Tango)

Farmtale: Sans (Sam), Papyrus (Ben)

Mafiatale: Sans (Demon), Papyrus (Creeper)

Mafiafell: Sans (Fang), Papyrus (Torpedo)

Other skeletons: Ink, Error, Disbelief!Papyrus (Delta), Dustale!Sans (Dune) - Killer!Sans (Killer)

HELPFUL LINKS

Characters birthdays

MASTERPOSTS

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37

FANFICTIONS

Completed - The Doppelganger [Underfell & Horrortale] | Out of the closet [Undertale] | 7 a.m. in the neighborhood [Undertale]

In progress - Horrortale: Rotten Apple [Horrortale] | What is best for humankind [Undertale prequel] | No weakness [Underfell] | Remember the good days [Undertale] | A heart in a cage [Undertale]

#masterpost #pinned post #undertale ask blog #undertale asks #undertale imagines #undertale headcanons #undertale #undertale au #undertale ao3 #undertale fanfictions #myfanwi talks

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graysoncritic · 9 months ago

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A (Negative) Review of Tom Taylor's Nightwing Run - What Went Wrong? Bea Bennett

Introduction Who is Dick Grayson? What Went Wrong? Dick's Characterization What Went Wrong? Barbara Gordon What Went Wrong? Bludhaven (Part 1, Part 2) What Went Wrong? Melinda Lin Grayson What Went Wrong? Bea Bennett What Went Wrong? Villains Conclusion Bibliography

I wish to spend this part of the essay examining how Taylor’s appropriation of Bea’s character betrays his complete disregard towards the ordinary people. Admittedly, this section is a late addition to the essay. As I was going through my edits, Nightwing #107 was released and Taylor’s handling of Bea was simultaneously so atrocious and so relevant to the topics I wish to discuss that I was unable to leave it untouched.

I should also note that this section was written and edited long before the Nightwing Annual written by Travis Moore was released. I considered completely cutting this section as a result, or to add a section addressing Moore’s (very bad, in my personal opinion) retconning of Bea, as well as how it tainted Bea and Ric’s relationship (what, in the view of many, was one of the few redeeming qualities of the Ric arc). But I decided to instead leave this section intact, for while Moore’s Annual adds additional context for this section, it does not change the point I wished to make.

Bea was always a complicated character when it came to Taylor’s run. She was the elephant in the room, her absence felt yet unspoken. Dick loved her not too long ago. She was there for him when Babs and his family abandoned him because he could not meet their expectations. She gave him a place to belong, she gave him the support he needed, and she fought for his well-being not because Nightwing needed to return, but because she loved him.

And yet, when Dick regained his memories, Taylor completely ignored her existence. Rather than dealing with the aftermath of regaining his memories and dealing with the incredibly complicated ordeal of sorting through who he was before losing his memories, who he was as Ric, and who he is going to be now that those two parts of him are combined, Taylor decided that he would instead create a soft reboot. This meant that while the Ric arc was acknowledged as having happened, its consequences, events, and characters were, for the most part, ignored.

And that included Bea.

We can see this in how Taylor decided that rather than allowing Dick to be single for a while as he regained his footing, he immediately started to lay the groundwork for Dick and Babs’ romance, making it clear as early as #79 that this would be a major point in his story.

(Taylor, Tom, writer. Redondo, Bruno, illustrator. Leaping into the Light Part Two. Nightwing: Rebirth. 79, e-book ed. DC Comics, 2021. pp 05)

Never, during those early days of Dick and Babs’ romance, was the fact that Dick just got out of a serious relationship with another woman whom he was deeply in love with acknowledged.

(Jurgens, Dan, writer. Cliquer, Ronan; Moore, Travis, illustrators. Who is Dick Grayson? Nightwing: Rebirth. 75, e-book ed. DC Comics, 2020. pp 36)

Never did Dick have the time to process the way Babs treated him while he was Ric, nor did Babs get a chance to apologize for the unreasonable demands she made of him while he recovered from a traumatic brain injury.

(Castellucci, Cecil, writer. Sauvage, Marguerite; Lupacchino, Emanuela; Aneke, illustrators. Little Wonders. Batgirl: Rebirth. 50, e-book ed. DC Comics, 2020. pp 14)

Never did Dick and Babs have a conversation about whether they should wait for Dick to heal before proceeding forward with a serious relationship, what it meant for Dick to be with someone who only knew a version of him from years ago, and if the him of now could be the same person Babs once knew and loved. They never had to reconcile their time apart. They never had to wonder what Dick’s relationship with Bea meant now that he recovered his memories. They never had to have a serious and mature conversation where they figure out what is best for them as individuals and if what they wish to have now is even possible given their circumstances.

Just as important, never did Dick seek Bea, who is a Bludhaven native who worked with homeless individuals, for her opinion on the best ways in which this problem could have been addressed.

(Taylor, Tom, writer. Redondo, Bruno, illustrator. Leaping into the Light Part Six. Nightwing: Rebirth. 83, e-book ed. DC Comics, 2021. pp 13)

There are ways in which a Dick and Babs romance could have developed slowly while taking all of these conversations into consideration. There are ways in which Dick could have examined his relationship with his family and friends from years as Dick Grayson and the friends he made as Ric, and if those two worlds could exist as one. There were a myriad of ways in which the aftermath of Ric’s existence could have not only been acknowledged, but also addressed in a mature story about recovery and healing while still giving Dick a fresh start and treating Taylor’s run as a good onboarding point for new Dick Grayson readers (the memory recovery and reassessment of relationships could have provided ample opportunities to explore Dick’s history and provide context and information for new fans). But rather than doing any of this, Taylor decided to ignore all of these complicated affairs and treat his run as if it were Nightwing’s very first issue.

As I said before, I do not wish to go into the merits of whether this was the right or wrong decision. But it was a decision nonetheless, and nowhere else was its effect more felt than in not only Bea’s absence, but the complete erasure of her character. Rather than making it so she just wasn’t a part of Dick’s life anymore, her existence was never acknowledged, never commented on, her absence never mentioned. When Taylor started his new run and decided to skip Dick’s healing process and to start a new romance between Dick and Babs he also, as a result, removed Bea from existence.

Now, I cannot know why he recently decided to walk back this decision. My best guess is that he witnessed the push back against it and decided that rather than stick to his plan, he would quickly and, quite frankly, messily deal with said criticism by having Bea play a part in a story arc.

The warning sign that this was going to be handled poorly appeared early on, when the narrative mentioned that it had been two years since Dick recovered his memory. Again, I cannot know for certain why Taylor made such a decision, especially as there had been no indication of time passage up until that point, but my best guess is that once Taylor decided to bring Bea into the narrative, he realized how badly it would reflect on Dick to have gone from his romance with Bea to one with Babs.

However, what was far more offensive was how Taylor took a character whose big draw was the fact that she was just a regular person and decided that, in order to make her worthy of his narrative, she must have been a vigilante as well.

When Dick was confused, hurt, trying to discover who he was and trying to distance himself from vigilantism, Bea was a safe harbor. In an universe so filled with super-powered individuals, with humans capable of taking down monsters by themselves, with individuals whose hacking skills are so great they could shut down governments, Bea’s ordinariness was a breath of fresh air. She grounded the narrative and became a guide to the regular world of Bludhaven, the world that Nightwing once protected and that Dick and Ric both belonged to. Through her volunteering, she showed that you can still help others even if you’re not in a position of power; through her compassion towards Ric she showed that even when someone is at their lowest, they are still worthy of love; and by taking on Joker and Court even though she was just a regular person, she showed that even the most ordinary person can be brave, can be heroic, can protect those they love.

(Jurgens, Dan, writer. Cliquet, Ronan, illustrator. War for the Mind Nightwing: Rebirth. 71, e-book ed. DC Comics, 2020. pp 19)

A lot of Bea’s importance in the narrative came from the fact that she was just an ordinary citizen. Her “lack” of specialness was what made her special. She gave the ordinary people of Bludhaven a face and a voice, and she served as a reminder of what it is that the heroes we love fight for. As someone who was also not involved in vigilantism, she could also give Dick a form of unconditional support that it would be difficult to get from those whose lives are often dictated by life-or-death stakes. As someone who was not involved with the Bats, the Supers, the Titans, or any other hero, she had just the right amount of distance to offer him impartial advice that is not colored by a complicated history with either characters or the conflicts of being a vigilante. She could give him an alternative perspective that he, his family, and other heroes would ordinarily have lacked. She could remind him and the reader of the importance of the little things, she could be his anchor, and she could be his friend and his friend only. She could be the person who was always on Dick’s side. Not Nightwing, not Robin, not Batman, not Agent 37; not the detective, the superhero, the leader; not the boyfriend, the older brother, the mentor, the son. Just Dick.

But instead of realizing the specialness in her “lack” of specialness, Taylor instead decides to make her into a secret pirate queen, with a long and troubled family history that involves all those high stakes. Most insultingly, not only does Taylor physically remove Bea from Bludhaven for her vigilantism operations by making her operate in the sea rather than on land, he also has Dick specifically call out that Bea’s incredible actions are now explained because she was a pirate queen.

(Taylor, Tom; Conrad, Michael, writer. Byrne, Stephen; Acuna, Serg, illustrator. The Crew of the Crossed Part Three. Nightwing: Rebirth. 107, e-book ed. DC Comics, 2023. pp. 08)

This one line is truly revealing of Taylor’s thoughts of ordinary characters and the ordinary people of Bludhaven. He insults Bea and destroys her character by very blatantly stating that her “ordinariness” made her a liability in his story. Bea could not have been helpful to others despite lacking power because she cared, because she wanted to help, because she realized that even regular people can make a difference — she had to be a pirate. Bea could not have taken on the Joker and the Court because she loved Dick and that love gave her courage to fight for him — she had to have been a vigilante. Rather than empowering, now Bea’s strength and capabilities are waved away as her being another vigilante.

In trying to “make her special,” Taylor took away what made her special. Not only that, by having it Dick state this sentiment in these words, Taylor is making it so rather than believing that we all have the power to make the world a better place, no matter how “ordinary” we may feel, we can only do so if we are one of the few who have this specialized training and abilities. Ordinary people, according to Taylor and to Dick, do not have the courage to face difficulties or take on bad guys for the sake of our fellow humans or for those we love. We are incapable of doing that. It is only once someone is “special” that such traits “can make sense.”

This complete disregard towards the value of ordinary humans can also be observed during the brief time in which Dick gained power during Taylor’s run. Rather than using this as an opportunity to emphasize that Dick does not need powers in order to be great, the entire arc has this wistful tone, as if Taylor wished he could permanently make Dick into a superpowered individual. “Wouldn’t it be cool,” the arc implies. “If Nightwing could have all of these superpowers?” Taylor goes as far as having Clark, a character who has known Dick since he was a child and who would have known that Dick never needed the assistance of powers to be a hero, lament the fact that Dick’s talents were only temporary.

(Taylor, Tom; Pacat, C. S., writers. Pansica, Eduardo; HDR, Daniel; Moore, Travis, illustrators. Superwing in Rise of the Underworld Finale. Nightwing: Rebirth. 104, e-book ed. DC Comics, 2023. pp 11)

Once more, I feel the need to draw a comparison between the implications of this panel and how, in World’s Finest #12, Waid had Kara emphasize how awe-inspiring it was that Dick could save himself while still being an ordinary human.

(Waid, Mark, writer. Lupacchino, Emanuela, illustrator. Scream of the Chaos Monkey. Batman/Superman: World’s Finest no. 12, e-book ed. DC Comics, 2023. pp. 06 - 07)

This disrespect and disregard towards “ordinary” humans explains why, rather than building a supporting cast with Bludhaven-natives, and rather than having Dick bond with the citizens, Taylor instead decides to move the Titans into Bludhaven, move Dick into the Titan’s Tower, and impose a physical and emotional distance between Dick and those he is meant to protect. It is as if Taylor does not think that ordinary citizens are worthy of writing about. While their flaws are scrubbed away so they can be “perfect victims,” their troubles can be used as backgrounds, to make the heroes look socially progressive, but any opportunity for meaningful interaction is cleanly removed from the story.

The ordinary people of Bludhaven are denied agency, denied voices, faces, individuality, diversity, and even names because Taylor’s narrative deems them invaluable due to their “ordinariness.” Their lack of “specialness” makes them unworthy of Taylor’s time and of Nightwing’s time. In Taylor’s story, ordinary people do not deserve screen time, they do not deserve to interact with Nightwing, Batgirl, or the Titans. Bea’s transformation is but the embodiment of Taylor’s complete lack of regards towards the people of Bludhaven, towards the city of Bludhaven, and, by extent, towards their hero.

To treat the ordinary people of Bludhaven with so much disregard is to fundamentally misunderstand what is so incredible about Dick Grayson. The appeal of most Bat characters is that, though they are just ordinary people, they are able to rise above the odds to do what seems impossible, and in doing so, they inspire us to take on the challenges we face in our lives. Dick, specifically, has always been a voice for those who felt ostracized by society. He defied all sorts of expectations, not just as a hero, but as Batman’s partner, and showed that one could still be different and be great. He empowered individuals who felt otherized not by being super-powered, but by being compassionate. Dick sees the value in every single individual, his compassion is unparalleled, and his desire to help everyone, in both big ways and small ways, is why he so often worked among the citizens of Bludhaven, and not apart from them. He was not better than them, he was not above them. He was one of them. He was Nightwing, yes, but he was also a bartender, a police officer, a gymnastics instructor, a taxi driver.

But Taylor does not allow Dick to be any of that. Just like Taylor does not allow Dick to have his toxic perfectionism or obsessive tendencies. Just like Taylor has Dick recite online-rhetoric without considering if that would be fitting of his character. Or how he has so Dick’s competence and individuality is sacrificed for a heternormative romance with Babs. In trying to paint himself as progressive while responding to online discussions, Taylor demonstrates his, at best lack of interest, at worst disdain, for who Dick Grayson is and what Dick Grayson fans love about him so much. Rather than embracing the uniqueness of Dick and of Nightwing, Taylor instead strips away everything that differentiates him from others, taking him away from those who love him and appropriates him, his values, and his relationships. In Taylor’s Nightwing, Dick is only a blank canvas stand-in protagonist for audiences to project themselves into, a wish-fulfillment fantasy that has nothing of Dick Grayson in sight.

#nightwing #dick grayson #anti tom taylor

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asgoodeasgold · 5 months ago

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This is the week of unseen gems! My goode friends on Twitter (see credits below) shared this lovely interview of Matthew for Vogue in 2021, with a gorgeous photograph by Paul Wetherell.

Here are all the quotes for those who need a translation:

Interviewer:

"Zany and self-effacing, Matthew Goode is a world away from the dandies and playboys he seems to portray."

He is "charmingly neurotic in ways his roguish roles don't prepare you for."

Matthew:

"It takes an awfully long time to recover [from seeing himself on screen]."

Reviews tend to be painful "because people can write about you however they want."

He was "thrust on the stage as a singing mouse" by his mum.

"I am coming to really enjoy having Keira [Knightley] as my wife on screen."

His wife and his young kids have been his priority: "I just don't want to be away from them. I have turned down a lot over the years."

He loves to "forge greater relationships with fascinating people."

Matthew has found his groove and is now looking to write and direct too: "You hit 43 and think it's about time you got some confidence inside this hollow body." "These last 10 jobs, I have absolutely re-fallen in love with it."

OMG that last tidbit is so exciting - I would love to hear Matthew's own voice as a writer/director.

📷 Photograph by Paul Wetherell and article by Amel Mukhtar for Vogue UK, Dec 21.

A big thank you to JaneAndrew60 on Twitter for sharing this gem and to CookieCat2017 for procuring me a digital copy. Goode fans are honestly the best!

#matthew goode #matthewgoode #acting #a discovery of witches #abigail #downton abbey #the colour room #silent night #the king's man

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celinamarniss · 25 days ago

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Year in Review

In 2024 I posted 4 fics at 53,035 words.

Previous years:

2023: 4 fics at 58,153 words

2022: 4 fics at 45,096 words.

2021: 3 fics posted, 55,788 words.

2020: 7 or 10 fics posted, 125,738 words.

2019: 7 fics posted, 72,149 words.

2018: 7 fics posted, 87,752 words

2016: 9 fics posted, 51,643 words

2017: 9 fics posted, 115,336 words

2016: 9 fics posted, 51,653 words

In total, 52 fics posted to Ao3.

Thrones, Dominions

31,420 words, explicit, Thrawn/Mara/Luke

I finally wrapped up the Triumvirate verse with a big flashy finale (and bound it, too). I started Triumvirate in 2019, which means I've spent six years on this series, and that blows my mind a little. (a lot).

Will there be more Triumvirate stories? I genuinely hope that other writers will take up the torch and write more fic for all fans of the series. I’m not sure if I’ll write any more myself. It could happen. But for now, I’m happy to let this series rest.

An Oral History of the Ewok Bikers of Endor

4,115, gen, an Uncommon Hazards fic

I pitched three story ideas to the From A Legends Point of View fic collection, and this is the concept they accepted. It takes an idea from the Uncommon Hazards series, that post-Endor, Ewoks have immigrated to Coruscant and started an illegal swoop racing industry.

As I began to write it, I realized that the fic challenge required 5k and this story wasn't much more than a 3k concept. I stretched it out to 4. I'm not sure that this story was exactly what the mods had in mind, but it was fun finding ways to bring in characters and reference different types of media.

A Smuggler’s Guide to Joining the Rebellion

14,355 words so far, gen, the sequel to The Things You Find on Tatooine.

I wanted to get this fic through all of ANH by the end of the year, but my brain didn't cooperate and I ran out of time. But Smuggler's Guide has been a fun distraction to carry through into 2025.

The Coruscant Job

3,145, gen, Fenig Nabon/Ghitsa Dogder

Who? you may ask. Why, the super obscure con artist team that appeared in three short stories in the 90s. AKA the Fenig Nabon/Ghitsa Dogder fic literally no one asked for, because no one even knows who these characters ARE. This was another idea I pitched to the FALPOV challenge, and while it wasn't selected, I wanted to write it anyway. It turns out that was a good decision, because what I wrote wouldn't have followed all of the FALPOV rules. (My idea moves their timeline forward and retcons the story “Credit for Your Thoughts.”)

GOALS FOR 2025

Finish A Smuggler’s Guide to Joining the Rebellion (teen, Luke/Mara) The ongoing project. Progress: five chapters posted, uhhhh lots of scraps and and partial drafts in a doc.

Lando Calrissian and the Jewel of Andara (gen, Lando/Karrde, Luke/Mara) The Lando and Mara heist romcom I’ve been promising forever. Will 2025 finally be this fic's year??? at this point, I don't even know. Progress: three chapters drafted, but in need of heavy revision.

Experiments (teen? Luke/Mara) I honestly started to think this fic was dead dead, but this year I dusted off the old files and finished drafting the first two chapters. What happens next? I'm not really sure. I feel like this period/setting (Mara on Coruscant post TTT, pre Yavin) has already been well-worn by other fics recently and I don't know if there will be any interest in it. If I keep going, I'll have to come up with a outline and figure out what I want to do with the fic. Progress: two chapters drafted, but they may need to be merged into one chapter.

Other fics on the backburner:

Courtship remix

Daughter of the Rain and Snow (dead???)

More daemon fic! (I always want to write more daemon fic)

#year in review #my stuff

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Private equity ghouls have a new way to steal from their investors

Private equity is quite a racket. PE managers pile up other peoples’ money — pension funds, plutes, other pools of money — and then “invest” it (buying businesses, loading them with debt, cutting wages, lowering quality and setting traps for customers). For this, they get an annual fee — 2% — of the money they manage, and a bonus for any profits they make.

On top of this, private equity bosses get to use the carried interest tax loophole, a scam that lets them treat this ordinary income as a capital gain, so they can pay half the taxes that a working stiff would pay on a regular salary. If you don’t know much about carried interest, you might think it has to do with “interest” on a loan or a deposit, but it’s way weirder. “Carried interest” is a tax regime designed for 16th century sea captains and their “interest” in the cargo they “carried”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Private equity is a cancer. Its profits come from buying productive firms, loading them with debt, abusing their suppliers, workers and customers, and driving them into ground, stiffing all of them — and the company’s creditors. The mafia have a name for this. They call it a “bust out”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Private equity destroyed Toys R Us, Sears, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and many more companies beloved of Main Street, bled dry for Wall Street:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/

And they’re coming for more. PE funds are “rolling up” thousands of Boomer-owned business as their owners retire. There’s a good chance that every funeral home, pet groomer and urgent care clinic within an hour’s drive of you is owned by a single PE firm. There’s 2.9m more Boomer-owned businesses going up for sale in the coming years, with 32m employees, and PE is set to buy ’em all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

PE funds get their money from “institutional investors.” It shouldn’t surprise you to learn they treat their investors no better than their creditors, nor the customers, employees or suppliers of the businesses they buy.

Pension funds, in particular, are the perennial suckers at the poker table. My parent’s pension fund, the Ontario Teachers’ Fund, are every grifter’s favorite patsy, losing $90m to Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency scam:

https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/about-us/news-and-insights/2022/ontario-teachers--statement-on-ftx/

Pension funds are neck-deep in private equity, paying steep fees for shitty returns. Imagine knowing that the reason you can’t afford your apartment anymore is your pension fund gambled with the private equity firm that bought your building and jacked up the rent — and still lost money:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/25/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-25-feb-2020/

But there’s no depth too low for PE looters to sink to. They’ve found an exciting new way to steal from their investors, a scam called a “continuation fund.” Writing in his latest newsletter, the great Matt Levine breaks it down:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-levines-money-stuff-buyout-funds-buy-from-themselves

Here’s the deal: say you’re a PE guy who’s raised a $1b fund. That entitles you to a 2% annual “carry” on the fund: $20,000,000/year. But you’ve managed to buy and asset strip so many productive businesses that it’s now worth $5b. Your carry doesn’t go up fivefold. You could sell the company and collect your 20% commission — $800m — but you stop collecting that annual carry.

But what if you do both? Here’s how: you create a “continuation fund” — a fund that buys your old fund’s portfolio. Now you’ve got $5b under management and your carry quintuples, to $100m/year. Levine dryly notes that the FT calls this “a controversial type of transaction”:

https://www.ft.com/content/11549c33-b97d-468b-8990-e6fd64294f85

These deals “look like a pyramid scheme” — one fund flips its assets to another fund, with the same manager running both funds. It’s a way to make the pie bigger, but to decrease the share (in both real and proportional terms) going to the pension funds and other institutional investors who backed the fund.

A PE boss is supposed to be a fiduciary, with a legal requirement to do what’s best for their investors. But when the same PE manager is the buyer and the seller, and when the sale takes place without inviting any outside bidders, how can they possibly resolve their conflict of interest?

They can’t: 42% of continuation fund deals involve a sale at a value lower than the one that the PE fund told their investors the assets were worth. Now, this may sound weird — if a PE boss wants to set a high initial value for their fund in order to maximize their carry, why would they sell its assets to the new fund at a discount?

Here’s Levine’s theory: if you’re a PE guy going back to your investors for money to put in a new fund, you’re more likely to succeed if you can show that their getting a bargain. So you raise $1b, build it up to $5b, and then tell your investors they can buy the new fund for only $3b. Sure, they can get out — and lose big. Or they can take the deal, get the new fund at a 40% discount — and the PE boss gets $60m/year for the next ten years, instead of the $20m they were getting before the continuation fund deal.

PE is devouring the productive economy and making the world’s richest people even richer. The one bright light? The FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division just published new merger guidelines that would make the PE acquire/debt-load/asset-strip model illegal:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/07/ftc-doj-seek-comment-draft-merger-guidelines

The bad news is that some sneaky fuck just slipped a 20% FTC budget cut — $50m/year — into the new appropriations bill:

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1681830706488438785

They’re scared, and they’re fighting dirty.

I’m at San Diego Comic-Con!

Today (Jul 20) 16h: Signing, Tor Books booth #2802 (free advance copies of The Lost Cause — Nov 2023 — to the first 50 people!)

Tomorrow (Jul 21):

1030h: Wish They All Could be CA MCs, room 24ABC (panel)

12h: Signing, AA09

Sat, Jul 22 15h: The Worlds We Return To, room 23ABC (panel)

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

[Image ID: An old Punch editorial cartoon depicting a bank-robber sticking up a group of businesspeople and workers. He wears a bandanna emblazoned with dollar-signs and a top-hat.]

#pluralistic #buyout groups #continuation fraud #pe #pyramid schemes #the sucker at the table #pension plans #continuation funds #matt levine #fiduciaries #finance #private equity #mark to market #ripoffs

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