#posting this on the side blog as to hide my actual interests from the irls

[batburgerofficial]

hi i think about this way too often for a so-called “functional member of society”

[metalmewtwo-kxb]

Special Pokédex Update:

Zoromun - The "OOC" pokémon. Type unknown. This chimera Zoroark is a loose representation of the mun, who interacts inside and outside of the blog's in-world setting via asks and independent side posts/images. It is rather elusive and prefers to avoid most direct encounters. However, it can be encouraged to be friendly if approached with tact and sincerity.

Quick notes:

Mother and mom-friend

Cranky when hungry or tired

Hisses

Bites

Fiercely territorial. ((Hippity hoppity- get the HECK off their property))

Possessive ((That tree is Zoromun's. So is that rock. And that twig. And those butterfree. And those flowers. If it touches the land you can't have it. Will fight you for stepping on their bug))

Squirrels away and adopts ALL the unattended babies. Snatches lonely stragglers also

Food aggressive due to upbringing with littermates. Only shares with babies and close companions. Will not take food from others

WILL Shadow-Claw trespassers

Defensive and protective

Likes to color

Cuddles and acts silly with people and pokémon it trusts and likes

Empath. Locks on to those who are in need or hiding something. Hates rancid vibes

Prefers the dark and the quiet. Also soft and glowy things

Sneaks around and explores for fun

Mischievous menace to society and (affectionately) adopted siblings

Knows who Team Skull is. Pesters the remaining members to show friendship and favoritism due to sharing similar marks, but hates their music

Picks up every random shiny thing like a crow and stashes them in their nest

Shows affection by gifting food, trinkets, and cool rocks.

Shapeshifts into a variety of pokémon. Mostly foxes, felines, and dragons

Spots and stripes on their leg are never consistent, but the splotches on its back stay the same

Most dangerous in the form of Bewear.

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I'm actually very happy to introduce my pokésona, Zoromun! I didn't really have an interest in making or having one before, but this design had me sold on it 👏 I also got the idea for the back pattern since irl I have 3 different Team Skull jackets (including the official) that I wear almost every day for work. It felt like a good opportunity!

Dominantly intend this to be used for silly things, but I might have some other ideas too! We'll see!

I flipped the pattern from the left leg to the right, but original design below was created by the sweet and lovely @dingbat-things 👇

[akito-shinonome-daily]

#unreality — what was up with all that?

➥ it’s been a little over a day, so i figured i should probably explain myself…

TLDR: i impulse-made an arg, decided against going through with it, and left the parts i had already finished up rather that undoing the work. it was going to be themed to a story, but not horror.

✱ there will be no more arg content on blog!

➥ below the cut will be the above message in more detail and the “solutions” to the parts of the arg that went up. ⤦

so! i (very much on a whim) was inspired by all the daily vitamin blogs to try making my own arg. after my counterpart-of-sorts, vitamin-akito went on a hiatus, i suppose i wanted to continue getting that arg fix—but by trying my hand at creating one. my hope was that it would be subtle enough that it wouldn’t effect things on this blog for those who wouldn’t be interested in such a thing. it wasn’t horror-themed and i wanted to utilize hiding things in plain sight, so i only had to be suspicious long enough for people to pick up on it, and those that were in the know would then be given more clues/codes/directives on the side while the blog otherwise ran normally.

unfortunately for me, i must be quite a bit more nosy than the average person, and no one really seemed to pick up on my “subtle” approach. i eventually tried tagging things with unreality and posting hints when i saw no one was making any progress, but the only one i know of who got to the end was my irl fish, who had some hints from me, and of course the added assistance of me accidentally reblogging one of her posts to the secret side blog, making it pretty clear i was hiding something. to her credit, she went through the process of finding that blog properly, so she’s still the “winner” of the scrapped arg to me!

the clues are all still there if you have a desire to look for them now. otherwise i’ll be writing up an explanation/walkthrough of what i had left up below. i’ll try to leave clear blocks between steps in case you want to use it as a hint when you need but otherwise solve it on your own. i’ll also be including my thought process where applicable.

and just to be very clear this is /gen /srs. no lying. this is ooc, me irl, mod speaking, telling you that there is no more arg. this is not just a misdirection or anything like that. there is no more arg. 👍

also i’m not mad at all that nobody really found anything. it was experimental for me, and it was specifically designed for someone to be like “that’s weird…i’m going to comment on that and see where it goes.” part of my decision to leave it up was to answer the question “how close to other people look?” so i don’t blame anyone for not engaging much with it. in hindsight, i didn’t really give any reason for intrigue like the vitamin blogs use. i was purely relying on people being nosy. so it this was a learning experience for me.

perhaps in the future i will run an arg on a separate blog with the same/similar idea. tbf, my idea was almost more kohane-focused than akito-focused anyways, which is partly why i scrapped the idea. the other part being i chickened out of the rp aspect (i have ✨anxiety✨) so unless you’re reading this like “i think a combo arg/rp blog where i try to save my favourite pjsk characters from doom would cure what ails me, and i need it now,” and are willing to profess that supportive desire to me, it probably won’t happen any time soon. and i may not put my name on it if i ever do make it.

but without further rambling ado, here’s the solution to the first part of arg that’s all still up online:

if you think you want to play along, start with the #akito_posting tag in chronological order.

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① the buildup

the original “subtle” plan to clue people in to the arg was the series of screenshots taken from the neo 2DMV. all posted without any comment and tagged with only “#from neo 2DMV” and “#akito_posting”

the underscore is not in my actual “#akito posting” tag, and was meant to be a clue in that something about these posts was off, and that they were connected. if the images are brightened/adjusted and zoomed in on (as shown below in order of their posting) they all contained the text “day 203.” personally i can still see the text without adjustment, but they is probably helped by me knowing where and what to look for. in my plans, the arg would always tell you the next day to look for clues. it wouldn’t be fair to make you comb through every image that goes up on the blog, so i figured that was a fair compromise for my “hiding in plain sight” gimmick.

as time went on and i didn’t notice anyone picking up on anything being strange, i added the unreality tag to the final neo screenshot, which had “day 203” hidden in it 3 times and just “203” another 3 times. i’ll admit 2-3 of them got very hard to see with the compression, but i was still thinking some would be findable.

come the time of their posting however, i got comments on the unreality tag, but no one seeming to successfully find the answers—leading to me writing this post the evening it went up with the colored text as clues to where in the image to look, as when i told irls where in the image to look they did not have trouble finding things. the final lines in pink were a way a just implying that all the clues in that post led to the same post, so it was OK if it was too hard to read some of them. additionally the use of the akito_posting and unreality tags were meant to tie it back. the tags also said it was a hint and not me trying to write a heartfelt akitoya poem…but another experiment of mine proved that people might not read my tags as much as i assumed. this post did go up in the middle of the chibi akito saga however, and fish did tell me it got lost for her, so it’s possible my data there was a little unfairly skewed.

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② day 203

as day 203 was going into the main tags, it already had unreality as a warning. i also added the tag “aRe You PAyInG AtTeNtiOn? diD you catCh the siGns? diD yOU evEN kNoW to LoOk FoR It?” as a last ditch effort of “hey, this is the one. look at this one.” as for the strange capitalization, we’ll discuss that later…

each image contains one hidden letter, shown below, in order, with adjustments for visibility.

however, since no one seemed to find anything again. (fish was working on it since i had already asked her to check on the “day 203” hint, and i asked her to post some of her progress to see if that could help anyone else out.) i added another hint post.

the three symbols are meant to represent contrast, brightness, and sharpness in a photo editor, all of which are applied to the zoomed in akito from day 203. those are my suggestions for the best ways to make the hidden text a bit easier to see, tho once again they are visible if you just zoom in on the right spot. each symbol also contained a link, to the #akito_posting tag, the day 203 post, and an online tool for cyphers respectively. the tags also include a new tag 🥓🔍 which was a hint for the actual cyphers meant to save anyone from wasting too much time trying to work the code in the wrong direction.

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③ @LVTEZD

so if you put all the letters in order, you’ll find this blog on tumblr. lvtezd is a caesar cypher with a shift of 11 for “akitos” but that’s just a fun fact so i could have a random name for the hidden blog and i enjoyed that 11 is akito’s character number.

now lvtezd is primarily blank. the pfp is a darkened screenshot from the journey 2DMV to match with akito-daily and be a little reassurance that you’re in the right place. there is one post.

if you recall from the tags of the day 203 post, there’s some wacky capitalization going on. typo intentional. btw.

as of writing this post now, i’m thinking the au mentioned here might not actually be posted to akito-daily so i can save it for the potential arg/rp blog i make in the future. there’s plenty of similar aus out there i can draw for and i have plenty of my own aus (mostly crossovers 👉👈) to put on akito-daily so i’m keeping this one close to the chest for now.

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④ the final message

recall that 🥓🔍 from earlier? a quick google should point you in the right direction.

but if you’re just here to read the write-up, then that’s meant to be a little hint at “bacon cypher.” named for a guy whose surname was bacon. simply put, bacon’s cypher encodes a each individual letter to a five-piece string of two figures. typically a and b. this can be applied to plain text by letting a = lowercase characters, and B = uppercase characters. also i = j and u = v for the version i used, so getting “haue” at the end is not a true error.

i unfortunately had to encrypt my final message manually, as i couldn’t find a tool online to do it for me and don’t know how to write a code/algorithm that could do it for me. fortunately for you solvers, i have found a tool on the cypher website linked to earlier that will take text and convert all lowercase characters to 0 and uppercase characters to 1. the output may look like binary, but this is still bacon’s code. depending on the bacon decrypter you’re using, you might be able to tell it 0 = a and 1 = B, otherwise you can use a text replacement tool to convert your 0’s and 1’s to a’s and b’s.

you probably will get a result out with no spaces or punctuation, but it should be easy enough to get to this final message:

“a mind after my own i see / really though i decided not to do the arg / thank you for the effort / this is the end of the rabbit hole / you have my word”

the text in the tags on day 203 follows the exact same decryption process, giving “look carefully”

and that’s it! if you were actually willing to read through this all and you still have any questions / comments / encouragements for me, lmk! ask box is always open with anon on for your comfort (except when i accidentally turn things off and don’t realise it…) or leave a comment or reblog on this post. thanks for reading and taking an interest!

if you happen to see this and want to know how i did the encryption manually, i used the set up below. red box for the plain text, blue box for the bacon code for each letter, and green for the plain text with the capitalisation i then just to typed it up as shown. unfortunately this was a lengthy process (what’s shown below is only about a fifth or sixth of my total work) and obviously there is quite a bit of room for error. i think i had 4 or 5 letters off (out of maybe a 80 or so?) that i had to correct when i checked the decryption.

[appatary8523]

Dumb probably negative no context rambles under the cut

Last chance, don't ruin your mood and go back

OK you wanted it this way

1.- I like STW but I usually have to get up to do things while playing (yea sometimes in FN:BR I hide in bushes to go and do some other stuff. I've barely made any progress, the game is quite complicated to me because I don't play it often and I forget what was going on? And I don't know how to use most of the mechanics of the game(? Still, the humor is funny, the gameplay might feel repetitive from time to time but I like it, I really really like it.

I also would like to have more IRL friends who play STW (or FN in general), I bet that game mode is way funnier and rewarding in squad. But nobody plays it, and I think I have no friends who play FN? Just my older brother and he has his own duo so I'm not getting in between them (?) (and he doesn't like STW so he doesn't even have access to it). There's a dude at my workplace who plays FN but no thanks, I don't like him, he's stupid (he's the it guy who can't fix a damn thing. I hate that guy he's so stupid)

As always, I'm playing solo in this squad mode game called life (?

2.- I know I often say I'm doing it for me but, damn, I wish someone could like it the way I like it too. I'll see if it's worth the effort or if I should just finish the damn thing and save if for myself. I'm not hurt or anything alike, I was 1000% aware this was going to happen, and it's helping me improve. I think I just don't want to deal with that anymore. Sorry, I lose motivation quite often and easily

3.- I try to keep everything happy and positive in my FN blog but... I don't really like Hope. I mean she's cool and all that but I just don't like her e-girl thing going on. The only thing I like about her is the cat on her banner icon whatever the name of that thing is. Neither sunsp0t, actually y don't like a lot of things but I'll just save my awful FN opinions. I should've saved my headcanons too

4.- Surprise surprise (actually is no surprise) I'm losing followers. And I get it, I get you guys, I used to post funny things, funny drawings (or drawings in general) but now I just complain about everything. Sorry, I'm not in a good mood anymore.

I don't think people should keep following/stay suscribed to a channel, account, blog thing they dont like no more. I've seen artists (on Twitter of course) complaining about how people should not follow an account for X specific thing but I don't think that's how things work. Just like the things you like change, the things other like change too. They should NOT feel forced to like the things you like and see the things you want to share. But I guess you have to grow up to realize that. I personally don't feel offended when people stop following me, right now I'm offering nothing but negative text post, and that's OK. Curate the things you consume, make it a more pleasant experience, don't feel forced to follow someone you no longer like.

I personally follow people for a specific thing, and sometimes, like everyone, they change the things they make, but if I like their stuff I usually stick around because it's interesting! I just stop following if they change for worse (the same way I changed for worse). Still, not everyone thinks the same way I do.

5.- I still thinking I should just make another sideblog to dump all this dumb kind of posts but honestly I don't want to deal with it. Making an FN exclusive sideblog was already way too much, but I didn't want to mix all in here

6.- I guess that's what you get for interacting with people half your age.

7.- Shouldn't have joined, should've stayed away

8.- I wish we could talk, someday. I'd like to know you better. I know I don't exist for you but you mean so much for me (yea now I understand my taste for one-sided fictional relationships lol). I know, im stupid, I'm delusional, I'm, as always, daydreaming about things that will never ever happen and I will never have. I can't understand love, I can't wrap my head around the idea of being romantically involved with someone but that's OK, that kind of things are not meant for me

9.- I wish I could control whatevers going on in my mind. I wish it could slow the pace of my thoughts, I need some rest from the world but most important, I need a break from myself but I guess there's nothing I can do about it

10.- Also, Beatles song

11.- I fell asleep after posting this and I OBVIOUSLY had to edit it to add this because i DREAMED someone gave me some support words and it felt so nice and comforting jdjsjs I'm alone

12.- Morningssey song. Yes I like him too so sue me (?

[keep-your-tigress-bred]

“Hel-loo… may I speak now?”

or

About Me and This Blog

To start! Hello! I’m Kit! As the description says, this is an 18+ only space. For the moment, I will do the best at blocking any minors or ageless blogs that interact at all, including just reblogs. I don’t say this to be mean, I was under 18 once too. But what this blog is into (a collection of things with a focus on breeding, pregnancy, and labor) is not something that you want getting stuck in your head at that age. If you get to where I am simply because you’ve got a really annoying drive to have kids and it’s gotten out of hand, good for you, come back when you have real life experience under your belt.

So:

🔞 MINORS DNI🔞

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Current RP Status: Open

That out of the way, I’ll give you a rundown of myself. I’m a thirty-something masc presenting woman (I can’t say stag as a bisexual masc woman because it just makes my life confusing with my partner,) who has bouts of various sorts of dysphoria. I share a lot of the same interests with my partner, and because of that, I’m not looking for a long term romantic of sexual thing online. Just to post what I like, reblog what I want, and maybe find another RP partner. I’m always down for PWP and mostly prefer it if we’re just talking casual stuff and no plot. I usually borrow OCs or Canon characters from various things, but I’m fine with OC/ OC.

The A/B/O concept of a female with a clit that is actually sheathed inside the vagina that is able to become hard and act as a cock is a pretty good description of how my dysphoria can slingshot between extremes. (Was stunned to find it was a thing outside of my experience.)

This is purely a k!nk blog that will sometimes be open to RP anything on my list that is green or yellow. Hard stops are hard stops.

The focus, of course, is breeding, pregnancy, labor, and delivery. I’ll get more into the RP side of things after my greens, yellows, and hard stops.

Things I’m into:

Breeding

Accidental pregnancy

Primal play

Monster fucking (either as the monster or the one being had—even as a smaller monster)

Pred/Prey dynamics

A/B/O with female alphas who can stud and Alpha passing male Omegas who try to hide their status since they aren’t common as seeming to be alphas who are of breeding.

Pregnancy, labor, and delivery

Preggo sex (includes to induce and during labor)

Male chastity

“Animal” (think puppy or kitty) play

Mild violence (violence would be “sparring” level)

Dark cardiophilia

Knife play

Blood

Scarification/branding

Lactation (either way)

Size difference

Size difference but the smaller is the dominate one

(Legit just a wing kink.)

Edging

Orgasm denial

-I’ll update as I remember and am not exhausted-

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What I might be up for:

Reluctant impregnator

CNC (ask me about this because it’s very much exact things not just everything)

Transformation

Dominance fights

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Hard Stops:

Scat

Intox with intent

Most CNC

Rapeplay

Ageplay

Dismemberment

Diapers

Wound fucking

Water sports

Mostly anything with bodily fluids that aren’t blood

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I’ve got my DMs and Asks on at the moment, feel free to drop a line.

There aren’t any “rules” for RP but try to at least either come with an idea or a set of things off the list. I usually write third person POV but asterisk is fine most days too. I’d like to chat about the dynamics before jumping into it.

I don’t share irl pics. Might post art.

If you’re a dd/gl blog just don’t bother following

If you’re gonna give me a hard time about how my brain makes my bottom dysphoria express, miss me with that.

Trolls will not be fed.

-end transmission-

[landofwindandskyscrapers]

7/52 Wasp: A Review

Also: domestic terrorism for fun & profit

Also also: wow, the past really do be like that

So I guess this is starting to become a book review blog now.

Wasp is a very strange, weird book, to the point I didn't like it even though I don't feel it totally wasted my time.

By modern standards.

Because, and this is crucial, it was released in 1957.

I've said before that the past is a foreign country, and this book makes it apparent; to give an example, midway through the book, I realized that there were no female characters.

Or female bit-parts.

Or mention of any gender save from men at all.

And it goes deeper than that; the main character can just walk into a bar and…. magically find a pair of assassins to order around.

The novel starts with the protagonist…almost meekly accepting that he's being drafted in the Earth - Sirian war as a spy and saboteur because he was raised on a Sirian planet.

And there's no exploration of his feelings about, save bits and pieces that are…almost pro-forma?

It honestly feels like a lot of…. narrative technology? Wasn't yet available for book authors.

It’s also jarring how much more violent everything is, in an off handed way. Which makes sense; this is not a book that could have been written post-9/11, what with moral being “domestic terrorism is a fun & wholesome way to achieve your military aims”.

The strangest, yet most interesting parts are in what isn't said, but is taken for granted.

A lot of references are made to the boot camp for spies the protagonist went through - which impressively brings him 85% of the way to James Bond levels of competency - but we're never shown what the book camp was like, if he made any friends there…

In the Jason Bourne books, the source of his abilities* is a gripping mystery.

Here, it's still a gripping mystery, but the novel doesn't care.

I'm trying not to be too harsh on this book - I first got interested in it because it was advertised as a primer on saboteur activities and was bitterly disappointed.**

The alien culture is interesting - the little we see of it - in that it feels distinct. In the “other country over in Europe” kind of way, not “completely alien” kind of way, but still.

(Oh yeah, the aliens are basically human, the book is laughably bad at hiding this).

What I can recommend it for is as a window into the past.

*Side note: spies in fiction are superheroes, fight me irl if you disagree. The feats they perform are things that would take whole teams to accomplish in real life, their gadgets are just disguised tinkertech/supertech…hells, the villains in spy movies and superhero movies can probably waltz from one genre to the next, no adaptation necessary!

**Aside from the gadgets he has, the main character is so effective because….he has a truckload of cash he can bribe people with. I was actually reading this through the lens of the Ukraine war and I concluded it was useless for them.

[orbviously]

same anon abt the pro-shipping shit. my aggression was me being oocly anxious and it came across weird, but genuinely i was looking for a way to empathize or understand your side. i'm not looking to change your opinion, and potentially not to change my own, but it doesn't mean i don't want to know what your reasoning is and/or understand where you're coming from. just wanted to apologize cause damn i didn't know it came across so rudely until those reactions.

Hey, anon, thanks for sending this ask. I'm actually grateful that you realized how you sounded. I do think it's kind of normal and encouraged, unfortunately, to be aggressive rather than open minded. However, it's going to make it harder to understand people when you're basically already acting like they've done something wrong.

I'm not an expert in the proshipper vs anti thing, I just come from old internet and fandom where you get to write whatever and it had no bearing on your real life. It didn't affect your "morality", it didn't mean you viewed real people in some degenerate way--fiction can effect reality, but fanfic writers and queer creators and such do not have the sway that mainstream media does.

this got long, and any time I write "you" it's a general you, so keep that in mind.

People use the JAWS comparison a lot, but what they're leaving out is how big and influential that Steven Spielberg creation was--a popular fanfic author for a fandom you're into will only have as much reach as the fandom, and sometimes, not even that much. I'm into Hazbin Hotel, and when a popular Hazbin Fanfic writer joined the scene, I had no idea who they were.

I think it is bad to view things under black and white. It will always be okay to write problematic shit in fiction, it will never be the same as endorsing it IRL. You may encounter people who do that, sure, but just like everything, there are messed up people, and there are normal people. Kink spaces have always been largely friendly towards LGBT+, because for a very long time, (and still today) it was unsafe to be out. It was unsafe to be yourself. Fanfic is similar to kink spaces, in that way. It's a safe, controlled space where you get to write the outcomes, you get to control the things happening.

The original link is gone because the person who posted it probably changed their URL or deleted the post, but it was essentially about how darkfic is good for people to work through their own traumas and shit, but also it's just a good safe way for people to write about anything. And it is safe, because it's not real. To then accuse people who write these things of being okay with hurting real people is patronizing at best, absolutely disrespectful and infantilising at worst. I learned how to separate fiction and reality as a child, and to be accused of not knowing the difference is very insulting.

It's okay to have squicks! It's okay to not be comfortable with various themes, but that does not mean those themes are not allowed to exist. Censorship makes it harder for everyone to protect themselves. Who are antis protecting by encouraging people who write/draw/RP dark themes to kill themselves? Because I can guarantee you, in every group of antis, there are people hiding their darkfic interests, afraid their friends will turn on them. Having interests in dark shit does not make you bad, it makes you human. It's normal. When we started to tell people, especially teenagers, that if they are interested in darkfic it means they endorse those things in real life, it is entirely damaging to their self esteem, but also opens them up to being abused.

You can have your limits and people will respect them, but demanding it with threats and fear mongering, that's probably not gonna get people to want to listen to you. I've been bullied a ton in my life, and I don't listen to bullies. I never will.

@/olderthannetfic is currently a blog I am reading a lot and it's really good! it talks a lot about this stuff. But you do yourself a great disservice to pretend that fiction has an effect on reality to the degree antis behave. It is never okay to bully someone to the point of suicide. It is never okay to accuse someone of being an actual p*do over shipping Vector and Espio. Do we not care about actual victims of these situations? Have ANY OF YOU heard of the parable THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF?

To sum it up: A shepherd keeps screaming that a wolf is coming, but he's lying. every time, people come running but he laughs at them for believing it. finally, a wolf does show up. He screams and cries out for help, but nobody comes because they think he's lying again.

If you constantly make false claims of heinous accusations, people are not going to believe you when something ACTUALLY goes down. People will not believe ACTUAL VICTIMS. Blonic should never have the same rights as a real life human being, that's so incredibly insulting.

Nobody is evil just because they enjoy fucked up fictional media. I just don't read anything that upsets me or grosses me out. If my shipping Orbot and Cubot grosses you out, then please don't follow. It's okay. I'm not responsible for other people, just my own enjoyment. There is no right and good way to enjoy fictional characters. But the moment you attack real people based on your thoughts about fictional characters, you have somehow managed to fuck up enjoying media. That's the truth.

[tundrainafrica]

I've been following your blog for a while now and I love your writing and your meta! I was wondering, do you consider Levi and Hanji's relationship to be romantic in canon? Do you consider it canon that Levi had romantic feelings for Erwin?

Thank you for the ask anon, also, thank you for ruffling my feathers a bit too :D. I’m glad you like my writings and meta and I hope that my works continue to bring you joy. 

The types of questions you asked up there could only lead to the types of answers that can spark ship wars. I mean the dialogue in 136 and the change in kanji for chapter 132 hinting their own ships canon were enough to have Eruri and Levihan shippers bashing each other on twitter tbh. 

Personally, I see the romantic potential for both Levihan and Eruri in the show. That’s why I found myself reading a good number of Levihan and Eruri fics. (But lots more Levihan if it isn’t obvious from AO3 bookmarks and my tumblr title). I mean lots more romantic potential than let’s say.... ereri

Do you consider it canon that Levi had romantic feelings for Erwin? 

I’ll answer this one first. No. I don’t think Levi had romantic feelings for Erwin anywhere on the show. Was there potential for something to bloom? Possibly, that’s why I still read eruri fanfiction. I like exploring the possibility if Erwin wasn’t a little too obsessed with his dream, maybe their relationship could have turned out differently.

In canon, by the time they introduced Erwin, Erwin had already forsaken all romance and I think whatever feelings Erwin had towards romance rubbed off on Levi and their relationship ended up being more professional than anything. Due to Erwin’s one track mind and the position he had taken upon himself. any romantic possibilities between them in canon was just harder to make happen. 

Levi though still had strong feelings towards Erwin. It’s undeniable. Erwin had given Levi purpose to live and direction on where to go next, what to do next so that’s why regardless of whether canon had made it possible or not, this relationship is still very interesting to explore. 

Erwin was more professional and cold than Levi imo and honestly, despite the cold demeanor of his best friend Erwin, Levi was an incredible softie at heart and we’ve seen that side of him multiple times, when he gave Petra’s badge to that one soldier, when he stared at that one mother and child when they were on the wall ready to leave to retake Shiganshina.

We all know Levi begrudgingly wanted that soft side of him indulged and between Erwin and Hange the one more likely to indulge that softie side of Levi was Hange. 

Which brings me to the next question.

Do you consider Levi and Hanji's relationship to be romantic in canon? 

I wouldn’t be obsessively writing Levihan fics if I didn’t see it as romantic in canon. But at the same time, I don’t believe Hange and Levi have been in a relationship since Season 1. My headcanon here is Hange and Levi built that relationship over time and this relationship just rapidly progressed after season 3

It’s incredibly subtle which is one of the reasons people like to pretend it doesn’t exist. Probably because they’re trying to promote another ship or they don’t wanna see romance in AOT

But I don’t think a relationship developing subtly is at all a sign that it can be more platonic than anything else. 

In fact, most healthy relationships and most relationships from a bystanders point of view, develop subtly. Like we were the bystanders in many other developing relationships in real life, I think we, the audience of AOT, were also bystanders watching the subtle development of Hange and Levi’s relationship. 

Let’s think about how we’ve watched relationships develop in real life.  

If we’re not invested, they happen incredibly subtly. These people are just constantly together, then eventually we realize we can’t invite the other without the other, then we realize we can barely get them alone, then we realize the person changed and eventually they drop this bomb saying “by the way, I’m dating this person now.”

This pattern happens way too many damn times among my friends though and people I just randomly watch everyday that it just became so expected for it to develop into romance so eventually, when I’ve seen the formula play through, I tend to lean on the side of ‘yeah, they’re probably togteher or getting there.’

Yeah, I get it, there’s a danger in assuming that people are together. I’ve seen enough romantic relationships develop though to realize that leaning on the side of ‘romantic’ given specific signs is usually the correct assumption. In fact, I have earned a good amount of money irl winning bets with my friends that two people are actually together but are hiding a relationship (or possibly are in denial).

What are some of these signs? 

The way they treat this one person is so glaringly different from how they treat other people 

Through the years, I have lost a lot of my best friends to their boyfriends/girlfriends and as the youngest child, I have watched all seven of my siblings get into a relationship and believe me, a lot of them have a certain line they would draw on what they are willing to do for their close friend or sibling and what they are willing to do for a lover. 

I have seen people in love so willingly have their hand crushed while the person they love has their fingers set back. “Hold my hand as hard as you need to.” I’ve seen my friends take a detour 1 hour away from the destination just to pick up the person they love. And here’s the thing, they wouldn’t have done it for anyone else usually, they would have only done that thing for that one person. 

Yes, okay doormats exist. But even people with doormat syndrome, the threshold of what someone is willing to do for a close friend and for a person they love still differ regardless. In a life or death situation, I think both Levi and Hange would have fought to conserve lives but if we consider small things, like routines, groceries, small favors, I feel like Levi has an incredibly low threshold of what he’d be willing to do for a random person. But Levi still carried her groceries for her so he could meet her with Moblit in the smartpass. Levi still picked her up and waited for her in Season 2 when she was researching the rock. And for Hange, chapter 115 is all the hint you need. I honestly don’t know if Hange would have gone through those lengths for anyone else but selfishly abandoning commander duties for one guy? She practically said screw you to everyone else. 

The way they talk to each other is different.

This is something I notice in real life too. Most people won’t notice when they themselves do it but it’s incredibly obvious for listeners if the listeners look out for it. The tones of people’s voices change when they’re talking to someone they love. For a lot of people, sometimes their voices get a little high pitched. For others, sometimes their voices get a little softer. Just watch when you’re talking to a friend and suddenly their SO calls. (It might not apply to everyone but I find this incredibly common.) Not just tones, speech patterns change or tendencies too. In front of that one person, sometimes people are a little more selfish. Like maybe, they don’t usually say what they want to eat but when the one person asks, they would answer because suddenly they know what they want. 

With Hange and Levi we have the ‘let’s live together’ and the ‘dedicate your heart’ respectively. 

These are two expressions/phrases they would have not used with anyone else. There was probably more in canon, but these are just the most glaringly obvious ones with two pivotal scenes that blatantly show that Hange and Levi do have signs of the above.  

Hange and Levi who are generally very selfless all business people, are suddenly only selfish with the person they love. Hange with “let’s live together?” An injured Levi deciding to rest and sleep despite the fact that they were in a war because Hange was nearby to take care of him?

Those two were suddenly selfish when they were alone with one another?

They are constantly together.

Okay, irl, you can see this when you have all your friends ride in a car together and somehow, it’s always them taking those two seats next to each other. They leave the classroom together. They leave every single dam room together. And it could be subtle or not but they always wait for one another. Yet if one person is not there, they’re the type to just go ahead and leave without giving the room behind them a second look. When someone wants to buy something, the other always has an excuse to come. And oh my god, when you call your friend in the middle of the night to hang, that person is always in their dam house or in their dam room, no breaks. 

And Hange and Levi have their equivalent of this. 

Levi literally picked Hange from her lab in Season 2 while she was injured and he had no need to. 

I think I have made a post where Levi and Hange are shown constantly together but lemme make some points. Even early in canon, why were Hange and Levi introduced riding next to each other, they’re not even in the same squad. Why were they riding out the gate together? Shouldn’t Levi have been with his squad and shouldn’t Hange have been with her squad? 

Yeah sure, maybe they just decided to ride together. But why were they next to each other in the Ilse’s notebook too when they went out the gate? And even when they were going to take back Wall Maria, Levi and Hange were next to each other in the lift, they were back to back on Wall Maria. 

Like the only expedition where they weren’t riding together was when Levi had to protect Eren yo.

“They’re both leaders of course they were together” Mind you, Levi’s position in the military is a special one. He’s the captain of a special operations squad and not at all a squad leader so he shouldn’t be riding next to Hange if it were by “leaders” and in the retake Wall Maria, if they were divided by “leaders” why didn’t Hange take the lift with the other squad leaders? Why wasn’t she back to back with the other squad leaders on top of Wall Maria? 

Why did she pick to hang out with Special Ops squad Captain Levi of all people, in every. Single. Damn. expedition. Scene. 

And don’t even get me started on post Season 3 man. They’ve been inseparable since Erwin died.  

They literally come in a set. 

And you kinda realized your friends are in love when you wanna invite one of them out and you realized you kinda have to invite their special little friend by default. 

And Hange and Levi are just like that too, 

Hange and Levi have always come in a set. In fan art, in those advertisements, Hange and Levi are always next to each other. In those fan audiobooks, smart passes, there are always Levihan crumbs. Attack on Titan Chuugakkou was literally a testament to the canonicity of Levihan since in that show, they didn’t even hide anything, Levi and Hange were always next to each other. (I think Hange actually ended up living with him towards the end?) Post Season 3, I don’t even think there were many seasons where Levi and Hange were apart and when they were apart it was more of for duty than anything else. 

Hange was always with him when she could, despite her duty as commander. Given their circumstances, they wouldn’t even be together a lot if they didn’t make the effort too. 

Especially towards the end, 126 - 132, the few times Hange did leave Levi behind were for commander duties but Hange never left Levi for the lulz. And also, in 132, Levi was magically able to walk when Hange finally left him behind, and Levi could barely walk in 132, yet he still pushed himself to stand up, walk toward her and attempt to stop her. 

In fact, Hange’s first scenes were next to Levi and Hange’s last scenes were also next to Levi “See you later Hange.”

And I think the huge efforts they put to being together despite their circumstances says a lot already. Hange and Levi’s treatment of each other and their being together constantly in general is a huge testament to the canonicity of their romance. 

Sure, there were no ‘I love yous’. But really, before our irl friends who were in love actually came out to us, maybe months or even years after we’ve watched them be joined at the hip, were there really ‘I love you’s  between them or did we all just place bets on it because they were just being too glaringly obvious about it in how they treated each other? 

[shiro-motoori647]

Blog Update:

Okay, this is going to be about the left field and all; but I do want to say some things:

1. As much as I thank you for making what was just a dumb little side thing to cope with the pandemic to something, I'd genuinely enjoy doing sometimes. I have made many promises I'd made that never really came up.

I do like to apologize, but I know that only that won't suffice. Although, I have much to deal with with SummoSnap and AnotherEidos when it comes out. I want to at least try to get one thing that I promised long ago to surpass. I don't have hope for myself, I have to try to at least do it.

Won't learn anything if I don't.

2. I'd like to do a major change to the blog, starting 2 weeks from now.

No, it's not me retiring Tumblr if you were hoping for that.

I'd like to not start fresh ( as that's a messy game considering the blog I'm dealing with ), but at least clean the blog a bit.

So, any new post that is personal ( every IRL post ) will be dedicated to a sub-blog.

Now, you're wondering, "You barely used the Tokyo-Times blog outside of that Horny Sword joke and to show off art from someone else that you at least were generous to credit." Now, you speak of the truth. However, I feel like I might share more. I already shared my fucking interests ( especially coming from Batuu ) and shared my fucking embarrassing moments.

But, it does feel out of place in my blog, more focused on TAS content. So, I want to clean up and make anything, not TAS, LAH, or AnotherEidos on my personal blog.

Heck, I really don't give a shit hiding anymore. Basically, I just gave information to a friend ( that I can't disclose ) I made on Tumblr. Honestly, I gave too much. But hey, he inadvertently did it too so mutual feelings, I guess.

I might as well do a face reveal when I start my personal blog ( though I'm shit with selfies at 17, so that'll just make me the laughing stalk ).

3. I do plan on actually doing a bet, though, just to have more engagement with you guys ( at least if school doesn't get in the way ).

No, it does not mean NFT's or anything ( I'm a complete dumbest in Bitcoin anyway ).

So, here's the deal. I will attempt to do a speed run of Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion. I absolutely adore the game; I might as well punish myself with it.

When I post the video ( a.k.a confirmation that I'm no cheater ), I ask anyone who has the game to just absolutely wreck me with your time.

Whoever gets the lowest time will choose what punishment I have to deal with.

--------

Side note:

The punishment can't be NSFW, illegal or offensive. Along that, it has to confine in SummoSnap or IRL if the vote rules majority.

Examples of Punishments That are Ok:

Eating the World's Hottest Chip

Forcing Shiro to Say Word For Word Logan Paul's apology video

Etc.

Punishments I won't allow:

Anything dealing with pornography

Anything racist, sexist and/or offensive

Anything that is Illegal

Etc.

-------

So yeah, I'll definitely be embarrassing @lil-sal, @othersal, @muttonchopguy, @andre8398 and @quinnii off, of my blog definitely ( Well I may just scare the absolute shit out of them off my blog more to be quite honest ).

4. Yes, you read it earlier. I know I'm just one year behind before I can even play AnotherEidos, but. Uhmm, IDK. I feel conflicted that you guys would feel a bit awkward having a 17-year-old. Play what is basically TAS but with actual balls to show them off.

I might as well put up a poll or something later on. I am just very conflicted.

------

Now, if you'll excuse me. I have to think about how to then the Finale.

( Thank you for reading this and being a follower, no matter if you're new or an ace senior ).

[positivityforlesbians]

i don’t know if i’m gnc or chapstick or neither and it’s stressing me out.

i always identified as a tomboy (b4 i was brainwashed by the internet) bc i liked sports and activities and didn’t care about getting dirty and prioritized feeling comfortable and having functional clothes over how i looked, but as i’ve gotten older, i can’t do a lot of physical things anymore and have developed some ocd tendencies around ‘cleanliness’ and i don’t know if i’m appropriating the term i guess?

bc i like dresses more now that i’ve detransitioned. i like that i don’t have to worry about trying to fit into pants that weren’t made for my body type, and they’re comfortable and easy to throw on. i still wax my legs and underarms every now and then, but that’s more because i have trich (i pull my hair out) and i go out without trying to hide my body hair. i hardly wear any jewelry, but i like shiny things and ‘light’ makeup for special occasions. i have a buzzcut that i do myself and i don’t wear bras but those are also like feminist related actions for me. i like heels every now and then, and leggings-as-pants (with a long shirt) every now and then but i prioritize comfort and functionality over looks.

i just don’t know where i fit or if i fit in these smaller niches of lesbian culture. i know it’s enough to just be female and homosexual but it’s so hard to find actual lesbian communities irl and online nowadays and it seems like there is less appropriation in more specific labels. (i would say i’m a bambi lesbian cuz i’m also asexual but that tag is basically dead except for positivity posts for other unrelated groups)

i know these labels aren’t as important as lesbian (female homosexual) but i still find it hard to conceptualize myself as part of the lesbian community when i never had a real Girlfriend and covid makes community difficult, and i find myself doubting my sexuality again

basically: i have trouble accepting myself as i am, as a lesbian, when i don’t have other lesbians to relate to. i just keep hearing like tra conversion therapy rhetoric and replaying moments where i convinced myself that i liked men because i have a LOT of internalized homophobia from my family, from society, and from my online experiences. i just wish i had more people like me in my life, even if just online.

i guess i’m asking what the difference is between gnc and chapstick and if there’s a certain amount of gender conformity that isn’t like considered ‘being gnc’. that part is even hard as i realize how femininity and masculinity are mostly relative and tools of the patriarchy but i digress.

thank you for this blog, i rely on it so much when i start to spiral into my own internalized homophobia

Hi, like you said, these specific labels don’t matter as much, they just fit some of us better than others and it’s fun to recognise a lesbian as this or that type but that doesn’t mean there aren’t grey areas. There isn’t really a strict code of what makes a woman a tomboy/gnc, we get the general idea but it’s not like we have a list of criteria that should all be ticked to be allowed to call ourselves that, other people are usually very able to see that we’re tomboys/gnc and they’re the first ones to point it out to us.

A woman can be both a tomboy and a chapstick lesbian, they don’t neutralize each other as they are similar (it’s just that tomboy isn’t specific to lesbians). For example a “soft-butch”, who is more on the androgynous side than the very masculine side of her style can be both a tomboy and a chapstick lesbian, there are overlaps and it’s important to be conscious of it. A chapstick lesbian is neither butch nor femme, she’s in the middle and more neutral about her style. Nowadays a lot of us are chapstick but within that group you could find yourself aligning more with a bit of masculinity or more with a bit of femininity, specifying it is not necessary.

An interesting fact is that the word “kiki” was used in the past (50s/60s) to talk about lesbians whose style fall “in the middle” (which shows that this word isn’t used only in the gay men community to talk about a gathering of friends to gossip and “spilling tea”), now you’ll also find a lot of us call ourselves andro/androgynous, though we aren’t all actually androgynous (def : ambiguity and confusion for others to find whether we’re a woman or a man). I cannot really know what you are but usually when you don’t fall in either the butch or femme category then the chapstick one is the right one. Xx

[rivetgoth]

I had this friend I met in the Hetalia fandom in like 8th-9th grade who was like, a lot older than me (I was like 12-13 when we met and she was like 17 or so), and we were REALLY close for a really long time, we'd talk and call every day and it got to a point where she was really dependent on me in this awful way where she would like constantly threaten suicide if I didn't answer her texts fast enough and shit like that. She was really rich cuz her dad was a doctor and one time she bought me an entire fucking Xbox One (I did not ask for it like... I'd always been a PlayStation gamer LOL) because she didn't have anyone to play Halo with her. My family still has it and uses it as a DVD player/Netflix machine.

Anyway the really batshit thing about this person (BESIDES the fact that she was like, definitely a pedophile who loved shota and frequently sexted me after she'd turned 18+ and I was like 14 and she also had both a bestiality and incest fetish that she'd talk to me about constantly — I was a kid I had no moral concept of anything and just liked being edgy and feeling mature) was that she was like. A chronic liar who constantly faked identities. And for years after cutting off contact with her I would look back and realize that she had faked even more than I had noticed at the time. The thing is, I knew for sure she wasn't lying about her home life -- Her address, what she looked like, her dad's profession, her age, her house, her pets, etc, were all things I had proof of. But when I knew her she was constantly remaking her Tumblr to escape drama she'd start, and she would constantly make side blogs under pseudonyms and pretend it wasn't her (sometimes it would be random shit like aesthetic blogs under different names or ask blogs for characters or smthn, other times it was like, callout blogs for people she had gotten into drama with where she would pretend to be someone else defending her). I assumed back then that I was always going to be in on it, because she would always tell me whenever she made one of these fake accounts, and sometimes she would encourage me to make a new account too as a sort of roleplay thing where we both pretended to be people we weren't... Until I learned that she wasn't always telling me. Every so often, I would become mutuals with a new account who would start messaging me about my interests and strike a conversation with me. Then something would slip and my "new mutual" would admit that they had actually been my friend all along... Which should have made me immediately cut contact because that's weird as shit, but I was young and she was a close friend, so I would just sorta accept it.

She ended up being like, horrifically transphobic. She got run off her blog twice for being specifically transmisogynistic, first insisting that she was allowed to headcanon canon trans women as feminine men and then on her next blog insisting that lesbians couldn't be attracted to trans women. I was still young and closeted and she was one of my closest friends and was constantly messaging me that the situation was making her suicidal and she was just wording things wrong and totally supported trans people and people just weren’t giving her the benefit of the doubt and she was still learning so I tried to just stay out of it without losing her. Then... I came out as trans lol. She stopped replying to me when I first came out and then made a bunch of vents on her tumblr about how much it upset her and about how “using he/him pronouns for AFAB people is triggering” for whatever fucking reason. She told me her “best IRL friend” who she had introduced me to once on Skype but who never logged in again after and who refused to ever do a group call or anything (definitely another fake account) said that it was irrational for me to expect my friends to respect my pronouns so soon after coming out and that I shouldn’t be upset if I get misgendered. Then she apologized but told me my name and pronouns would never fit me. As you can imagine, as a little baby trans kid who was closeted from my family and terrified of even having come to terms with being trans, I didn’t really have a great defense.

Soon she started being really woke like 2014 style Tumblr SJW to save face, she came out as nonbinary and told me in private it was because she felt bad when people called her cis during discourse (she absolutely wasn't nonbinary) and she coined a "new sexuality" that was "attraction only to people you perceive as feminine, regardless of how they identify" -- what this actually meant was "attraction to cis women and not trans women." She ran an aroace help blog despite not being aroace? And made a bunch of pride flags that I still see around sometimes to this day. She would start fights a lot and try to out-woke people and got into a bunch of drama with other SJW types of the day, got into a bunch of drama with TumblrInAction and Mogai-Watch and shit like that, and she claimed for a short while that she had a headmate (FWIW I totally believe DID is a legitimate thing but like. Trust me on this one.) who was transphobic and that it made her so sad, she told me that it was actually that headmate that had been transphobic before, and every so often her headmate would front out of nowhere and misgender me and use really abusive language like calling me a cunt or a bitch or whatever. She started making these "intersex nonbinary" OCs who she would constantly make porn of under the guise that they were representation for LGBT people who were just like, extremely fetishistic cuntboys and dickgirls (they were “intersex” to explain why they could be “girls with natal penises” or “boys with natal vaginas”).

At that same time, she somehow always managed to have these random, very sporadically active trans women mutuals who were apparently amazing friends of hers, who shared some interests with her but also would defend her when people brought up her past, with these long-winded “Well, I’m a trans woman and I think what she said is perfectly justified and everyone makes mistakes and she’s always been a good ally!!” Then one day some trans woman received an ask from her account where she claimed to be a “black trans woman” (she was, of course, a white cis woman) and she freaked out and claimed she had “been hacked by TiA or 4Chan to make her look bad” — I realize now she had just been sending anon messages pretending to be things she wasn’t and forgot to hit anon LOL. Late in all of this she also got into a bunch of hot water for being really antisemitic and saying she didn’t trust Jewish people because they were just like Christians and like, 5 seconds later she came out as Jewish and wrote this whole long sad vent about how she had had internalized antisemitism and then started going by a random Hebrew name LMAO.

In the end the final breaking point was when I found her secret TERF blog, where she had been making posts for months about how trans men are just insecure women who are trying to escape misogyny by stepping on the backs of “fellow women” and using me as a fucking example, and also saying that me not coming out as a trans man had been “basically rape” since she had been SEXTING me when she was 18+ and I was 13-14+ and that it was traumatic to know someone she had trusted was secretly identifying as a man LMAO. She was also obviously saying all sorts of transmisogynistic things, but also had these really bizarre fetish posts about wanting trans women to fuck her...? I confronted her about it and she literally fucking out of nowhere told me that she was in the emergency room with a mysterious illness that might kill her and she was allowed to have her phone but due to privacy laws couldn’t send a picture as proof. While “in the hospital” she deleted the TERF blog and her personal blog. I had known her for literal YEARS at this point (we had met when I was 12-13 or so and by the time we no longer spoke I was a few months from 17), and I was completely stunned to fucking hear this person trying to pull “I’m in the hospital with a deadly disease” at being confronted for some shit like that LMAO. I made a post about it on my public and another “trans woman friend” of hers logged in to vehemently defend her by saying that there’s nothing wrong with AFAB women being untrusting of trans people because female oppression is uniquely traumatic and that there’s nothing wrong with women expressing their sexuality by sexting minors as long as the minor consents and that I was the real predator for “hiding that I was a man” (remember, I’d been a 13 year old closeted trans boy), before never logging in again... 😭 One of the last times we ever talked was when she demanded I refund her for the fucking Xbox and I refused.

Anyway, the long-term aftermath of that is that a few people online (in some random cringe areas of the internet) who archived some of her antics still think that I also wasn’t a real person, since they caught onto how much she lied about too, so they think I was also a sock puppet and I have no interest in clarifying and making myself known to those people LOL. I have no fucking idea where she is now, she deactivated everything after her being a TERF came out. There’s like, so much more to that I could say because I knew her for YEARS and, like I said, she was one of my “closest friends.” Her parents had wildly expensive pure bred designer dogs that she would make Vines of. She wrote Beatles real person fan fiction. For her birthday one year I made her a shirt on Zazzle with an inside joke about one of her OCs... does she still have that? Either way, she was easily the most batshit person I’ve ever known closely online and I will forever associate the Hetalia fandom with people like that.

[bettsfic]

socknography: the importance of preserving fan creator biographical data

i wrote earlier on utilizing collections and bookmarks to boost the archival power of ao3, and in that post mentioned how i wish authors would fill out their bios so we can preserve fanauthor information as well as we preserve the fics themselves. so, here is my rant about WHY WE ARE SO IMPORTANT.

for my masters thesis i wrote about the layered pseudonymity of fanfiction authors, and after doing a ton of research, i find myself still thinking of the pseudonymous/anonymous divide as it pertains to fic. we have authors we consider “famous” and ones whose followings eclipse that of traditionally published authors, but unlike traditionally published authors, we don’t put a handy bio at the end of our fics. in fact, if you want to find out about the author, you have to hope they’ve linked somewhere to their tumblr or twitter or dreamwidth, or they have consistent pseuds across platforms. and from there, you have to hope they have an ‘about me.’ but most, myself included, don’t.

unlike traditional publication -- where amazon and goodreads and even the back of the book contains biographical info -- and even unlike the rest of fandom archival etiquette -- which, despite having virtually no committed rules still maintains its organizational structure -- there is no standard etiquette on fanauthor biographical data. 

i speculate the reasons fanauthors are hesitant to write their own biographies is very complicated: 

there is no “ask” for it or existing standard. when i publish stories under my real name, i’m required to provide my bio, which contains my accomplishments, where i got my degree, where else i’m published, and my website. all literary author bios follow this formula, so they’re pretty easy to write. other than this post, i have never seen a request for fanauthor bios. so without an editor demanding it, and without a standard formula or platform to draw from, a total lack of information becomes the norm, and almost any info other than the standard “name. age. pronouns. ao3 name. list of fandoms and/or pithy one-liner” of tumblr or occasional ask game is seen as a deviation from the norm. even ask games get a bad rep sometimes, and they’re transitory, a post you see as you’re scrolling through to somewhere else, not static, like a dedicated profile page.

pseudonymity veers too close to anonymity. an anonymous author cannot have a biography. a pseudonymous author can, but biographies may be seen as defeating the purpose of writing under a pseudonym, or multiple pseuds. a sock account is a sock for a reason -- you don’t want it associated with your main. moreover, i believe fandom creates an environment in which to acknowledge your accomplishments and promote your own content is seen as narcissistic. fanfiction can sometimes be seen as a genre of selflessness, donating time and energy into a community centered around a shared canon, not personal gain. to acknowledge the self publicly is to invite attention, and attention is contradictory to anonymity.

shame and humility. the more information you have on the internet, the easier you are to find. very few fanauthors use their real names, or feel comfortable connecting their fan identity to their real one. i hear pretty constantly how often fanauthors hide their fannishness from their coworkers and loved ones, how only the people closest to them know they write/read fanfic. moreover, you might think “my most popular fic only has 10 kudos and 1 comment, nobody wants to know about me” (which is so not true, but i’ll get to that in a minute).

fandom is constantly changing. with a central archive for fanfiction in place, it’s easier now to be in multiple fandoms at once than it ever has been. if you want to read all sugar daddy fics, there’s a tag for that, and if you’re not picky about canon, you have an entire buffet of fandoms to choose from. communities are growing and shifting and changing shape. i move fandoms, and i keep my friends and readers from previous fandoms. i get dragged to new fandoms frequently. my interests and inspirations change, but i don’t erase my history or identity every time i move, i only add to it. i am always betts whether i’m in star wars or the 100 or game of thrones. but if you only read my fic, you don’t know the stories behind it. many people don’t know i entered fandom in the brony convention community in 2012, or that i was sadrobots before i was betty days before i was betts, or how fandom changed my life and led me through a path of personal trauma recovery, or that i co-founded wayward daughters, or ran the fanauthor workshop, or all these other things about fanfic that is not fanfic itself. 

if you are a fan creator, your fannish personal narrative matters. telling your story helps preserve the metatextual history of our genre.

i think constantly about what our genre will look like in 30 or 50 years, if it will be like other genres that began as subversions of the mainstream: comic books, beat literature, science fiction. genres that, at the time involved groups of friends creating stories for each other, bouncing ideas off of one another, experimenting with or distorting other genres, and which became, over time, well-regarded forms with rich histories. 

maybe one day, like the MCU, we’ll have a dedicated production company that churns out adaptations of longform coffee shop aus written between 2009 and 2015. maybe “BNFs” will be read in high school literature curriculums. maybe our work will end up on the real or virtual shelves of our great grandchildren. and if that happens, if fanfic goes entirely mainstream, how will fanfic authorship be perceived? how will fanpeople in 2080, if humanity is still around by then, interact with the lexicon we’ve created and preserved? what would you do if you found out Jane Austen wrote under five different sock accounts across three platforms over the span of twenty years? how would you, a fan of Pride & Prejudice, even begin to find all of her work?

we have so many social constraints pushing against us. there’s purity culture, which encourages further division of identity -- fanauthors may write fluff on their main and have various sock accounts for underage/noncon fics. if you’re a scarecrow, you’re much harder for a mob to attack. there’s misogyny, which dictates women/queer ppl shouldn’t be writing about or indulging in or exploring their sexuality at all. there’s intellectual property and a history of DMCAs, which, although kept at bay by the OTW, may still have influence on the “illegal” mentality of our work. with social armies against us, it’s easier to exist in the shadows, on the fringe. we change URLs based on our moving interests, and split our identities a million different ways, and keep sarcastic “me” tags full of self-deprecating text posts. we are difficult beasts to catch, because we have not been allowed to exist.

i spent a lot of time today googling the word for “pseudonymous biography” and came up empty-handed (if someone knows of an existing word, pls let me know. “pseudography” is apparently a fancy word for a typo; “pseudobiography” is a fake biography), so for lack of anything better, i’ve come up with the term “socknography” because 1) it’s funny and doesn’t sound intimidating, and 2) it encapsulates the sensitive and complicated way fanauthor identifying conventions work. and also i think “fanauthor biography,” “bibliography,” and “profile” just doesn’t cut it for the actual work of these pieces. they don’t necessarily include IRL biographical data, they include more historical/community context than a bibliography, and the words “profile” and “about me” don’t really inspire interaction, or acknowledge the archival importance of this work.

astolat’s fanlore page is my go-to example. astolat writes under multiple pseuds and has major influence in the history of fandom. she’s also a traditionally published author, but you notice, her ofic novels are not mentioned, nor any other real-life identifying information. fanlore has a really good policy on this in place, for those concerned about doxxing. 

(moreover, i am not suggesting you centralize your socks. they’re socks for a reason. but most everyone has a main, and that main identity has a story.)

there are 2 existing spaces to preserve socknographies. 

fanlore, a wiki owned by the OTW, you can make an account and create a user page (which is different than a “person” page) using a user profile template

ao3′s “profile” page, which is a big blank box in which anything goes

(i’m not including tumblr on this list because i don’t think it’s a stable platform.) 

fanlore’s template is straight to the point and minimal, which doesn’t really invite narrative the same way a literary bio would. ao3′s big blank box leaves us with the question -- wtf do i say about myself? how do i say it? how much is too much? and because of that, most profiles are either blank or only include a policy on translations/podfic/fanart, and maybe links to tumblr and twitter. but let me tell you, if i have read your fic and taken the time to move over to your profile, you better believe i am a fan. and as a fan, i want to Know Things.

here are the things i want to know, or

a potential template:

introduction (name/alias, age, location, pronouns, occupation)

accomplishments (degrees, personal history)

fan history (fandoms you’ve been in, timeline as a fan, how you were introduced to fandom/fanfiction, what does fandom mean to you -- this is where your fan narrative goes)

fandom participation (popular fics/posts, involvement in fan events/communities, side blogs, interviews, etc. 3 & 4 might be one and the same for you)

spotlight (which of your fics are most important to you/would you like others to read and why? what are the stories behind your favorite fics you’ve written?)

find me elsewhere* (links to tumblr, twitter, insta, etc.)

policies on fanart, fanfic of fic, podfics, and translations

*you cannot link to ko-fi, paypal, patreon, or amazon on ao3/fanlore per the non-commercial terms of service

i’ll be working on filling this out for my own profile as an example, but you can also see how my @fanauthorworkshop participants filled out their fanauthor spotlights, and the information they provided. obviously, you should only share that which you feel comfortable sharing, and as your fandom life changes, your narrative will change too. it’s not much different than updating a CV or resume.

tl;dr the goal is to provide a self-narrative of your fan life/identity for posterity. who are you and why are you a fanperson? why do you create fan content? what are you proud of and what do you want to highlight to others? who are you in this space?

[disslve]

𝐲𝐞𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐰 & 𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐝𝐲 ! this is nai and my cowboy ass is here to throw roxy @ u and also tell u bad jokes and cry over life is strange 2 because i’m still not over this game and I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT. just a heads up, i came up with roxy on a whim because this rp just looked so good,  so if it seems like i don’t know what i’m talking about ... it’s most likely the case whoops . ( this is an excuse for me bringing shitty muses ). anyway, my fake cowboy ass loves to ramble so if you’re interested in plotting feel free to LIKE this post or hmu. i forgot to mention that i’m also a fake grandma so idk anything about discord at all and i still need to set it up which will happen in the next few days dsdnsdsdn. 

ps: wanted connections/plots can be find in my wanted tag ( a link is on my blog ) and i’ll also list some below !

EDIT: discord name is nai #7158

 * [ kristine froseth + cis-female + she/her ] —— have you met roxanne ‘roxy’ bailey ? they are a twenty-two year old junior currently studying romance languages and literatures. they live on decker house and word around campus is that this scorpio is compassionate + dedicated, as well as impatient + dishonest. i wonder if they’ll make it out alive. 

basics.

full name: roxanne elise bailey

nicknames: roxy, rox

sexual orientation: bisexual

birth place: valencia, spain ( but only lived there for five years ) 

history. 

one could say that roxy had lived an easy life, though her parents weren’t distinguished by their social status, it didn’t mean they lacked money which was enough to support their daughter in whatever she wanted to do.

truth to be told, roxy was indeed a little spoiled, the type of kids who would try all kind of things on the expenses of their parents only to quit a new ‘hobby’ again. she could barely stick to anything. she was some twisted kind of golden child, good at many things but never had the patience to continue something for long enough to cultivate it. 

skipping over the part where she almost tried everything from arts, music etc. she finally found her passion ( and even roxy herself was surprised ). figure skating. she didn’t know what drew her in, she couldn’t explain it, she tried it and it felt right. roxy always describes the feeling as finding a soulmate if she feels extra dramatic that day. 

unsurprisingly, she was good at it. not that kind of good at something she was at all the other things she tried before, but that being good at which stemmed from genuine interest. maybe, that is why she managed to get so far. and it didn’t take too long that people even started to call her a figure skating prodigy. 

at this point at her life, she had it all, spinning the stars on her fingertips ( or warning bad pun ahead: spinning on the ice ). until, well, her parents company was in some crisis and they had to cut corners in the meantime. also oh so ‘conveniently’ roxy lived at the arse end of nowhere and getting to her practices was now even more difficult because as mentioned before they had to save their money for more necessary things. of course, there were more things , small and big, which totally threw her off ( which i am too lazy to list rn).

roxy tried to work part time, but a) the money wasn’t enough b) she didn’t want to cut more hours of training she managed to get. AND well, here comes the turning point and roxy thinking she was oh-so-smart without realizing that it would cost her career. oh-so-smart roxy came up with the idea to , well, just steal some stuff. after all, she trained with many other wealthy peers and she could just sell off their stuff or something. 

at the beginning she only did it to afford certain things she needed, but soon it somehow became an addiction. she felt in control when everyone else in her life was an utter mess. however, the more she took things away from others the more she felt comfortable, doing it more often and sometimes taking things which weren’t even worth that much. it was only a matter of time until she was caught. and as if she was lucky for too long, the person who caught her pressured her into either giving them a hefty sum of money (which she didn’t have) or to quit figure skating. she decided for the latter.

well, here she was and her sudden departure was quite a shock. but she had no choice and stated it was for personal reasons. 

skipping over her being devastated over it, etc. her parents managed to save their company (whatever this company is) but at this point it was already too late and roxy was accepted into holloway. 

right now she actually wants to pick up her figure skating career again, however, she’s too afraid that the blackmailer is going to expose her and also she doesn’t really know who they are (lets pretend they wrote her letters, txt messages >??) and also she’s kind of afraid due to the lack of practice she had .

personality.

okay i’ll keep this short bcs i wrote way too much for her background story. but to sum it up, roxy kind of has that perfect girl facade.  considering how many friends roxy has and how social she appears to be it is odd that no one seems to be able to describe her.  roxy doesn’t want people to know who she truly is, and she keeps her distance as she actively avoids conflicts that might cause her to say something wrong and exposes herself. 

she shields her feelings by only presenting polished version of herself, the facade of the perfect girl: kind, hard-working and polite. someone whose life is easy and someone who looks like she doesn’t have any worries. it doesn’t mean she isn’t anything of that, but it’s not as if her kindness has no bounds or that she doesn’t need to put effort into the things she does. nevertheless, she believes that she must be perfect in order to make people like her. and while, she is pretty good at masking her emotions and smile along, as soon as someone threatens to see past the illusion, she will become defensive and won’t hesitate to lie in order to preserve it.

plots.

best friends: although roxy pretty much keeps her distance from everyone else, this person had always stood by her side. maybe they knew about roxy’s sudden wannabe-thief phase ( which she is still in ) and well tried to talk her out of it ( which obviously didn’t work ). also adding some drama here and maybe they had a big argument over it and distanced from each othr because of it. however, my angst ass doesn’t want to ruin it and they’ll rekindle their friendship. they might meet again at holloway and it’s awkward at first, maybe they even have some arguments but they’ll get over it because everyone loves a good rekindled friendship story.

annoyance: someone who gets under roxy’s skin.seeing past the perfect girl face and constantly calling her out on it. maybe they just have fun annoying her and want to see what she really likes or they just don’t like roxy , thinking that beneath all of this act, she is a really unpleasant person. perhaps, they’re even doing it with good intentions and want to show her that she doesn’t need to hide who she is. whatever it is, they’re determined to expose to the world who she really is. 

pen pal ??:  muse a and roxy had been friends for a very long time, yet the funny thing is that they’ve never met each other nor do they know what the other look like. all they know is their name ( or maybe they only know each other by their usernames ) and their deepest secrets. maybe they already have crossed paths many times and perhaps even know each other but don’t like each other irl. or they never had noticed the other.

blackmailer: BECAUSE WHY NOT??? the person who forced roxy to give up on figure skating. maybe, they were a rival or just didn’t like her, or any other reason. they might as well, have noticed that roxy is secretly training again and might be back at their shit again. 

exes: GIVE ME THE ANGST, maybe muse a and roxy used to be in a serious relationship and as naive they were back then both of them thought this love would last forever. however, at some point roxy started to distance herself from muse a, constantly cancelling their dates because of their busy schedule. at first muse a tried to be understanding towards her, but as time passed things only got worse. roxy hating any kind of conflict just decided to ignore the problem instead about talking about it and eventually stopped replying to muse a messages. muse a never really got to know the real reason behind their break up and was left with unanswered questions. but anything works  

unrequited love: (this is just me throwing in my favourite way to make myself suffer) It doesn’t matter who is the one with the the one sided love because i just want some good angst.a)  muse a has a crush on roxy, yet they never told her about it. yet, muse a can’t hide it and it doesn’t take too long until roxy notices it. but instead of trying to talk to muse a about it, roxy just ignores it acting as she usually does and perhaps even give them false hope that she might like them back. maybe muse a even confessed to her and because roxy didn’t want to hurt them she told muse a she’d think about it.

b) roxy has a crush on muse a but doesn’t admit it. she doesn’t want to show their vunerable side and just plays it down. maybe they’re friends and roxy doesn’t want to lose another friend. but one day she confesses to muse a on accident, making everything awkward between them.

someone she stole from: idk i thought this would be fun ? maybe she confessed to them about it or maybe they caught her but decided to not confront her about it.

fan: someone who used to watch her perfomances on their tv and is still not over the fact that she quit.

i also have a connection page on my blog if these are too specific or none of these work 

i’m too tired to come up with more dsdsdnjsd but gimme everything !! THE ANGST, FLUFF, DRAMA PLS!!! 

[singing-robot]

in my personal experience the most common reaction to talking about undertale irl or showing people fanart of it is “oh i loved this game!!!” seriously don’t worry about it! it may have a bad rep on the internet but generally everyone who i’ve met who’s a fan has been lovely

That’s very comforting!!! And I’m sure that if people are selling fan art of it, they like it, too. I’ll try and keep that in mind if I see other artists again. After all, a game about being nice is sure to produce nice fans, yeah? I think I only saw one or two artists with Undertale stuff, though, but that might’ve also been due to actual comic fans, and also the SU finale had aired like a week or two beforehand, so there was a lot of that. Oh and two anime groups. And a Legend of Zelda family! Maybe I’ll see more Undertale stuff at the next one and meet new people then! 

Uhhh this got long and kind of personal and off-topic, but I spent all this time writing it, so for my general experience of sharing Undertale with people, look under the cut. 

 I think the one thing that’s really gotten to me is that, when I first got into it, I didn’t know Undertale was a big thing. I didn’t know about the memes, or the sexual obsessions, or the general reputation it got for such. I had never heard MEGALOVANIA, and I don’t think I so much as walked into a Gamestop and saw a trailer for it. So the reactions I received upon excitedly sharing this Cool New Interest were, 

> “Dude, that’s cringe.” (cue me explaining that I really like the music and colors while turning to a new note page to hide my Undertale doodles. ha. ha ha.) 

> “yeah I love that game/character” (can’t remember which) after I shared some of the funnier stuff from Handplates, which I discovered and binged in less than a week before I knew anything about Undertale. so uhhh rip me for sending pieces of a gruesomely angsty fancomic to my closest friends and talking about it. 

> I think one of my friends didn’t like the game for one reason or another, but they put up listening to me because I really liked it. I could be wrong bc I have no face-reading skills, but I stopped talking about it with them until I was actually playing it earlier this year. So. Yeah. 

> there was that one time I was playing Fallen Down alone in the band room and one (1) percussionist asked what I was playing and I said “haha yeah it’s from this game I found-” “I know what Undertale is, but WHICH SONG” and I felt bad because I don’t want to be the “you probably haven’t heard of it-” type of person bUT I HADN’T HEARD OF IT AT ALL FROM ANYONE 

> actually did several independent things in band (I played in the dressing room/bathroom), so when I got bored with the stuff the director gave me, I’d pull up PDFs on my laptop and play them. I want great at it and the majority of songs are out of my range/clef, but I remember at least one kid coming in and saying “you’re gonna have a bad time” bc I was practicing MEGALOVANIA, lol

> oh my god I let someone borrow my notes once in English and it had a relatively large drawing of Papyrus at the bottom of the page and he never mentioned it so idk 

> my brother expressed -45 interest in it at first, but then a few weeks later he said he likes Bonetrousle. Minimum talk about it, but the other night he did ask if I was about to fight Sans when I was in the Judgement Hall (which is impressive because he judged it entirely by sound; he didn’t see where I was, he just heard Sans talking and was correct about where I was in the game).

> We’ve also had at least two arguments about how to pronounce “Bonetrousle,” called in a third party to decide for us, except she pronounced it a completely different way. We haven’t argued about it since.

> one time I was drawing Hollow Knight and this kid who sat near me asked if it was Undertale again and I was like????? No???? And he said oh sorry I saw you drawing Undertale before and wondered if it was the same AND YOU KNOW WHAT? MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS, JARED. 

> took a picture of an airbrush tee stand, my brother asked if it was for the sans shirt (it was), and I panicked and said it was for pikachu. I don’t know why I lied but I don’t like that I did. I planned to discreetly take a picture of all the sans shirts to make a joke about the names on them, but stopped after the one. I don’t know why.

This is going a little off topic from first discovery, yikes. Anyway! I’ve come this far and it’s my post on my blog! 

I’m fairly shy about sharing my interests, which is why I run side blogs instead of having everything on my main, or I say “oh it’s from some game” and describe it as normally as possible and get to the point. Unless close friends want to know more about it! When I talk about something I like, I won’t stop talking about it until I’ve exhausted or distracted myself, or until I am stopped by someone else. So I either have to put a cap on it before I talk or I will run nonstop, you know? Not my greatest quality. 

Anyways uhhh if you’ve read this far then congrats! Don’t let this bring you down, it’s all in the past. But I did suffer some embarrassment at these memories so I have to post them bc this can’t all be for nothing. I’ve been a little scattered lately so uhhh sorry if this was a trip to read. Nice to write so much, though. 

[laveritaswoman]

What If ... ?

(This post was inspired by some questions posed by @pissedoffsoka13​ yesterday, but I went so far afield of what she was asking that I didn’t want to weigh her blog down with my excessive wordiness and off-topic topics. So thank you for the inspiration, Soka.)

What if S/C would have come out publicly as a RL couple in January 2016? (Offered as a “what could have been.”):

If S and C had come out publicly as a RL couple when shippers suspected they were going to in January 2016 (instead we got the IFH, most likely thrust upon them by TPTB), I believe there would have been few negative effects. But I also think they would have achieved so much more ... together. I think they could have had more “coupley” fashion endorsements, a la the Saks and Departures magazine promotions (and probably Kooples, which may have been in the works but got canned by IFH). These endorsements would have raised their visibility and popularity factor immensely. The fact that they were a couple would have made the TV/magazine/newspaper entertainment section circuit. As a result, their visibility/popularity factor, again, would have increased markedly, garnering them more viewers who decided to check out OL simply because they were enchanted by S/C’s natural chemistry and funny banter during their appearances on entertainment TV segments or in magazine interviews.

I don’t think being a couple would have hurt their acting opportunities outside of OL. In my opinion, the entertainment industry would not have viewed them as less legitimate actors if it was known that they were together IRL. Just look at the ”Americans” couple and their noms, awards, and recognition. Both S and C have shown their acting chops in projects outside of OL and they have showreels to prove it.

Contrary to C’s rationale offered during the IFH as to why they couldn’t work together and “be together,” I believe that if S/C were together, they were not the types that would have succumbed to fits of jealousy and fights if one was getting the acting gigs and the other wasn’t. They have established too many other interests outside of acting to keep them busy. I think they wouldn’t have succumbed to the pressures if, after OL was over, they had to spend periods of time away from each other on their own acting projects. Both are mature individuals who’ve been living life on their own terms for over 20 years -- I don’t see them as clingy and they are quite capable of doing fine being apart, as evidenced by the vacations/holidays that they spend apart from one another now (but I do think they secretly meet up at the end of these vacays/holidays to spend leisure time together).

As for the impact on OL, I don’t think coming out as a couple would have been problematic to the show, even if they were to break up. S and C are mature professionals who understand and embrace the importance of their jobs and their roles. They would have continued to show their great chemistry in front of the camera on OL regardless of their on- or off- relationship status. Who knows, the OL TV series might continue through completion of all 8 (or 9) books; who better to take on a long-term project than a long-term couple?

If they had a child or children, which they’ve both expressed they would like, they wouldn’t have had to worry about hiding her/them from the world because of some fake narrative that they had to maintain. They just wouldn’t have had to hide, period, and to me, the hiding and lying would be the most difficult, stressful thing to do if I were in their shoes. But most of all, they wouldn’t have had to compromise the respect and love that they received from their loyal, passionate fans early on, but that they slowly chipped away at with their deceit, gaslighting, belittling (”crazy” and “delusional”), troll endorsement, and bullying enabling.

They could have had the most loyal, loving, creative, powerful fandom of any fandom out there, and not one that is now among the most fractured. Fans would have been able to proudly celebrate both OL and “S/C together,” without all the venom and vitriole of the antis, NSTs, celebri-trolls, and assorted nasties. They could have used the power of the fandom to win new acting jobs and entertainment industry awards, People’s Choice Awards, etc. They could have rallied their fans behind their causes to an even greater degree and brought in even more money for WCC,Bloodwise, MPC, and Cahonas.  

But most important of all, S/C would have been able to be their authentic, lovely, loving, joking, touchy, raunchy, perfectly synchronized selves around one another ... all the time. They could have openly, as a couple, shared all the exciting highs in their careers together. They could have slayed the red carpets together. S could have proudly escorted his wifey to all the awards show parties, and they could have made all their networking connections together as a team ... or separately if needed (but while watching each other’s back). S could have been there to cheer C on from his seat next to her at the GGs, the BAFTAs, the IFTAs, etc.

Perhaps, someday, we’ll be lucky enough to see S and C actually come out publicly as a RL couple and we can celebrate their love for reals. And I can guarantee you they will be able to obtain a much higher level of privacy by being public. I know that sounds contradictory, but it’s true. Once the fandom knows the truth ... the actual truth and not the fake truth ... everyone will take a collective deep breath, calm down, and celebrate S/C together. Those that aren’t pulling for S/C together will pack up their hatred for happiness and go home or move on to find another fandom to destroy. There will be no more intrusions on S/C’s privacy, and that of their family and friend’s, caused by fandom factions fighting over “are they/aren’t they?” and trying to examine every little micro-detail to prove that their side is correct.

Until then, we can imagine S/C together, we have that right.

[curestardust]

if you want: wholesome stories / great comedy / slice-of-life

Hinamatsuri was a last minute addition to my Spring watchlist (yes, I’m STILL watching Spring Season anime) and I almost dropped it based on the first episode. But I’m very glad that I didn’t because it turned out to be a very fun and wholesome experience.

Let me explain. The first episode starts out with Hina appearing at Nitta’s house. She has psychic superpowers. Nitta gets sent on a suicide mission cause he is part of the yakuza and Hina helps him out with her powers. We get some backstory on the place Hina came from and how they used her to order her (possibly) to kill people and such. There’s some minimal comedy as well but it’s not very prevalent. This episode is one of the worst pilot episodes I’ve ever seen. Why? Cause NONE of the rest of the anime even resembles the tone set up here! The yakuza bussiness? Irrelevant. Hina’s powers? Irrelevant. Hina’s backstory? (Almost) irrelevant. Comedy? Cranked up to the max. 

Even if you aren’t quite fond of the dynamic of Hina and Nitta, or their personalities in general, no need to worry cause there are actually 3 main characters in Hinamatsuri. First we’ve Hina of course. She is very careless and childish and I’m not going to lie, I had trouble tolerating her at some parts. Second is Anzu, who’s sent by the “organization” to bring Hina back. She uses her powers for about 2 seconds, loses, realises that she can’t go back and becomes homeless. Her story is the most touching out of the three, with the least comedy. Our third character is Hitomi who’s completely seperate from the superpower/organization plotline as she is just a normal schoolgirl who gets dragged into having to work (keeping it as vague as possible).

Episodes consist of 1 story in the first half and a completely seperate one in the second half. The main character keeps changing which is great, cause as I said all 3 characters’ stories have distinct feel and tone to them. 

The comedy is really good imo. Great timing and great reactions with the jokes being surreal but not too much as to become too weird. The art style may get a little to get used to however the animation quality is up to par. [8/10] (x)

Recommend: HELL Yeah! | Yes | Eh??? | Nope | This anime killed my parents 

if you want: cute girls / cute female friendships / some pure fun / exciting story / good character development / basically no fanservice!

And in today’s “only Japan could come up with something like this” we have racing horse girls, The Anime!

And I’m going to start with what’s all on your minds when you look at this the first time. “Horse girls, anime of a mobile game = bad production, no story and lots of creepy fanservice” right? Actually, no! Not even close. I avoided this as well cause that was what I thought it was going to be like but I gave in and I sure am glad I did! Because there’s no fanservice, the production quality is great and the story is actually thrilling! 

So in Umamusume there are girls who are half horse and half human which basically means that they have the physical capabilites of a horse but the looks of a human (with cutesy ears and tails of course because anime). These girls attend schools to take part in races. That’s it, that’s the anime. But wait! It’s actually...pretty exciting?

First off, from reading other people’s reviews and doing some minor googling, it turns out that the characters in the anime are actually based on...real life, actual racing horses. Not only that, but their hair colours are actually based on those horses’ fur! This is why a lot of them have weird white streaks in their hair because the horses often have white spots of fur. I know that’s a minor detail but I was amazed by this because...it shows that the creators not only have knowledge of the base material but are actually dedicated about it. I’ve also come to know that the races we see in the anime are also based on real races that happened with the same outcomes.

We basically have 2 main characters, Special Week and Silence Suzuka. Suzuka is an already established and talented horse girl who however is losing her love of racing. Spe-chan (Special Week’s nickname [incredible]) is new to the school and taking part in races and we follow these two on their journey. 

In regards to characters, there are a shitton of them. First we have the trainers of the 2 teams. The male trainer is the one whom you would expect to be the “fanservice/self-insert” thing character and they kinda set him up as such in the first episode however he becomes more of a father figure to the girls. Then, there’s Team Spica with their members who are the main supporting chars and Team Rigil who’re the secondary supporting characters. We get to know the Spica girls more but they’re mostly there to provide some additional entertainment. Which is a big shame cause they’re shown racing in the opening and they all seem to have different techniques but we’re not shown that in the anime itself. BUT! While I’m sad about that, I’m also glad that the anime knew what to prioritise in its short runtime of 13 episodes. In the end, the focus was Special Week and Suzuka’s character development in which the races WERE the focal point.

And the races! Yes, it’s just a bunch of girls running in a big circle but they made them so exciting! There’s one quite impactful race where the main character is not doing quite well and then the background and sound dissapears and she takes a deep breath. And I was rooting for her so hard and so stressed that I unconsciously took a breath WITH her. That’s how invested the anime can make you. 

Oh and side-note, the winning girls put up basically an idol performance at the end of the day of the race with singing and dancing and all that but the anime basically pays no attention it so I’m guessing that it was only included because it’s in the mobile game(?).

Umamusume is a surprising little gem. The creator’s dedication to horce racing bleeds through the anime and is one of the big reason that it’s so enjoyable. With lovable characters and an exciting and heartfelt story, I’d recommend this to anyone. [9/10] (x)

Recommend: HELL Yeah! | Yes | Eh??? | Nope | This anime killed my parents

if you want: (hetero) romcom / adults juggling IRL and being weebs / some not cringy romance / to go “uwu” / relatable shipping problems / relatable gaming problems

Wotakoi is definitely not something that’d be my first choice when deciding what to watch. Romance focused anime isn’t really my style but I saw another user that I like blog about it and saw how high rated it was and as there was the “comedy” aspect I thought...eh there isn’t really much to lose here, at most I’ll just dislike it. But I’m incredibly glad to say that this, just as the other 2 anime included in this post that I only gave a chance due to “peer pressure”, actually didn’t dissappoint!

Our main cast is made up of adults in their mid-twenties, working an office job. In the first episode we are introduced to Narumi who’s switching to work at a new firm where she founds out that her childhood friend Hirotaka is also employed at. Narumi was first planning on hiding her hobby of being a big-ass weeb but she soon finds out that 2 of her co-workers also share this hobby of hers. The first episode then ends with Hirotaka and Narumi deciding to “date” purely because they’re both weebs and it would be convinient not to have to hide it.

There’s a great chemistry between the 4 main characters and the shippers are probably having a field time with this anime as basically all of them are shippable with each other. 

So, obviously this being a shoujo, the main appeal to most fans would be the romance but that definitely wouldn’t be enough for me to enjoy something. But this is where the comedy and the “relatable :100_emoji:” aspect comes in. The 2 work in tandem, with most of the humour steming from typical “otaku problems” and how much being a weeb affects their everyday life. 

One downside would be the kind of rushed ending. Wotakoi isn’t a plot focused anime but they introduce a new character like 2 episodes before the finale and I just didn’t see the point. It DOES show the text “See you later” or something at the very end, so maybe there will be a second season? (Would watch). I also thought there was a missed opportunity with the last character introduced as she is obviously also set up as a love interest for another character (not one in the main cast, don’t worry) but this char thinks that she is a guy. Now, the main 2 female characters are BL lovers and I thought that introducing an actual gay couple into the anime would force them to realise that, you know...it’s not very polite to fantasise or obsess over gay people just cause of their sexuality...but eh, I guess that’d be a too serious topic for something as lighthearted as Wotakoi.

All in all, it was a nice, short and fun 11 episodes and if you like comedy, romance or both, I’d definitely recommend! [7/10] (x)

Recommend: HELL Yeah! | Yes | Eh??? | Nope | This anime killed my parents