#but look! it's sweeps!

[orangepenguino]

x

[suntails]

toot toot!

[yeloenk]

⟢ VOTE INK!!

my obligatory ink propaganda art

vote ink or else /j

link to poll: here

ink belongs to @comyet

[velichorus-k]

The second installment of this comic right here. In which the gang hangs out :) pages under the cut!

[ollyollyaxe]

fuck the club, they shoulda been at the mall

[kbsd]

you made me want you, and all the time you knew it

OR: buck just needed a little time

[livelovecaliforniadreams]

[gideonisms]

I think that harrow is way too much romantically speaking for most people but gideon three desserts nav is into being studied like a bug and receiving one of harrow's bones for valentine's day so what can you do

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[friendlyengie]

in line with the hc I’ve seen thrown around often that medic comes from a long line of doctors who are just as fucked up as he is. I think his parent was a single mad scientist lady and medic is her beautiful baby science experiment that she grew in a tube through various scientific affronts to god. Her favorite freak of nature.

[tsuchinokoroyale]

My back looks like bc his messages look like this ✨

[zivazivc]

my brainrot about these two can be measured in liters

[suntails]

❤️⚔️

[cosmicnyan]

Baldi's Basics!

[phoenixnicks]

yuri, to me

[kedreeva]

Alright, I'm dragging you all into doing tasks with me today.

I've gotta do a bunch of laundry and dishes and clean floors and stuff, and I hate working alone, so here's what we're gonna do!

When you reblog this and tell me your completed task, I'll add it to a tally and update periodically with a progressive total. Before I go out tomorrow, I'll grab a final count, and that's how many whole food "treat" pieces the birds will get when I get home (a mix of fishies and crickets and mealworms and blueberries and nugget treats and banana pieces etc, all stuff that is a good part of their diet). Tasks can be anything you need to do, but it would make me especially happy for folks to do things they've been putting off or are hard to find motivation to do alone, so the birds can help you back.

So! Let's get to work together today!

Do it for her!