#Looping Limbo ∞ Gen
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vesselreborn · 12 days ago
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Swept away (— Ingvar, weird as the scenario may be!)
Now, she remembers falling into the cold embrace of the water, the realization of her misjudgment of exactly how strong the current was, and being in a panic as her hands scurried to find any kind of stability as her head ducked underwater.
A mix of shock and confusion made her cough up the last bit of water lodged within her. She could feel her wet hair cling to her as the breeze sent a shiver down her spine.
What she doesn't remember is how she got out. Her mind, of course, suspected Kereb as her savior. He always was, so it wasn't too far fetch of a guess. As she tries to focus on her companion, she winced as only a sharp pain in her head could be felt. Her head still felt foggy, maybe she needed to rest a bit. Still, his presence could be felt, so he was there.
Sitting up, she cautiously motioned her hand towards where she presumed Kereb would be. However, the only thing she managed to grasp was a handful of dead leaves and dirt. That was odd, Kereb never placed himself too far from her... come to think of it, she hasn't heard anything from him.
Quickly, she retracted her hand and felt herself become smaller. It was beginning to dawn on her that whoever was in her presence, wasn't Kereb.
"W-wh...?", her lungs still felt like they were on fire, so her few words ended up sounding more like a croak. It was hard to keep focus as her head and body both ached, but despite her previous attempt, she tries to sightjack. Again she was met with a piercing pain in her head.
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ao3feed-jonmartin · 4 months ago
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Four Things You Can Feel
read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/jNEvZbd by septemberstorms Jon could feel. He didn’t quite know what that meant, though. He could feel a light sensation on his cheeks, and it felt like soft fingers. Reminded him of… what was their name again? It didn’t matter. or, After the events of MAG 200, Jonathan Sims is in a numb, unfeeling limbo that seems to be looping infinitely. However, there is something just out of the grasp of his fractured memory that seems so familiar, and endlessly important. Words: 1524, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English Fandoms: The Magnus Archives (Podcast) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Categories: Gen, M/M Characters: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Additional Tags: Post-Episode: e200 Last Words (The Magnus Archives), Spoilers for Episode: e200 Last Words (The Magnus Archives), Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Needs a Hug, Martin Blackwood Needs a Hug, The Magnus Institute (The Magnus Archives), Millbank Prison Panopticon (The Magnus Archives), Location: Somewhere Else (The Magnus Archives), Spoilers for The Magnus Archives Season 5, POV Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Hurt Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, I am so normal about them, jon isn't a beholding avatar anymore, gay people make me insane read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/jNEvZbd
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ezrisdax-archive · 1 year ago
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fic ideas I had for things but never finished or started properly (also a lot of these I came up with with other people):
b7
fake dating au
accidentally got married au
 mutual pining whoops we're sleeping together anyway
ace attorney au
 seven as the one in shattered instead of chakotay au with maquis!b'elanna in janeways spot
future fic from naomi point of view about her gay aunts
dragon age au with warden!b'elanna and morrigan!seven
kes stays and is sick of them flirting and locks them in a closet au
 the coffee shop au I never finished which became a whole world anyway
 help desk support b'elanna dealing with ext 709 on the phone every day
hades game au
stuck on the holodeck and have to act the parts out to get out
utena au
xena au
troisha
expanding on the au I had where alternate reality tasha ended up in prime timeline instead of going to the past
xena au
roommates at starfleet au which I think I may have also done? so like...a different better one
 tasha didn’t die but ended up in some limbo form and deanna keeps seeing her as a ghost
kiradax (either dax)
reverse au with ezri as the dax host before jadzia and jadzia in season seven
mass effect au with asari!jadzia and human!kira
dragon age au with hawke!jadzia and mage!kira
au where kira stays on ds9 at the end of season six and is able to get to jadzia in time to save her but jadzia has to leave for trill for healing for a while and they write each other
chlodine
time loop au where they're looking for atlantis and whoops its got a funky artifact that has nadine looping
au where they meet much much sooner
office au where nadine is night security and chloe works late and keeps forgetting her badge and breaking in
wilenko
the au where one of them gets the beacon instead of shep
winter soldier cerberus au where they show up instead of sheps clone in ME3 or take kai lengs place in ME3
tim hortons vs starbucks au in niagra falls listen I'm canadian
stargate au
grissom academy instructor kaidan but ash on the normandy still
 pacific rim au
star wars au with clone soldier ash and jedi kaidan
vetryder
never went to andromeda au and ryders dig site needs supplies and she finds vetra
the typical au where sara isn't the pathfinder but calls dibs when she wakes up and meets vetra anyway
were dating pre andromeda but vetra thought ryder died when the hyperion didn't show up
misc star trek
seven/ezri where seven ends up on ds9 by the borg attacking the defiant and them getting seven from it look it wasn't fully fleshed out
divided we fall rewrite (ezri/lenara)
on an away mission together leading to fake dating (joann/keyla)
the kes stays on voyager, tom leaves au with kes, harry, b’elanna, and seven shenanigans (gen)
ezri and harry bffs serving on captain geordi's ship (gen)
misc
 ichiban time loop au (yakuza, gen)
au where korra doesn't fully get her memory back in season two but thinks her and asami are dating (lok, korrasami)
seong-hui keeps texting saeko and this leads to a relationship (yakuza, seong-hui/saeko)
tifa finds aerith at shinra hq where she’s been locked up for a while (ffvii, aerith/tifa)
tifa dead all along based on the latest trailer and technically a ghost but aerith drags her back to living anyway (ffvii, aerith/tifa)
rei begs susato to dress up again to get out of dating other guys (ace attorney, susahao)
franmaya star trek au with romulan/vulcan fran and trill maya (ace attorney, franmaya)
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s-c-r-i-p-s-i · 4 years ago
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Castigation
[Dead by Baelight’s Kinktober // Day 2: Trap]
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You couldn’t explain it if you tried, but it was like he was seeing through you.
Right to your guilty, nasty core.
🖤  🖤   🖤
Pairing: Pyramid Head x Gender-Neutral AMAB Reader  
Rating: Explicit
CW: non-con/dub-con, smut, tentacle/tongue sex, reader is a coward and does shitty things, dissociation, canon-typical violence
Word Count: 3,238
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You didn’t like what this place was turning you into.
Before the fog you were… you wanted to say normal, but in reality, you’d led a pretty privileged life. Not in the sense that you were rich, or blessed with preternatural wit, intelligence, or beauty, or anything like that. You were just sort of hit with the mediocrity stick. While most people had brushes with hardship at least once or twice in their lives, you’d somehow managed to avoid anything interesting happening in your life ever. Or that’s how it felt, anyway. You never had to discover what kind of person you were under stress. If you’d rise or fall to the occasion. Or the things you would do to save your own neck.
But you knew now.
For the most part, it started small. Hiding in a locker longer than strictly necessary. Letting someone else go for the unhook even though you were nearby. And, yes, sometimes your waffling around got some people killed. Indirectly. But the worst thing they could blame you of was being too cautious. Or, at worst, a coward. And - it wasn’t like they stayed dead.
Then somewhere along the line, things started to get… intentional. Shit you’d have a hard time trying to justify to someone’s face - but on the rare occasion you were caught, you tried anyway because you weren’t about to own up to it. You started to do things like stealing offerings and items from people’s personal piles in Limbo while they were off in a Trial; the place was like a homeless camp, everything out in the open and nigh impossible to secure. Just like in life, you never seemed to find anything special on your own, and it didn’t seem fair. This you tried to justify by never taking any personal effects - Kate’s guitar, Ace’s lucky shot glass; that kind of stuff always went untouched. But if you were being completely honest, it wasn’t out of decency. It was because they were worthless to you.
All you cared about was surviving another day. Or whatever passed for a day in this hellscape. After a while, you didn’t even feel guilty about it anymore. It just became your new normal.
And then you did something kind of fucked up even by your standards.
It was in a match against Myers. Just you and Claudette remained, both injured, both one strike away from death, working on the last gen so you could hopefully get the hell out of dodge. She’d offered to heal you, but it didn’t feel like there was enough time. And sure enough, before you could finish it off, there came that infernal heartbeat.
She reacted faster than you could, quietly slipping into the nearby locker that you’d had your eyes on, but had been too slow to secure for yourself, running to the thing just as she closed its doors.
And it was the only one in the room.
You heard her whisper, “Sorry, sorry!” But it didn’t mean jack to you. Something unfamiliar flashed through you then. Hot, simmering rage.
It wasn’t fucking fair, you remembered thinking. Why did she get a chance to live, and not you? Just because she was a little bit faster than you? Just because she happened to be on the side closest to the lockers? Why did she get to choose?
You even knew where the hatch was, you’d passed by it on the way there. Survival was so close you could taste it, could hear the phantom draft of the open hatch in your mind already. You could visualize it so perfectly. Everything but how to get there.
Then you figured it out.
And something inside you just… shut off.
Myers entered the room. Stared at you. You stared back. And then slowly, deliberately, never taking your eyes off the empty voids staring back at you, you rapped your knuckles against the locker. Once. Twice. Then made a run for it.
You knew when you heard her screams behind you that he’d taken the bait.
She wouldn’t remember, anyway. Not the pain, and not the betrayal. The last few moments were always foggy. Whether that was a kindness of the entity, or just a testament to the human mind’s ability to repress awful things, who knew?
But you’d remember. And you’d carried that guilt with you ever since. In the moment, you hadn’t felt anything but when you saw her back in Limbo, and every time after that, you felt… dirty.
You’d gotten pretty good at justifying your shitty behavior. There was always some excuse. But not this time. You could come up with the right words, yeah - ‘People die all the time. And it’s not like she died died. I was just doing what I had to do to survive.’ But no matter how you sliced it, nothing seemed to fill that black hole of guilt eating you alive from the inside out.
It made your stomach twist just thinking about it.
Part of you wished there was something you could do to make it up to her.
Another part of you wished there was something that could be done to you. You found yourself wishing she would just… react. That she would cry or scream or shout or push you around, just so you could have something. Some kind of consequence for your actions. You did something bad and nothing fucking happened. That’s not how the world was supposed to work.
But she’d never react, never do anything because she didn’t even fucking remember. You were the only one who knew. You hated it. You were miserable.
Little did you know all that guilt was about to make you a fucking magnet for the Executioner.
You were following your usual tactic for whenever a new Killer entered the fog, which was avoid discriminately. (Coincidentally, that was pretty much your tactic for everything.) And it went mostly without a hitch. There was one death, but Nea was looping him in the distance while Steve worked the exit door. You were just kind of waiting, sat in the alcove near the gate watching the chase. You’d managed to avoid him the whole trial, so you felt pretty safe. Impatient to get out of there, but safe.
Then he - it? - just stopped. In the middle of the fucking chase. Turned, slowly, as if just now realizing that the exit gate was almost open and that he was being given the runaround.
Except you swore he was staring right at you. It was impossible to tell with that enormous metal helmet thing on his head, or if he even could see, in the traditional sense, but freezing cold dread swept over you in an instant. You couldn’t explain it if you tried, but it was like he was seeing through you. Right to your guilty, nasty core.
The gate buzzed, doors noisily sliding open, and you, Steve, and Nea, who was just a couple paces behind, were home free. But right before you crossed over the threshold into safety, you chanced a glance back. He was still just… staring.
What did he want from you?
Nea caught up, pulling you through the fog by the wrist, and just like that, you were back in Limbo.
You were shaken up by it for a while. That’s not how killers acted. Abandoning a chase? If he’d kept at it, he probably could have had at least Nea. That would have been two out of four - not bad. So what the hell could he have seen that was more important than that?
You weren’t sure you wanted to know.
But either the Entity had it out for you, or you just had real bad luck these days, because it wasn’t long before you faced him again.
You were doing a great job avoiding him, though. Until you weren’t.
You hadn’t even seen that shit on the ground, but you sure knew when you stepped in it, a wave of pure agony shooting through you the moment your incautious foot planted itself in that bloody trench. A shriek ripped through your throat and you tore away as if you’d been burned. But the damage was already done.
The torment was like a wreath of barbed wire around your heart, constricting tightly as his heartbeat began pounding in your ears, quiet at first, but building cataclysmically. Alerted to your location, no doubt, by your scream, and making a beeline straight for you. Shit.
You weren’t ever keen on being found - that feeling that things were life and death, even when death didn’t mean anything here, never truly went away - but this filled you with a special kind of dread, remembering the way he’d just turned and stared at you before. You still didn’t know what that was about, and you still didn’t want to know.
Frantically, you looked around for a place to hide, you weren’t good at looping like the others, you weren’t good at anything. Fuck, fuck fuck. There were no lockers, no nothing. What were you going to do?
You watched with horror as he appeared in the entrance to the jungle gym and then paused. As if remembering you - or maybe just seeing whatever it was he saw before.
You didn’t wait around to find out. You threw yourself into a sprint for the nearest window, trying to put something between you and him besides distance. But he grabbed you mid-scramble over the sill, throwing you back, your ass skidding along the dirt.
He began stalking towards you, and desperate for space, you hastily tried to crabwalk backwards on your elbows and feet until you were backed up against the wall. Holy shit he was bigger in person - maybe it was just the angle, but he was monstrously large.
Now you could see everything, up close and in high definition. And you wished you couldn’t. Vein-like clumps of flesh clung to his helmet and hung from the edges in meaty strings, the way they just… dangled making you feel sick to your stomach. But his skin was worse. Far worse. Mottled - burned, maybe - flayed chunks of exposed muscle and even bone, you realized, slivers of rib and shin and finger bones glinting in the moonlight.
Despite the obvious damage, it didn’t seem like it was hurting him - or that it was even any kind of hindrance at all. By all means, for someone who looked like they should be falling apart, he was… very put together. He didn’t shamble or limp. He didn’t so much as falter.
You were mesmerized, in some morbid way. Like a train wreck; it was hard to look away. You almost forgot to worry about what he was about to do to you.
The beast seemed to consider you for a moment, looking down at you before his other hand clapped onto the hilt of his great knife, grasping it with both hands. That put your priorities back in check real fast. But before you could even think to shout something out in protest - how would you even begin trying to bargain with something like him? - he drove the knife into the Earth at your feet.
You weren’t sure what happened next. Briefly, you thought it was a sign of mercy. Wishful thinking.
It was as though you were sinking into the earth. Your arms shot outwards, trying to pull yourself up before your face could be swallowed up by the dirt, lungs wrenching in panic at the realization that you were about to be buried alive, and you gasped for breath, thinking it might be your last.
But then you were being thrust back up by an unknown force somewhere completely different, rising, not like a phoenix but a puppet.
Two spikes simultaneously shot through your shoulder blades, suspending you in this metal cage you found yourself trapped in as you howled in pain. It was about as bad as a hook, in terms of pain. Difficult to compare infinities, but, maybe more, maybe less. There were two entry points, but better distribution of your weight.
You treated it like a hook, anyway, slowly allowing yourself to hang, shifting all your focus onto flexing and curling your hands into fists. Open, close. Open, close. Rinse and repeat. That was all you could do to keep yourself from thrashing and hurting yourself more.
Open, close. Someone would come for you. Open, close.
And someone did. It just wasn’t who you were hoping for.
Your eyes rolled closed at the familiar sound of a heartbeat kicking up in the distance. Why? There were three other people he could go after. Why you? You could hear his knife dragging across the ground as he tread closer - not digging, just quietly scraping along. And then it stopped. Tears pricked the corners of your eyes. When you opened them again, he was standing right in front of you.
The bars of the cage moved on their own, magically giving way for him as he stepped forward.
“Why? Why me?” You asked, voice scratchy and reedy and thin from blowing out your vocal cords earlier, barely pushing out anything more than air. You weren’t even sure if he could answer, but you had to know. You weren’t connected by the same universe. You weren’t special. You didn’t even think you were a threat. Why was he singling you out like this?
Betraying, you think, some kind of sentience, the helmet tilted slightly, and for a moment you almost thought it was going to speak. Instead, it leaned forward, and something began to crawl out from the corner of his helmet. There was an opening where the metal was curled back, and a dark, blood sausage-like tendril was slithering out. Cringing, at first you thought it was a parasite - or some kind of symbiotic thing that lived inside his helmet - and you were that convinced whatever it was, it was about to murder you. It reared back like a snake, and you flinched, expecting it to strike. Instead, it touched your neck - not… gently, exactly, but not with the violence you were expecting, either. Almost like it was feeling at you. And that’s when you realized it was part of him.
You weren’t… completely celibate. Knew a tongue when you felt one. Even if it didn’t really look like one. Frustratingly, your body seemed to think it felt familiar, too, and you had to tamp down some… inappropriate, knee jerk reactions as it traced the curved of your neck, sweeping down to your clavicle.
It felt like there had to be a logical reason for this, it wasn’t sexual, you were just thinking with your human brain. Maybe it was trying to… taste something out. You didn’t know. But he must have made some kind of decision about you, because he made a low, groaning vocalization that was almost like a hum.
Then he started grabbing at your clothes, huge, grotesque hands pulling and ripping into them as easily as tearing through gauze. You tried kicking at him, but pain shot through your shoulders where you were still impaled, and you couldn’t -… You just couldn’t. You were trapped. There was nothing you could do. What was left sat on you in tatters, skin exposed to the cool air.
His hands roamed over the curve of your waist, over your hips, shaking you by them briefly, as if testing them out, while you croaked at the way your shoulders protested to even the slightest movement. What was he doing? Why didn’t he just kill you already? His tongue dragged down your stomach and your muscles fluttered, heat pooling in your loins against your will. You tried to push down the obvious reaction your body was having as it continued to travel down, down down, before it began curling around your erection.
“Oh fuck,” you wheezed hoarsely, “No, please.” You’d had a good half-chub since he started licking you, but you didn’t want this. Inhaling sharply, your eyes fluttered back, pinching closed as it started to move, experimentally jerking you off despite your begging. The feeling was unreal as it was unwelcome, unlike anything you’d ever felt before. But it didn’t last long, and you panted in relief as the tongue unfurled from around you. You hadn’t even realized your whole body was tense until you felt it deflate.
You didn’t understand why this was happening to you. This was no accident, he’d chosen you.
You weren’t allowed to dwell on it long. The respite was short lived, the Executioner’s hands hooking under your thighs without warning and hoisting your legs up.
This, oddly, was actually more comfortable in the sense that it hurt a lot fucking less, the support relieving almost the entirety of your own body weight off the spikes. You were still skewered in two places, that couldn’t be undersold. But at least now it didn’t feel like gravity was going to rip them through you like a heavy earring ripping through an earlobe.
But it was a whole lot less comfortable in the sense that you’d seen enough hentai to know what was coming next.
Whole lower body twitching as his tongue probed your backside, it swept over your entrance and prodded, testing it’s resistance before punching through it anyway, a broken cry purling from your busted throat as it forced you open and began violating you. Past the pain, you could still feel with perfect unholy clarity the alien way the muscle squirmed against your walls, stars and red-orange flashes dancing behind your eyes every time it fucked in and out of you. In need of something to hold, to ground yourself, your hands flew up to grasp at the spikes on one of the bars behind you.
You couldn’t even begin to think clearly, even as the motions slowly just turned into noise. But maybe- maybe you deserved this somehow. For what you did. Maybe the universe, or the Entity was finally throwing you your comeuppance. Or maybe you were looking for reason where there wasn’t any. Maybe everything was chaos and nothing mattered. But you’d take it. You’d take it, and maybe you’d come out on the other end feeling pure and exonerated.
You didn’t know how long it was before he withdrew and pulled you off the spikes- you thought you heard a generator ping on the numb fringes of your consciousness once or maybe even twice, but eventually you felt the slide of them leaving your body. Or rather, you leaving them.
He manhandled you a bit, and you confusedly let him, trying, somewhat, to cooperate but you were disoriented and slightly less helpful than dead weight. But that was fine. He had full control of you, turning you around and pressing down between your shoulder blades so you were face down, ass up, jerking your hips up so you were just how he wanted you, and if you rocked on your feet a little, it didn’t matter much.
You didn’t have to look behind you to hear the scrape of fabric as he moved the loincloth aside. Haggardly, you pulled up your head, vision obscured by tears and a veil of your own sweaty, stringy hair. Staring forward, you grabbed onto the spikes, one hand, then the other, fingers tightening around them as his tongue began snaking around your waist.
You deserved this.
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Thank you for reading!!!
🖤  🖤 🖤  
Notes:
A Cage of Atonement is kind like a trap, right? 😉
Thank you to Pugge as always, for beta'ing and being my hype man. (Also the entire server, they’re so supportive!!!)
Thank you to Null/Gabe/Slaandere for answering my every question (I’ve never played a SH game in my life) and enlightening me about the existence of PH’s tongue. This one’s for you, bb. 💖
This piece was written for Day 2 of the 🔞 Dead by Baelight 🔞 Discord server’s Kinktober.
Anyone over 18 is welcome to join here.
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I Think I know why happened To Scrappy
The jury’s in, guys-Scrappy’s just not universally hated. But you want proof, well, just go and check. 
Random Heckler: NOBODY LIKES-
Random Heckler, what are you even doing here? According to you yourself, everything I say is bunk. Why are you wasting your time with someone you claim to be delusional/a troll/other? Go on, git. Do something productive instead of wasting your time with a ‘silly little troll’ like me. Git a move on, pardner.  ...
Theeeere we go.
Right, now that that’s over with, it’s safe to say that Scrappy’s a broken base case. Obviously there are people who don’t like him and those who do like him. Scrappy stuck out like a sore thumb, and that naturally made him an object of contention the harder it became to ignore the guy. 
Just because a character is hard to ignore doesn’t mean they’re bad.
Plus he came to the show later, and that always makes a ruckus, not because of the mythical ‘cousin oliver syndrome’ but because new additions to the cast make some people uncomfortable. 
So you went out and checked. If you looked carefully you probably found some people. If you looked even more carefully you probably realized that the series with Scrappy survived a lot longer then it would’ve if nobody’d liked him. 
So clearly some people liked Scrappy and some people didn’t. You may have also noticed was that for the first twenty years or so of Scooby’s existance, Hanna-Barbera was largely targetting the children’s audience.
“So only kids liked Scrappy!” People, please. That’s not quite fair to say. I’m 19 years old. Legally an adult, I like Scrappy.
Kids could like him because they admired his adventurousness. Adults could like him because he reminded them of their own kids in some ways, or maybe (like me) they liked him as children and have fond memories from then. Or maybe they just think he’s cute, funny, interesting, or what have you. There are a thousand different ways. 
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Pinkie Pie, another exuberant, reality defying character who is loved (and sadly disliked by some) kids and adults alike. Copyright Hasbro, 201
In the same way you could also dislike him in a thousand different ways, :(, but Scrappy survived and showed us who he was and what he could do. 
What happened? 
Well, to figure that out let’s look at when everything began to change: 
The last cartoon to unironically feature Scrappy was Scooby-Doo and the reluctant werewolf. The last Hanna-Barbera feature.
Scooby-Doo and the Arabian nights? Warner Brothers. 
Pup Named Scooby-Doo? Warner Brothers.  
‘So what? So Warner Bros chose to treat Scrappy differently?’
Exactly.  That is it exactly. 
Cartoon Network wanted to appeal to fans’ nostalgia, and the fans said they wanted Scrappy gone.
Now this always threw me through a loop before-why would they deliberately appeal to Scrappy’s haters whenScrappy stil has fans?
But the answer was staring me straight in the face: They DID know about Scrappy’s fans, see, but they chose to appeal to Scrappy’s haters instead-because they are appealing to gen X people through nostalgia, not the other fans.
Look at this shot from the Puppy Power comic: Scrappy himself acknowledged it.
And Cartoon Network says
They were appealing to adults. They were planning Scooby’s return. They were aiming to appeal for adults. 
So there you have it folks: Cartoon Network got rid of Scrappy’s fandom because Scrappy’s hatedom was more in line with their target audience.
It all makes sense.
The Scrappy Rants thing was a big huge ol’ foreshadowing-Scrappy is upset about something, though it doesn’t specify whether or not the fans or the network itself has him so upset. He makes kids represented by Dexter (an unchildlike child if I ever saw one, based on my limited experience with his show) 
James Gunn’s words about ‘destroying Scrappy forever’ also add weight to this, though judging by his genuine surprise and chastening by the Scrappy fans’ negative response to the movie, he wasn’t totally in on Cartoon Network’s grand plan...but I don’t think anyone was. The live action movie, trapped Scrappy in limbo instead of obliterating his fanbase as expected.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/27/movies/after-14-years-one-network-for-children-refocuses-while-another-5-gets-wackier.html
https://www.nydailynews.com/archives/money/cartoon-network-rise-popular-shows-put-nick-rival-edge-article-1.844881
https://web.archive.org/web/20001011154219/http://www.geocities.com/~zoinks/oldsite/schedule.htm
Look at t his one! He was on saturday mornings! 
Hanna Barbera had sold the company. It wasn’t that they didn’t care about Scrappy, but there wasn’t anything they could do anymore. Scooby-Doo was in new hands.
This and several other interviews states that a third of Cartoon Network was adults-a third of an audience to choose to cater to.
tl;dr: Cartoon Network deliberately tried to thin out Scrappy’s fanbase to focus on his hatedom, which was more in line with the overall target audience.
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junker-town · 4 years ago
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How esports is revolutionizing sports broadcasting
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E-sports streaming platforms like Twitch are reaching new and younger audiences who are more engaged with what they’re watching.
We didn’t know if there would be live sports this year. The coronavirus pandemic kept the world in limbo for months. It was shocking when the NCAA announced the cancellation of March Madness, which feels like a decade ago — and in its wake we’ve seen hundreds of events cancelled, altered or modified to try and make sports return as safely as possible, with mixed results.
Whether through simulated crowds or altered camera shots to direct attention away from the lack of fans, sports broadcasts are evolving during the crisis. Leagues are turning online to engage fans in real time as they look to make them feel closer to sport, even when they can’t be there in person.
The idea of fan involvement beyond cheers and waves may be new to traditional sports, but it’s a technique that has been honed and cultivated for over a decade in esports. Broadcasters are innately aware of their online audience, legions of fans are accustomed to chatting in real-time, and it’s all happening on a platform where the same people calling the action can see what those fans are saying. Involving the crowd in the action has become a critical part of the esports experience, and now traditional leagues are trying to mimic the experience for a new generation of consumers.
Jeff Eisenband began his career in traditional sports broadcasting, now he’s working with the NBA as a commentator for the NBA 2K League. He’s worked with crowds live and online, seeing the differences in both sides of broadcasting. He believes there’s going to be a greater shift into esports-style announcing in the future.
“Twitch is very Gen Z-centric,” Eisenband says, “I think that one thing you learn in media is that people react very highly to feeling like their voice is heard.” When Eisenband is calling a game in the 2K League he keeps an eye on Twitch chat during the event, because much is added to the experience by involving fans. “If there’s something interesting, or a fan made a good point, then I’m going to say something to make those fans feel like they’re being heard, that they’re being seen by the broadcasters.”
“You used to have two traditional broadcasters with a sideline reporter. They had no way to follow what the pulse of what fans were talking about.”
That level of engagement hasn’t existed before, and for younger generations the feedback loop of feeling like they’re part of the broadcast is critical. It’s one of the reasons why, at a time where traditional TV viewership is in decline, Twitch continues to thrive. As of July the platform boasted 55 million active monthly viewers, as more and more people get their entertainment from individual content creators and online broadcasts rather than traditional media.
“You used to have two traditional broadcasters with a sideline reporter,” Eisenband says, “they had no way to follow what the pulse of what fans were talking about.”
He believes the proliferation of Twitch will “keep traditional broadcasters on their toes,” forcing them to adapt to the new medium. Tearing down the wall between broadcast and viewer may be scary, but it’s also critical to how sports are received moving forward. With this comes a necessary evolution, should current broadcasters want to excel in the new landscape.
“[They] have to get snappier, and we’re seeing — whether it’s the NBA with specific ‘follow LeBron James’ broadcasts or anything like that, but we’re going to see microtargeted programming in traditional sports.”
This “microtargeting” may sound like a buzzword, but it’s really just a way to get fans the content they want, in the way they want. College Football has embraced this with its playoff format, offering fans a variety of different broadcasters to choose the announce team they want. In a lot of ways, it’s a throwback to days of silencing the TV and simulcasting announcing over the radio, with fans choosing to listen to their local announcers over national voices.
It makes the product feel more personal, which in turn is more engaging — and that includes leaning on Twitter to make everything more fun.
“Adam Silver has been saying with the NBA for the last three or four years that he envisions the Twitch product being what you see in regular traditional sports,” Eisenband says, “ On Monday Night Football they put in front of Steve Levy that Patrick Mahomes’ mom was saying “Don’t call my son Pat.” That’s a variation on a broadcast that engages with Twitch chat.”
The first step in making the transition needs to be having networks embrace the shifting nature of modern broadcasting, and train its talent in it. This doesn’t need to be a case of getting rid of the old guard, but rather better educating them on how to carry a crowd in new ways. Eisenband says that one of the major differences in dealing with an online game without a live crowd is adapting to not having thousands of people as a crutch.
“It’s the broadcaster’s job to carry that energy to the viewer at home, because you don’t have that chance to sit back and let the crowd tell the story with your reactions,” he says. For too long broadcasters have allowed a stadium audience to convey the emotion, but without fans in attendance the move has been to simulate crowd noise, rather than train announcers to engage in new ways.
Regardless what happens with traditional broadcast sports it’s clear that the online shift for viewers wont go away. More people than ever are electing to spend their money solely on streaming services, or by giving to individual content creators. The pandemic didn’t alter this trajectory, but perhaps opened the minds of those who were otherwise against the idea of watching sports online. NASCAR played around with the format at the beginning of the pandemic by announcing virtual simulated races, and while that level of integration between virtual and traditional sports, we will see a shift. Eisenband sees this coming too.
“When esports are on linear television now, people aren’t going to be as inclined to say ‘why would I watch that?’ they’re going to be like ‘this is part of the culture now.’”
The next move is on traditional sports to adapt. In the end, the forced adaptation caused by the Covid pandemic could be what saves traditional sports broadcasting. It’s better to evolve early and find new audiences than wait too long and try to find revenue when audiences have left. This isn’t a moment of peril, but an opportunity for salvation — assuming broadcasters are smart enough to see it.
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