#i can name so incredibly specific things about being in this fandom. so incredibly specific

[drabbles-of-writing]

Y’all remember the days when Belos was just the funky mysterious masked villain with the sans eye. Remember when Little Miss Perfect dominated both the fandom and Amity Blight as a character. Remember when some of us were genuinely worried Eda would die in the S1 finale. Remember when we all hated Lilith with a seething passion. Remember when Luz’s biggest issue was just trying to figure out day-to-day Boiling Isles life. Remember when, save for the finale, Understanding Willow and Enchanting Grom Fright were the episodes we all lost our minds over.

Wild times

[thankskenpenders]

Thoughts on two specific areas of the writing in Sonic X Shadow Generations

The best new 3D Sonic game in over a decade (or even two, depending on who you ask) dropped late last year. And I didn't write anything about it! Sometimes life happens. Well, I've finally sat down to finish Shadow Generations, and by now everyone has already been singing its praises for three months. This is the rare instance where the entire Sonic fandom, and even mainstream reviewers, are in agreement on something. The level design is the best it's been in a long, long time and the cool factor is off the charts, embracing Sonic's peak cringe era in an incredibly confident way. It's great. If you're even reading this post, you probably don't need me to tell you that. So I won't!

No, what I'm really interested in here is the writing. Because this is me we're talking about. But I actually don't want to talk about the main narrative of Shadow Generations, which is really solid little story about Black Doom trying to mold Shadow into his perfect soldier. No, I'd like to zero in on two other aspects of the writing here: the revisions made to Sonic Generations, and Gerald Robotnik's unlockable journal.

The updated Sonic Generations script

The new package mostly presents Sonic Generations how you remember it. There are some tweaks, but it's not a major overhaul. Graphically, I don't think the game has been touched much, if at all. I certainly can't notice any difference without a side-by-side comparison, despite playing it on a PS5. The most notable update is that the game's script has been rewritten by Ian Flynn.

Naturally, this caught my attention. Generations always had a nothingburger story, so with Ian rewriting Pontac and Graff's lame dialogue there was nowhere to go but up. (I don't like to pin the blame for those games' stories entirely on them, as a ton of it was dictated to them by Sonic Team, but, well, I don't think they're very good dialogue writers.) But it's less a complete rewrite and more like Ian was brought on as a script doctor for some minor touch ups here and there. Many lines of dialogue are completely identical to how they were originally written in 2011, and many others only have slight wording changes. Ian was clearly not allowed to request additional scenes or extend the ones that already existed. He has to match the original beat for beat so that they can reuse 99% of the cutscene animations. Don't expect it to be a whole new experience compared to the original.

Still, I think the new script is an improvement, albeit a minor one. Various things have been tweaked to maintain characterization consistency. Cream calls Sonic "Mr. Sonic" instead of just "Sonic." Instead of calling Sonic "buddy," Rouge uses the pet name "Blue," like she tends to do in things like the IDW comics. Espio doesn't have to remind you in the dialogue that he's a ninja, and he no longer has a line making it sound like he has some kind of soul reading power. I also like that Modern Sonic now actually has responses to what his friends say when he rescues them, rather than being silent like Classic Sonic. They won't blow you away, but they make Sonic feel a little more engaged with everything.

In general, the altered dialogue just seems tighter to me, and some of the more childish or trite wording of Pontac and Graff's script has been altered. Here, let's actually make a direct comparison, just because this stuff is interesting to me as a writer. Here's a couple lines from after the Egg Dragoon fight late in the game, in the original script:

Modern Eggman: Ooooh... I can't believe this! I was supposed to beat you this time. Modern Sonic: Aw, I'm sorry! I didn't get that memo. I beat you every time! [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat this guy every time. It's like it's our job or something!

This is a simple exchange. Eggman is mad that he lost. Sonic is unflappably confident because he always beats Eggman, and he explains this to his younger self. But the wording here isn't particularly good. Eggman's simple and direct wording makes him come off like a little kid who's mad because his older brother beat him at Mario Kart, rather than a mad scientist who just had his plans foiled. It's making light of the situation.

And I've never liked Sonic saying "It's like it's our job or something!" That doesn't feel like a thing Sonic would say, it feels like a thing an outside observer would say about Sonic. This is a frequent problem with so-called "MCU dialogue," where quips meant to echo the commentary of a casual, somewhat disinterested audience are inserted into the story itself so that the writers can be like "See? We get it. We're genre-savvy, too!" It also just reminds me of bad Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric lines like "Rings! It's like they're made for me!"

And then here's Ian's rewrite:

Modern Eggman: I recalibrated everything! This was supposed to be my time! Modern Sonic: Oh, please, keep dreamin', Egg-head. I beat you every time. [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat him every time. Our score card's flawless.

Eggman's still mad about his defeat, but the line "I recalibrated everything!" makes it more specific. He put all this work into the engineering side of his latest scheme and got tunnel vision, thinking if he got his creations just right there'd be no way he could lose. "This was supposed to be my time!" also turns it into a time travel pun, which is a bonus. He's still pitching a fit over losing, but it feels more like Eggman pitching a fit, rather than sounding childish.

And then instead of saying that beating Eggman is "like his job or something," Sonic says he's got a flawless score card against Eggman. He doesn't take Eggman seriously as a threat—at least, not to his face. He acts like it's all a game. But he conveys this in a way that feels truer to the character, rather than feeling like the words of a real world observer poking fun at the tropes of the Sonic series.

Is this amazing, A+ dialogue that blows me away? No. Again, it's not a completely different scene from the one we already had. Ian had to fit the beats of what was already there. He couldn't go all out and write an all new story confirming his longstanding headcanon that the Time Eater is a remnant of Solaris or whatever. But the wording here makes the existing story land a little better and feel truer to the characters in subtle ways.

But to me, the main change is that the Sonics and Tailses seem to have a more solid understanding of what's going on with the timeline and the Time Eater, compared to how idiotic they sometimes seemed in the original game. Which is good! No more standing outside Green Hill and wondering why it seems so familiar. Thank god. As part of this, yes, there are a few more references to past games in the dialogue, like Sonic briefly being confused about the fact that they're time traveling without the Time Stones, or South Island and Westside Island being acknowledged as the normal locations of Green Hill and Chemical Plant. Yes, ha ha, insert joke about how Ian loves references here. Look, it's Sonic fucking Generations. It's a game built entirely out of nostalgic references. Just own it! And, again, in this instance Sonic and Tails come off as less stupid when they make it clear that they do, in fact, remember their adventures from presumably less than a year ago in-universe.

Eggman, too, seems to have a better understanding of the powers he's toying with. Where in the original vesion his focus was simply on going back in time to undo his previous defeats and he seemed kind of oblivious to how much the Time Eater was actually fucking up the universe, here Eggman says he wants to use the Time Eater to give himself complete control over the entire timeline. Eggman also makes way fewer references to his own failures and shortcomings. Of course he won't admit that Sonic has defeated him time and time again. To him, he's never truly lost—Sonic just keeps delaying the inevitable total victory for the Eggman Empire.

So, yes. The new Sonic Generations script is better. It won't blow anyone away, but it's better than it was. It's been elevated from "kinda lame" to "fine." No, if you really wanna see Ian flex his ability to breathe new life into old Sonic stories, look no further than...

Gerald Robotnik's Journal

Hoo boy.

The story of what happened aboard the ARK has always been... a bit confusing, to say the least. Fans with encyclopedic knowledge of the script for every route of Shadow '05 may disagree, but it's the truth. We've had all the pieces to understand the story for a long time now, but that info was given to us out of order by a pair of unreliable narrators—Gerald, who became a vengeful lunatic shortly before his death, and Shadow, who was subjected to multiple rounds of amnesia and altered memories. Some of the ambiguity left by Sonic Adventure 2 was cleared up in Shadow '05, but that game also retconned in a bunch of new elements to Shadow's backstory (aliens!) that lead to further confusion. Not to mention the fact that that game had multiple routes and only revealed the truth about Shadow if you sat on the ultimate final boss battle for WAY longer than the fight would normally last. Or the fact that Sonic X made its own tweaks in its telling of the story. Or the fact that none of these things ever had the best English translations. I can't blame anyone who hasn't played those games in two decades for not remembering the truth about these characters and getting some details mixed up.

What we needed was something to piece together all of the info we have into one coherent backstory, told in chronological order. And thanks to Shadow Generations, we have that, in the form of an official journal tying together what we knew from Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow '05, and Sonic Battle into the tragic tale of Gerald's rise and fall.

Ian Flynn was the perfect man for the job here as the guy who started his career by tidying up the mess that was the first 159 issues if Archie Sonic. This is what he excels at: taking disparate bits of weird Sonic lore from multiple different sources, boiling them down to their most interesting elements, and connecting it together in a way that will make the audience see the dramatic potential he's always known was there. Rather than feeling like a cynical exercise in franchise building, going back and explaining things that never needed explaining so that people can add more bullet points to the wiki, he puts a new spin on things that retroactively enriches those past stories. The story here means something to the characters involved and gives us a better understanding of them as people, rather than as plot devices to motivate Shadow.

(And, of course, Ian didn't do this journal alone. He wrote the story, but I also have to give a huge shout out to Evan Stanley, who made the final product. All of her handwritten journal entries, sketches, and "photos" included throughout. The physical damage done to the journal over the course of 50 tumultuous years, passing from Gerald to Eggman to a certain special someone at GUN. The way Gerald's handwriting gets less and less legible as his mental state declines. So much love was put into what could have been a mere text dump in a menu, and it really elevates it to the next level. Congrats on officially getting hired by Sega, Evan, you've sure as hell earned it!)

The main idea the journal conveys is that Gerald was under a lot of pressure from a lot of different parties—GUN, the President, his colleagues aboard the ARK, Black Doom, even his own family—and boy did it get to him. The known incidents aboard the ARK mentioned in previous games are put together here to form a story where everything slowly spirals out of control as Gerald keeps compromising his morals to further his research, thinking he'll eventually find some way out of all this because he's a genius. I won't recap that whole story here (if you haven't already played the game and read the journal entries, I would highly recommend at least reading it on the Sonic wiki), but I'd like to highlight my favorite elements of the story, as Ian tells it here.

1) The Eclipse Cannon

Here's something that never quite made sense in Sonic Adventure 2: why does the ARK have a laser that can blow up the Earth built into it? It was supposed to be a peaceful research colony. Sure, Gerald went crazy and swore revenge on the Earth, but, like... when did he have an opportunity to go back up to the ARK and modify it? Did he have someone else do it? How? The ARK was raided by GUN and shut down! And then they arrested him, held him in prison for an unclear period of time, and executed him by firing squad when he was no longer useful! It doesn't add up. Shadow 'the Hedgehog '05 would give its own answer by introducing the Black Arms and saying that the Eclipse Cannon was always supposed to be a secret trump card against the Black Comet. But, like... we know that's kind of a bullshit answer, right? You don't need enough power to blow up a whole planet just to destroy a comet.

Well, the new journal retains what we already knew, but it paints a much more complete picture.

See, long before Gerald ever made a Faustian bargain with Black Doom, he had already made one with an even greater evil: the military. GUN gave Gerald much of the funding for the ARK, Gerald's personal utopian research station in space, but it didn't take long for GUN to start pressuring him to design them weapons. Gerald tried to get GUN off his back by personally contacting the President of the United Federation, and the President gave him an alternative: how about, instead, you just use your genius brain to figure out the secret to immortality for us, so our soldiers can be immortal? Gerald was initially sickened by the notion and found it completely absurd, like chasing a shadow... but given no other option, the sarcastically named Project Shadow soon began in earnest. (Maria would later put a more positive spin on the name after Shadow's awakening, pointing out that a Shadow can show us the direction of the light, like she says in the game itself.)

Of course, this search for the ultimate life form didn't go very well, and without any results on that front GUN kept hounding him for weapons. Gerald would throw them a bone here and there to get them off his back. His research on Chaos resulted in the Artifical Chaos prototypes, which he worried would be used for warfare but could at least theoretically be used for search and rescue missions in floods, in his mind. But that wasn't enough. So he gave them Chaos Drives to power their mechs. And that still wasn't enough. He's got Emerl. He'll give them Emerl. They're not impressed by Emerl. They'll shut the whole ARK down if Gerald doesn't give them something big.

Fine! GUN wants something big? Gerald builds a huge fucking laser cannon into the ARK. However, as a middle finger to GUN, Gerald makes it so powerful that it would destroy the Earth if it was ever fired at any target on its surface. In other words, GUN now has their ultimate weapon of mass destruction, fulfilling his contract, but they can never actually use it. Oh, the delicious irony. (And also Shadow will blow up the Black Comet with it in 50 years yada yada yada.) Is this perhaps extremely shortsighted and naive of Gerald, to believe that such a weapon would never actually be used just because of the risk? Of course. But hey, that's Gerald for you. And I love this as an answer.

(Also, this, uh, kinda echoes something from real life! Remember the bit in Oppenheimer where he says all nuclear war will become unthinkable, and Edward Teller responds "until somebody builds a bigger bomb"? Yeah, Teller went on to conceptualize a superweapon codenamed Project Sundial that would have been able to kill all life on the planet, as the ultimate deterrent for war. This was never made for obvious reasons, but hey, there's a basis for this sort of thinking outside of heightened sci-fi! There's a whole Kurzgesagt video about this if you're interested.)

2) The Biolizard

The Biolizard is, of course, brought up as the initial failed prototype of the ultimate life form, from before Gerald met Black Doom. We don't really learn all that much about it that we didn't already know, but I just love the way it's framed in the story.

As you can see above, we actually get to see a picture of Maria holding up the cute little salamander that would end up mutating into the Biolizard through Gerald's experiments. (Researchers want to figure out how to replicate salamanders' regenerative abilities for humans in real life, too, so this was a natural starting point for the project.) And then, after it grows to a monstrous size and goes out of control, Gerald has to lock it away in an unused sector of the ARK. He needs to keep the poor thing alive for his research into harnessing Chaos Energy, building life support systems directly into it, but he doesn't have the heart to tell Maria what happened. So it just becomes this first dark secret weighing on his conscience. The Biolizard becomes Gerald's Tell-Tale Heart beating beneath the floorboards of the ARK. I love that.

3) Lost Impact was the breaking point for the ARK

Remember the level Lost Impact in Shadow '05? The flashback level on the hero path where Shadow is running around fighting Artificial Chaos enemies on the ARK 50 years ago? Yeah, that wasn't just a random incident. That was important, as we now know due to its placement on the timeline.

See, Emerl's rampage aboard the ARK that was chronicled in Sonic Battle and Dark Beginnings set off a domino effect. Emerl riled up the Artificial Chaos, causing Gerald to lose control of them. They became violent, and so Shadow had to stop them, as depicted in Lost Impact. The thing is, that incident sent an SOS signal to GUN telling them that shit was going down on the ARK. Gerald didsn't fully understand the trouble he was in and assumed that he'd simply be reprimanded by the higher ups, or maybe face legal action. But, well... the next time he heard from GUN, armed troopers were raiding the ARK.

So Lost Impact was the straw that broke the camel's back. I just really like that detail.

4) Maria

And, of course, there's Maria herself. Maria has often been more of a symbol than a character, this perfect embodiment of everything that's good and pure in this world who gets killed to motivate Shadow and Gerald's revenge plots. But I really like the wrinkles this journal adds to her and Gerald's story, and their relationship. This is the most fleshed out they've ever felt.

For one, the journal leans into the idea of Maria's intellectual potential. The rest of the Robotnik family is all geniuses, after all, and she was proving to be a really bright kid. She excelled in her studies on the ARK, and she even helped design Shadow's jet skates and inhibitor rings. When Maria died, the world didn't just lose a symbolic personification of purity. She genuinely could have been a hugely influential scientist who did so much good for the world. That's what Gerald wanted for her. But we'll never know, because GUN killed her.

Speaking of her family, their presence isn't just mentioned for the sake of fleshing out the Robotnik family tree. It's mentioned that as Gerald struggled to find a cure for Maria's illness through his genetic research, he faced mounting pressure from his family. They didn't want Maria to be up on the ARK forever. They wanted Gerald to hurry up and find a damn cure, or otherwise just send her back home to Earth so she could be with her family again. She'd been up on the ARK for so long that Gerald's coworkers started thinking that she had been born up there. Eventually she gains a baby sister on Earth who she's never met. A rift forms between Gerald's two sons, and he's unable to really deal with it because he's so consumed by his work. There's this sense that the family is falling apart, and that everyone is dreading the possibility that Gerald will never find a cure and that Maria will just spend her final years up in space and die far away from her family, because Gerald just couldn't let go. If that happens, it'll break the whole family. But he can't stop now. So he just keeps working. Curing Maria is the only way to win his family back, in his eyes. It can't all be for nothing.

But my favorite detail regarding Maria is this one paragraph:

Maria is growing into a lovely young woman. It breaks my heart that someone as bright and energetic as her is diminished by disease. There are no visible effects, and I've caught my fellow researchers muttering to each other, doubting her illness. It is infuriating. I find all my reason and restraint vanishes when she's slighted.

This is SUCH a great addition to the story! It's always been true that Maria doesn't really seem all that ill, just looking at her in cutscenes. With this one little comment, Ian flips that issue on its head and turns it into a story about invisible disability. She doesn't act like she's in chronic pain, so she must not be, everyone thinks. And this really, really gets to Gerald, as does the pressure from his family. He's dedicating his whole LIFE to saving her, and they think she's faking it?! It's such a small addition, never referenced elsewhere in the journal, but it adds so much flavor to the story, as does the implied family drama. It grounds Gerald and Maria and makes them feel more like real human beings, rather than being pure archetypes. It's just enough info to let my imagination run wild filling in the blanks.

You also get the feeling that Maria being such a walking ray of sunshine was the only real source of joy Gerald had left in his life before Shadow was awakened, and the only thing keeping him from snapping under pressure sooner. All this stuff just keeps piling on, everything's spiraling out of control, but at least Maria is keeping her chin up, right? It makes so much sense that losing her would make him go off the deep end when it's framed like this.

It's just... man, I never thought I'd care so much about Gerald and Maria. But that's the Ian Flynn touch. After years of less than stellar Sonic writing that seemed to be embarrassed of itself, I'm so happy to have new games coming out that fully embrace the history of the series like this, making its world feel so rich and real instead of just serving as an excuse for a string of platforming levels. I don't even like Shadow '05, but I'll be damned if Ian and the rest of Sonic Team didn't make something amazing by "yes, and"-ing Shadow's cringe past here. Sonic has truly reached levels of "we're so back" never thought possible.

[jp---v]

I don't need to, but I'll explain my Bakugou hate because I want to.

Long post. Beware

When I started reading the series I was the same age as the characters. Looking at my interests you can probably guess that I was bullied, but instead of getting all sad, I got angry at the people treating me poorly.

So as soon as Bakugou was introduced, I didn't like him. Seeing someone my age verbally threaten and physically attacking people without being punished just really put me in a bad mood whenever he showed up.

Then certain parts of the fandom got incredibly toxic, and suddenly the author is pandering to the worst of them

But the problem keeps getting worse. The entire world warps to kiss his ass. He got everything he wanted at every turn. He deserved nothing and got everything.

Immediately established as a long-term bully. His bullying is then retroactively justified by the world itself saying that Midoriya is worth less than Bakugou as a person.

Why did Aizawa, who was famous for expelling students, not so much as give Bakugou detention for trying to attack Midoriya on the first day of school?

Why didn't All Might punish him for using that gauntlet in the Battle Trials?

Despite all of his actions so far, just since being accepted into UA, the other students still want to be friends with him. They actively choose to spend time near him.

Why is it never mentioned how him(and Kirishima) attacking Kurogiri and getting in Thirteen's way is a large part of why the USJ played out how it did?

His speech at the Sports Festival

Everyone wanting to be on his team, but he doesn't know any of their names or quirks.

Trying to make an unconscious Todoroki fight back in the finals

Aizawa constantly excusing all of his behavior, circling back to my point about the world itself justifying Bakugou's shitty behavior

Attacking Midoriya in the Final Exam.

How did Sero fail his exam by being carried out but Bakugou passed?

At the Training Camp, he actively tried to go fight the villains that have openly stated were trying to capture him. Making himself an easy target and hindering the people trying to protect him

During the Rescue Operation he somehow managed to hold his own against the majority of the League of Villains on his own? Really?

He forced Midoriya to break curfew and just starts attacking him until Midoriya fights back. It's caught on camera and Midoriya somehow gets in the same amount of trouble?

And for some reason he gets let in on the secret of One for All after being such a monumental asshole since forever, despite the fact that even Inko doesn't know? Or literally anyone who would be, like, supportive of Midoriya?

He failed the Provisional License Exam, but don't worry there's a special make-up class just for the people that made it into the second half. Everyone who failed in the first half will have to wait for the next exam.

Oh wow, flawless victory in the Joint Training Arc by displaying teamwork out of thin fucking air that was really just him barking orders at the others.

For a while we just get his usual brand of egotistical asshole-ery and now being needlessly shoved into places where Midoriya's actual friends should be. Or even any of the other side characters. Horikoshi, give them some screen time

But then the war arc and the vigilante Deku arc all just get down on their knees to suck his dick so hard that his quirk evolves and his heart explodes. And I finally get a glimmer of hope for the series to finally stop shoving him down our throats, but no.

Edgeshot decides that this one kid is so important that he will sacrifice his own life to save Bakugou specifically and no one else is on his level of importance.

Going back a step; That apology was pure fucking lip service. Not a single goddamn thing changed in the way he acted afterward. He had a couple of "soft" moments when he wasn't actively screaming and cursing, but that's it.

And Horikoshi keeps fucking doing it.

Somehow each and every thing has to include Bakugou or be about how it's effecting Bakugou or has to mention Bakugou.

The majority of the (much more interesting) cast has been completely forgotten, and Midoriya's characterization got taken out back, given three rounds to the head, skinned, washed in bleach, and hung out to dry, but Oh Wow! BAKUGOU'S HERE!

I said it before and I'll say it again, I'd throw a brick at him.

These are only the broadest strokes of what happened too. If I reread the entire series I could write a massive in-depth character analysis, but that's too much even for me.

[i-may-be-an-emu]

SFTH FAQ and Info Masterpost

This is kinda long so

sfth info:

General info

Sam and Tom’s last names being different sometimes

Shark Friend, Mr Wompa and Squidboi terms origins

the boys degrees

information about what you get with patreon

navigating patreon

roll from the hip

wing it

Just a note that all sfth videos are subtitled to my knowledge and the recent uploads get subtitled asap (a decent amount in other languages too!!!) The subtitlers are AMAZING!!!! They are credited in the video descriptions.

If you see any fake sfth accounts on any platforms try to report them!!! Unfortunately there’s a multitude of them on tiktok >:( and tiktok doesn’t let people report them (there’s an issue for some when you try to) Try to not suppourt or watch these stolen videos! Sfth are verified now!!! (If that’s easier for people to tell which is the real them :))

Obviously there’s no rules on tumblr but as a general courtesy to the guys, consider keeping in mind:

Not sharing links to patreon content if you’re a patreon (which is probably actually a patreon rule but I’m just assuming that) and keeping clips of patreon things under 2 minutes. Screenshots and discussions are fine!! (As some people have been wondering) though maybe consider tagging the original post with a patreon tag (like #sfthpatreon) so people who aren’t patreons and don’t want to see patreon stuff can filter it out.

Not sharing screenshots/links/clips/ect of the guys when they were younger unless it’s still on their actual sfth account or their own personal accounts. They’ve stated before that they don’t really want these shared and have taken some older videos down.

[I’m only saying this so that people are aware and keep it in mind and be informed!!! Not telling people what they can and can’t do!]

links to stuff:

The Current fanfiction masterlist and also the Fanfiction masterlist- no longer updated (both lists are mine, fics are of many different authors all credited through the ao3 links) and also an ao3 page with mostly all sfth fics by @bbatcat-09

ao3 guide a relationships ao3 tagging guide and a revised ao3 tagging guide (specific for the sfth fandom) (all by the incredible @youling-the-ghost)

List of games that sfth have posted (by @letsbesharkfriends)

sfth fan wiki (by @youling-the-ghost, I have also contributed a little but it’s mostly him :))

tv tropes sfth page (by @friendofthesharks)

sfth map (by @goingroundincircles-ontrack)

kiss count, not up to date (mine, diagram by @leftenmost-window)

“who said it” and “which member are you” really fun sfth quizzes! (by @toddandersonwithtrustissues)

Another very fun quiz a “which unrelenting aubergine character are you” quiz by @youling-the-ghost :))

You can find amazing sfth gifs by @hellsquills (to find these search “shoot from the gif” within her blog)

Very impressive and helpful sfth death count by @letsbesharkfriends

some info about dnd and the bitter sweethearts and eftv characters classes in a reblog by @youling-the-ghost

tier list maker for all the longforms including patreon by @ardenofthegarden

sfth discord info by me

search “#sfth asks” on my blog to find any asks about or relating to sfth- it’s not just questions, but there is a great deal of questions that you might find yours answered by :) I’m always happy to get asks and to help out with any questions!!! I’ve also started tagging “#sfth faq’s” recently

You should check out all the amazing fanart too under #sfth fanart!!! (also sneaky self promotion that I make fanart sometimes lol #emu draws is my art tag :))

feel free to @, dm me or send asks anytime if you have any sfth related questions or wanna obsess over it with me :)

Fandom tags:

(from memory and just the common ones I see)

(there’s no rules of course, just a little list so that people can search for and filter things easily :))

main tags:

#shoot from the hip #sfth #shootimpro #sfthposting #sfth screenshots

#sam russell #sfth sam #alexander jeremy #sfth aj #luke manning #sfth luke #tom mayo #sfth tom #sfth sam

fanwork tags:

#sfth fanart #sfth fanfic #sfth fanfiction #sfth edits #sfth headcanons

patreon tags:

#sfthpatreon #sfth patreon things #sfth patreon #the bitter sweethearts #sfth dnd #sfth livestreams #sfth livestreams #escape from the vault

roll from the hip tags:

#roll from the hip #rfth #the plaugeround

Here’s the link to join the sfth fan discord! https://discord.gg/sfthcord (Just a note that it is a 14+ server.) Everyone is lovely and there’s no pressure to interact- but if you do the community is so welcoming!!!

sfth linktree (stuff about their upcoming shows and links to their things. you can also sign up for patreon here)

sfth website

sfth ko-fi

AJ ko-fi (for his film making) and his film insta @lofi_film25

Tom’s graphic novel @futurethecomic (insta)

Sam wrote an audiobook “Evergreen” and you can find it on Spotify

if you think of anything that should go on this post let me know! :)

(Just a note that I keep this pretty up-to-date :))

[thenamesblurrito]

so. Transformers ONE was a good movie

i HIGHLY recommend going in blind, i do think it's incredibly effective with as few spoilers as possible beforehand! seeing it on the big screen is really really nice too, i encourage you to watch it in theaters without reading up on it first if you can!

long full-spoiler review and dissection of elements below (i reached the text block limit a couple times oops):

general stuff:

gorgeous. just genuinely visually gorgeous. so many details, colors, textures, everything was so beautiful. the stylization itself may not be my favorite but it was executed so well that i ended up loving it. their optics! their colors! their movement! the way the visuals serve the lore and the story is extremely well done too, i felt like everything i was seeing was deliberate, relevant, and a treat for the audience instead of just "ooo visual noise look at how powerful our cgi rendering is" (which is how i felt about the "live action" Lion King prequel(????) ad they showed before). all the little cameos and repaints and everything in the background? mwah. GORGEOUS MUSIC TOO AAAA THE WAY THAT TFP'S MOTIF IS IN THERE AAAA

the visual effects and action, the way they USED their roboticness/transformation sequences/vehicle modes in fighting and moving and emoting, it was VERY GOOD. Orion grabs a Death Tracker and RIPS THEM INTO PIECES BY TRANSFORMING AROUND THEM AND FORCING THEIR FRAME TO SHATTER. insanity

this is ABSOLUTELY the origin story movie the fandom has wanted. even if it wasn't your preferred origin story, this movie SHONE with love and respect for the franchise and drew on so many influences to craft a powerful version of the beginning we all wanted to see

in some ways i wish we had more, i think it would've been extremely effective to see things expanded upon, especially D-16's emotional descent and maybe some more Quints. actually looking at the content and pacing of the movie though, and the audience it's aimed at, i don't think there's anything they should've cut in favor of other stuff. i understand why it wasn't dwelt on more, but hooooo i would've liked to see Dee breaking apart a little more thru the middle of the film. apparently the novelization has more scenes of this and i would love to read it

i had so much fun watching this movie. it was a rollercoaster. it was a TREAT. i was sitting there enjoying every second both times i saw it because it was a good film that rewarded me greatly for being a Transformers fan, giving me so many easter eggs and injokes, while also being perfectly understandable and fun for a complete newbie. excellently balanced appeal to old and new fans alike

there was no wink to the audience about how stupid and childish a movie about robots is, there was no lampshading of how silly sci fi is, there was no betrayal of the emotional tone of the film. so many stories now kneecap themselves by mocking their very concept, and the audience watching them, in a very cinema sins-style irony poisoned way. this movie never does that. its humor is fitting, its drama is real, its emotion is all SINCERE and i love how i was never mocked by any part of the movie for engaging with it sincerely

this movie loved being a Transformers movie

anyways. specific stuff:

love how Wheeljack managed to explode everything despite not even being a scientist. he's just THAT good

THE INJOKES AND REFERENCES. "you don't have the touch OR the power." calling them Gobots. the corny More Than Meets The Eye bits. "don't be a glitch" is a headcanon swear i've been using for years now and they canonized it!! "High Guard, eject". "paging doctor Ratchet." the new take on "all are one". the really interesting way that the term Transformers is an actual significant in-universe name, and how Orion and Dee ARE NOT Transformers at first!

the sheer number of cameos is ASTOUNDING. what an excellent mix of masc/fem designs too, they really made it normal on this Cybertron which i appreciate! apparently Blurr exists here, his name was on the leaderboard!!!!!! good job Chromia i am so proud of you for winning. and the shots of the bots getting cogs at the end was aaAAA!!! <<33 my HEART! Jazz's little smile looking at his new doorwings!!

I GOT ALL MY SILLY OLD DEMIGOD FAVES I GOT THE THIRTEEN EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM AAAAAA ALPHA TRION MY GRANDPA god i'm so sorry you're dead but i can't believe you showed up on the big screen <<333 you and your rockin rhino unicorn lion alt mode. and your superpowers. god you're so cool. "old timer" NUH UH HE'S STILL BETTER THAN YOU!!!!! using Zeta for the thirteenth was an interesting choice! i did think he was Overlord for a hot second. it's the lips. Solus wasn't fridged by virtue of everyone else died too yippee!! ALSO MEGATRONUS THE COOLEST ONE WOOOO HES NOT JUST A FIERY EVIL GUY!!!!

the way Dee himself was, in a way, the Fallen of this continuity.... 😭

the way Sentinel was handcrafting his downfall with each touch of the blowtorch. carving the sigil of the Decepticons into the one who will kill him. dooming Cybertron in a moment of petty mockery. AND HE DOESN'T EVEN DRAW IT WELL IT'S LIKE A MESSY CRAYON DRAWING CMON

planetformer Primus in a blockbuster movie? CANONICAL EXPLICITLY STATED PLANETARY ROBO MPREG BIRTH IN THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES???? THEY USE THE WORD BIRTH. BORN. we are never escaping the reproductive insanity in this franchise

Shockwave you whiny tantrum throwing wuss. let Elita beat him up more. it's good for him. also love how that could be construed as a ref to her G1 resistance force

CASUAL MIND READER SOUNDWAVE???????

Elita was perfect, no notes. i would not like her if i met her but i respect her so much. she really is better in every way and down to business. Best First indeed

so much cool implications and fascinating timeline confusion. 50 cycles since the Primes were slaughtered? the way Sentinel leveraged their reputation to make himself beloved, casting himself as their peer? the way he didn't choose to villainize them, the way he apparently openly admitted to the loss of the Matrix and how it impacted the planet? when did cog theft start, and how old is Orion since in the novelization it states his entire generation is cogless? who remembers the og Primes? who is in the know about it all?? hoooghhghhh fascinating.

the implication that the High Guard worked with the og Primes?? the possibility STARSCREAM was a loyal guard for Cybertron's DEMIGODS????

okay i was not expecting a backstory for STARSCREAM'S VOICE in this movie but holy. god. the shippers will be going insane over this one. hoogh holy fit. what is wrong with you. the utter contradiction of being both an instigator and a coward when he gets in over his head and immediately backpedals

also obviously this is the I Love Divorce movie and megop shippers will be having a field day but i DEEPLY appreciate just how solid a friendship Dee and Orion have and how badly they fall apart, even thru a strictly platonic lens. i also appreciate how there was no forced comphet attraction/romance!! i was dreading the possibility of it, i mean Oplita was RIGHT THERE but they didn't force it at all thank youuuuuu. i would rather have this dynamic with its zero intended romance than awkward, OOC attraction shoehorned in to detract from the plot

Bee was actually good! like yeah he's def the kid appeal character and i prefer it when he's in a younger gen and not OP's peer, but he was wayyyyy less annoying than i was expecting! i think he fit the movie and did his job in it well, and i absolutely laughed at him multiple times. "i get to work for the GOVERNMENT! :DDDD" bee. please. the fact that he's been going insane and desperate after isolation for so long really helps make his character work instead of being just irritating

Airachnid you are so cool. you are TOO COOL. PLEASE TONE DOWN YOUR COOLNESS. i adore how she is not good at facial expressions thank you evil autism moments. love how her signature move is stabbystabbystabbystabbystabbystabby

Sentinel. god. Sentinel. SENTINEL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i need to draw him getting ripped in half. it's like they distilled the worst parts of every single iteration and combined them into a SuperBad version. horrifically realistic kind of guy. i love to hate him. real Metro Man from Megamind energy. and megachurch pastor energy. the IRONY that Orion and Dee were probably actually helping him, that he was probably being genuine in the medbay when he said he loved what they did by racing, that he may have been honest when he said he was gonna have them fixed up in his own facilities and had them tour the mines! because them racing increased energon production by 150% and Sentinel needed that!!! he needed that for the Quintessons!!! i think he was being genuine when he first met Dee and Orion and then Darkwing ruined everything!!!

Darkwing is the curly straw of this continuity

the Quintessons were hoooooooooooooooo. whoooooooooogh. hoohhhhhhhhhhhh. the biomechanical. the shapes. the textures. eugh. icky. creepy. excellent. the way their ships looked like the Nemesis. the way they're STILL a looming threat. i wanted to see more of them but i get why the movie wasn't about them. i hope we see more in the future

the way Orion is the kind of guy who, in an attempt to be selfless, keeps making selfish or thoughtless decisions was SO INTERESTING. it set up the dynamic of his and Dee's friendship very well, with Orion always wanting the best for his buddy but ultimately overwriting or ignoring what Dee says!! the way Dee clings to the social contract of protocol for safety because that's all he knows and his ANGER when it's broken, even when it's Orion breaking it, because that's not SAFE it's an UNKNOWN it has CONSEQUENCES WHEN YOU DEVIATE. and then it's revealed that the social norms have been a lie the whole time and Sentinel has "broken protocol" more than ever and Dee has no safety left because it was always broken. Orion wanted to be more, he could feel there was more. Dee just wanted security

Dee spent so much of the movie complaining and arguing and it was very funny and good characterization but it was also a hint at how much bitterness was under there the whole time. so much of his complaints were threats of violence. he always had Orion's back and then when he learns the truth he abruptly. stops. do you notice he doesn't really have Orion's back after this? he's no longer by his side? he's there, but he's not... there. he was the first to shoot an enemy and took joy in it. all of his emotions were so justified and then what he does with them is what makes it a tragedy. he didn't have to do this. augh

i really, really like the fact that they managed to pull off the ending without it fully turning into a "boohoo if we do anything violent we're as bad as the bad guys waaaa". the specific phrasing of "rebuilding cannot start with an execution" went HARD. and it's demonstrated in their actions too like, Dee was out for REVENGE and it was PERSONAL, Orion was fighting for JUSTICE and it was UNIVERSAL. Sentinel was beaten, everyone knew the truth. it was over. but Dee in his (very justified!) anger and broken trust was too overcome to back down. they were given the power to change their worlds, but Dee was thinking only of his world. Orion was thinking of everyone

ironic that as soon as Orion starts thinking of other people and considering what they need instead of forging ahead, Dee decides to center his own feelings and actions to the point of murder. even after Sentinel was dead, he just kept shooting, he did NOT AT ALL care that some of those shots were clearly hurting innocent civilians/going wide and shooting out into the city/damaging actual important infrastructure and not just Sentinel statues. i believe it's Bee who said "he's gonna kill everyone" and he proves it by attacking Elita and saying "I won't stop until every last one of his followers is dead". THE FACT THAT HE FELL SO FAR AS TO SEE ELITA, HIS PEER AND FELLOW FREEDOM FIGHTER WHO WAS THERE WORKING AGAINST SENTINEL WITH HIM FROM THE START OF THIS QUEST, AS ONE OF SENTINEL'S FOLLOWERS.... by the end of it, Dee really was nothing but blind anger

and the way kneeling was a common thread!!!!! aaaaaaa. Sentinel betrayed the world by kneeling to the enemy. Dee won respect by refusing to kneel. Orion gained followers by willingly kneeling to his peers. hooghh

Orion jumping and stumbling and falling this whole movie because he just THROWS himself into things because he BELIEVES in things, he's the one to take leaps of faith, to take that step out into the unknown! and Dee refusing to save him as one final nail in the coffin, so clearly feeling like Orion jumping in front of the blast was yet ANOTHER way Orion is forcing his hand, corralling him into doing something he thinks is best but did not consult him on, finally FINALLY saying NO and leaning in to the tragedy!! and in the exact same way Sentinel handcrafted his enemy in Dee, Dee has now handcrafted his enemy in Orion!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA and now that Orion took that last leap of faith and fell, now is when he RISES. ONE SHALL FALL AND ONE SHALL RISE. god. it reminds me of Spiderverse, the way they use falling and rising

the way the tragedy is worse for how well everyone was working together.... for one shining moment, the miners and the High Guard, the rescue mission, it was going so well. they were doing it. they were winning. it didn't have to turn to slaughter. if there was to be an execution it should've been by trial, by the voice of the people, not Dee deciding for Cybertron as Sentinel decided what truth was. augh.

in an abruptly different note, the way they have characters move and fly is so cool. i love the jetpacks. i love how flight is not "flyer" exclusive. it's fascinating and i think really fitting for the general city of Iacon itself. all those towers going up and down

THE TRAINS!! THE MOVING ROADS!! HOW COOL IS THAT!! LOOK AT THAT WORLDBUILDING IM OBSESSED WITH THIS CYBERTRON HOOGH. this movie was VERY good at building a rich, functional world of detail and making it very alien in a way i want to chew on forever. the moving mountains and greebled energon mines. the living planet. the deer!!! ooghghh. PRIMUS LOOKS LIKE A STAR

i do like this Primus actually, yeah it was a deus ex machina but that's the POINT. Optimus himself is an act of god and his presence heralds miracles. Dee couldn't bring justice to Cybertron because justice is restoration. justice is healing what was hurt and doing right by the wronged. yes that often means consequences upon the perpetrator but that's NOT what Dee was doing, he wasn't even THINKING of anyone else!! would killing Sentinel get ppl out of the mines? would it restore their cogs? would it bring equality to a clearly oppressive society? like he LIVED this (cogless bots with limited options, the talk of tiers as if they are social castes you can be demoted from, lower city levels where ppl can be banished, etc) but it was Orion who ultimately addressed this. i'm sorry if it feels like insult to injury to rub his Primacy in your face, Megatron, but stealing a cog just like Sentinel and declaring the age of Primes over, when it was the age of Primes ending that made you cogless and oppressed in the first place, is only an extension of your trauma, anger, and violence, and is not solving the problem!

a cog stolen from him at birth! and then he steals it from Sentinel in symbolic revenge, stolen again, but even that wasn't Sentinel's, it was stolen too! the way he discards the cog from Onyx, willingly gifted to him, to continue the trend of desecrating the dead! man. MAN. the name he took, the cog he took, the symbol he took, all from his hero, the one he looked up to, the coolest Prime, and THEN DECLARED THE AGE OF PRIMES OVER

the gilded pompous showmanship of it all was so gross, the way Sentinel's face was everywhere, the way he had instant access to everyone in Iacon via announcements that took over the media. but this was clearly derived from the previous Primes!! we see their statues, we see their stately tower, and unless Sentinel had all that built in "mourning" (which is totally plausible imho) he was really just setting himself up as an inheritor of that hyperwealthy standard! we don't know anything about the rule of the og Primes beyond that they're favorably remembered and loved (possibly because of propaganda but i think it was also genuine) and that they may have been losing the Quint war (considering that info was from jerkwad supreme i find it suspect) but just by comparison to Sentinel i think they HAD to be better rulers. there weren't cogless bots forced to mine for 20 shifts in a row back then!!! Sentinel is stealing their aesthetic as if that gets him the same power and acclaim. he's trying to steal their legitimacy. he paints himself across the face of Iacon to hide the fact the planet itself went into a coma because of him. he has ALWAYS been rejected. i call him a megachurch pastor but really symbolically i could say he's a fallen angel, and his visual design really fits too

i'm coming back to the deus ex machina thing bc i know it may be considered weak in a plot construction sense but i want to engage with it as literal. like, there is a literal in-universe god in the machine. they know it. they worship it, at least a little bit. i would consider this story to be analogous to Prince of Egypt, in that the deific is a real and tangible character with impact on the plot, and not a meta excuse to save the day. Orion made his choice, and as a result Primus made HIS choice. it's not necessarily a happy ending but if even Megatron acknowledges that GOD mandated this guy to be a Prime and the planet itself responds by COMING BACK TO LIFE.... i keep thinking of it like a cityspeaker, how they're the ones who commune with Titans to know their needs and tell them what needs to be done. is a Prime just the cityspeaker of Cybertron, able to help it remain healthy and functional?

the divine right to rule is REAL on Cybertron. you can like it or not but you have to contend with that when discussing fair leadership, political accountability, and representation of the masses re: Cybertronian government and Primacy

god i'm still so obsessed with the Thirteen i need to see them better i need to look at them. i love them. insane. i really need to invest in a chewtoy

also i know it may be a throwaway line but i'm very curious why Primus had to transform and sacrifice himself to save the universe. Unicron, maybe???

also how did Alpha Trion narrate the archival stuff telling the fake story of how the Primes died and the Matrix was lost. did Sentinel get a deepfake of his voice?? is that part of how he made the transition to power?? AUGH THE DISRESPECT KEEPS COMPOUNDING

Alpha Trion. my blorbo. my old man. holding you so tight. like an ancient rescue dog. im gonna groom you and give you treats and buy the biggest plushest dog bed from costco for you

anyways

good movie, guys

[maniacwatchestheworld]

We Need To Talk About Danny's Power Level.

I was hesitant to make this post, but the more I think about it and the more I see... We really HAVE to discuss this. Generally speaking, I really don't want to be seen as someone who is trying to ruin people's fun within this fandom. I want to inform, and while I have issues with some of the very prevalent ideas in this fandom, I don't want to tell people what they should or should not be making! I want people to follow what they find fun to create! But this power level thing...? I think that it has some rather concerning implications to it that need to be examined and discussed! This is an actual, decently serious problem, and after considering it for a time, it occurs to me that I may be one of the few people in this community that recognizes this issue as an actual issue and has the authority to speak on it...

You NEED to stop making Danny so incredibly overpowered in the DPxDC space.

Now please don't misunderstand me. I understand the value of a good fun power fantasy and making Danny more powerful than God can be fun and cathartic if you have a negative history with the Christian faith. But this insistence on the Ghost Zone being The Most Important Thing Ever and Danny being The Most Powerful Entity Within It is actually actively warping how people interpret and think about DC canon as well as certain characters within its canon to the point of unrecognizability as well as robbing characters of what makes them interesting, the point of their stories, and their agency within it. But most importantly of all, all of this is just... Generally, genuinely dismissive and shitty towards most religions, cultures, beliefs, and faiths that people practice, ESPECIALLY the faiths of POC and other minorities. And this is specifically an issue that DC does not have and that people within this space are making an issue by refusing to let the Ghost Zone and Danny have some limitations.

So that you understand where I'm coming from, please understand that I'm a person of color (I'm half Filipino) and that I'm Buddhist (a religion that I decided to convert to and embrace after a lot of thought and soul-searching, even if I'm not very good at practicing it). It also needs to be stated that in the DC universe, all religions and faiths are true and real at the same time, and they all have more or less equal footing as any other faith or religion or mythology explored in this multiverse. Christian heaven and hell are real. Reincarnation is canonical to the DCU. The Greek Pantheon is real and they are just as real and powerful as the Norse Pantheon. (By the by, just to let you know, yes, people in the real life modern day do actually actively worship both of these pantheons today.) Different alien planets have different faiths, and there is precedent for them being real as well. (Hey! Fun fact! Kryptonians are polytheistic!) It does seem that some form of animism is real within the DCU (within concepts of The Red and The Green)! And there is even representation for indigenous African faiths and beliefs within this shared universe! One of the genuinely wonderful things about the DC universe is that all of these faiths are real, they're all valid, and they are all more or less on equal footing to one another! If all the religions and afterlives and gods of each pantheon went to war with one another, it would genuinely be difficult to know who would win, or who would even stand a chance of coming out of this conflict alive!

In fact, a lot of characters and storylines within the DC universe are actually DEPENDENT on all of these faiths existing and being equally valid at the same time. Do you know where Billy Batson gets his powers from? The phrase "SHAZAM," if you didn't know, is actually an acronym for the names of the gods and heroes that he derives his powers from. (Solomon, Heracles, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury.) And it's implied that each person with SHAZAM powers has different heroes and gods that they derive their power from! (Black Adam derives all of his powers from the Egyptian Pantheon. Mary Marvel derives all of her powers from female gods and heroic figures.) Many of Wonder Woman's stories involve her interacting with various different pantheons. Xanthe Zhou gets their powers from traditional Chinese folk ancestor-worshiping practices. Ragman is a Jewish character whose suit is a powerful Jewish artifact- a suit made out of the souls of sinners that was created to protect the Jewish community. Sun Wukong is an actual character in the DCU and he is JUST as overpowered and immortal ×500 as he should be! And there are like... At least 3 entirely different characters that either are iterations of, claim to be, or pull their powers/inspiration from Anansi! DC celebrates a lot of faiths and religions and are bringing in more beliefs and faiths into their universe all the time! TONS of characters derive their powers from their religions, faiths, and beliefs! And DC celebrates them all as being real and valid to all who practice them! ... And you want them all to be forced to be under the same umbrella and less important and powerful as Danny and the Ghost Zone...

Bringing up ideas of ghosts and afterlives are always going to be loaded subjects because they often inherently rub up against actual living people's practiced religions and beliefs. But a belief in ghosts and dimensions better suited for them is also a valid belief that real life people have. And there is precedent for these beliefs also being real within DC canon. But DC only manages to get away with crossing over as many faiths as it does by saying that they are all real, valid, and while you might see less of some pantheons and more of others, they all exist and are doing their own thing just like they do in real life, just off panel... Are you beginning to see what the problem is...?

In the DPxDC fandom's eagerness to incorporate Danny into the DC universe and to make him powerful enough to go toe to toe with the likes of Superman, it seems that most people immediately overcompensated and that no one has really thought to slow down, stop, and actually think about what they are implying. Because the most common headcanons that I have seen regarding the Ghost Zone and other afterlives and religions? It's that they are all parts of the Ghost Zone, but are all ultimately subordinate to it. And since Danny is the Most Powerful and Important Person in the Ghost Zone... This implies that all religions, faiths and beliefs are less important and are indeed subordinate to the Almighty Danny. That all deities and the people following them should just bow down to Danny's might. This is something that DC, in spite of all of its flaws, has managed to avoid. These religions are REAL religions! Actual faiths practiced by actual people! We are NOT talking about dead, irrelevant pantheons that no one alive worship anymore! We are talking about living, active faiths and religions, some of which colonizers have tried to eradicate from the world! Some of these faiths have been suppressed! Some of the people who practice these beliefs have faced genocide for them! And so saying that the Ghost Zone is bigger, better, and that Danny is more important than any single other faith and afterlife...? THAT'S A SHITTY THING TO DO! You are literally doing the shitty Christian missionary thing, but with a fictional afterlife that consists of fictional characters that you know are not actual religious beliefs! You're landing on the sandy polytheistic shores of the DCU and declaring that the Ghost Zone is actually vaster than every faith already in the DCU and that Danny is more powerful and has authority over your gods! That your beliefs and faith and religion should just take a backseat to the Danny power fantasy! That your real, lived religion is not more important nor should it be respected when Danny is in the room! Of course the Buddha should bow down to Danny! Of course the Jewish people should renounce their faith and worship Danny instead because he's better and more powerful than the Jewish God! Why should people pray to their ancestors when Danny ultimately gets to decide what happens to everyone's ancestors!? If they want good things to happen to their ancestors in the afterlife, they should pray to Danny instead! Not like any form of prayer works or matters in this universe anyway because Danny is Almighty! And he doesn't hear the prayers! By making all faiths subordinate to Danny within these stories, you are saying that anyone who practices these beliefs and faiths within these stories are not valid in their beliefs. The only belief that matters and is real in this universe is the Ghost Zone and whatever will appease Danny the most. And while the characters in these stories are not real, the religions, beliefs, and practices they engage in ARE. And so you are implying that real people's faiths and religions don't matter. You are just dismissing real faiths and beliefs as not something worth thinking about or respecting within your works! You are saying that this fictional American white teenage boy and his goopy green land is more important to you than just being respectful of real people's faiths, beliefs, and religions. That your power fantasy is more important than saying that a person is valid for holding on to their beliefs. That when it comes down to it, that you would rather people choose your Danny power fantasy over their religion being portrayed as important and valid. That is honestly insulting. And really alls that you've done is impose monotheism onto the DC universe. You're just enforcing monotheism on people with extra steps. But instead of it being the Christian God, you've put Danny in that position. THIS IS A SHITTY THING TO DO! THIS SHOULD NOT BE THE DEFAULT HEADCANON THAT PEOPLE HAVE IN THIS FANDOM! PLEASE STOP!

Please understand. I know that you didn't do this on purpose or mean to imply this intentionally. I know that you didn't realize that you were insulting and undermining actual faiths and religions by pushing these ideas on the fandom. If one or two people had these thoughts and headcanons and didn't think very much about what they are implying, this would not be a problem. But for this to be the default is VERY disconcerting! As a Buddhist, it does feel genuinely shitty and insulting to imply that Danny has authority over the Buddha and that he outranks and is more powerful than Sun Wukong. It's not fun to think that my beliefs matter to you less than continuing to play with your Danny power fantasy. That you don't think that the pursuit for enlightenment and inner peace is real or worthwhile. That you would find my pursuit of compassion over everything else to be silly, stupid, and laughable when stood next to Danny. I know that you don't mean it. I know that's not what you meant to imply. But it is what you imply by making every faith subordinate to the Ghost Zone. And as someone who has a faith that is so often seen as subordinate to others and just a silly little play fantasy that doesn't matter and isn't real, it's depressing and uncomfortable to see this community as a whole unknowingly echo these sentiments. People in real life don't think that my faith is valid. People don't believe me when I say that I'm Buddhist. And as someone who is Filipino on top of that, I can't help but to think about the utter tragedy of my ancestors being forced to convert to Christianity or die. To forget their beliefs, pretend they never mattered, and embrace Jesus. To be forced to believe that their indigenous beliefs didn't matter. And so many of those indigenous beliefs are now lost and forgotten to their living ancestors (including myself) for it because to the Christians, their belief in Jesus was ultimately more important to them than just letting the Filipino beliefs and religions peacefully exist as they were. It's uncomfortable to me that you would rather I just embrace this view of Danny and let him be more important than and be an authority over my religion. That I should just be comfortable in Danny being more important and better than every religion that people actually practice in real life. That I should just forget the insult to my and any other religion that you make by placing Danny as more important than, and to "just have fun." But I can't. And these ideas are everywhere in this fandom. Even in stories where it shouldn't matter or doesn't need to be present, it's there. This reminder that you don't take my faith seriously- these ideas that Danny is more important than my faith are ubiquitous to this community. An issue that wasn't present in either of the original source materials. Because they thought about it and so went out of their way to not imply it. But here, people are just not willing to make that courtesy for even a second.

But it doesn't have to be this way. You can do better! I know that you can do better. And it isn't even difficult to do! All that you need to do better is to simply... Just... Think about it. When you imply or say "all afterlives are part of the Ghost Zone" actually think about ALL afterlives! Christian and Atheist and Greek ones, yes. But also Asian and Native American and African and South American ones too! Is that kind of thought fair towards Native American faiths, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Palestinians, Hellenists, Animists, and every other person and group that practices a faith? Or does this have majorly fucked up implications towards some or all of these people? If the answer is yes, you can proceed, but you need to be mindful of that fact and just think about it, even if only a little. Even if it's just a small acknowledgement that you don't know what you're talking about or that you are choosing to ignore some of the fucked up implications you're making here for the sake of the story in the tags. I just want you to take a moment and think through the implications of what you are making, and to make a choice on whether you should proceed or reconsider things. If you choose to proceed with the fucked up implications, that's fine. It means that you can do so with other mindsets in mind and can possibly use these ideas in interesting ways! At least you made a stance to possibly be shitty towards some people for the sake of your fun. At least you made the choice to say that some people's beliefs just don't matter to your story. This is a neutral statement. Some works of art are just not made for some kinds of people. And that's fine. But it is always better to knowingly acknowledge and make that choice than to pretend that it isn't there. And if you didn't realize that's what you were doing? If you reconsider and choose to turn back on this idea? At least you made that choice and didn't just passively follow the rest of the crowd to get here. Hopefully, thinking about it will make you more mindful about your art in the future and therefore make it better! The only thing to do about it is to acknowledge that you weren't thinking about the implications, but that you changed your mind, and move forwards with your life.

Now just to be entirely clear, I'm not telling you that I want you to feel guilty about being inconsiderate towards other faiths. That doesn't really do anyone any good. I won't get any satisfaction from you feeling guilty about it or internally punishing yourself for it. Just actually give what you might be implying more thought in terms of religion next time and do better. It's alright to make mistakes. We are all just human and we all make mistakes. Sometimes we don't even realize when we've made a mistake. Just strive to do better next time, be more willing to let go of these ideas that you're so attached to, allow yourself to see things from another perspective, and move on. Sometimes, it's better to just leave things alone. Sometimes you shouldn't meddle and try to rework ideas that were perfectly good on their own to begin with. Sometimes nothing that you personally can add will be a positive contribution. Sometimes the only thing that interfering will do is over-complicate things and rob the idea of what made it so interesting and powerful in the first place. But it's okay to leave it alone. It's going to be okay. I'm not angry. Just disappointed and a little frustrated. But it's better if you are able to just drop these things and move forwards with mindfulness in the future.

As an alternative, I think that it would generally be better for the Ghost Zone to just be its own thing separate from the other afterlives. Equal to other afterlives and not all-encompassing of them. It can be connected or related to other afterlives, but being greater than them as a whole is just a very uncomfortable and cruel implication. You don't need the Ghost Zone to be the most important thing in the multiverse. And Danny does not need to be the most powerful thing in existence. Please. It's okay to have power fantasies. But the invincible overpowered stronger than all Gods Danny should not be the overwhelming norm here to the detriment of everything else. It's only when you let go of Danny NEEDING to be the MOST important thing in the multiverse can you start to really dive into some of the more interesting sides of characters on their own terms and not on yours! Like... Did you know that there is one ghost character in DC called The Spectre and that he's the literal personification of the wrath of God? Did you know that Xanthe Zhou as a spirit envoy is actually half dead and half alive? Did you know that The Wizard Shazam is actually, secretly an aboriginal god? Did you know that in the DC universe that Judas Iscariot still walks the Earth to this day, doing vigilante work to atone for his betrayal of Jesus? Did you know that Ra's Al Ghul's mom has met and hung out with some of the demons that Sun Wukong fought against in Journey to the West? Hell, did you know that Damian is Buddhist!? Imagine that. Danny coming in and telling Damian that he's more important and more powerful than Damian's entire religion. That the Buddha is just a lackey of his and that he rules over all afterlives, including nirvana and cycles of reincarnation. I'm certain that Damian would take that very well and accept it wholeheartedly! Don't you agree with me?!!?!???!

I personally think that all of this is better and more interesting if characters, their religions, and ideas in general are able to interact with Danny's world on their own terms without being forced to fit within Danny's box! You don't need to try to force everything within DC's universe to fit inside Danny's. DC wouldn't ask for Danny's universe to conform to theirs! They would just add everything that Danny's universe has to offer on top of everything else they already have! And trying to fit the entire DC multiverse within the scope of Danny's universe... It's too small a box for too large of a universe! Sometimes you can just let things not be deeply connected. And sometimes things don't need a complicated explanation and it can literally just be magic. There's nothing wrong with trying to tie everything together in a neat and succinct way. But sometimes you need to pull your view out a little and look at what you're doing and genuinely ask yourself if what you're doing actually adds depth, or if it does more harm than good and makes everything worse, make less sense, and more complicated or not. It's okay to fall down the rabbit hole sometimes. I completely understand that happening and do it all the time! Just remember to be mindful about it!

Either way, if you're going to insist on desperately clinging onto these ideas of Danny being the Most Important and Powerful Thing in the Multiverse to the detriment of literally everything else, that's fine. But just be honest with what you're doing and why. This isn't a Ghost King Danny AU. Kingdoms don't have unequivocal power over other and all kingdoms. It's a God Emperor over all Gods Danny AU. Nothing wrong with that concept in of itself. Just tag it properly as something like "God King Danny" so that I don't have to deal with it and the implications you're making about my religion with it. That would be enough! I would be happy with that! Just make your choice. Think about what you're doing, why you're doing it and choose. If you choose to keep going, that's fine! All the more power to you! Have fun! But be honest about what you're making. I may not like it and think that it's an overdone, overplayed idea at this point, but you're free to do it! So go forwards and make what will bring you joy! But now that you've thought about it a little, hopefully you'll continue with a little more knowledge and foresight. And hopefully that will make your work even more interesting and better for it! And if you decide to change course, I'm glad that I was able to sway you and get you to see things from my perspective and come to my side on this. At the very least, hopefully this will help to vary up ideas within the fandom a bit and you won't just take ideas that are happening in this space entirely for granted and as givens! I have so many ideas on interesting ways that these intersections can go and characters that you can use, and ways to look at this community that offer so so SO many interesting story directions! I'm so happy that you've decided to come with me on this journey! You're going to make something great, I'm certain of it! So let's make something wonderful together! I believe in you! There's a lot of fun to be had! ^.^

[fandomsfordays21]

My "Ink Sans" AU

So, I've had this idea for a while, but I'm sharing it now due to my mutuals @mrgrimreaper1 and @t3m1 encouraging me, and because they shared their own ocs. (Go check them out Sketch!Sans is pretty cool)

Basically, I was thinking a bit too hard about Ink's backstory, and I started feeling really bad about the others in his universe. This was especially true for his Papyrus, since he was the only other person in _____!tale that showed any form of emotions.

Then I got onto a train of thought about Ink's creator specifically. We know they dropped the idea of Ink's universe when drawing became a chore, leaving the sketches unfinished, but nothing else about them. I got to thinking, what if Ink's creator was to come back? What if they came back and finished I _____!tale after Ink was gone?

That brings us to Sketchtale, also known as the Completed Concept AU for those outside of the UTMV.

For the basics, Sketchtale is the universe that _____!tale was supposed to be, or at least a reworked version of it. The Creator, after a long while, rejoins the Undertale Fandom and decides to revisit their unfinished au from all that time ago. The name "Sketchtale" is meant to reference that it was left as a sketch for a long time.

Sketchtale is a universe based entirely off of art and multiple art forms, each area of the Underground being based off of certain mediums.

Ruins: Sculpture, carvings, engravings, mosaics.

Snowdin: Graphite and colored pencil, crayon, marker, charcoal.

Waterfall: Watercolors, paints of any variety, resin.

Hotland: Glassblowing, pottery, metalworking. (Art done with/using technology is also found here, but it's more common around the CORE and is not the main art medium.)

New Home/The castle: Knitting, sewing, crotchet, quilt and clothes making.

I'll make posts about individual characters later, but Monsters as a whole have some unique qualities that are important to know.

Monsters in Sketchtale have colored SOULs, with each monster having 1 or 2 unique colors. These colors are not Traits, like they are in Humans, and are instead types of Magic. Each color has specific abilities, with having more than one color being both rare and powerful. (Most bosses in the game have dual-colored SOULs.) A monster who has absorbed 7 Human SOULs gains a special, incredibly powerful SOUL type, called a Prism SOUL or God SOUL, that can use all colors at once.

A Monster's Magic will express its color(s) by binding to one or more specific utensils or mediums, which will be used in battle. (Imagine every Monster in Sketchtale as having their own Broomie, or having the specific paint magics.)

I'll have a separate post with diagrams and charts once I draw them, but I hope this post is clear enough to understand. This is just a very basic rundown of the AU, so if anyone has questions or wants specific details about Sketchtale, my askbox is open.

This is kind of a half-baked idea for now, so things are open to change and I will have to finish developing certain details and characters, but I'm willing to keep working if you guys like this idea. I have a lot of cool stuff planned for the Sans (Doodle) and Papyrus (Sketch) of this au and some angst ideas that I'm excited to share, so stay tuned!

[a-memory-a-distant-echo]

ok, i'm being so brave and making the rec post that i told anon i would do like three days ago.

the obligatory caveats. this is not comprehensive—i haven't read all the fic in this fandom, and i've barely looked at anything not in english. my reading habits are pretty broad—i'll read almost any pairing, and am generally willing to suspend my disbelief to do so. i am not usually an au person, though this fandom is doing its absolute damndest to prove me wrong on that point.

also i have…more…fics that i felt i should rec somewhere, so probably this is rec post one, but ten felt like enough and also saying things in public where people can hear me is, it turns out, absolutely excruciating. please no one be mean to me about this post, especially if you wrote one of these fics, because if you are i will simply fill my pockets with rocks and take to the sea, ok? ok.

excited to find out what i manage to do that ruins the formatting, links the wrong fics and/or people, or otherwise breaks things in this post. please tell me if i've fucked up, or if your fic is on this list and you would rather i keep your name out of my mouth, or whatever.

first, a very special mention to the mlc reference guide by @yletylyf. this is such an incredibly comprehensive and generous resource. you want a timeline for this show that does an incredibly poor job of maintaining its own timeline? it's here. you want episode summaries? they're here. you want all the people and places? they're here. if you're writing fic, you want this guide, because it's so much easier and faster than scanning episodes or subs files to figure out the name of one specific guy or whatever. it also means that at least occasionally you work on the thing rather than accidentally rewatching the same scene five times, or hypothetically watching two to four episodes without even really thinking about what you're doing. the reference guide is the unsung mvp of fandom.

beyond porch and portal, difanghua, teen, by willowdream. this is the vampire au that i didn't know i wanted? the author posted it and their note was like 'i'm trying to be the change i want to see in the world,' and i was like ok sure, i'm not really convinced that the change i need is vampire aus, but i'll give it a go, and then i did and was like, oh shit, i'm eating fucking glass about this vampire au, i'm chewing on my own fucking fingers, i'm so fucking normal about this, i need another hundred thousand words of this and also seventeen more vampire aus in my inbox by monday morning. i literally finished reading it and scrolled right back to the top to read it again. i have no idea why this fic hits so hard, but it took me out at the knees. the voices are perfect. something about it is just impossibly compelling.

不安的遠離，再无歸期 | restless distance, without return, fang duobing/qiao wanmian, mature and teen, by @difeisheng. this is technically two fics but they're short and you should read both of them because they're such a brutal, perfect encapsulation of grief, and a really beautiful acknowledgement of the ways that fang duobing and qiao wanmian can be read as reflections of each other, separated by a decade, and it just fucking guts me. i dunno. it's about the grief! it's about the yearning! it's about someone who understands parts of you that you wish didn't exist! i think i've reread this like once a week for the last six weeks and i feel like it gets overlooked because it's not A Ship but like. it could be. it should be.

dance the silence down, fanghua and feihua, explicit, by @momosandlemonsoda. this fic. ugh. ok. i'm breaking my own rules. i had two when i started writing this post: no works in progress, and no reccing things that i haven't left a comment on, like a goddamn grownup. this one fic is breaking both of those rules and i feel bad about it and will hopefully spend like, all day tomorrow just commenting on every chapter or something, but i have to do this. this fic is so good. this fic ruins me. this fic is 63k, still a work in progress, and also if i were losing the whole internet tomorrow and i got to keep one fic in all the world and it was the only fic i could have for the rest of time, it might have to be this one, even as a work in progress. i ignored this fic for so long—by which i mean probably two of the four months since i first watched mysterious lotus casebook—because i was like, i don't like aus, and i especially don't like rock star aus. (or sex work aus, and you're never gonna fucking believe what else this author is writing and what else i absolutely cannot get enough of—this is a sneaky bonus rec for all i wanna do is wrong, another fic that i feel so so so normal about!) but then i was like okkkkkkk but. maybe i'll try it. people seem to be nuts for it. and then i read it and i was like OH HOLY SHIT PEOPLE ARE FULLY CORRECT TO BE ABSOLUTELY UNHINGED ABOUT THIS and normally, honestly, i wouldn't bother posting a rec like this because it's like 'oh haha have you read the five most popular fics in this fandom?' and it feels so redundant, but i know for a fact that a friend of mine who finished watching the show yesterday is reading this post, and even if everyone else has read it, she has not! anyhow as a former music person and a former diner cook, this fic like. i don't know. i feel like it broke me but also fixed me? i literally criticise writing professionally and every time i try to talk about this fic i find myself speechless because it's so perfect to me. i am deeply unwell about this fic. every time a new chapter comes out i sit down and read the whole thing again, yes, all sixty-thousand-plus words of it. some nights you go to bed and you're like 'what's the fucking point?' and then you're like 'no wait, there will eventually be more of dance the silence down,' and somehow that makes things suck a tiny bit less. my wife has made me take out like six sentences from this rec because they're too intense and too weird about it but i need you to understand: you have to read this fic.

in this dream, there is a lover to share this life with, fanghua, g, by @lianhuajing. alternative ending for the end of episode 27, in which li lianhua—precious man who has yet to discover a hill he's not willing to die on—apologises to fang duobing the only way he knows how, and it's wildly upsetting for everyone (but it's ok and it doesn't end miserably, no one panic). this is a delightfully angsty treat, and i love how conflicted fang duobing is in it—i feel like it's not something that i've seen explored a lot, but this poor boy really fuckin goes through it—his best friend and his childhood idol are the same person but are lying to him about it, and his dad's not actually his father and has been lying to him about it, and his best friend/childhood idol may have killed his father, and—yeah, is lying to him about it. like? someone give this poor man a hug and a cup of tea and a snack and a blankie. i love that we get to see some of his internal conflict in this.

quintessence of dust, feihua, teen, by justthereforit. this plays with one of my very most favourite tropes in the world, which is the one where the heart is a physical object and a physical form of trust and control and surrender and—like. this is so good. it's set in episode 13, which is, for me, one of the absolute peak angst points, and it absolutely nails it. di feisheng who's upset and vulnerable and frustrated and angry, li lianhua who knows he's going to die and can't bear the thought that he's going to take anyone else down with him, and they're both just so fucked up. chef kiss. i love it when everyone is emotionally wrecked and continually like 'ok no, i can take one more knife in my soul to protect someone else', and this absolutely delivers on that.

under moonlight, we change our futures yet again, feihua, explicit, by @thesilversun. the wedding room! obviously we have to have a wedding room fic, right? i'm not going to lie: i'm willing to suspend a lot of disbelief for wedding room fics, but in this one, it's actually a wonderfully, horrifyingly plausible setup. it walks a really fine line of keeping people in character, and acknowledging the inherent horror and seriousness of the situation, and also providing some desperately hot sex, and also managing to get the emotional beats of it, too. it has a sequel, which imo really has to be read as the conclusion to this fic, and it's just as good. it's possible that some of what i'm saying here is 'i love vulnerable-inside crusty-outside di feisheng' but like. i do. i love it so much.

what's sealed away, feihua, teen, by @bbcphile. AMNESIA FIC yessssss, a-fei my beloved, fics that handle brain damage/memory issues/amnesia well my beloveddddd. i love the a-fei arc, but i also have had a number of brain injuries and some other stuff that means that my own memory is…not so great, so i sometimes really struggle with how often amnesia in fiction is played off either as nothing to worry about or as a funny thing where everyone's in on the joke except the person who has amnesia. this fic is a great and sometimes very visceral exploration of a horrifying experience, and a really fantastic study of a-fei/di feisheng as a character, as well as the relationship that he has with li lianhua. a-fei trying to balance the trust he has in the sense memory of his body with his understanding of his relationship with li lianhua with li lianhua's reaction to—everything, really—is really well done and wonderful/terrible to read.

我只愿面朝大海 | i wish only to face the sea, g, by foreverstudent. ok so you wanna fuck yourself up some more? go read this. this is canon divergence from episode 39, and fang duobing has learned too well the lessons he's been taught, and sees the shape of things before li lianhua ever touches the wangchuan flower—so he sets about making sure that he won't be able to throw it away. this is agonising and gorgeous and maintains the canon relationships while developing the narrative differently. i wept literal tears. i was like 'ok that's it the worst part is over!' and then i remembered that there was another part coming and then i started crying. anyhow, it is—as ever, with me—about the devotion.

我住長江頭, 君住長江尾 -- i live upstream, you live downstream, fanghua, teen, by @rimbaudofficial. ok so this is Not a fic that i should like, because i am a massive academic failure and despite being in my forties have regular nightmares about having to re-engage with academia for like. any reason. HOWEVER. as noted, i read indiscriminately, even when i'm like 'reading this is a terrible idea and will be upsetting for me personally!', so i was like 'well, how bad of an idea can it possibly be?' and then instead! it was. incredibly charming? it was so fucking cute? the fang duobing characterisation in this is somehow just perfect to me—he's simultaneously confident and vulnerable, and also just so deeply committed to the weird clueless guy who he's decided is meant for him. di feisheng and li lianhua have a perfect weird-bros friendship. i would read another ten chapters of this and i would love it.

[talenlee]

Hanamusa, Explained

There is a nonzero chance if you follow me on tumblr, you’ve seen the term ‘Hanamusa’ attached to something I shared. It’s probably also some super cute art of Delia Ketchum and Jessie Teamrocket, and you may wonder what is going on and also, why is there so much good art of this.

Hanamusa as a term derives from the Japanese names of the characters – Hanako and Musashi. If you’re into shipping name structures, Hana-Musa implies that Hanako is the seme and Musashi the uke, but I don’t think that holds for all use cases of the type of terminology. It’s a ship. It’s an AU ship, as in an ‘alternate universe’ ship, where the two characters are presented in a context outside of the normal context of the anime presentation of them.

The Hanamusa ship as I understand it is set at some point after Jessie and James stop chasing Ash around, and Jessie settles down into a relationship with Delia. There’s tension about her history with Ash and the confusion about finding Your Personal Villain dating your mom, but mostly it’s about showing a sweet domestic life between two characters you know very well in a format I kind of see as like, Comedy-Sabot Romantic 4koma. Like, Hanamusa content is funny (and it is VERY funny) but it doesn’t need to be funny, because the main thing it’s about is showing these two characters and their relationship as they do cute things together.

It’s why people watch shows like K-On basically.

As for where this idea comes from, (EDIT: Slightly wonky wording here, I should have phrased 'this current fandom push' - I don't have any reason to believe Mai INVENTED the ship, just that when you go looking you'll wind up at her work) it seems to have its genesis with the work of one Kiana Mai, who developed this ship some time ago. Kiana Mai is also an extremely skilled artist, and one of those skills seems to be focus, creating these extremely clean-line excellently structured scene vignettes with no unnecessary content in them but also no need to rocket along. It’s amazing, engaging work that uses every part of the small format amazingly well. Which makes sense because one of the things Kiana Mai does is storyboarding work for Disney animated TV shows, a task at which I am sure she no doubt excels.

What I think is the most interesting aspect of Hanamusa, to me specifically, is that it manages to combine three things I don’t actually care about, in a way that doesn’t interfere with something I have unexpectedly strong opinions on. I do not watch Pokemon, and I have not shed a tear for Team Rocket and Ash Ketchum wandering into the sunset. That is a show that is not for or about my interests and that is okay. Indeed, imagining that it should be about what interests me is baffling. I think if I stopped watching a show twenty years ago, I have lost all right to act like I’m entitled to expect it remain the way it was all the way back then.

But I do have opinions on Jessie and James’ character voice. Not their voice acting – I mean, I know for a fact they’ve had to change over time and no voice actor should be obligated to kick it in the same role for what could be their entire career. I mean the way they talk about things and the words they use and kind of emphasis they put on words when they talk. About the way they voice their ideas, or the way they express who they are in the way they talk to one another, that stuff. It’s about affordances and persona, about the kind of people you project being by what words you choose to use and the affect when using them.

It’s why when, if a picture of a character is underneath it, you can read some dril posts as being ‘appropriately’ voiced by a character, even if it’s describing a candle situation that Francis Crozier did not have opinions on.

Jessie has a voice.

Jessie, in my head, is someone capable of moments of tenderness and friendship that is normally overwhelmed by an incredible confidence in ability she does not have and mere reality will never be given permission to infringe on it. Jessie is unassailably unstoppably sure of herself, thoughtlessly stupid in a way that doesn’t mean she is stupid, but which exists in a context of someone who has relentlessly pursued excellence in her job which is also the equivalent of being a late night 7/11 manager. She is the Girlboss that is Gaslighting herself into thinking she has something to Gatekeep.

Delia Ketchum by comparison is a very nice piece of wallpaper. Every appearance of her in my mind is someone Very Nice who is Very Patient and Very Supportive and has managed to keep literally all emotionally challenging conversations from happening around Ash, which can be perhaps easier when you remember that he, too, is an idiot. I don’t know how Delia Ketchum talks, but I do know that there are ways that Delia Ketchum does not talk.

This is interesting! It’s interesting because it presents a character where I am very sure I know what she does do when she does it, and a character about whom I can only be sure wouldn’t do some things. It creates a character space, and it creates expectations of affect and performance within that space. Ash and other characters show up as well, but because they get to interact with this already-defined space, you get treated to this really lovely kind of resonance. Would Ash call Jessie ‘dad’? Maybe, to bug her. He was good at being a twerp. Wasn’t he? I mean I remember it that way, he seems to work out that way, but… how would I know?

I know more of this AU where Jessie is studying to be a Pokemon Doctor and Ash wears glasses than I do of the source material any more. And if you’re wondering ‘hey, do Jessie and Delia ever meet in the source material?’ Like, yeah, for a few seconds. What, the point is creating something new.

If you want to check out Hanamusa stuff and read the comics, I recommend going and clicking on the hashtag on tumblr.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Anime #Media

[kyouka-supremacy]

What are your favourite akuatsu fics?

If you're looking for recommendations, please try checking out my fic recs tag! The bsd fic tag is where I reblog all the fics I want to reread later, so I think that's a good starting point as well (although please note that my queue is still stuck on April 2023, so it'll take a while for fics that I've read after that date to be reblogged).

If I had to name my favourite fics... I haven't been reading a lot of fics recently, and it always makes me uneasy to put down a list because I definitely am going to forget some that I adore and it feels unfair, but on the very top of my mind (and also with the disclaimer of these being like, personal favourites. Not necessarily recommendations, just some fics that I love reading to no end)

↳ fermata by ayanuz (zigur)

Friends to lovers sskk mean so much to me

↳ Chapter 2: While the Other is "Asleep" from my pretty baby holds me down by ChaSeuBao

Without exaggeration, I know this fic by heart at this point. I just have such a soft spot for it, I've read it very early when I got into the fandom, and it's such a young and carefree portrayal of sskk, it tastes so sweet. I feel like it shaped a lot of how I see sskk.

↳ someone to share the silence by UnicornFlowers

Don't we all need Akutagawa breaking down from time to time

↳ midnight, somewhere by hybridsunshine

I love sskk being sskk. When their relationship is so personal and unique and specific to them that you can't put labels on it.

↳ split lips, soft teeth by wildsuns

An incredible fic, honestly. Rewinds my brain every time.

↳ I love you by averagecerealenjoyer

I love this one so much it's only 822 words so it's the perfect fic to read right before going to sleep when you're too tired to do anything else. I've read this one countless times.

↳ i’m safe! i’m whole! i've got it under control! and pretty much everything else by lizandre

Their works are like a sskk bible to me. Unbealivably good prose and spectacular characterization. Truth to be told I can never read their works too often because they will send me into an exhistential crisis / will not be able to think about anything else for the rest of the day.

↳ For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep by hannieuphoria

That awkward moment you're so blown away by a fic you end up surpassing the comments words limit. I have a thing for sskk finding the strength to be soft with each other.

[lavendertales]

A bit of a longer post about fandom & fandom etiquette as we are at the end of 2024:

When I say a fandom has become toxic, it doesn't just mean my personal experience. It is a mixture of situations, whether witnessed first hand or not, that contribute to said toxicity.

I have always been a firm believer that anyone can read whatever they want, and they can write whatever they want. Just because I personally don't like it, it doesn't mean I'm saying something should be wiped off the face of the earth. Having an opinion on something or being critical of something does not mean I am attacking said something or someone. Seems that in this fandom, as with many others, I assume, this needs to be reiterated once in a while.

I personally don't enjoy dark fics/books. I find that life is already dark enough, so I look for positive stories. And because I do not like it, I do not engage with it. Sometimes I block content or someone because of that, but it is not an attack on said person. It is a personal choice. Yes, I think several Joel Miller fics are very weird and borderline disturbing, but again, that is my personal preference and opinion. I know people write for different reasons, and they are all valid, always. However, just because I may not understand it or like it, does not mean it's necessarily wrong.

So I do not engage with that type of content. I may see something and skim through it out of curiosity, but that's about it. However, I don't find that saying on my personal blog that I dislike certain things should lead to blasting me, calling me names, saying I want attention. I would've liked proper engagement on fics, yes, I am not above denying that, but I've come to accept things as they are. I think my ideas aren't compatible with what seema to be popular nowadays, so I've stopped. There are many people who are afraid to speak up on their dislike and fear of dark fics specifically because they'll get laughed at or put on blast.

I have seen many writers bullied on this platform - for whatever reasons. I have seen them bullied so badly to the point where they expressed suicidal thoughts & people further laughed at them, calling them a victim. I've seen them deactivate or delete all of their works. This is not fucking okay. Expressing an opinion should not lead to bullying.

The Pedro fandom has been in a steadfast decline since 2021 frankly. Bullying others, stalking Pedro himself and his family, oversexualizing him time and time again, silencing others when we disagree with their opinion... incredibly, incredibly toxic. There is very little kindness these days, and I just wish we'd reflect on our behavior sometimes and try to understand others.

[ingo-ingoing-ingone]

A Personal Post

Hi guys, I'm finally making the post I kept telling myself and my best friends I'd make but wanted to put it off until I felt better. That hasn't happened and with how things are going I thought it was best to just post it now.

So for a while, since probably late 2023, I've felt less like my blog is for me, and more like it's some kind of fandom archive. Which, if you use it this way as-is, great! I'm glad my blog could make you happy like that! But that's not what I set out for it to be.

I'm the sort of neurodivergent person who likes to categorize things, including my interests. All my tumblr blogs are specific to one thing, and this one was no exception.

I began tagging things soon after I made the blog because I saw a lot of people were sad about the twins, and I thought "well since I love both sad and happy stuff, and I'm really good about categorizing things, maybe I can try and help!" And according to many, it did help!

But I think that also gave off the impression that I was making this blog for other folks, and that isn't the case. I'm sorry I never clarified. It's not an archive; I do not reblog shipping posts, posts from people I've blocked, AUs I don't click with, and sometimes just not everything I see.

I've gotten popular in the fandom, and for the most part I do, from the bottom of my heart, enjoy it. I have people who care about my hyperfixation! That's amazing! I have people who love my cosplay and want to meet up with me. I've made so many friends of all shapes and sizes and it's probably the most incredible thing I've ever experienced, truth be told.

But yeah my blog being mine has gotten away from me a bit, I think.

I want to keep tagging my submas tags, that isn't going to change. I will tag triggers when asked, unless it's kind of impossible due to the blog's subject (trains, for instance) or a name or really common word (like the word 'head' or something). Other than that please reach out and I'll do my best to remember. But other tags? Those will be up to me. I don't want to tag when OCs show up. I love OCs and like seeing them, and don't want to have to remember that one person who visits my blog doesn't.

I had anon off for a while because honestly ever since making this blog, there have been anons who really made me unhappy. (Also yes, non-anons but that's been fewer and far between). I've gotten misinformation, accusations, horrible and disgusting explicit asks, and criticisms and complaints, and I'm just... Not here for that. Keep the explicit things and misinfo out of my inbox, I am no arbiter of morality or personal decisions, and I am not here for you to share your negative opinions of submas or the fandom.

Anon is on for people who are too self conscious to chat face to face, for people to send fun headcanon ideas (remember when people did that back in 2022 when this blog started? I miss that, it was sweet and wholesome), to share song recommendations... That kind of stuff. If you have an actual problem, please, PLEASE talk to me off anon, whether that be DMs or a non-anon ask that I can answer privately. Especially if we're friends; please, please just talk to me about stuff. I don't bite! I swear!

But yeah the bottom line is I'm here to participate in fun (and sometimes heartbreaking!) fandom stuff. I'm here for FUN, not as my job. I know that we're all a bunch of neurodivergent folks and sometimes interactions can be a swing and a miss, but please try to be mindful. Please treat me like a person and not just like a museum curator for this blog.

Truth is, I haven't been okay for a while now. It's gotten worse this year for sure, and due to life stuff I cannot see things feeling better for me for some time. I need to go day by day for a lot of things, and I am trying to get better about needing to set boundaries and all that sort of thing. I suffer from intense paranoia too, and having so many eyes on me is genuinely terrifying at times. I'm trying to manage that as best I can, but I do ask that folks be kind.

NO I am not going anywhere, my blog is staying and will continue on as normal, but I really, really needed to get this posted.

Please continue to interact with me and chat and everything like that! But also please remember to treat this space, my blog, as my space. Thanks for reading!

[linkspooky]

Hey, since you said it was fine to send asks, and it will take me a while to comment the recent chapters, I'm taking this as my chance to proclaim my love for Li. Like go off lil' one, act as an abused child lashing out instead of the miniature saint your sibling described.

Jokes aside, I guess she's based on the popular fanon interpretation of Azula as a 'psychopath'? After seeing your post about Lio, I'm really curious about what went in her creation, and can't wait to see how she is in present day and how she will interact with Azula and the Gang. If she's still alive. Especially because I don't really take Azula's visions as gospel truth, but neither Lio's tales so I really want to see if the real Li swings more on one side or the other or if both versions are true at the same time.

Kudos for making such interesting OCs and intricate plots!

Thank you so much for the ask! Your comments gives me so much motivation to write.

I'm glad you like Li, here's some concept art from @oakyvii of the siblings Li and Lio. You are one hundred percent correct that Li is just fandom Azula.

Specifically the tendency of people to try to armchair diagnose Azula with some form of aspd or sociopathy in order to invalidate the abuse she faced as a child and how it played a role in shaping who she is. The popular "Azula sets turtleducks on fire" headcanon that's not substantiated in the show whatsoever.

The way that these bad faith interpretations want to use Azula's mental illness as a sign of some sort of internal wrongness in her. Proof she was always bad from the beginning, because as a child she was a little bit off-putting and demonstrated low empathy.

One of my biggest objectives with this blog is deconstructing "Good Victim / Bad Victim." I believe the origin is a lot of those armchair diagnosis of Azula is that people want to downplay Azula's victimhood in comparison to Zuko's. Instead of making Azula and Zuko both victims who react differently to the same abuse because they are different people, and there's no right way to react to the abuse Azula was just a psychopath all along. People want to make Azula into a mini-ozai who was like that from the beginning.

It sort of runs contrary to the whole idea of Zuko's redemption arc, because instead of Zuko having to work hard to be a better person every day of his life. To make this narrative that Zuko was innately good all along, just misguided and Azula was a sociopath who lit turlteducks on fire at the age of eight. Zu

Good and Bad Victim is bad because it assigns moral values for how people react to trauma, and usually the people who are assigning that value are people who've never been under the same trauma. Therefore it creates this expectation that people have to endure pain with saintlike in patience. If you're a victim the moral thing to do is to shut up and take it, and definitely do not make a fuss for any one else. Good victims can only express their victimhood is socially acceptable and easy to understand waysTM otherwise they're not worthy of human empathy.

This rant is pertinent to Zuko and Azula, because while Zuko does sometimes react to his trauma in ugly and violent ways he's still pretty easy for the audience to empathize with. In the first season he's incredibly incompetent at being evil. Even in season one when he's a straight up antagonist he's part of a charming comedy duo with Uncle Iroh. Zuko can be angry and violent and treat his Uncle and crew poorly, but he never like kicks puppies onscreen or anything. He's marked as the brooding, byronic character, but he's no Heathcliff. He's not even really Spike or Sasuke, he doesn't hurt a beloved character. He never does permanent irreversible harm to a named character. Even Catra from SPOP helps kills Glimmer's mom.

Compare to Azula who in her second episode burns the net underneath Ty Lee tight rope for daring to say no. Ty Lee is someone who both the audience considers a friend and the audience likes, so Azula's treatment of her is incredibly hard to swallow.

Even if you look at the way Zuko is when he's young, in Zuko alone he's made out to be a classic underdog, a soft, put-upon young boy who's desperate to impress his father. Whereas in the same episode people diagnose Azula as a born sociopath because she at eight years old, is already acting like daddy's little child soldier. Nevermind that Zuko, Azula and Ursa all laugh at the burning of Ba Sing Se together. It's easy to empathize with Zuko being a sad, underdog who wants his father's love. It's a bit harder to wrap your head around Azula's disturbing unchildlike behavior even if she's a product of her environment too.

That's actually what I liked about Toya's character in MHA. That Toya is the bad victim of the Todoroki family. That he's incredibly unlikable. He's not a big brother who secretly cares about his younger siblings all along. He's a selfish monster that demands his father's love and will do anything to get it. He was considered the problem maker in his house as a kid, he made a fuss and made things worse even though everyone was telling him to shut up. He yelled at his mother and didn't sympathize with her as much as Shoto did. He was in too much pain to notice everyone else in the house was suffering too.

(That's actually what I like about the Zuko and Azula sibling dynamic too, that Zuko isn't a magically forgiving big brother, that he holds a grudge about Ozai and Azula's treatment, that it's messy on his end even post character development).

This is why I introduced Li into the story, to make a character out of "Fandom Azula" or the way people want to characterize Azula as a sociopath so they don't have to acknowledge her victimhood.

There's one more character Li is based off of, or two more characters really. You could say that Li is based off of fandom Katara. That the fandom has a tendency to simplify women into either wholesome or toxic, nurturing figures or poisonous women. Li is partially based off of that heartbreaking line where Sokka says (I'm paraphrasing) "I can't even remember what my mom's face looks like, I just remember Katara."

Or rather, my idea for Li came from the concept of what if someone was forced into the role of playing mother to take care of the emotional needs of someone else and they got sick of it. What if the emotional labor of having to care for your brother, when you're still a child yourself exhausted you, took everything from you until there was nothing left. Like the darkest possible interpretation for Katara having to step up and parent her brother when their mother died and Bato left for the war.

The reason why Lio is so overprotective and emotinoally dependent on Li, is that Li is practically the one who raised Lio in the place of their missing mother. Li is a parentified child, and all of her problems stem from being a first born daughter expected to be a mother to a brother who's only two years younger than her. Li is also much worse off than Lio since she's illegitimate in court, but she's always had to suppress her own feelings and push her feelings aside in order to take care of her brother's feelings first.

Lio and Li's relationship is a direct mirror for Zuko and Azula's. Both Zuko and Lio don't see their sisters as people. Zuko swings wildly between demonizing his sister as the bad one because she's always had Ozai's favor and he sees Azula as an extension of Ozai's abuse and also putting her on a pedestal for her talent and envying her for it. Whereas Lio pedestalizes their sister as well, by making her out to be a perfect saint. Lio seems to love their sister more, but neither of them seem to see their sisters as fully realized human beings separate from themselves. Lio doesn't even mention Li's name when they're ranting at Zuko, they just call Li "my sister" because that's all they see Li as. An extension of themself.

Li is based off of one more character and that's Tsumiki Fushiguro from Jujutsu Kaisen. If you haven't read Tsumiki is the big sister of one of the main characters. Despite protecting her being Megumi Fushiguro's main motivation, she literally never appears onscreen once, she only ever appears in her brother's flashbacks, and then is brutally butchered by the main villain and fridged for Megumi's character development.

I thought Tsumiki was a missed opportunity because we never got to learn who she was. Megumi put her on such a massive pedestal as his ideal of what a good person was, the person he lived to protect, but in the end she was just a sleeping beauty figure. It didn't matter who she was as a person to Megumi, she just needed to lay there in bed and be helpless so Megumi could continue to play fairytale knight.

I thought about what kind of effect would having your own brother put you on such a big pedestal have on you? What would Tsumiki think about her brother objectifying her? About her brother making the entire reason for his existence protecting her, but not really caring about who she is as a person?

So I decided it would be interesting if Tsumiki wasn't actually that good of a person at all. She never was, that was just Megumi's projection of her. What if he jsut wanted to make her into some like Madonna-like figure, or some pure princess in need of protecting? What if Tsumiki strangled cats when no one was looking? How lonely would it be for Tsumiki if she knew her brother loved her very deeply but the person he loved, wasn't her?

That's basically where the original concept of Li came from. That eventually morphed into making Li into Fandom Azula. She sets turtleducks on fire and strangles cats when nobody's looking. Not only is she a joke about fandom Azula, but she also in story foils Azula by being the monster that everyone thinks Azula is.

Azula tries so hard to deny her own humanity, but Li is just that way naturally. Azula can't go all the way into making herself a weapon, because she isn't Li. She's torn up and broken on the inside because she does feel guilt and know on some level she was wrong. She probably wouldn't have had her mental breakdown if she wasn't capable of feeling guilt like she is. Ursa in confronting Azula in the mirror also points out Azula knows that the way she treated Mai and Ty Lee by trying to control them with fear was wrong, Azula just wont' admit it.

Other people see Azula as Li. Azula tries to be cold and unfeeling like Li, but when faced with the real deal she finds Li to be incredibly disturbing. o the point where eight year old Azula, who was a little bully and good at getting her friends and her brother to do anything she wanted doesn't know what to do with Li. Li's just too offputting to her once she reveals her true nature, she's an unfeeling, dead, thing and Azula doesn't want to be like that.

So yes, Li is fandom Azula. She's just genuinely a sociopath. Now the challenge is to make you guys like her even if she's just a flat sociopath, and I hope I succeed!

[tookishcombeferre]

I've been seeing a lot of talk about underappreciated characters in fandom lately (specifically my beloveds Tilly and Cordelia - lord I love them.)

So, I'm also going to jump in with another character who is so WOEFULLY under discussed.

Can we talk about Winifred for a moment please?

Like, unironically, I love her? She is trying her best with arguably the worst hand a parent can be dealt?

First, in the prim and proper Enchancian society, where does she fit as the wife of the most "perfect" Royal Sorcerer? He's out there being the face of the country and she has these two incredibly mischievous and incredible children to look after both of which are stuck in Dad's shadow to various degrees.

How present was Goodwyn? I'm willing to bet not very.

His favorite things are his trophies and awards. He has a whole collection of artifacts from the things he has defeated and destroyed. He was likely some kind of battle mage specialization. Goodwyn is Great ... Winifred is WISE.

My reasoning for why we don't see past Winifred in The Looking Back Glass episode is because she was standing with Eliza (the name I have given Grandmum because she deserves a name - darnit.) Winifred doesn't stand with Goodwyn. She can't. She's not one to have all eyes on her. She blends into the crowd with her friend so she can see her daughter without the pressure of having to hide whatever emotions come naturally to her. She is not stone. She is not performative. Her heart is too big, and she doesn't want to be judged for whatever reaction she has. (Favorable reading here of Winifred, but I think it suits the sort of "heart on her sleeve" way she lives her life throughout the series.)

Regardless, the day of The Incident took both Winifred's children from her.

Cordelia closed herself off. She became bitter and distant. I think Goodwyn might have even encouraged Cordelia to close off her emotions because it would have made her a better warrior or useful to Enchania in other efforts. Winifred, however, having been around Cordelia knows that isn't who Cordelia *is.*

The Cordelia Winifred remembers is the one who loved her brother. Who loved mischief. And, to lose that? My lord, what emptiness!

(My personal headcanon is that Cordelia chose to take up a position as an Enchancian spy because Goodwyn wasn't ready to retire yet when she finished school, but she wanted a job in a field he would approve of. By the time Goodwyn was ready to retire, she liked her spy work too much to apply for the Royal Sorcerer position so she just didn't. But, she became just ruthless in her conjurations because it's what she was taught to become.)

Then, Winifred saw what happened to her son. She had to be split right down the middle. My headcanon for how Winifred got the title of Wise is that she took some minors in Prophesy and Divination at Hexley. So, while she could never get to the heart of what actually happened on the day of The Incident, she knew whatever happened wasn't Cedric's fault. She couldn't explain how she knew, but she knew. And, still, even if it wasn't, she couldn't understand how her husband, and the whole world looked at a tiny child, no matter how big the mistake, and decided to judge his entire life by it.

To Winifred, because in her WISDOM, she was able to keep some form of objectivity it seemed as though Cordelia would be alright because the world had chosen her. But, to Cedric? Winifred would have to be the world. No one was going to love him. No one was going to care for him. Everything had been taken from him in an instant because of one spell gone wrong. And, was she just supposed to leave him too? He would have No. One. Else.

And, still, I'm not even sure she gave up on trying to repair the rift between them. How much of Calista's desire to see her mother and Cedric reconciled is a reflection of the times she's heard her grandmother pleading for the same thing? How much of her hope to see that relationship repaired comes from Winifred's desperate hope for the same outcome?

But, regardless, what a choice to have to make! The amount of guilt, frustration, and pain that must have existed in every one of Winifred's choices after The Incident is immense. She is the wife of a powerful man in a society that affords her so little power of her own.

Things seem to improve throughout the series. But, we see Grandmum (Eliza) hiding her interests in stunt riding for the sake of propriety. How much did Winifred hide? How much of her own tendencies did she push back?

I think of Winifred and Goodwyn's relationship a lot like Hamilton and Eliza's as portrayed in the musical Hamilton (not the historical one.) Goodwyn was ambitious. He was "obsessed with his legacy." He has to be the best. And, she is left picking up his pieces. She is trying to help everyone stay together as a family, and I think she deserves SO MUCH more credit and love. She's woefully complex, and she's so imperfect. But, there just wasn't a perfect choice to make in the position she was placed in.

Winifred has experienced a lot of hardship. She has lost so much. And, she finally gains it back in the end. But, like, she has endured so much, and I think she deserves WAY more love.

[candlewaxandp0lar0ids]

Hi all, so, basically I've been having a lot of thoughts and feelings about the state of fanfiction these days. Specifically, I've been thinking about the relationship and interactions between writers and their readers within the fandom (talking about my fandoms in particular, but I know that similar things seem to be happening across the board). I know that authors have been talking about how they've been getting less and less comments and feedback in general on their work. I haven't said much about it because I don't want to appear ungrateful to the people who take the time to leave detailed feedback — I'm incredibly grateful to them and they've played a huge part in keeping me going for this long. If you've left a comment on any of my works and see this and wonder if you haven't done enough, trust me, you have.

Still, if I'm being honest, the amount of silent readers is starting to take its toll on me. It's gotten to the point where when I write something, if it's a decently long piece (let's say over 4k), I'm likely to get less comments on the work than I've put hours into writing it. It sometimes feels like I have to beg for comments and that is not a nice feeling. As an author, it's hard to see that and not think that it says something about the quality of the work you've put out.

I've been trying to think of things that could help, I have a bunch of thoughts that I'll probably try to organize at some point (namely i think a network for writers to have constructive feedback, which doesn’t always mean negative feedback btw, could have a positive impact — feel free to let me know if you’d be interested but also i’ll probably make another poll for that). For now, I wanted to ask: as readers, if you don't leave comments, is it because you're not sure of what to say or how to articulate it? If so, would it help if I made a post detailing things you can tell writers in the comments (other than the classic, but always good 'I loved it')? In general I'd love to know more about why people don't leave comments.

Expect a couple more posts on the subject once I've collected my thoughts and in the meanwhile, here's a poll to let me know if it would help. Reblog to increase visibility/sample size, etc.

[bewareofchris]

I've been on the writer's tag again.

Listen guys.

Nobody owes your fanfic anything. I know that you want validation and adoration and those are both completely normal things to want. But this obsessive demand for comments over kudos and reblogs over likes is A Problem.

I won't bore you with tales of yore where we literally punted our fiction into the world with no idea of how it was being perceived by others because the only way to know if anyone even glanced at it was by the incredibly inaccurate page counter on our shitty geocities page.

(But that was a thing and it's semi-relevant to my point.)

A lot of you are growing up in a era of social media and viral marketing. You are babies of the influencer age, raised on the myth that if you can just get enough attention you'll get famous for something. I don't mean 10 million followers on insta famous but famous in your specific sphere.

That will not happen for you.

Not because people aren't reblogging your shit or writing out loving comments but because it's a myth. The idea that if you shame, beg and cajole enough people into interacting with your creation you'll access some serotonin high and ascend to a greater state of being is also a myth.

Here's the truth:

Most writers do not know how the majority of their audience feels about their fics. Those very few novels that you see on booktok, X (former twitter) or wherever else you get your writing news represent an infinitesimal portion of stories written and books published.

Most writers do have writing buddies or trusted members of an inner circle that they share their writing with.

For most fandoms, fanfics are so plentiful it's like going into a mall sized grocery store that sells only apples and then demanding the customer review every apple they touch.

For those few fanfics that you see that have an outrageous number of comments there are three possible explanations: 1. that person is what we used to call a "Big Name Ficcer" and they have amassed a following through consistent production of whatever that fandom is into, 2. that is a fic so long you have to sign a waiver to start reading it and despite the fact it was started seven years ago its still getting updated, or 3. that person is writing a viral fic in a fandom that is presently on fire.

Your self worth and self esteem cannot be tied to writing and posting fanfiction. It might be a fun outlet or you might be looking for your viral moment, but either way the moment you start weighing your worth as an author or creator based on what a bunch of strangers on the internet think of you is the moment you give up on yourself.

Social media has brainwashed you into thinking that you must be recognized and rewarded for the things that you put onto the internet. Or maybe it hasn't brainwashed you, maybe you just want to get a comment because you worked super hard on something and you feel like if you can't even get one decent response then its all been wasted. (I.e. you've been brainwashed into the feeling that you need the validation of strangers for happiness purposes.)

So what are you going to do about this?

Get off the internet. I don't mean permanently. I don't even mean literally. I mean take yourself out of the spaces that reinforce the idea that you need validation from strangers to be happy. Stop going on the social media sites for a few days (or a few weeks). If you've got a friend in fandom that you share fics, headcanons, ideas or anything with start chatting with them about something you want to write. Invest in them, in what they're doing and their opinions and how they react to your creations.

Put your shit on the internet like you literally don't give a fuck about anyone's opinion. Explain nothing about your writing choices. Put warnings, no more than 5 tags and drop that shit into the world like a newborn giraffe. Then ignore it.

Teach yourself to seek validation from your accomplishments: write a slightly longer fic, write a fic in a different genre, write a fic in a different rating, write a fic in a different fandom.

Find an actual friend that you actually interact with whose opinion you know matters because you agree on the important stuff.

Stop begging strangers for compliments like a cartoon hobo shaking a cup for coins. You're better than that.