#Ian Guest

[sage-lights]

the two genders: woman and italian

[burninface]

Gallacrafts Theme 36: Birthday Boy Mickey Milkovich

🥳🥳🥳 @gallacrafts

[shredsandpatches]

The season announcement just dropped so now I can say it:

I'M GONNA SING WAR REQUIEM. WITH IAN BOSTRIDGE.

I'M GONNA SING WAR REQUIEM WITH IAN BOSTRIDGE

(And all of you will get to watch my slow-motion emotional breakdown because I'M GONNA SING WAR REQUIEM)

(WITH IAN BOSTRIDGE)

[polterwasteist]

Me when I don't see my parents for a whole week: 🥱

Me when I don't see Ianthony for a whole week:

[ohkate]

Petrichor

Thanks to @suzy-queued for the Petrichor prompt for @galladrabbles. I feel like I might do more than one for this. This was just something silly that came to mind a few minutes ago.

Word Count: 100.

-------

"Why is it in these stupid stories you read, everyone always smells like caramel or vanilla? Or pet…petri… I don’t even know what the fuck.” Debbie snickers. “Petrichor. It’s the smell in the air after the rain. Stop reading my stuff,” she takes the laptop from him. “And no one brushes their teeth. Just wake up and start macking on each other. Shit's unrealistic.” “What are you two talking about?” Ian asked, bringing in the last grocery bag. “Mickey doesn’t understand romance.” “I understand plenty. I’m completely in love with him.” “Aww Mick…” “And he smells like ass sometimes.” “Hey!”

[babyboybuckley]

OK but smosh fans we have been Fed this week... Everyone Guesses Shayne, FNAF3, Rhett and Link on Flashback, Amanda not knowing Harambe???? Truly a top tier week

[karatekels]

Well, it's not *my* reaction video, but I did agree to share something, so here's Archer dealing with me rambling about my disappointment:

Also I made a disturbing realization the other day and forgot to post it here:

[ian-anthonyupdates]

Ian in The Grump's new season intro 30/01/25

[emmynominees]

henry ian cusick as desmond hume in season two of lost

primetime emmy award nominee for outstanding guest actor in a drama series

[herosplatling-replica]

Edega leaned down to Ian’s ear, lowering his voice to a murmur. “You wouldn’t let that happen, would you?”

fanart of @hear-that-music-in-the-air's STUNNING fic Conversations Behind Closed Doors! god please please please check it out, it had me stimming for hours on end!!

[ricelacethrust]

i had a dream that in the smosh work building or wtv, there was half a plaque on the wall and the other half was long lost, its disappearance of mythical origin... eventually it was found and Anthony and Ian put the pieces together: Ian's had his name and birth year on it (idk his birth year) and Anthony's name was on the lost half, which cited his birth year as 1523 and i woke up laughing

[unproduciblesmackdown]

batch of pics from before & during the fri 7pm xmas show

[m4ndysk4nkovich]

ian gallagher’s so real. i also never have a clue what’s going on and say stupid cringe things (including puns) at the wrong time.

[the-travelling-witch]

Hi hi holly! Hehe Can we hear more about Carmilla? (and if you’ve decided on who her potential partner is 👀)

hi tato!! omg ofc you can!! where do i even start though… probably by saying this is going to be messy ^^; i may have a lot of thoughts but that doesn’t mean that any of them are connected or possible to translate into words jshshs

first of all, i put a little thought into her name that i think sums up her vibe pretty well. carmilla sounds a lot like camilla (harmless little plant, also good for calming down) but it’s actually taken from the vampire carmilla (dangerous, seductive, draining people’s energy yk like her unique magic). her last name comes from the hawthorn tree (but with an e tagged on for aesthetics), which are also called fairy trees and i think the magical, whimsical and mischievous vibe of fairies is exactly what i want her to be ^^

she wasn’t actually twisted from a disney character at first but i’ve went and kinda assigned her the will-o-wisps from brave, which would also fit the fairy/fox fires i’ve described floating around her before; i haven’t settled on a definitive incantation for her unique magic yet but it’ll be sth along the lines of “I’m your light in the darkness, you’ll follow me blindly. If you take, you must give. Share the Love.” or at least that’s my last draft of a spell jshhsh

since she’s not a beastman but a fae, i was thinking that she gains an additional tail with every 100 years she’s lived like a kitsune (though she would always just show one anyway). i was thinking that she’s close to 200, kinda like malleus, and would get a third tail “soon”.

as for the partner i’ve picked for her, he has not changed since the last time we spoke (or well, i rambled). he shares her partially teal colour palette, he schemes and plots, he is… jade leech!!

dramatics is what they would want

my reasoning is still pretty much the same as it has been when i first thought of it. for one, jade is one of my faves, so putting him in more hcs is always a win in my books. but also, he’s mature and confident enough to handle a relationship with an idol who flirts her way into many hearts (that unique magic has to be fuelled somehow) without taking it personally. sure he might activate the fake pout for sympathy afterwards but both of them know he’s just being funny. also i just want to see what these two would get up to (sorry azul, sorry nrc)

i’ve already rambled about how i can see carmilla visiting mostro lounge after a concert. it’s already past closing time and jade is the only one still there, wiping down the counter and the glasses behind the bar. she’d slip onto one of the bar stools, watching with a smile as he’s already making her favourite drink, asking if everything went well (he can already tell by the way she’s basically glowing with her unique magic). they continue their small talk until they go to bed… how fortunate that jade always happens to be the one closing up when carmilla has a performance~

(yes floyd is used to it but if azul or jamil ask about where carmilla has been, neither of three know anything about it)

also, as an idol, carmilla is quite used to being involved in rumours and fortunately jade seems to find them amusing instead of getting bothered by them

i can see them chilling in bed, watching a movie or being on their phones after spending the day together as she happens across a headline trying to pin her in a dating scandal

carmilla, on her phone, snuggled up against jade: hey did you know i was spotted in a restaurant i’ve never been to with a male idol this evening?

jade, fake gasping: to think that you would cheat on the mostro lounge like this, dear, i’m very hurt

carmilla, wiping a fake tear: i’m so sorry, i just can’t help myself

your honour, i just think they’d be fun together. also going hiking with jade would be great for her to clear her head and get away from it all while still exercising <3

(+ she was born in a briar valley forest, she probably knows some whacky mushrooms and plants she can tell him about)

[thena0315]

SVU Guest Star - Ian Somerhalder in "Dominance" [4x20]

[sege-h]

Im gonna throw in my 2 cents to just say that people that hate Flynn to the point of fandom conspiracy theories already believed he was behind a bunch of things they didnt like about the franchise even when he was only working on the comics. Idk where this came from-- if it was because IDW brought him back as a writer for Sonic and the hatedom was upset they werent rid of him or what.

Point is, they already believed he wanted to have and did have more influence on Segas decisions for Sonic.

So i imagine him actually starting to write for the games and be a consultant on other Sonic properties just made them worse and louder about this.

Help me out here: Why is there so much Ian Flynn hate going around lately? I thought everyone loved that he was contributing to the games. Now suddenly they aren't. I guess that's par for the course for this series but I don't get it. He isn't perfect but I like what he's done. Am I a weirdo?

Ian Flynn has always had a lot of fans, but any creator putting their work out there is going to have detractors as well. That's just the nature of being an artist. To some extent, it's no big deal. He's not a perfect writer. Nobody is! I consider myself a fan of his work, but I've criticized plenty of individual writing decisions from him on here.

But Ian doesn't just have critics. He has his own obsessive hatedom. And the specific nature of Ian's hatedom is... interesting.

A decade ago, Ian was only the guy writing for Archie Sonic, meaning any debates over his work were quarantined within that tiny niche of the larger Sonic fandom. Only people who kept up with the comics month to month had any real reason to have an opinion on the guy, which means we're talking about merely thousands of fans as opposed to millions.

Within that group, he had some haters. You had the people who were mad about story changes made during his run, particularly things like ancillary characters getting killed off (although over the years we've learned that most of those were editorial mandates from Mike Pellerito). You had the people mad that Ian didn't push their favorite ship, with feuding SonAmy and Sonally fans claiming that he was CLEARLY biased towards one or the other. You had the people who just really, really liked one of the previous writers way more - usually Penders, as hard as that may be to believe today. That sort of thing. Pretty normal comic fandom type stuff. Again, it comes with the territory.

Unfortunately, many of those haters only got worse over time, morphing into reactionaries who constantly try to incite Comicsgate type culture war bullshit.

There are people still mad at Ian for making Sally bi and pairing her with Nicole instead of Sonic in the later Archie comics. There have been elaborate MS Paint red string conspiracy boards explaining how people like Ian and Jon Gray have apparently been destroying the franchise from the inside for years by Making Sonic Woke. (Jon gets dragged into this because people are still mad about him drawing The Slap 20 years later. Yes, really!!) There was an unhinged change.org petition trying to get Ian fired, specifically from people who were mad that the Freedom Fighters aren't in the IDW comics. There was even a very sad little fan campaign from these people trying to get Sega to move the Sonic comic license away from IDW and over to Udon, because they thought Udon would bring Sally and Bunnie back and also make them sexy again. There's a lot of this.

(Unfortunately, Penders has also exacerbated this by gossiping about Ian on Twitter and giving these fans ammo, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)

The thing is, for years, people who only played the games or watched the cartoons had no reason to pay attention to any of this. Now, though, Ian isn't just writing for some weird spinoff comics that only the super nerds read. Now he's writing comics that are canon to the games, and ALSO some of the games themselves, and ALSO consulting on other tie-in media like Sonic Prime, and ALSO writing the official Sonic encyclopedia, and ALSO serving as part of the new Sonic Lore Team at Sega. And on top of all this, he's got an increasingly popular podcast where he fields questions about his work on all of these things, which serves as one of the fandom's main windows into creative decisions being made behind the scenes.

As a fan of Ian's work, it's been really cool to see him rise in prominence. But the dark side of this is that his obsessive haters from the Archie days now have WAY more of a potential audience of their own. Now, every Sonic fan has to have an opinion on Ian. What this frequently means is that you'll have the Comicsgate types taking things Ian writes or says out of context, attempting to get more of the general fandom to yell at the guy.

Unfortunately, there are a wide variety of Sonic fans who take the bait:

You've got hardcore fans who disliked basically any recent piece of Sonic media and are looking for someone to blame.

You've got the people who are concerned about the sanctity of Sonic's canon, who shoot the messenger any time Ian mentions a new retcon from Sonic Team on the podcast - or any time he even mentions the THOUGHT of changing anything about the canon, as we saw recently with the Sol Dimension nonsense.

You've got people who romanticize some sort of mythical artistic vision that Sega of Japan supposedly has (or had) for the franchise. To many of these fans, American contributors like Ian just don't "get" the heart of the series and are trying to turn Sonic into something different. (This "heart of the series" tends to be some mix of Japanese instruction manual lore, the cinematics from Sonic CD, the OVA, and/or the games written by Shiro Maekawa, depending on what Sonic media the fan in question grew up with.)

You've got fans of specific characters or ships who pin the blame for how their faves are depicted entirely on Ian - most vocally fans of Shadow, even though the root problem is that Sonic Team hasn't known what to do with Shadow since 2006. At best this stops at regular old criticism, but at its worst this devolves into claims that Ian has an agenda against certain characters.

You've got fans annoyed by a perceived over-emphasis on comic-original characters in the IDW comics, ignoring the obvious facts that these characters exist because the game cast is so tightly controlled by Sega, and also, you know, that people just like the IDW characters and want more stories about them.

You've got a LOT of discourse over IDW's Sonic being a hero who tries to give his enemies second chances, as if half of Sonic's closest friends aren't already former villains and rivals. Honestly this is very transparently just reheated Steven Universe discourse lmao

You'll also see people who just think they could do Ian's job better. They can't believe that THIS GUY is the American fan working on all these Sonic projects, when clearly THEY understand the characters and lore and themes SO much better than this charlatan.

All it takes is for someone in one of these categories to be unhappy about some recent piece of Sonic media, and for them to come across an out of context quote or comic panel that rubs them the wrong way, and suddenly the leftist Zoomer Sonic fans will join the latest dogpile on Ian alongside the reactionary Comicsgate types who are mad at him for Making Sonic Woke.

In general, when fandoms get upset, they tend to want a scapegoat. A person or two to point a finger at and go "THAT's who ruined the thing I love!" This tends to be based less on reality and more on which contributors are the most visible online. You'll sometimes see teenage and adult fans of children's cartoons single out a storyboarder who's particularly vocal on Twitter, blame them for every story decision they don't like, and harass them off the platform out of a sense of retribution for their favorite ship or whatever. Failing that, fans might choose to blame every nitpick, down to individual lines of dialogue and frames of animation, on a showrunner, just because that's the name they associate with the show. And unfortunately, when it comes to Sonic, Ian is now arguably the most prolific and outspoken contributor on the English speaking internet, and therefore a common scapegoat.

Some of the things I've seen Ian blamed for are truly wild. A lot of people have claimed for YEARS that he's just lying about the existence of creative guidelines and restrictions from Sega - or, as fans call them, The Mandates - even though they're just an inherent aspect of working on a licensed property. Others claim that The Mandates are real, but somehow Ian's fault. A vocal minority of fans have convinced themselves that Ian is the sole reason the Freedom Fighters don't exist in the IDW comics, even though Ian says he's been pushing to bring them back since day one.

Sometimes you'll see people say he ruined shit he didn't even work on. A few weeks ago on Twitter I saw someone claim that Ian had written a rejected script for Sonic Forces in which Tails died. I could not find a source for this for the life of me. As far as I can tell, the rumor seems to have been born from an alleged leaked script for Forces with margin notes from Aaron Webber that criticized the way Tails was written, and also an old tweet where Aaron joked that Tails would die in an upcoming episode of Sonic Mania Adventures. These merged into "Aaron Webber criticized a draft of the Forces script in which Tails died." How'd Ian get dragged into this? Who fucking knows!

It's all just a big game of telephone. All it takes is some asshole to make something up about Ian on Twitter or YouTube or a DeviantArt journal or some forum, and at least a couple people will believe it, and then it gets repeated as fact. Again, this used to be contained by the niche nature of the Archie Sonic fandom, but now there are WAY more people who are receptive to this shit.

It's just sad to me that Ian tries to be so open and honest about his work, to try to explain the rationale for certain things, to keep fans looped in on the direction the franchise is headed, and this just gives the Flynnspiracy types more quotes to take out of context and try to paint him as the devil. If it sounds like I'm being overly defensive and dismissing his critics, man... some of the things I've seen people say directly to him are just unbelievable. People will send paragraphs-long angry screeds in to his podcast that completely tear him apart, and he has to sit there and be like "Well, that's your opinion, and you're entitled to it." People literally pay for special guest interview episodes where they just rapid fire complaints about his writing at him directly to his face. I don't know how he does it. I would snap.

All of this over Sonic the fucking Hedgehog of all things.

I don't know how to wrap this up. Engaging with fandoms online is very tiring, which is why I tend not to do it. Things like this are too common. I guess, just... remember that making art collaboratively is a complicated thing. The people involved are generally trying their best given the circumstances, but they're only human. They make mistakes. But please treat them like humans. Criticism and dogpiling are not the same thing.