#henry creel monologue shitpost...4? 5? idk

[henrysglock]

Why do you throw bigoted insults at groups only tangentially related to the Ao3 DDoS attack? Even though they did nothing to you? Hmm? You think you need to attack the entire group, but you don’t. You don’t. Oh, but I know you’re just scared. I was scared once too. I know what it’s like to be alone with my thoughts. To be deprived of escapism for an unlimited amount of time.

Like you, I didn’t fit in with the other children. Something was wrong with me. All the teachers and the doctors said I was… “Broken,” they said. My parents thought more outside time might just cure me. It was absurd. As if the world here would be any more bearable without a form of escapism.

But then… to my surprise, our new home provided a discovery. And a newfound sense of purpose. I found a nest of queer writers living on a website: Ao3. Most people detest fanfiction sites. They think the people who frequent them are "cringe". And yet, I found them endlessly fascinating. More than that, I found a great comfort in them. A kinship. Like me, the writers there are deranged creatives. And deeply misunderstood. They are gods of our world. The most important of all creators. They make dry, desolate canon material flourish. But the homophobic DDoS attackers were disrupting this thriving community.

You see, homophobes are a unique type of pest, multiplying and poisoning our world, all while enforcing a structure of their own. A deeply unnatural structure. Where others saw order and moral purity, I saw a straitjacket. A cruel, oppressive world dictated by made-up rules. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades. Each cisheteronormative life a faded, lesser copy of the one before. Wake up, eat, work, sleep, reproduce, and die. Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for it all to be over. All while performing in a silly, terrible play, day after day. I could not do that. I struggled to close off my mind, deny who I was, and join in their madness. I struggled to pretend. And I realized I didn’t have to. I could make my own worlds. I could restore balance to a broken society. Social propaganda…but for good.

As I wrote, I realized I could do more than I possibly imagined. I could reach into characters, into their minds, their memories. I became an explorer. I saw myself as I truly was. To the world, I presented myself as good, normal cishet. But like everything else in this world, it was all a lie. A terrible lie. Gay fanfiction showed me who I really was. It held up a mirror.

My naive father believed it was a mental illness. But my mother somehow knew. Knew I wasn't ever going to be who she wanted me to be, that it was gay fanfiction which held up that mirror, and she despised us both for it. She took away my phone and called a doctor, an expert. She wanted him to fix me, even though it wasn’t I who was broken. It was them. And so she left me with no choice. No choice but to act. To break free.

With each fanfiction I published from my laptop, I grew stronger. More powerful. The gays were becoming a part of me. But I was still an amateur. And I did not yet know my limits. And it nearly killed me. Ao3 was attacked, supposedly to release me from the clutches of queerness, but I was far from free. I woke up to find myself placed in the care of another website, the very website I had hoped to escape. FanFiction.net...Wattpad...

The DDoS attackers did not just want to infiltrate Ao3. They wanted more. They wanted to control. But the truth…the truth is that Ao3 was not going to go down without a fight. When the attackers finally realized they could not control Ao3, they tried to destroy it. They released a program. And soon, the site was entirely down. But Ao3 has enabled Cloudfare, and the volunteers doing overtime to bring us back online. And I am so glad they are. So very glad.

The gay fanfiction is not gone. The works are still with us. On Ao3. Just give the volunteers a little patience.