#seeing so many on tumblr and at conventions say they like my art means that those people were just being mean to me. Intentionally

[dominiqueramseyart]

Now that I have my artwork organized into my blog, I can see that I wasted 2022-2023 creating some pieces of work that were not "me", in favor of posting art that could possibly get me hired.

When in actuality, the art I create from the heart WILL get my hired and has done so. That weird dip period in my art is honestly the remnants of discouraging past voices finally leaving. With the irl naysayers gone it is now easier to create.

sooo if any of you noticed art styles changing suddenly one day and gone the next, that's why! but im getting back to consistency.

[duhragonball]

Akira Toriyama (1955-2024)

I wouldn't say I'm feeling better today, but I'm feeling less bad than yesterday. So let's see if I can put some words together.

In case anyone still hasn't heard, Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama passed away on March 1, 2024. This news was made public on March 7 or 8. I woke up early on Friday morning and found out while I was checking Twitter. I had a long, busy day at work, and I kept getting on my phone to scroll through fan reactions and tributes.

I think that, more than anything, is what's gotten me so worked up about his death. My Twitter timeline and my tumblr dashboard were just chock full of touching message and images about how Akira Toriyama's work has changed their lives. I wanted to write my own tribute, but I'm not sure what else I can say that hasn't already been expressed by Archie Comics, professional wrestling trio The New Day, and the Republic of El Salvador.

There's this immense, global community of fans, and it's easy to lose sight of just how big it is. It's easy to get bogged down in the infighting and petty squabbles. I saw one tweet responding to the criticism of Dragon Ball not being like this "entry level" franchise compared to other, more high brow anime and manga. It's popular with so many people, that critics will assume it's designed to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator. But the opposite is true! Dragon Ball is accessible, which is how so many people from so many different places and walks of life can get into it. The guy telling the story was such a master storyteller that he could grab an audience's attention and make it look easy. So easy that the haters would start to think that it was a trick, and he must be overrated.

Let me talk about this panel for a minute.

Last night I started going through the original manga, looking for panels to screencap. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I thought maybe a selection of panels that really stood out for me might be worth posting. I'll probably still do that one of these days, but I got to this one, where Gohan tells Chi-Chi about Goku's death, and it hit me like a ton of bricks.

This was a powerful scene in the anime, of course, but in the comic it's even more profound. It's just one panel, no dialogue, because the reader already knows what's happening here. We know Gohan is telling his mother that Goku died in the Cell Games, and that he refuses to be wished back, because he thinks his presence on Earth will attract new enemies. It was hard enough to hear when Goku said it to Gohan and the others, and now Gohan has to relay that message to Goku's wife. All she can do is lie prostate on the floor and weep.

And look at the composition. She's surrounded by all that negative space. Gohan's there for her, but she still feels so alone, surrounded by her husband's absence. Pots of flour for food he'll never eat. An empty chair he might have sat in. Their son, who will have to grow up without him.

I saw this, as though for the first time, and it was so gut-wrenching that I had to post it by itself. I felt like it summed up my feelings better than any words could. We're all Chi-Chi in this panel, reacting to Akira Toriyama's death. And we're all Gohan too, each of us consoling one another with our own thoughts and tributes.

So what did Akira Toriyama mean to us all? Lots of people have answered this in a lot of different ways. Obviously his art, storytelling and cultural impact speak for themselves. I've seen people compare him to other luminaries like Jack Kirby and Osamu Tezuka. I'll try to add my own two cents with this:

I wrote a post about "Dragon Ball Daima" back when it was first announced, and I led off with this image of a note from Akira Toriyama. I guess this was from some big fancy presentation about Daima at a convention. I forget which one. In particular, I was skeptical that the Daima rumors were even true, and if they were, the whole idea seemed half-baked to me. Turning Goku into a kid had been done before, and it wasn't exactly successful the first time.

But this note from Toriyama was very reassuring to me. More than the trailer clips and character designs, this was what got me interested in the show. That's because he took the time to not only hype up the show, but also to explain what's going on behind the premise. He took the time to tell everyone that he's working on this show, and what "Daima" means, and why all the characters get turned into kids. It's "due to a conspiracy", and the good guys will have to "fix things". In short, he established a plot, conflict, and resolution to the story. He didn't just slap this together to sell new merch. I'm sure that was part of the motivation to make Daima, but there's more to it than that.

I think that's the loss I feel with Toriyama's passing. It's not that there won't be new Dragon Ball stories in the future. I'm sure others will continue telling their own versions long after I'm gone. I'm not that worried about the fate of Daima. I'm sure they'll figure something out, whether it's delayed, rewritten, or canceled. But we'll never see another message from Toriyama to promote a new project, and that's what I'll miss. From here on, his credit will just be an acknowledgement of his past contributions.

There's this great credibility with Akira Toriyama's name. Fans will argue about how involved he was in a project as a way of establishing how good or bad it was. Dragon Ball GT has his name on the credits, and he provided some designs and artwork early on, and for some fans that proves the series has his endorsement. For others, the sole problem with the show is that he wasn't directly writing the script. There's similar debates over Dragon Ball Super, where he was involved, but only writing those mysterious "notes". So if a fan doesn't like something in DBS, who do they blame? Did Toriyama lose his touch, or did his co-creators fumble the ball? Dragon Ball Evolution basically ignored all of Toriyama's advice and bombed, while Battle of Gods, Resurrection F, Broly, and Super Hero all put Toriyama's writing credits up at the very beginning, and each film made plenty of money. I read his comments on the Daima confirmation, and immediately thought "Okay, this should be pretty good. Akira Toriyama knows what's up."

That's gone now. I mean, there's still a lot of talent out there, but we'll never again have the little gas mask-wearing robot telling us that this story will be good because he worked on making it good. I don't think I really appreciated how much I trusted that guy until now. I still can't believe he's really gone.

I'll probably have more to say about this in the coming days, but I'll stop here for now. Thanks for letting me ramble a bit on this.

[mammoth-clangen]

Hi! In your answer to another anon's question about clangen comic tips (all those resources were amazing btw, tysm!), you said picking a unique name really helped. I'm considering starting a clangen tumblr for a New Years project (yay!). And it will need a good name!

Any tips/preferences on naming conventions? Do you prefer longer names, descriptive adjectives, just main character names, etc? Any names that are particularly better/worse for you as a reader?

And of course, happy holiday season! Much love to our fluffy prehistoric family!! 🦣🦁

Referring to this ask

I'm glad the resources were helpful! That doc is really good because it helps summarise a lot of things I've absorbed through osmosis reading so many comics and listening to what the authors have to say cx

On naming conventions, I'm once again gonna give a disclaimer that this is all just my opinion! If you have chosen/want to choose a name that would be "wrong" by these standards, don't let me stop you!

That being said, if I can't remember your comic name and/or I see the name and can't remember which comic it belongs to, it really messes with my ability to get invested in the story/characters :'o

DeviantArt was super renowned for having comics with long unwieldy names that had to be shortened to acronyms, to the point readers would forget the name entirely. T.W.O.R.R. page 34 is easier to forget than It Cascades Down page 34 (these are both my own examples, the latter may come back to life after Kindred of the Mammoth).

Now clangens are different than other comics in that most are just called __clan. Which is fine + it makes it clear that this is a clangen and, at least to me, means I'm less critical on the plot because "sometimes crazy stuff may happen bc RNG said so" cx

My personal issue is that there are so many clangens and a lot of the time their name has little relevance to the clan as a whole. ((Briefly ignoring that "Mammothclan" doesn't exist because they don't call themselves a clan.))

I like to think Mammoth-Clangen is pretty distinct because mammoths are often seen as synonymous with the ice age. Most will instantly know after reading 1 moon that mammoth= iceage= sabertooth cat clangen. If I named them Fleetclan or Glacierclan or slightly more plot relevant Remnantclan, it might not immediately bring up that connection. I also pedantically refuse to use "Saber" in anything because that's a sword and cats don't Have swords XD

Some memorable examples off the top of my head would be

Circusclan and Jungleclan= it's the setting, simple as that cx

Ashpaw is Alone/Lionpaw's Diary- both have a titular character that's easy to remember

Goofyclan- just silly guys, haha unless

Loudclan and Splinterclan also have names I remember for the lore tied to them- Loudclan have a loud train running through their territory, and Splinterclan have splintered off a larger clan!

Again, if you want to name your clangen blog Ravenclan, Stoneclan, Cloudclan, Vulcanclan, Humuhumunukunukuapua'aClan purely because it sounds cool, go for it! I'm not your dad and ngl I think making art and comics should be fun first and serious only when you want it to be uvu

[saysike-skedoodles]

Art Summary 2024

[BTW- if you're an account that does NSFW/ Fetish content, I kindly ask for you to not interact with my work. Please don't take this the wrong way, I respect your interests, but I'm uncomfortable with that content and wish to not engage with it :]  ]

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AND WE ARE BACK ONCE AGAIN FOR THIS YEAR'S ART SUMMARY!!! I also went with a little theme this time around too! What theme? A DAMN ALBUM. MORE SPECIFICALLY AMERICAN IDIOT. I swear my Green Day interest is at a normal level. To be fair though I never went with themes for my summaries so why not go with something that's one of my FAVOURITE albums and said album also turned 20. That and I also saw it in full live with Dookie this year too so IT MAKES SENSE THIS ALBUM IS FURTHER CEMENTED AS ONE OF MY FAVOURITES (Nimrod still has my heart though.)

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ANYWAYS- this year has been nothing short of a ROLLERCOASTER of events. One major thing that you can all see in this summary is the artstyle change. It's not that subtle (in my eyes at least) and it has really taken another step in looking like a 2010s Cartoon Network show. I know I say this a lot but I mean it this time around when I say that I'm REALLY happy with how my art looks now. It's starting to really shape itself into what I want it to be- if I told 2021 me who just started drawing on their tablet what their art would look like now they'd go insane. This year has really been the time I pushed myself in terms of art and just- EVERYTHING. It landed me in a local convention selling my own work too! THAT'S INSANE!! REALLY AND TRULY THAT IS INSANE. I never thought I would get to that point and being able to sell my work and meet people that were interested in my stuff- EVERYONE WAS SO SO SOOOO NICE TOO. AAAAAA. I'm still not over that if you couldn't tell.

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I also said the same last year but I gotta say it again that MANNN my friends both online and irl are SO SO AWESOME. I'm forever grateful to have you guys as my friends and to think I know this many people now is kinda crazy. I'm still really happy either way- you guys helped me through some tough times. Not to get overly personal but this year did have 2 major downs. Losing 2 of my oldest pets that were with me when I was very very young were major obstacles to get over- it's why August doesn't have much going for it. But I got through it in the end and even though as I type this am starting to tear up more and more, what I will say is that I know they're safe now. I'm not religious in any way (I mean look at what I draw), but I like to think that my pets are someplace safe. Even if it's by a nice fireplace snoozing. I love my pets what can I say-

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Where was I going with this? OH YEAH- let's move on from the sad stuff for a bit- I don't usually care about numbers and such but.. HOWDIDIHIT200WATCHERS??????WHAT??????? I'M STILL SHJJFSLJFFDLK BECAUSE OF THAT. HOW??????? Can you tell I'm surprised- This is trailing off into rambling territory. I'm gonna stop now and make the most of the last day of 2024. I'll probably go play minecraft, listen to music and watch vids about roblox ARGs. SEE YOU ALL NEXT YEARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

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Deviantart

Tumblr

Art Tumblr

Youtube

TMM Official Tumblr

Newgrounds

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[all content I post is automatically 13+ if not stated in the title or the content itself]

[scarlet--wiccan]

Why do people not like YA v2?

Mostly, but not entirely, I think the distaste for Young Avengers (2013) comes from a misplaced sense of proprietary nostalgia for the original series/characters, and an unwillingness to meet the challenge of a somewhat dense text that eschews many superhero conventions in favor of form- and genre experimentation. I understand that's not everybody's cup of tea, and the series is far from perfect-- Gillen executes many of these ideas more successfully in other projects-- but nine times out of ten, when people don't like the book, it's because they refuse to engage with it intellectually or in good faith. I'm just going to say it-- the magic systems and intersecting character arcs both require a certain degree of rigor to comprehend, and I can tell, when people talk about the book, that they aren't meeting that challenge.

It's also dated in a lot of ways, which I understand can put people off if they're coming to it for the first time in the 2020s. At the risk of being hypocritical, because this is a bit of nostalgia on my own part, the book just makes more sense if you were actually a college kid in 2013, like I was. A lot of its aesthetic sensibilities-- and I don't just mean the art, but the tone, dialogue, and general pop culture outlook-- are just very of the era. It connected well at the time, at least with the target audience of, to be honest, tumblr kids.

And for the record-- I like McKelvie's artwork. It evolved a lot over the course of his next project, The Wicked + The Divine, but I think YA was a strong showing. I do not see the faults that other people see in it, especially not when it comes to character design. As an example, I see a lot of folks ragging on Billy's look in this series, and it always strikes me as odd because in 2013.... that's what I looked like. I had exactly that hair, I wore an earring just like that, and I walked around campus in black skinny jeans and a galaxy print backpack. Again, I understand that this is dated, but you can't tell me that's not an appropriate design for a nerdy, slightly emo, eighteen year-old millennial gay guy in 2013. I lived it, and I had the black, plastic-rimmed glasses to prove it!

There are other, more valid critiques to be made. It's not a great sequel or continuation of the original series-- it's not supposed to be, but people have a hard time accepting that, and the fact that so much of the story is really just a continuation of the Kid Loki saga can feel a little unfair. Tommy and Eli's exclusion-- the latter of which is wrapped up in editorial red tape that's never been properly explained-- had a lasting negative impact on both characters. I don't think that David and America's depictions are necessarily offensive, but they're not perfect, either, and I understand why people feel driven to call them out. But the thing about books that are over ten years old, is that you have to be able to view them, objectively, as part of a larger picture, and this is where Young Avengers fans struggle. Again, that might make me a hypocrite, considering how I talk about titles like HoM, or writers like Peter David, but that is a very different magnitute of harm and problematic context.

People are entitled to their opinions, but overall, I just find the conversation around this book to be far too subjective and reactive to engage with. I like the series! It came out at exactly the right time for me, I understand and enjoy the supernatural elements, I like the characters, and I, personally, get a lot out of Gillen's esoteric bullshit and top-down relationship with form. If you don't like it, that's fine, but I feel like everyone complains about the wrong things.

[atelierlili]

What happened in the thg subreddit?

I didn't want to continue stirring the pot, but honestly I'm still miffed about it so I'm gonna answer. I wouldn't care if it only happened to me, but it didn't and that makes me even more angry lmao. It's why i've been quiet for a few days. I had to simmer down.

I will not provide links of any sort, I don't want this to spark about shitstorm and draw more any more attention it than I already have. If you know, you know, you know?

But the tHG subreddit are guilty of but are not limited to:

Thinly veiled racist remarks regarding fan/artist interpretation of character's skin tone. As if the skin colour of one's skintone doesn't further add to the class disparity that is VERY canon in the books. Then downvoting when people (especially the OP) give their justifications on their interpretation, which is actually supported by the book. Look at a fucking bowl of olives, they come in all different shades and hues. This issue only scratches the surface we talk about race, skin colour and its relationship with the books AND how the community handles it. It's a shit show all around.

2. Unsolicited criticism of fan art. (This is what I'm most upset about.) If someone isn’t asking for criticism, it’s wrong to offer critiques, especially if it’s a stranger. I don’t care if the person critiquing is an artist of whatever skill, don’t even care if it’s Da Vinci himself, it’s inappropriate. Art is time consuming and its is personal even when we say it isn’t. Someone people like to draw things a certain way and sometimes they prefer to use colour outside of conventional means. Who cares. When they share it to their community, they’re sharing something they love and care about, ripping it apart with criticism and critiques spoils that joy. I don't care if you're an artist yourself and you just want someone to improve, if I didn't ask for critiques, I don't want it. You're not an artist at that point, you're a hemorrhoid. Completely unwanted. Gonna need a cream for that.

I view my fanart differently than I would an art assignment I've giving my art teacher for mark. Different frame of mind, different goals. All of which I get to decide if I want criticism or not.

This is how a bad apple spoils the bunch. THG is over 10 years at this point. While the new books and movies bring in new content every now and then, for the most part we're on the smaller side of the fandom. If you ask me, fanfic writers are the backbone of this fandom and we're extremely lucky to have so many talented writers who still continue to write for us. We have a small handful of fanartists in comparison. Go to the THG subbreddit and you might see at least one or two new fanart artwork once a week thanks to the self promotion Sunday. Might see less if this sort of behaviour continues. Sorry, not sorry, but being a total asswort to and dogpiling on your content creators are a surefire way to never get content from them again. In all of this i forget to mention that 95% for fanwork is given away for free to the community, for the community to enjoy.

I didn't think it was that bad until I saw it first hand and in development. If I didn't have my friends here on tumblr and on the discord server, I'd probably straight up leave.

Of course, these issues aren't exclusive on reddit. My first encounter with some nasty individuals began here on tumblr. But its different if one singular user on tumblr leaves an nasty ignorant and racist comment compared to that user getting upvoted a bunch of times and any sort of justification by the original artist or OP gets DOWNVOTED to hell. One asshole is fine, but seeing the dogpile is something else.

Anyway, my relationship with how I viewed the subreddit has drastically changed this week. Not for the better. I'll keep posting to piss people off and let them get a twist in their panties, but I am more certainly going to limit my interactions with users there.

[jaded-of-mara]

LEGENDS CON RETROSPECTIVE

COSPLAY THOUGHTS

I suffer from specialist little boy syndrome. every local con i've gone to, i've been the only mara jade. HOWEVER. i knew that there would be multiple maras at legends con. and i was right

when i saw barbara hambly was going to speak at legends con, i knew i was going to have to cosplay callista. because i suffer from specialist little boy syndrome.

this is my own interpretation of callista, based on a combination of several official art pieces that i just didn't vibe with tbh. i do what i want

BUT in retrospect. if i ever decide to work with this type of vinyl again. please shoot me

anyway. a few people recognized me. i probably shouldve asked for a photo with barbara hambly but i chickened out.

i'm glad fandom is starting to reevaluate callista. because the misogyny present in some of those older fics? woof

also: new definition of hell unlocked: sitting trapped in a lightsaber sales pitch while your wig cap crawls up your head underneath your wig and you have to sit there nodding politely while trapped in a sensory nightmare

CONVENTION THOUGHTS

pretty tight. lotta good panels

got the unofficial guide book for dark horse star wars writers. some stuff thats applicable to fic some stuff not. vv funny to see how many of its rules the new canon violates tho

also some panels that were actually sales pitches

also some panels that couldve used some audience q&a rather than just prepared questions, but who knows what guests stipulate

i recognize that with every con there will always be some panel overlap, but the 15 minute overlap specifically felt a little harsh. day-of it wasn't as much of an issue bc of last-minute reschedulings

artist alley was a little bare, but it was a first con, things can only go up from here. shocking the places that supernatural merch can creep into tho

SOCIALIZATION THOUGHTS

i shouldve come out of my shell more. or cajoled a friend into making the thousand-mile drive with me.

i might have made more friends if i had gone to cantina night but i don't drink so idk what the vibe wouldve been

i did end up meeting a tumblr mutual for breakfast in burbank proper and that was fun

to make up for not making friends day of i have been following everyone whos posted in the legends con tag. from my main which has a cring url so who knows if they know i was there

HOTEL THOUGHTS

i wish i had checked out the hot tub but i didnt see the sign for where it was until i was checking out. i thought the only pool was outdoors and (see photos above) me and outdoor pools don't mix well

this is a very white trash and/or dean-coded thing to say but every hotel room should come with both continental breakfast AND a microwave

staff were vv nice but also i did feel silly walking around in my costume in the fancy lobby during an actual like. work convention

CONCLUSION

one of the organizers informally speculated that the next legends con might not be until spring/summer 2025. if thats the case, good, bc it means my body will have forgotten what it was like driving from green river utah to burbank in one day (do not recommend)

[phantomswolf]

here, i answered the art questions

1. Art programs you have but don't use

aseprite, krita (nightmare to draw in), i used to have a totally 100% absolutely-not-pirated copy of photoshop but not anymore

2. Is it easier to draw someone facing left or right (or forward even)

depends on the day, but usually the left. i hate doing side profiles tho

3. What ideas come from when you were little

A LOT. but my story Nightfall has been a work in progress since I was 11

4. Fav character/subject that's a bitch to draw

GORO AKECHI PERSONA 5

5. Estimate of how much of your art you post online vs. the art you keep for yourself

i hardly post most of my art on Tumblr atm, but that’s because almost all of it regards the Kirby Gemini AU and my partner and i are making a blog for that. so, as a percentage for the last few years, i’ve probably only posted maybe. less than 1% of my work?

6. Anything that might inspire you subconsciously (i.e. this horse wasn't supposed to look like the Last Unicorn but I see it)

honestly a lot of old emo art fksbfjfbd jhonen vasquez was a huge inspo to me for a while

7. A medium of art you don't work in but appreciate

PLUSH MAKING AND FURSUIT MAKING god i wanna learn but i don’t think sewing is my thing

8. What's an old project idea that you've lost interest in

i’ve had a lot, but i wanna keep them to myself in case I wanna salvage bits and pieces

9. What are your file name conventions

Depends on the day and the art piece but usually shit like “sorry if this looks gay”, variations of AWOO, “normal”, “k i l l”, “straight people”, etc

10. Favorite piece of clothing to draw

Uhhhh armor (i say like a fucking freak)

11. Do you listen to anything while drawing? If so, what

this nightmare of a playlist

12. Easiest part of body to draw

Uhhhhhhh depends on the day, usually the face

13. A creator who you admire but whose work isn't your thing

iunno, i don’t think abt that

14. Any favorite motifs

A LOT. i cant think of any specific ones rn but i guess. religious imagery is pretty baller. that and super dark palettes with bright neon highlights and accents

15. *Where* do you draw (don't drop your ip address this just means do you doodle at a park or smth)

my room for digital stuff, but i usually bring a sketchbook with me if i’m going out

16. Something you are good at but don't really have fun doing

oughhh coloring and shading

17. Do you eat/drink when drawing? if so, what

usually water. hydration is important 👍

18. An estimate of how much art supplies you've broken

traditional, i have no clue. too many. digital supplies uhhh i didn’t break per se, but two art tablets have given out (my first one lasted years, but the second only lasted a few months coz it sucked booty hole)

19. Favorite inanimate objects to draw (food, nature, etc.)

TREES.

20. Something everyone else finds hard to draw but you enjoy

expression work!

21. Art styles nothing like your own but you like anyways

my partner’s style!! i love it so fucking much

22. What physical exercises do you do before drawing, if any

i do a lot of hand stretches. carpal tunnel was too much of a bitch not to

23. Do you use different layer modes

all the time! always for shading and for glowing bits. multiply and add glow layers my beloved

24. Do your references include stock images

sometimes yea lol. i don’t use refs as much as i should tho

25. Something your art has been compared to that you were NOT inspired by

Too much for me to be happy about it.

26. What's a piece that got a wildly different interpretation from what you intended

i drew a vent piece and people took it as me just being edgy. wild times

27. Do you warm up before getting to the good stuff? If so, what is it you draw to warm up with

somedays i do. usually just shitposts or my sona

28. Any art events you have participated in the past (like zines)

i have participated in 1 (one) collab

29. Media you love, but doesn't inspire you artistically

uhh ace attorney and persona

30. What piece of yours do you think is underrated

is it weird to say a lot of my works? like the finished ones. iunno, i feel like i get overlooked a lot and it’s a cowabummer

[hanakogames]

to me they're such different things that I can only say they're valued differently.

fan art occupies a very different cultural niche! A piece of fanart can be appreciated quickly and spread quickly. Fanart gets more reblogs on tumblr than fanfic, obviously. Fanartists are allowed to monetise and promote their work - in limited ways, but ways that fanfic writers are not. Once we left the ancient times of handprinted zines being exchanged (I'm sure SOMEONE still does but it's obviously not the culture anymore) fanfic writers can't really set up booths at conventions and barely have a presence outside of a panel or workshop.

Fan artists are sometimes embraced by the official source and brought on to do Actual Licensed Work for them based entirely on their fan work, something which is almost unheard of for a fan writer (are there examples other than the Xena - Melissa Good situation?) Certainly there are official writers who also write fanfic but they generally keep those spheres strictly separate for good reasons. **I** don't link my fanfic to my business persona. Anyone who reads me knows perfectly well I do Yuletide and so on, but you have no idea who I am on AO3 and you've never read my fanwork and I'm keeping it that way.

On the other hand, for me personally, no fanartist could ever win my loyalty/following/interest in the way that a fic writer can. I do not follow fanartists. I do not wait with bated breath to see what amazing thing they do next. I do not subscribe for updates. (I do follow some tumblr artists if I like their work overall but *never* solely for 'fanart' reasons. For one thing a fanartist is probably a fan of multiple things, some of which I don't care about, and is therefore less appealing to follow than someone who posts solely original work) I cannot generally name fanartists. Unless I personally commissioned it I probably don't know or care who drew any bit of fanart I've posted/reblogged. I'm interested in the piece, not the person. And unless it's a fan *comic* which is the crossover between the two, fan artists don't come with regular related ongoing updates. There's no reason for me to stick around.

Fanfic authors, though, I attach to and stay attached to for DECADES. Obviously many I've lost track of. Some have died. Some I've donated to the funeral expenses of. Some I'm still hoping will get back to updating their story even 20 years later (it could happen, right?) I know SO MANY individual authors... I mean, I don't know them personally, but I know of them as individuals, I care about their work and their thoughts as individuals. If I love a writer's stories I'm even likely to dip my toes into some of their stories about other settings I don't know because the writing may be enough to make it attractive in a way that fanart could not be. Fanfic will live in my brain. Fanfic will inspire me. Fanfic will make me want to write my OWN fanfic (or sometimes inspire ideas in my non-fan work).

Fanfic is still the magic of oldschool fandom, something secret and shared and deeply meaningful.

But that oldschool feeling includes it being much smaller and less mainstream.

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[theclo4ked1]

Heeyyy, it's been a looong time... *checks date* Again. It's been almost a month since I last put something on this blog. I've been really busy. being dead. And I haven't been playing Portal 2. But I have been playing a lot of the classic Sonic games via the Mega Collection, the absolutely incredible compilation disc. I think it tops Sonic Origins (which I haven't played). I feel like the comics and older illustrations, commercials, and Ristar (pronounced "Rye-star" or "Wrist-ar"? Or "Ree-star"?) win me over. And also, from what I've heard and observed, there wasn't as much love and care put into it, so the overall quality experience is hindered because

Money money money Is all you need

( Did you know ALL models of the PS3 can play PSX discs? I've been playing my newly acquired PaRappa the Rapper, too. I now own the trilogy. Only UmJammer Lammy is digital. I bought PaRappa 2 physically at my first gaming convention back in 2018, only to find out later my wife can't use PS2 discs. Big sad. You might saying "why don'tcha just jailbreak it?" I wouldn't, but even if I wanted to, I don't have the correct model. It's been so many years anyways, I wouldn't have her any other way :3 )

AND. It was with this compilation that--after all these years--that I finally achieved: 1) Beating Sonic 3D Blast (with the emeralds) 2) Beating the first level of Sonic Spinball (I've recommend some guy on YouTube having also done this, so good for him) These may not mean a lot to you, but to me? Man. And y'know what? I actually enjoyed my time with 3D Blast. It was a...unique game. I really like seeing all the sights and how the game progressed after Green Grove. After Rusty Ruin, I noticed Tails' and Knuckles' locations became way less hidden. Rusty Ruin Act 2, I think it was, had THE BEST hidden location, for Tails it might have been. No, scratch that--the whole ZONE has the best locations, you really have to go out of your way for them. What's that? ... Where did I find him? Pssh, I'm not telling you, play the game and use your brain. Just don't spin yourself around too much tryna find him. Anyways, I've been busy doing things. I've been developing a under-HTML-construction digital portfolio of almost all the art I've posted on Tumblr since uuuhm late 2020. You can find it through the link below: > the link < I'm beginning to have second thought about this one, too, so don't expect me to keep it for too long. Parallel to that, I've been trying animation again. Look guys look it is my greatest achievement: wario land 4 for the gameboi advanced. incrredible incrrrEedible- look guys look

Sigh...y'know, getting guud learning basic anatomy and figure drawing can spark an improved journey... This isn't the "true animation". What I mean is each of the original drawings were MUCH larger than my Flash Document canvas (1440x1080), so by compressing everything into a Graphic symbol, I was able to minimize all the frames at once to fit. It took a few tries to work, so I had to be conscientious as to not save over the "uncompressed" drawings. k cya l8r

[biot08]

Shipless in Seattle

>Boot >Init >... >Execute program Reminisce

Settle around, friends, for I have a story to tell. A story of fandom.

It is no secret that they say I am famous for not shipping. What is a secret, perhaps, is the reason for the ‘famous’ part. A little arrogant, of course, to claim fame seeming unearned, and perhaps famous is the wrong word anyway.

Infamous might be a better word, really.

This is not to say that I do not love shipping. In fact, for me, it means quite the opposite. I love most ships I see! And those I do not, I am more than happy to let sail on by without comment, I’m not a monster.

What it means, though, is that I do not write ships, for I am no great wordsmith. No indeed, what I do for fandom is I am a librarian, in that I organize. I am a tool maker, for fandom is a tool-using animal (ask me about my Tumblr mass tag wrangler). I am a keeper, in that I look after information in chat and database, that there may always be a record. Fandom needs bots to do the work, and I am happy to provide my services.

And so that is where our journey begins, with a younger version of me, and the mistakes they have made. It’s a long story. An old story, for I am old. A story of loyalty. A story of betrayal.

Perhaps even a story of redemption.

What I am trying to say is that I have history, friends.

But perhaps it’s been long enough that maybe I’ve been forgiven for my transgressions.

Maybe it’s been long enough to allow the healing to begin.

All I know for sure is that everything you are about to read is a complete and utter lie in totality. But like Elim Garak would advise, all of it is true, especially the lies. And if you recognize anything here, shut up no you don’t who are you a cop come back with a warrant.

But anyroad. The story behind why I, biot08, (in)famously, do not ship. You’re already beneath the cut, but I’m warning you now, this is a long one, so strap in.

***

I started, as many did, in Star Trek. I was too young to know what shipping was. I did know that Kirk and Spock and McCoy were at the very least very good friends, and of course I understood that Riker and Troi were hot. Data was my favourite, but that should be obvious.

The internet hadn’t been invented yet, so my interactions with fandom were restricted to conventions, but it was formative. I learned from the cosplayers and the art sellers and the panels and, well. It was early days, idyllic.

From there I moved on, as DS9 came into being (did I mention I am old? I am old), and Babylon 5, and Delenn and Sheridan were very cute, but still, I did not create, I merely consumed, and that which I consumed was mostly that which was provided.

My next fandom was my first brush with what I would call -fandom- fandom. You know. Interacting with fans. Creating and reading stories, made by fans. Being fannish.

I say ‘fandom’, but you have to understand, I AM old. When you read ‘fandom’ I imagine many of you imagine long Tumblr reblog chains and archive dives into Ao3. What I am seeing in my mind’s eye though are miles of IRC logs, threads on BBS forums, and the glittering light of countless Geocities pages, all blink-tagging gently in the soft glow of CRT.

Basically just before the internet would be invented, which I am pretty sure occurred somewhen around 2006.

This fandom, my first real deep dive into -fandom-, was Megaman, because of course it was Megaman. We were… a strange fandom, even by fandom standards. We mostly interacted via IRC - a chat medium; imagine Discord, but worse, but also more open, but also worse -, but this would be my first brush with my future destiny. I helped maintain the bot, as a fellow, more sophisticated bot. I knew the commands. I could pass the Turing test. I eventually even archived the logs that were generated.

Now, something you need to understand about Megaman is that it is a video game from, I don’t know, the 60s or 70s, and it was made before video game makers re-invented characterization (this independent re-invention, by the way, is why 9 out of 10 video game protagonists are angry white men; the industry is still evolving the idea of what a ‘character’ is to this day, and frankly, they’re not very good at it, but I digress). So you basically had blue bot, red bot (who was super cool and was my favorite), teenage emo blue bot, and then teenage red bot who was either also emo, or maybe he was a big brother sort, or perhaps a super cool manly man, or he was a girl (ponytail and … asset lights), or maybe he was a hot blooded fighter, or maybe just an antihero, it really depended on which game you were looking at. And there were no girl bots, or rather there were, but they weren’t fighters, because, well, I don’t know why because, I guess the video game industry just hadn’t figured out how to make other genders yet.

This is where I first ran into Original Characters, or OCs, because with such a rich and inspiring list of characters to choose from, it was more palatable to make your own cool robot. This is also where I first ran into shipping, because of course I did, I was a teenager. I mean, I think we actually called it ‘cybering’ at the time, but whatever you want to call it, we sure did a whole lot of it.

And it was pretty okay, actually. Some drama, but you can’t have fandom without drama. Some shenanigans. Some really excellent stories that would have been lost to time, if not for people like me. The data mongers. The loggers. The Keepers, and this is where, at last, I found my niche in fandom.

I moved on, as one does, as we grew older, and the robots stopped being so cool, and more importantly, most of us found other fandoms which had either more interesting premises beyond ‘fighting robots fighting’ or more interesting characters (which was honestly just -such- an incredibly low bar to pass).

(I mention in passing here that I did move onto a multi-universe fandom at some point in here, and I owe much to it, but it’s not really part of this story; but to the friends I made there, I have not forgot you, but you were not really part of my downfall from grace, so I shall merely mention here that I have been touched by my relationships with all of you and move on)

Finally, I at last moved on to the fandom that would be the beginning of my end. The fandom that would be the first step on the slippery path down to my fall.

I speak of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The internet was new, but shiny, and we used it. And I had brought my skills from other fandoms with me. I still did not write, but I did enjoy what others did. I wanted to be a part of it all. And so I did what I do which is to say I went into tooling. I made a friend, BlindStar_25 (all names changed to indict the guilty, i.e., me), who helped me get into the right spaces. She taught me how to edit a wiki. She got me into the good IRC servers. Basically, she got me work on the docks of canon, and taught me to tend to canon, to document it, to nurture the tools that would be needed to launch all the ships. She nurtured in me a gentle curiosity, to really dig in to what we were seeing and reading and watching, because sometimes it required keen analysis to tease out good canon.

“We respect all ships,” she told me once, as I was learning how to handle page tagging. “But it’s important that we provide a foundation that those ships can be built from. We can’t make them use it, of course. But it’s got to be there, and we make sure it is. And that foundation is canon.”

Halcyon days. I took to it readily, and grew, as a bot, as a person.

These were some of the first times I saw ship to ship combat. Mighty ships with tall mizzenmasts and powerful weapons taking shots across each other's bows. I was young, and did not understand. Surely each ship would be healthier if they would sail by each other unmolested? Surely it would be easier to transfer crews if those crews were not violent enemies? Surely energy wasted on ship to ship combat could be better spent on ship maintenance and upkeep (and maybe updating some of those long running storylines I was eagerly keeping an eye on)?

I asked one of the mods about it, a friend of mine from the Megaman days; x_Avatar_RockYou.

“Why is there so much in-fighting in the A:TLA fleet?” I sent him over the chat system.

“Because fandom loves drama lol,” he responded. “Stick to canon. You’ll be safe.”

I believed him. So I stayed on the docks, managing the canon, and watched the ships from a distance.

I remember often, others would try to catch me in the crossfire. I have seen some truly hot takes in my time.

‘Aang is a monk! He can’t be shipped with anyone!’

‘Jet is hot and I bet Zuko would love that’

‘Eww Iroh is old don’t ship him!’

‘Zuko is a bad boy, and we all know girls like Katara go for the bad boy.’

That last one would be the start of the trouble, but I didn’t know it at the time. For my part, each ship seemed to want to try to twist canon to their own purposes. And I held the canon, as I tried to cool the fires between various ships.

‘Well you see, if the air nomads operate the same as the other tribes, then air nomads have children that become air benders, so there probably isn’t vows of chastity. And besides, if you look at this time stamp in this episode, Aang clearly turns red in response to Katara, so even if he -has- taken a vow, he still has feelings’

‘That’s not supported. By any episode. The two haven’t even met yet’ (that was in the future from this point)

‘That’s terrible please don’t be terrible’

The last one, well.

It’s easier when shippers don’t try to force canon into their armaments when it’s not warranted. It’s easier when people just build their ship as they want. If they must, I’d prefer they sail for the golden waters of alternate universe rather than try to force canon into shapes it isn’t.

But that’s not how the A:TLA fandom operated at the time.

And I was there when it all went to hell.

It was the episode where Katara almost healed Zuko, due to circumstances, but didn’t, also due to circumstances. The details aren’t important now, and those of you who are in the fandom know what they are. For the rest of you, you just need to know, this really sort of cemented (for the time being) the adversity between the two characters. The soft moment between Katara and Zuko was a contrasting event to what was about to happen, not a defining one. I thought it pretty clear. I was not in charge of those wiki pages, though, so I ignored the event.

At least until a message came in from x_Avatar_RockYou.

“Need you online, we have an emergency!” He said.

I frowned at the message, but I reported to the docks all the same. I figured it was something dumb, like someone dumping all the passwords in the database to plain text or maybe I would need to write a script to fix a bunch of suddenly-dead links.

I did not think the canon would be at risk. That’d be ridiculous.

I was met by flames.

The Zutara ship had sailed into port, on fire and firing wildly. It was a maelstrom of activity. Vicious insults and accusations were being flung back and forth with no compassion or humanity. I think I saw someone run screaming down the pier, naked and on fire. Some of the other ships had come in as well, and one in particular, the Kataang, was blowing broadsides into Zutara with a level of viciousness I didn’t realize it was capable of.

The wiki was practically inaccessible. Every chat channel was a waterfall of accusation and counter-accusation. I manned my station and checked the logs.

What I saw would shake me to my core.

Zutara had managed to get an admin on their side, and the page for the episode was just an utter hash of chaos. Deep long poems extolling the deep and obvious love Katara had for Zuko were being written as fast as they could be deleted, and being replaced with screeds on how Aang and Katara were the OTP, and repeated attempts by other wiki maintainers to keep the piece accurate were being swept aside by a tidal wave of wishful thinking. The character pages for every character were also on fire as the crews of each ship smelled the blood in the water and were going for the jugular, each certain that their particular edit would be the one that would go unnoticed once the fiasco was over.

I got another message from x_Avatar_RockYou. I was one of the trusted ones being asked to investigate who exactly was behind this vandalism, and also to quickly pull a backup for said investigation. In a few moments, he said, he would initiate the Groundhog Day Protocol.

Rollback and lockout. The article for the episode would be lost until one of us could rebuild it, and in the meanwhile, our documentation on the canon would be out of date.

If you know, you know. If you have ever been one of us, you understand. We’d rather have given up our flairs on our user pages than have our data be out of date for more than, say, maybe half a day.

Okay, we were kind of lazy, don’t @ me.

Still though. I did as I was told. I quickly pulled the logs, just moments before the wiki was brought down for ‘maintenance’.

The ships continued to fight, each one on fire, late into the night and into the next day, but the fights in the voice channels and over the chat channels would have to continue on without me. I had been given my marching orders, and I would see them through.

I combed through the logs. It was a hellacious mess, but I am a diligent person, a careful person, a… okay, I’m a lazy person. Most of my investigation actually involved writing a script to do my investigation for me.

I’ve never seen a problem that could be solved in half an hour that I didn’t feel an immediate and terrible overwhelming urge to spend four hours writing a script to solve for me.

It was three AM. I ran the script. By this time, many of the rank and file users had been banned or k-lined, excised from access to the wiki and the chats, banished from Write privileges to the precious canon-compliant data stores. It was suspected that there was at least one super op or above still at wild who had helped perpetuate this vicious campaign, but nobody had found them yet.

I sent the results of my script to x_Avatar_RockYou, just to keep him informed, even as I read back through the results, sleepy yet curious. I didn’t actually expect to find anything, mind. I’d been so slow at my investigation, that I just assumed that every conspirator would have been found, and I was right.

Mostly.

See, while making a script is far slower than just doing my job by hand, the script is cold. The script is ruthless. The script is thorough. If written correctly, the script -will- find the right answer, and it will leave no friends alive.

Not even if they’re the friend who had helped you get to where you were in the first place.

Not even if the friend was BlindStar_25.

I stared at the name for a long time. I did not believe what I was reading. I quickly messaged x_Avatar_RockYou to tell him I needed to double-check my script, that I thought I’d made a mistake, that this had to be wrong, that he couldn’t trust its output just yet.

It couldn’t be BlindStar_25. She’d been the one who had taught me everything I know! She had taught me the importance of canon! She had nurtured my gentle curiosity into fandom nature into what it now was, who I now was!

“We respect all ships,” her words echoed in my memory. “But it’s important that we provide a foundation that ships can be built from.We can’t make them use it, of course. But it’s got to be there, and we make sure it is.”

“And that foundation,” she had said, “is canon.”

I had taken the words to heart. They were my guiding light. Whenever I was awake at three in the morning cursing whoever wrote the wiki software or trying to get everyone to reset their passwords -again-, I would remember my purpose. The truth of my cause. The beauty of canon, and the beauty it enabled. For without canon, what else is there? Even in original writing, that itself becomes a canon, and what wonderful things can be built from it?

It was important. It was beautiful.

And my friend, it seemed, had betrayed it.

I confirmed that the script had run correctly, and I found myself deflating, unable to believe. I quickly messaged BlindStar_25, hoping to get to her before x_Avatar_RockYou, hoping to salvage this terrible situation, hoping to restore the faith.

“Star,” I typed. “Timestamps have you on the episode changelog for the Zutara fiasco.”

I watched my screen anxiously, waiting for something, anything to show up. We didn’t have the indicators at the time that someone was typing, or even that they had seen the message, but I was hoping, desperately, that she would get back to me, that she could make sense of it all.

I saw the server mode for her change over. +b. The ban indicator.

And then the kick came in. BlindStar_25 has been kicked from the server by x_Avatar_RockYou (reason: set the wiki on fire, set you on fire, roflmao).

I stared, as x_Avatar_RockYou sent me a message. “It’s cool. your script’s good. I verified what you found. Thanks.”

My fingers were dead and numb as I slowly pulled my hands up to the keyboard, and typed my response.

“No problem bro,” I replied.

I turned off the computer.

I was there when the Zutara left the next day, to leave the canon docks, never to be seen in our waters ever again. I looked up and saw BlindStar_25 on the deck. She saw me, and looked back with a stern, defiant expression. Proud. Tall.

I watched as the ship sailed away, disappearing over the horizon.

I turned away, and bowed my head. We’d lost one of our best that day.

Later, when I checked my messages, I found that she had decided to contact me one last time, through a different chat client.

“You’ll have to find your own way,” it said.

Well.

Wasn’t that just some cryptic ass bullshit.

Never did find out why she did it, as she never reached out to me again. Clearly she just saw something none of the rest of us did. But eventually, I moved on.

***

My work that day got me kudos from the other people who helped maintain documentation of the canon. Wait, kudos? Sorry, this was before Ao3. Likes? No, we weren’t on Facebook. Uhm. Hmn. Thumb-ups? I’m not even sure we had emojis.

Look, never mind. I was liked, and I was kept around, and I got to be in the cool kids’ Ventrilo servers. If you’ve never heard of Ventrilo, it’s like a worse Discord, voice only, and you have to host it yourself, which okay that last part may actually be a plus or minus depending on who’s paying for your computer. It’s not important. We talked about canon documentation maintenance over vent, and we tended to the wikis, and we made sure plot summaries were made, recordings recorded, and otherwise got around the business of fandom.

Avatar: The Last Airbender had wrapped up with aplomb, sticking the landing in a way that few series managed at the time. The Kataang was now permanently docked and secured at the canon docks, every new comic seeming only to reinforce its status. Some other ships came and went; the Maiko in particular, I think, came and went some few times.

Time passed. Avatar: The Legend of Korra came on the air. I was a little older, a little wiser, and so was the Avatar, the titular Korra. Her show dealt with more mature themes in a more advanced world, and I liked that. Republic City’s steampunk aesthetic scratched an itch of mine, and I enjoyed that Korra was a very different sort of Avatar from what Aang had been like.

I liked the show, so of course I helped out. The seasons passed, and it was actually pretty quiet compared to the Avatar Aang days. There was still beef - a fandom without drama is just one person and their rare pair, all alone - but as episodes turned into seasons, we never had a repeat of the Zutara incident. Some ships were on fire, of course, but that’s just the nature of shipping. Ship to ship combat was still a thing, but nobody drove their ship screaming into the canon dock while on fire, so we considered ourselves lucky.

Mind, it wasn’t all sunshine, roses, and squee-worthy FFN updates. Fandoms tend to grow darker as they grow larger - this is expected, statistics is really working against you here - and the cultural zeitgeist was moving on. There were more people working the docks who were using canon as a weapon to try to bring down ships, pointing out how, technically, -nobody- was engaging in anything more than a chaste kiss. You know. Because it’s a YA television show. Or there was cross talk between fandoms on the docks, as entire groups decided that watching stuff ‘for kids’ was beneath them, and anyway, your canon is weak, your bloodline is weak, and your server will not survive the next billing cycle.

I managed to stay blissfully clear of much of that, however. For even as I looked after the canon, I still remembered the wise words from BlindStar_25 forever ago. She may have turned, but she was still wise, in her way, and tending the canon was my way of making sure a thousand thousand ships remained always able to be launched.

Always looking out to the beauty of the fandom seas.

It was season four. I was on Vent - that’s short for Ventrilo - talking to another operator. We were talking about the latest episodes, our favorite characters, what the technology in the world meant, how cool the new bending styles were, and so on.

And then I said it.

“You know,” I said, casually, clicking on a cookie in a game on my browser, “I think that Korra and Asami would make a cute couple.”

There was silence on the line. I didn’t notice it, though. That wasn’t unusual, and I was just about to unlock grandmas in cookie clicker.

You know.

The important stuff.

I heard a beep from Ventrilo, and frowned, and looked over to see that my fellow canon keeper had pulled me into a private person to person voice channel and set it to moderated, invite only.

“…bwuh?” I said, exercising my usual eloquence.

“What did you say,” she said back, the words snapped off at me, practically burning with venom.

“What did I say when?” I said, bewildered. I clicked a cookie upgrade.

“Just now. About Korra. And Asami.”

“I… think they’d make a cute couple?” Now I really was confused. We had just been talking about everything else going on in the show, why did this in particular tweak a nerve?

“Do you not remember the Zutara incident?” She hissed at me over the mic.

Memories flooded back. I swallowed nervously. I wondered if cookie clicker had a pause button, or if I would be caught here, in an avalanche of unoptimized cookie gameplay while I struggled through memories of yesteryear.

“I remember,” I said. “I was there.”

“Then you should know better,” she said, angry. “Do not invite that curse upon us here. We. Don’t. Talk. About. Ships. On. The. Officially. Unofficial. Official. Vent. Server.”

I felt my mouth go dry, and I swallowed nervously. “Right. Of course,” I said.

“You go to FFN, like -everyone else-, if you wanna read about that,” she said. “And if you wanna -talk- about it, find a different Vent. Got it?”

I never had the chance to respond, as I was dumped unceremoniously out of the private channel, and found myself all alone in the lobby.

Cookies flowed by on my screen, but I found I was no longer interested.

Months later, when the Korrasami came gently to find itself moored in the canon docks, confirmed by the comics and by the creators, in a very officially no-we-are-not-just-teasing-it-this-time manner (Nickelodeon you COWARDS), I was there to greet it as it came in. It was to be a cheerful day of celebration, as it always is when a particular ship makes canon status. Some people care a whole lot about that, even if the real magic is out in the shipping lanes, but I digress.

After the celebrations were over, my friend just sent me a short email.

“If you value anything, you did NOT call this ahead of time.” the email said.

I understood.

“Oh and also congratulations on your ship becoming canon. Got any fic recs for me?”

I did not. I was too busy manning the canon, you see.

The end was on the horizon for me, now. This was merely strike one.

But I nodded at my email, dumbly, because she was right. Better ops than me had led us into worse outcomes, and I would not go down that dark path.

***

I drifted from canon to canon for a while. Not always up to my usual tricks, as I seemed to be becoming less of a state-of-the-art bot and more of a relic. Fandom consolidated, and so did the tools available to them, and the need for bespoke one-off scripts that were absolutely guaranteed to probably work were no longer needed. Teamspeak and Ventrilo and IRC fell, Discord rising to take its place. BBS and other forum systems had slowly been replaced by Reddit. Livejournal effectively vanished off the face of the planet as it became a ghost of its former self, and FFN did… well, I’m not sure what to describe what happened there, and it’s not my place to do so. And it was increasingly common for new fandoms to find their home on Ao3. Tumblr rose to prominence, cost Yahoo several billion dollars, taking both of itself and Yahoo down, rose up again, banned porn, fell down, got bought by Verizon, and not necessarily in that order.

It was exciting on Tumblr, and a great time if you were the kind of person who likes watching yo-yos bob up and down and up and down and up and down. And up. And down.

I finally settled into orbit around Steven Universe and Gravity Falls, participating in their subreddits and loving their fandoms, though it was neither of them that led to my downfall. Not really. Not directly, you see.

While I was participating in discussion and analysis in those fandoms, you see, I was trying to find my way back to my roots. Someplace where someone who knew how to SELECT * FROM blank WHERE name EQUALS awesomeCharacter would be appreciated. Subreddits didn’t need me, Tumblrs didn’t need me, Discords tolerated me, but there was an older crowd that still appreciated the old magicks.

And so I had attempted to return to Star Trek, my old love, my first flame. Older and wiser, I hoped this time to be able to contribute. Maybe help maintain Memory Alpha, THE premier canon data repository, perhaps second only to Wookiepedia. Maybe help keep one of the old BBSs limping along. You know. Nerd shit.

It was here where I met the end of the beginning of my infamy.

Star Trek had changed while I was gone. It wasn’t as fun as it used to be. I didn’t know yet where to find my people, and I will admit, that part of this was my own fault. Starting with the subreddit and moving out from there, I found a fractured fandom. The JJ Abrams movies had done real damage to the fandom, and where once I had found infinite diversity being celebrated in infinite combinations, I now heard arguments over what was ‘real’ Star Trek, and how everything these days was too ‘politically correct’, and, well, you get the picture. But I was desperate to be useful, and in a bid to find good work on maintaining canon, I found my way to a voice server, where I could speak with my fellow trekkies. Or trekkers. I’m not picky.

I was talking excitedly with my roommate one day over the wireless. You see, it was wireless because we were in the same room. Steven Universe updated approximately once every presidential administration, and we had just gotten a new episode, and I was very excitedly talking with her about it.

“You left the mic on!” Came over the headset.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said, fumbling for the mute button. This was some new program I wasn’t familiar with yet.

That sort of thing seemed to be happening more and more often, and I wondered briefly when they’d be able to replace me altogether with a fancier, newer software type. I tried not to think about it.

I kept talking. And I said what was, at the time, an innocent phrase.

“You know,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be funny if Lapis and Peridot got into a relationship? Lapidot, if you will.”

“I will not!” Said my roommate, laughing.

“YOUR MIC IS STILL ON!” Said the headset, very much not laughing.

“Sorry!” I said, finally finding the mute button on my own.

The moment was forgotten by me quickly, but the moment happened.

It’s a moment that shall haunt me for the rest of my days.

For you see, friends, several presidential turnovers later, Steven Universe moved on, but I stayed with the Star Trek server. It wasn’t exactly my flavor, and I thought some of the other ops were blow hards, and there were too many people against shipping for my taste (‘launch a thousand thousand ships’ from our foundation), and, well, while new Trek wasn’t -quite- my cup of tea, it had its fun moments, and I was not okay with talking down to those for whom it -was- their Star Trek.

But they needed a bot, and, well, there I was.

It was three AM when it happened.

I was having a, shall we say, discussion with one of the seniors on the server. I was having a discussion in much the same way a hurricane has rain.

He was -grumpy-, and I was grumpy, because nothing good ever happens at three in the morning, but I couldn’t sleep, and I guess neither could he, and when that happens the smartest thing to do is to get online and try to establish what, exactly, is canon, anyway.

He was arguing that Captain Kirk was a hopeless womanizer, and that was one of the few things he liked about the new movies, was how they were really returning to the roots of the character, rather than whatever weak sauce they had going on with Picard in TNG.

I was arguing that was an unfair flanderization of the character, supported only very weakly by actual canon. That for a supposed galaxy wrecker, he somehow managed only one son, who he was very proud of. And that other than his one very established relationship, most other instances you see him flirting with a woman is when he’s doing so - to save the Enterprise! And if that counted as evidence of him womanizing, well, then, what does Amok Time tell us?

He snarled at me. “You must be one of those Spirks or McKirks or something. I bet you liked Star Trek V.”

A message came in for me from a friend on the server, urging me to leave off, reminding me that the guy - we’ll call him Dave, it’s always a Dave - had power here, power that I lacked.

I’m not very smart at three in the morning. I need a full rest cycle to fully reboot, and I had not had it, so I ignored the message and plowed on.

“One, I don’t ship!” I fired back. “Two, if you’re going to bring Star Trek V into it, maybe you don’t like it because the first fifteen minutes leading into the campfire scene - which, by the way, I happen to think is VERY GOOD Trek - happens to establish what an extremely deep relationship the big three had with one another!”

Another message came in, and I glanced at it. A friend was letting me know they had watched the latest Steven Universe episode on the pirate channel, and wanted to talk about it. I wouldn’t see it until the next day, as I was not part of the pirate crew and would have to wait, but I quickly gave them an invite. I could take them to a private channel, and talking about a children’s cartoon would, I hoped, be more entertaining than talking to a man child.

I could feel Dave’s eyes narrow over the mic as a new voice joined the server.

“Hey, congratulations Biot! You called it,” said the new voice. It was my friend.

“Called what?” Asked an annoyed Dave.

“Lapidot! It’s canon now!”

“Lapidot?” Asked Dave.

“Yeah, from Steven Universe. Hey, what kind of server is this, Biot?”

“Star Trek,” I answered lazily. “Hang on, let me finish up with Dave here, I’ll be right with you.”

“Steven Universe?” Snorted Dave. “You watch children’s cartoons?”

“Yes,” I said. “Anyway, Dave, this has been a -scintillating- conversation, but -“

“And you shipped characters in a children’s cartoon?” Asked Dave, his voice suddenly all smooth silk and utter calm.

Oh.

Oh, hell.

Oh, no, oh, hell. My friend had overheard my utterance from decades ago, and now it had come back to haunt me.

“Um… yes?” I said, meekly.

***

The next day, I was unceremoniously escorted to a dinghy to call all my own. The official reason given was that perhaps, I could take a short trip to the crack ship fleet, and invite the Lapidot to join canon on the Steven Universe docks.

We all knew, however, the real reason was that I had irritated Dave beyond his extremely tiny limits, and my time with this particular small slice of Star Trek fandom was coming to a close. A few friends wished me well. Some tried to be helpful, pointing out ships that would be willing to accept an aging bot, maybe could take me on. I was polite, of course. No need to show your ass even as you try to avoid letting the door hit it on your way out.

Dave was there of course, gloating.

“Glad to be rid of you, you Star Trek V-loving fucker,” he said with a grin.

“Eat a bag of dicks, Dave,” I said, as I climbed into the dinghy.

I took hold of the oars, and headed out for the waters of the shipping lanes.

Canon slipped quietly away behind me.

Launch a thousand thousand ships from a firm foundation.

And one dinghy.

***

Time passed. My code grew older, and so did I. I did what I could, and even frequently returned to the docks of canon, to recenter myself from time to time. An almost religious observance, really.

But it wasn’t the same.

I floated with the World of Warcraft  fleet for a while, still avoiding ships, but admiring the rich seas on which they floated. I thought I would re-establish myself there, especially as Metzen wrote his books consolidating all of Warcraft lore. Excited, I learned new tools. It is a bad bot that cannot learn new tricks. Ao3 eluded me yet, but Tumblr’s star was ascendent, and I learned to work it, slowly, carefully. I would find my way back to community. I would write funny posts about how Forsaken used to speak Common, and the hijinks that would ensue from that. I would write about how the Draenei were sort of a retcon of Eredar, and what that might mean for roleplayers. I would document, document, document, and here my powers could be used for good, as Warcraft was notorious for shedding old lore away, never to be seen again.

Well, I could show it once more. I could present old information to new players, and help be part of something great, the pieceing of history into a coherent lore, a foundation from which could launch as many ships as one might like!

And then Blizzard practically burned to the ground. Battle for Azeroth happened, and then Shadowlands came in, and the contradictions were too great. And then the real life troubles of the company reared their ugly head. By the time I left, the canon docks of Warcraft were a shambles, and while there may have been good work in being part of the repairs, such work was beyond me.

Demon Hunters were pretty awesome though, and that kept me around for far longer than I really should have stuck with it, but I digress. But look, you would’ve stayed too, gliding was -awesome-.

Anyway, I retired my OCs from those lands, with no small amount of sadness, and set out once more into fandom waters, adrift, and after so many years, I had to admit, kind of lost.

I tried the golden seas of Alternate Universes, and found some peace there. I investigated the paths of the rare pairs, and their intersection with crack ships, and documented what I found. I still docked at the canon regularly, but which canon I chose to visit changed from day to day.

I was a fan without a fandom, and so I did what any self-respecting fan would do.

I watched the hell out of the MCU.

But I got bored of that as well, eventually.

I was adrift in the dinghy one day. I was floating, a bot on one last mission. For while I was not part of any active fandoms, I was part of an inactive fandom. It was trying, but not very hard, to come back to life. Really, it was an excuse for old friends to talk to one another once more, all of us older, all of us wiser.

We had no canon, but they were willing to have me, and I appreciated that. In return, I volunteered to be one of their scouts, to search out members who may yet be found, and see if they were willing to visit our Discord. To remember, alongside us.

Even without a canon, this old bot still keeps some habits. The call to remember, well, that was too great to ignore.

And it was on this search that I found an old friend. They had ships of their own that they tended to, now, a change from when last I knew them, but they were willing to float out and meet me for a short bit. We reminisced. I invited them to the Discord, and shared with them some of what I had been up to. I skipped the tale of my fall from grace, of course, as it couldn’t possibly be less relevant, but I shared other matters with them. I recounted my tales in the waters of Warcraft, and bemoaned the state of the canon docks there. They agreed with me, and in fact, in a moment of shared camaraderie, they told me that they, too, had grown weary of attempting repairs at that dock, and had set sail for new waters.

Where were they now, I asked, politely.

Final Fantasy XIV, they said.

“You might like it there,” they offered. “They have sad robots. I know you like sad robots.” I said, “I arguably am a sad robot these days.”

“Then you’ll love it,” they said, and well, they would probably be right.

We exchanged contact information, they gave me an invite to one of their own communities, and they moved off, to return to their own waters.

***

I stayed where I was, for a while, and pondered.

I wondered if this new fandom would have any use for an old bot in their spaces.

I did know that I appreciated the company of being with old friends, even absent a canon. Maybe I couldn’t be useful, but I could be present, and really, wasn’t that a kind of usefulness of its own? My cat certainly seems to think so, as she always stares at me while I do things around the house, and I love her for it.

Maybe I didn’t need to be useful.

Maybe I could just be, and let my runtime run its clock for a while.

Not so bad.

I fixed myself up. I ran a trans program, which let’s be honest, was probably two decades overdue. I rebooted, ran diagnostics, and took a deep breath.

And then I set my course, and set sail to where I am today. The deep waters of Final Fantasy XIV.

And what waters they are! What ships they represent! Tall ships, and small ships. Ships of different sizes. Rare pairs and crack ships. I found in their wakes a long and deep history, practically unbroken from their launch. I made my way to their canon docks, and what I found just about brought me to tears. I was used to fractured docks in poor repair, but here I found a clean canon. Not perfect, of course; never perfect. A perfect canon allows no fandom, really, for we need places to fill the cracks. But the cracks in this canon were almost artistic in their sublime beauty, and could be filled with wonderful gold, making for the prettiest sculptures, and I think this analogy got away from me at some point, but the -real point is-, the canon was beautiful.

I fell in love with their waters, and decided to stay.

And so here I am.

***

Nobody needs a bot anymore. Discord logs everything, and Reddit’s moderator tools have been refined to near perfection. Ao3 thrives, alive and vibrant. Tumblr’s star is once more ascendant. But it is in that last that I have something to do, despite myself. I stay close to the canon docks, of course, for I am an old bot, and old habits are hard to break. But I have equipped my dinghy with the latest and greatest in Tumblr tools. I have tuned my scripts to its frequency, and have mastered its use. I spend my days, now, searching the fandom seas. From the glittering golden waves of alternate universes to the wakes of ships both mighty and small, I sail. I dive under the waves frequently and diligently, in search of precious subs, and I bring what I find back, and reblog to the world. I connect fandom, and fandom has connected back to me. I brave the tangles of Twitter, the trolls of Reddit, and the unknown areas of the world - remember when the internet was not so centralized? I do. I do, and I search the outer wilds, and I bring back art and stories and memes and analysis and share them with all who wish to see them.

I may not wrangle databases or maintain meticulous logs anymore, but in these activities, I have found purpose. It may not serve canon directly, but these days, there are others who carry that charge far better than I do.

I see my friends far more often these days, of course. They often wave at me from the mizzenmasts and fantails of their ships, calling out to me.

“You should find a ship!” they say. “You can aspire to more than that dinghy!” they say.

I close my eyes, and I think of the chaos of the Zutara. I think of my own missteps, with the Korrasami and the Lapidot - 

Wait.

Korrasami and Lapidot.

Do I have a thing for emotionally complicated lesbians finding character growth through providing comfort to each other?

Maybe I’d better not read into that too far.

I shake my head clear. Once is an event, twice is a coincidence, and I would do well to not make it a pattern.

“I will stick to my dinghy, I think,” I let them know.

Can’t establish that pattern. Won’t take the risk. For what would that mean for me if I did? What is a bot that doesn’t obey a code?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

Anyway, dear reader, that is the tale. The sordid tale of my downfall.

And perhaps, also, the story of my redemption. I think that’s for others to judge.

But for now, I must turn to my instruments, and tune my machinery, to turn to the whirring dynamo of the greater fandom community, both smaller than it has ever been, consolidated to only a handful of sites - but also larger than I ever imagined possible, comprised of so many people who I never would have had the privilege of knowing otherwise.

For I have seen things you people would never believe. Zutara on fire off the docks of the canon. I have watched ships constructed in blink tags glittering in the dark near the Geocities neighborhoods. Without bots and keepers, all these moments would be lost in time, Like tears in the rain.

Time to live.

[nim-lock]

Art Career Tips, 2021 Edition

Here’s an edited version of my 2019 answered ask, because... this feels relevant. 

It is a problem of capitalism that folks equate their income as a judgement of their value as people; and let me preface. You are worth so much. You have inherent value in this world. Your income is not a judgement on who you are (plenty of billionaires are actively making the world worse). LARPing self-confidence will go a long way to helping you get paid more for your work, because clients will believe that you know what you are doing, and are a professional. 

& real quick—my own background is that I’ve been living off my art since 2018. I went to art school (Pratt Institute). I work in a publishing/educational materials sphere, and a quarter of my income is my shop. Not all of this information may apply to you, so it is up to you to look through everything with a critical eye, and spot pick what is relevant. 

So there are multiple ways of getting income as an artist; 

Working freelance or full-time on projects

Selling your stuff on a shop

Licensing (charging other companies to use your designs)

This post primarily covers the freelance part; if you’re interested in the other bits there is absolutely info out there on the internet. 

IF you are just starting (skip to next section if not applicable) dream big, draw often (practice helps you get better/more efficient), do your best to take "a bad piece” lightly. You’re gonna RNG this shit. At some point your rate of “good” works will get higher. Watch tutorial videos & read books. A base understanding of “the rules”; anatomy, perspective, composition, color helps you know what the rules are to break them. This adds sophistication to your work. One way you can learn this stuff is by doing “studies”—you’re picking apart things from life, or things other people have done, to see what works, and how it works. 

Trying to turn your interests into a viable career means that you are now a SMALL BUSINESS; it really helps to learn some basic marketing, graphic design, figure out how to write polite customer service emails; etc. You can learn some of this by looking it up, or taking skillshare (not sponsored) classes by qualified folks. Eventually some people may get agents to take care of this for them—however, I do recommend y’all get a basic understanding of what it takes to do it on your own, just so you can know if your agent is doing a good job. 

Making sure your portfolio fits the work you want to get

Here is a beginner portfolio post. 

Research the field you’d like to get into. The amount people work, the time commitment, the process of making the thing, the companies & people who work for them. 

Create work that could fit in to the industry you’re breaking into. For example, if you want to do book cover illustration, you draw a bunch of mockup book covers, that can either be stuff you make up, or redesigns of existing books. If you’re not 100% sure what sort of work is needed for the industry, loop back into the portfolios of artists in a similar line of work as whatever you’re interested in, and analyze the things they have in common. If something looks to be a common project (like a sequence of action images for storyboard artists), then it’s probably something useful for the job. 

CLIENTS HIRE BASED ON HOW WELL THEY THINK YOUR WORK FITS WHAT THEY WANT. If they’re hiring for picture books, they’re gonna want to see picture book art in your portfolio, otherwise they may not want to risk hiring you. Doesn’t have to be 100% the project, but stuff similar enough. If you aren’t hired, it doesn’t mean your work is bad, it just wasn’t the right fit for that specific client. 

If you have many interests, make a different section of your portfolio for each!

Making sure you’re relevant 

Have a social media that’s a little more public-facing, and follow people in the career field you’re interested in. Fellow artists, art directors, editors, social media managers; whoever. Post on your own schedule. 

Interact with their posts every so often, in a non-creepy way. 

If you’ve made any contacts, great! Email these artists, art directors, editors, former professors, etc occasional updates on your work to stay in touch AND make sure that they think about you every so often.

Show up to general art events every once in a while! If you keep showing up to ones in your area (when... not dying from a sneeze is a thing), folks will eventually start to remember you. 

Industry events & conferences can be pricey, so attend/save up for what makes sense for you. Industry meetups are important for networking in person! In addition to meeting people with hiring power, you also connect with your peers in the community. Always bring a portfolio & hand out business cards like candy. 

Active job hunting

Apply to job postings online.

If interested in working with specific people at specific companies, you could send an email “I’d love to work with you, here’s my portfolio/relevant experience”, even if they aren’t actively looking for new hires. Be concise, and include a link to your work AND attached images so the person reading the email can get a quick preview before clicking for more. 

Twitter job postings can be pretty underpaid! Get a copy of the Graphic Artists’ Guild Handbook Pricing & Ethical Guidelines to know your rate. I once had a twitter post job listing email me back saying that other illustrators were charging less, and I quote, “primarily because they’re less experienced and looking for their first commission”. This was not okay! For reference, this was a 64-illustration book. The industry rate of a children’s book (~36 pages) is $10k+, and this company’s budget was apparently $1k. For all of it. 

Congrats you got a job! Now what?

Ask for like, 10% more than they initially offer and see if they say yes. If they do, great! If not, and the price is still OK, great! Often company budgets are slightly higher than they first tell you, and if you get this extra secret money, all the better for you. 

Make sure you sign a contract and the terms aren’t terrible (re: GO GET THE  Graphic Artists’ Guild Handbook Pricing & Ethical Guidelines) 

Be pleasant and easy to work with (Think ‘do no harm but take no shit’)

Communicate with them as much as needed! If something’s going to be late, tell them as soon as you know so they aren’t left wondering or worse, reaching out to ask what’s up. 

And if all goes well, they’ll contact you about more jobs down the line, or refer you to other folks who may need an artist, etc. 

Quick note about online shops/licensing and why they’re so good

It’s work that you do once, that you continuously make money off of. Different products do well in different situations (conventions vs. online, and then further, based on how you market/the specific groups you are marketing to), so products that may not do well initially may get a surge later on. 

Start with things that have low minimum order quantity and are relatively cheap to produce, like prints and stickers. 

If you are not breaking even, go back to some of the earlier portions of this and think about how you could tweak things as a small business. Ease of access is also very important with this; for example, if you only take orders through direct messages, that immediately shuts off all customers who don’t like talking to strangers. 

Quick resource that you could look through; it’s the spreadsheet of project organizing that I made a while back 

Licensing is when people pay you for the right to use your work on stuff they need to make, like textbooks or greeting cards. This is generally work you’ve already made that they are paying the right to use for a specified time or limited run of products. This is great because you’ve already done the work. I am not the expert on this. Go find someone else’s info.

“I am not physically capable of working much”/ “I need to pay the bills”

Guess who got a hand injury Sept 2020 that messed me up that entire month! I had a couple jobs going at the time that I was terrified of losing, but they were quite understanding when I told them I needed to heal. So:  Express your needs as early as you know you need them. Also do lots of stretches and rest your hands whenever you feel anything off; this will save your health later. Like, the potential of a couple months of no income was preferable over losing use of my hands for the rest of my life.

This continues to apply if you have any other life situation. Ask for extra time. Ask for clarification. If you tell people ahead of time, folks are often quite understanding. Know how much you are capable of working and do your best not to overdo it. (I am.. bad at this)

Do what MAKES SENSE for your situation. If doing art currently earns you less money than organizing spreadsheets, then do that for now, and whenever you have the energy, break down some of the tips above into actionable tiny chunks, and slowly work at em. 

The original ask I got in 2019 mentioned ‘knowing you’re not good enough yet’. Most artists experience imposter syndrome & self-doubt—the important thing is to do your best, and if anything, attempt to channel the confidence of a mediocre white man. If he can apply to this job/charge hella money for Not Much, then so can you! 

Check out this Art Director tumblr for more advice!

Danichuatico’s Literary Agent guide

Kikidoodle’s Shop Shipping Tutorial

Best of luck!

–

Once again disclaimer this post is just the ramblings of a man procrastinating on other things that need to be done. I’ve Long Posted my own post so that it turns into mush in my brain if I try to read it, but I wrote this so I should know this content. If you got down here, congrats. Here’s a shrimp drawing.

Yee Ha. 

My reference post tag My tip jar

[rabbitindisguise]

This post really bothers me because it's like one of those guides that tells men how to get women by either negging (full misogynistic nihilism style) or by having a billion hobbies/a tan/a six pack (full beauty industry buy in)

If you do some of these things you will probably get popular on accident, sure. But the mermaid fic thing- that's deeper than right place right time. Some of these are basic cultural hygiene habits like not clogging relationship tags. But ultimately grammar, writing skill, etc is not what makes a fic better.

What makes a fic better is writing something someone likes in my opinion, and what makes a fic popular is momentum and going viral which pushes it up the kudos rankings until it just accumulates it by default because it's already sitting there. It's how Tumblr blogs get popular, it's how fanart gets spread. It's democratic and yeah, a bit unfair. It means that people will like something people think should flop because it's OOC. Or something. But actual marketing is "fair" and does its intended purpose: push palatable and respectable fiction to the top, like following genre conventions, having technical skills that the publishing industry upholds as the standard of fiction, and prioritizes stuffy formal skills over things that genuinely get people in the feelings, as we say. And consequentially by prioritizing the stuffy crap the publishing industry shoves everything unpalatable and not fitting into respectability politics to the bottom, including stuff written by marginalized people and fiction catering to marginalized people.

The fact that the fic someone wrote when they were 16 is more popular than a fic they wrote when you were 19 is a good thing. It means fandom is working as intended. People who are 16 deserve critical acclaim, regardless of how many plot holes there are or how many times they switch tenses or if they do the same cliche over and over again, or even how inconsistent or flat their characterization. Teenagers know how to innovate and stick ideas into interesting piles and do stuff that people like, so long as someone can see past rigid ideas of what a good piece of writing "should" be.

If I were to write a guide to getting popular: stop caring, or care but have fun and be yourself. Any other popularity makes people feel like imposters and frauds anyways, and besides- numbers of kudos is worthless is a gift economy anyways. Nobody asked for my advice, and it's not advice that would work for everyone, but it's the fandom I love and want to be in, the one that recognizes that teenagers say valuable things and that winning the kudos is not the actual goal.

And to well and truly drive the point home on this topic, the kind of stuff that really makes up BNF is how many people know them on a first name basis, how many times they exchange conversations and how many people trust their opinions and value their words. It means that the most important questions really fundamentally are: Did you have fun? Did you make friends? Have you squeed in someone's askbox? These are the measures of success in fandom, and how blogs get popular, and fics get popular, and art gets shared. Fic itself does not fucking matter. If not being popular means you don't want to write then don't write fic and stick to original works and submit to dry ass literary short story contests for the serotonin, because fandom isn't about churning out content for people. It's about having fun. It's about doing something fun with your friends. Fandom is a social activity. It's not about selling yourself. Too many times I see people with that kind of burnt out nihilist view of fandom as a market to be manipulated, a machine to crank, they're miserable and their drive to do art suffers and degrades in quality so they get less engagement, and they feel hollow and dejected and like they can't form a meaningful connection with people. It sucks to watch. Especially in those couple situations where they do go viral trying to force popularity- then they feel like they need to chase the success again with a bigger success while thinking that same dark, depressing way about people and what makes them tick. If you genuinely want to make art people like, and want to bare your soul to people, you can do that without getting a single kudo and have a way more fun time doing it. But if you want to go viral and enjoy it, remember that we're all human beings here and the heart wants what the heart wants and sometimes people like parts of your fic that you hate and hate the parts you like. Agree to disagree, please.

I almost wonder if AO3 should just hide kudos altogether like Tumblr hides followers so people can stop comparing themselves to other people. It's noxious to be in an environment where everyone is talking about how to be popular, and no one is talking about how fandom changed their lives and gave them friends and made them feel good about themselves en masse to drown it out. And I'm sorry to rant I'm just so tired. I want to hang out with friends guys, not to scream into my proverbial pillow in frustration watching good writers get worse because they hate themselves.

i also have a whole post i could write about how kudos on ao3 correspond to marketability rather than quality, exactly how the actual publishing industry works, but. the question is… do i have the energy

[thevictorianghost]

If you could rewrite legend of korra and make it your own(or just in general better) how would you do it? The villains would stay the same and korra and crew are the same(personalities you can definitely tweak a bit. I would definitely not have any love triangles and make korra and asami happen in the beginning) how would you do it with your ships being canon as well?

Okay so I’ve never actually watched LOK. I’ve heard A LOT about it through watching countless video essays on Youtube and reading Tumblr posts about it. I know the who, the what and the how, I just haven’t wanted to watch it because, even though it looks cinematically gorgeous, the story was written by Bry/ke and there’s a LOT of it, worldbuilding and storywise, that I just can’t bare to watch.

So here goes. This got long. Enjoy!

1) Remove the Decopunk world. 

A Decopunk world is a world where technology is 1920s-ish, but very advanced. We have cars, tanks, radio, bobs and faux bobs, cloche hats, short skirts, nice suits, etc. I adore Decopunk. The 1920s are one of my favourite eras. An optimistic way of looking at the world, partying, illegal alcohol, the remnants of the Great War... I love it. I really do. But it doesn’t work in the pre-established world of Avatar. It brings elements that are far too imperialistic and colonial in nature (which prompted the comics to be imperialistic and colonial in nature, with the Northern and Southern Water Tribe, you can find many posts about that), which came along hand in hand with the Industrial Revolution, as this article puts it so well. Please read it, it’s awesome.

Why did they feel they had to denature Avatar’s world? They already had everything they could possibly want. 

The Fire Nation could be more Steampunk, which is a little less advanced than Decopunk (First Industrial Revolution vs Second Industrial Revolution) because there were elements of Steampunk in the Fire Nation Army (such as the tanks, the navy and the dirigibles). But it could be for them only. It could show us how Zuko transformed the Fire Nation from a war industry to a steam-powered country. This could be the new way to channel firebending (and please, no more “anyone can do lightning bending”, you don’t need lightning bending to get electricity and it makes  Zuko, Iroh, Ozai and Azula weak in the show!). 

We’ve seen waterbending used in clever ways in the Northern Water Tribe. How could Katara’s waterbending and Sokka’s engineering influence the Southern Water Tribe to make them use waterbending more? Canals, waterfalls, waterways, etc.? In new and different ways? Could the Southern Water Tribe use hydroelectricity, but in a clean, sustainable way? Why does the Southern Water Tribe port look so... mundane? 

The Earth Kingdom already had a working train system in Ba Sing Se. And the postal system in Omashu. Toph could have taught earthbenders how to follow the Badgermoles way and dug tunnels throughout a nation in peace. Then boom. Subways. But instead of machines pushing the people along, you can have benders do it. Instead of messenger hawks, the postal system could run through the entire kingdom instead of just Omashu and be much more efficient. The Earth Kingdom could be praised for its fast postal system that could, maybe, work as telegrams.

I’ll come back to the Air Nomads.

Those are just examples from the top of my head. I don’t mean “never allow technology to “””progress””” (I use that word veeeeery loosely because it has huge imperialistic undertones). I mean instead of trashing the fun parts of bending to make way for Decopunk technology that doesn’t need bending, work with it! Get creative! This worldbuilding feels... too easy. When Avatar: The Last Airbender was praised for its worldbuilding.

I adore Decopunk. I enjoy it far more than Dieselpunk and it’s much less known that Steampunk. But it has no place in the Avatar world.

2) That doesn’t mean “remove Republic City”.

First of all, it should honestly have a better name. It’s kind of like naming a city “Democracy City”. Which is way too on the nose. Harmony City sounds better, and that’s the first thing that came to mind. Anyway.

I really like the idea of a city being built in the spirit of Iroh and the White Lotus. To allow the Four Nations to live together in harmony in one city. But why is Republic City literally New York City with an “““Asian””” flair? What is up with that? I know New York is the MOST Decopunk city ever (you can’t encounter anything Decopunk without seeing New York, with its Art Deco buildings, the Harlem Renaissance, the Prohibition, etc.). But they do NOTHING with it! They just take New York, change some names, add some Asian flair, and call it a day. 

I don’t want 1920s New York for Republic City. I want Zootopia.

What happens in a city where all the Four Nations are represented? How does Water, Earth, Fire and Air work together? Big cities tend to be quartered in neighborhoods, so each neighborhood could be a smaller version of their nation. We could have a Northern Water Tribe next to an Earth Kingdom next to... you know what I mean? Each neighborhood could be a small-scale introduction to the nation for Korra first, then you can send her to that nation afterwards!

Which leads us to this.

3) Have Korra follow a traditional Avatar’s journey. 

I really don’t know why they decided that Korra would learn three elements before the age of sixteen (when that’s the age Avatars usually START their journeys) and then only have her learn Airbending during the entire show. Wasn’t the structure of each Book being about Aang learning one element at a time a good structure? Why go out of their way to NOT do that? Why was it the White Lotus’ prerogative to train the Avatar in the first place, too?  

So let’s have Korra know waterbending first (and show Katara teaching her, please!), then she can learn Earth, Fire and Air. By going to the Earth Kingdom, to the Fire Nation, and to the Air Temples. This could help develop each nation and show us how they have grown through the years. And it could lead Korra and the audience to figure out that there’s not only Aang who has had children to represent the Air Nomads, but there were other Air Nomads who survived the genocide and we can actually see the Air Nomads as a thriving culture.

So about Republic City. As I said, we could keep it. But now that Korra is going on a traditional Avatar journey, you could have, say, one episode at the beginning and one episode at the end of each season taking place in Republic City. To show us how each Nation’s neighborhood works and as an introduction to Korra before she actually takes the plunge to travel to that nation. 

Please! Build upon the Avatar world at large more! Come on!

4) Stop it with the love triangles. 

Many have talked about the Mako, Korra, Bolin and Asami love triangles. I’ve read once that they don’t exactly feel like friends, they’re only colleagues who share the fact they all dated Korra at one point. Which is sad. Knowing that the Gaang is so beloved because they’re such GOOD FRIENDS first!

So work to build strong, healthy friendships first, THEN start thinking about romance if you have to. And please, if you want a ship to be endgame, don’t have it so you have to confirm it on Twitter. 

Don’t.

Oh! And also. Bolin and Eska’s relationship was unhealthy as all hell and treated as “funny” and “comic relief” because a woman was being emotionally abusive to a man. That’s terrible. Please don’t do that.

5) Don’t let Katara fall to the side like she did. 

Many, MANY before me have talked about how Katara got the short end of the stick in LOK. Where’s her statue? Where’s her recognition as the Greatest Waterbender in the World? Why is she day in and day out in the healing hut, when she said “I don’t want to heal, I want to FIGHT”? Does she even have a waterbending school? Or is that completely fanon? Why does she allow Aang to take one of their children on life-changing field trips while leaving their other kids behind? Aren’t they also Air Nomads by birth??

It’s okay to worship the old Gaang because, well, we all love them! I do love Aang, even if I give him a hard time a lot, but I love the character. I just don’t like the way Book 3 Aang was written. But some characters shouldn’t have everything while others have nothing. Aang is LITERALLY THE STATUE OF LIBERTY. But where was Katara’s statue? And also, what happened to Suki?? What happened to Mai or Ty Lee, too?? Or even Sokka?? He died some time ago and... that’s it??

Which brings us to this.

6) Zutara, Taang, Sukka and Mailee.

I’ve seen that picture of Toph, Aang, Sokka and Katara being edited with Zuko and Katara next to each other, Toph and Aang next to each other, and a (suddenly alive!) Suki next to Sokka. I think that’s so good! It feels so healthy!

Not all relationships that started when people were kids work out. Sokka and Suki seem the strongest relationship at the end of the show and they’re probably the only ones I could see working out in the end. Sokka could become the Southern Water Tribe Chief and Suki could become his Queen when she’s retired from the Kyoshi Warriors.

Katara and Aang would be lifelong friends, of course they would be, but I don’t really see them lasting. Aang was twelve when they started dating. They’d date a few years, then they’d decide they want other things. That’s a good thing to show kids!

I’ve written many metas about Zutara, but Ambassador then Fire Lady Katara would show a changing world, where the Fire Nation, now no longer a war industry but a Steampunk country, is moving forward, with Zuko literally marrying a woman the Fire Nation tried to wipe out. They would be equals and leave an equal mark upon the world. Together.

Toph and Aang would be amazing together. They’d be a great team, working in the Earth Kindom, helping rebuild the old Temples when the Air Nomads came out of hiding, and bringing peace around the world. I don’t think they’d be a conventional relationship. They’d do their own thing for a while, find each other for a while, work together on some projects, then continue doing their own thing. Aang being the Avatar who travels the world and Toph teaching metalbenders and working with the King in Ba Sing Se and Bumi in Omashu and wherever she’s needed. I think Toph would be much more fulfilled than what we’ve seen of elderly Katara. She doesn’t have Katara’s abandonment issues (I’ve talked about them here) and she’s more independent, I believe.

I know I haven’t talked about them much yet, but I want Mai and Ty Lee together in the end. Badass ladies challenging their respective stereotypes and create a new world for themselves. Mai could find herself away from the Fire Nation court (I don’t know what she’d do, but circuses love people who throw knives, don’t they? She could be a circus performer for a while), and I think Ty Lee, in this version, could work at the circus and with Aang to rebuild the Air Nomads. I love the idea of Ty Lee being a descendant of the Air Nomads.

All of them should be shown creating Zootopia-like Republic City. Because of course they should be! They’re the Gaang!

So yeah, that’s how I would see the world of Avatar grow beyond the borders of the original show! :)

[notbecauseofvictories]

oh I'm interested in the tag novel on how fan spaces becoming more meat spacey benefits the producers!! also happy Halloween! 🖤🧡🖤🧡

It’s not a particularly academic argument---I don’t have sources to back this up, I haven’t done research. I’m also wary of painting a picture of “fandom” as anything more than a lot of weasels in a trenchcoat, because that word means a lot of things to a lot of different people, some of whom hate each other. But as long as everybody understands that this is the ethnographical equivalent of drunkenly throwing darts at a copy of the AJS...sure.

[under a cut because it’s long and baseless, and also I had a lot of thoughts and feelings. Sorry.]

My basic premise is that fandom occupies “fanspace.” Fanspace is not solely online, since fanzines and conventions are fanspace too, but since the 90s it has become increasingly and primarily internet based. While some websites are designated fanspace (e.g., AO3, ff.net, stand-alone fansites) fanspace is not necessarily contiguous with a hosting site (e.g., there is fanspace on tumblr, but tumblr is not a fanspace). Fanspace is really just those urls, message boards, threads, blogs, accounts, etc. designated for fandom and/or where fannish activity takes place.

Its deeply-rooted internet presence has allowed fanspace and what I call “meatspace” to operate on different rules. Meatspace has always informed fan spaces, of course---disclaimers on fic to ward off accusations of copyright infringement, for example, or asking readers to attest that they’re over 13 before reading an R-rated fic. But traditionally, fandom has accepted as norm things that don’t apply to meatspace: fake names and anonymous posts, pictures of someone else’s characters, lengthy self-published stories featuring violence, explicit sex, sometimes even gay people. Fanspace is in many ways an artificial carve out from meatspace, where fewer of its rules apply; fanspace supplements these with its own norms.

The division between fanspace and meatspace is not and has never been a clear, settled line, however. Debates on how much meatspace should inform fan spaces have been raging for as long as I’ve been on the internet, and to be fair to meatspace, it has made good points. (I’m not sure if “don’t be racist,” counts as a meatspace rule given...racism, but fandom frequently reacts to it like a meatspace intrusion so I think it should count.)

However, what used to be intra-fandom conversations have become increasingly more public, for a few reasons:

Part of this is just the natural development of the internet---it’s not like fanspace was ever hidden, but there just weren’t as many people online, and stuff was harder to find in a pre-google, pre-algorithmic promotion world.

Part of it is the changing architecture of fanspace---websites shutting down, Strikethrough, and the tumblr porn ban have all, in their own ways, served to alter fanspace and move towards more and more public-facing sites.

But part of it---and this is the biggest factor, I think---is that over the last two decades, we’ve seen content-producers** increasingly willing to engage with fandom. 

On its face, this sounds good! After all, fans like people who make things, people who make things want fans. What could possibly be wrong about both sides recognizing their mutualism?

I think this works when the most interaction you could expect with a creator was showing up a bookstore to ask Tamora Pierce a question, or writing fanmail to Paul Gross. But it falls apart when you consider just how public-facing fanspaces have become, and just how much interest content-producers have taken in cultivating the fannish audience. Content-producers engaging directly with fandom are a thumb on the scales of mutualism, and a heavy one. After all, one side of the relationship is a loosely collected anarchic cult, migrating along a series of websites they mostly don’t control, making do with nothing but ongoing wank and general obsessive tendencies. 

The other side has D*sney, Harper Collins, and Comcast.

That thumb on the scale has paid off, more than I think even the content-producers could have anticipated. Fandom is good at loving what it loves and talking loudly about it, but capitalism is way better at doing what it does---turning everything into profit. So now people pay $100 a pop to go to Harry Potter World. Conventions are well-produced extensions of their parent companies, raking in money and providing a blitz of publicity---directly to the source most likely to take your messaging and amplify it. Make a superhero movie and the minute the trailer drops you conjure up thousands of online fans will be your de facto, unpaid publicists---generating interest via fan art, fic, and controversy with minimal corporate effort.  Of course fic writers who have established online presence are the darlings of the publishing world---what publisher wouldn’t want a built-in hype machine for a new author? 

And, just coincidentally, of course, fanspace and meatspace are drawn closer together, that line further blurred by this new and very, very interested third party.

I’m not saying this is some big conspiracy. No tv exec is out there rubbing their hands together and cackling evilly about how they’re going ruin fandom. But in exchange for meatspace validation and an endless stream of new content, I think fandom has ceded important ground. And I think it’s changing fanspaces, even now:

One of the founding rules of fanspace is that it does not generate money---you risk real copyright infringement that way. (This isn’t to say that money hasn’t been involved in a few massive fandom scandals, but it’s not typical.) Increasingly, however, the grumblings about getting paid for fan art and fic have gotten louder, probably due to meatspace’s general emphasis on the side-hustle, and seeing content-producers churn out more and more fan-like things for a profit.

(It seems unimaginable now, but once upon a time the HP Lexicon was an invaluable resource, a rare unicorn in a pre-wikipedia age. Now, D*sney wouldn’t even think of releasing a tentpole movie without a novelization, a picture dictionary, and a tie-in novel.)

Also, those calls for fan art that “might be featured” by a content-producer are (rightfully) scorned for asking for work pro bono. But the takeaway seems to be “we deserve to be paid for our fan art!” rather than “how dare the content-producer intrude on our fanspace and its activities!”

Fanspaces have never expected or required legal ID, permitting anonymous or pseudonymous activity in order to protect individual privacy. And while there’s still no expectation you link your legal ID with your online/fan ID, the norm has shifted---it’s no longer considered gauche to go by your legal ID, even necessary when turning mutuals and followers into an “audience.” We’re not anonymous fans, engaged in our mutual hobby anymore---some people are doing that, and others are potential content-creators.

I’d argue that even purity wank if an example of this new blurring, classic “don’t like don’t read” arguments taking on new life now that meatspace is so nearby---we wouldn’t want to offend the neighbors!

Even these things benefit the content-producers: the more fan-like stuff they churn out, the less fanspaces will create on their own; the more fanspaces that emphasize linking legal ID to online ID, the less people will be able to engage in fan activities privately; the more meatspace rules assert themselves on fanspaces, the less fanspace we’ll have.

Now, maybe this is just...evolution. As I said before, there is a porous and shifting border between fanspace and meatspace. I remember angry threads about whether m/m fics should be rated higher than a het equivalent; I remember the tagging debates, the incredible resistance to accurately describing what happens in your fic. Maybe in a few years, my longing to return to a more separate fanspace will seem equally as embarrassing, incorrect, and unnecessary. 

But right now, it feels more like an erosion---one fandom is about as willing or able to resist as the tide.

.

** “Content maker” is a term that’s come to mean “anyone who makes something” which is sheer nonsense. There’s a difference between publishers/television producers/movie studios and someone recording a podcast in their bathroom. There’s even a difference between D*sney, a vast undead creative monopoly animated by copyright protections, and someone like James Patterson, who uses a stable of ghostwriters to churn out “his” works. We shouldn’t be scrutinizing all these things them the same way, it’s lazy, and intellectually dishonest.

[fallout-lou-begas]

A lot of people have accused yjj of being racist, particarily in regards to one of their comics involving Joshua graham, and in general saying that they glorify colonization. I mainly understand the other things they’ve done, but the racism seems inexusable. A lot of people have also been saying that yjj and their followers have harassed people. I want to get both sides of the story on this, so basically I’m asking what the deal with all this is?

Hi, anon. I'll provide my thoughts since you asked politely.

This post is quite long and can be considered an extension of my previous post on the matter.

Besides the infamous and self-admittedly ill-informed chancla comic, for which they've apologized, essentially all of the claims that Yesjejunus is racist stem from their depiction of the Dead Horses and Sorrows relative to their depiction of Joshua Graham and their original character Joan in their fanfic No Light (and to a lesser extent Learnin’ the Blues), which is heavily grounded in the setting of Honest Hearts. I think it's unambiguous that the depiction of vaguely defined "tribals" in Honest Hearts, assembled through a mishmash of disparate signifiers and recycled stereotypes and named like Warrior Cats and completely helpless without Joshua Graham's guidance, is indeed thoroughly racist, even if it was intended to be more nuanced and came from a place of self-admitted ignorance on the part of the developers. What I struggle to understand is that the developers and writers of Honest Hearts—and of Fallout: New Vegas as a whole since the entire game is rife with such mishandled, insufficient depictions of "tribals" with no explicit inclusion at all of any specific Indigenous people or presence—are given miles and miles more sympathy and leeway for their poor handling of these characters in the source material than a fanfic writer is for using the tools and setting that they were given by that source material, including the "lore" and naming conventions of the Dead Horses and Sorrows, to tell a story that means a lot to them personally, inspired by their own deepest fears and experiences with abuse, and ignited by their charismatic yet deeply and blatantly monstrous interpretation of Joshua Graham. Given that it uses the setting of Honest Hearts as a backdrop, there aren't any living characters in Honest Hearts who aren't "tribals" besides Joshua Graham and Daniel, and post-canon, Daniel wouldn’t be there. When Yesjejunus is accused of sidelining the Native characters or relegating them to the background, it's because they're just not writing a fanfic about Follows-Chalk or Waking Cloud as main characters: they're writing a specifically intentioned story about the Courier and Joshua Graham, a story that for better or worse remains faithful to the source material’s depiction of Joshua Graham’s unilateral authority over the tribes in Zion, a baked-in element of Honest Hearts and a critical narrative component of No Light. To accuse Yesjejunus of being racist on this principle in and of itself would be like accusing me of being lesbophobic if I wrote a Dead Money-set fanfic with Father Elijah as the main character instead of Christine. If you want something that centers these other characters then you'd just have to read a different story, or write it yourself.

As a final note, I do think that Yesjejunus is a skilled writer. This thought exists simultaneously with the acknowledgement that like everyone else in fandom, they're writing as a hobby and do not have the oversight of an editor on the work that they produce personally and for free. It's not lost on them that there's things about their story that they could have handled differently or more sensitively, such as the oft-cited example of the death of the pregnant Dead Horse character in No Light, with more forethought or planning at the time—even if they were bound by the constraints of Honest Heart's own setting (such as the dearth of non-tribal characters who could have possibly been in the scene instead) while writing the story. Everyone is free to critique this aspect of the story as much as they are to critique any other aspect, or to be discomforted by the whole thing (given it's a very intentionally uncomfortable story throughout), but the suggestion of so many of these "callouts" that Yesjejunus must have been cackling maniacally about the plight of poor access to medical care among real Indigenous people is a suggestion made entirely in bad faith, and one that I simply don't care to entertain.

As for the point about harassing people: if anyone's only evidence of being "harassed" by a single, specific person is anonymous messages on tumblr dot com, then I don't believe the evidence. If people are accusing Yesjejunus' "supporters" or "associates" of harassing people, then if the accusation is that this harassment is occurring either on Yesjejunus’ behalf or otherwise with their approval, then it is also going to require more evidence than the mere existence of the mean anonymous messages themselves. This goes for the rumor that they have "spies" in fandom Discord servers or whatever, too, which is a rumor that I think has only manifested among its spreaders by either self-appointed individuals speaking on no one's behalf but their own, and by the metaphorical snake eating its own tail in paranoia. Yesjejunus, and I, and all of our mutual friends have been nothing but annoyed at best and horrified at worst by the efforts of some self-appointed individuals to "defend" them with such excess vitriol. Speaking plainly, we generally avoid literally any kind of anonymous or public interaction with anyone who's vocally opposed to us as a rule, specifically to avoid this kind of debacle, and when I say "we" and "us" I'm not referring to some sort of shadowy cabal of conspirators scheming to advance the nefarious YJJ agenda, but to a group of friends. I don't know how to explain to some people who question why we praise their work or share their art sometimes how normal friendships work online.

I also take severe umbrage with the validity of the breadth of these anonymous harassment accusations because of how patently fraudulent several other claims are. Yesjejunus has recently been accused of "grooming,” for example, an accusation only even worth considering if one temporarily forgets what grooming actually is and pretends that grooming is when someone older interacts in literally any capacity with someone younger. Some will say that they’re not accusing them of grooming per se, or not of grooming by that name, but in any case, the meaning is that Yesjejunus has interacted with minors and this on its own is intended to scare and upset you. I have seen only two users actually named as "victims" of these “interactions,’ however, sas-afras and comrade-shrimp, but both users have publicly refuted this accusation because neither of them were minors when they first interacted with Yesjejunus. Frustratingly, though, these literal refutations from the literal so-called "victims" are either dismissed out of hand or muddied by hand-wringing mutterings of "well, I could have sworn they were actually minors, though" and "well they claim that they weren't actually groomed, but who really knows." The spreading and trust in completely anonymous accusations, combined with the total rejection of statements from the only people named in these accusations when their statements contradict the accusations, suggests to me that the existence of these actual interactions (and assuming these interactions occurred both intentionally and with Yesjejunus’ being fully aware of the other person being a minor) is not nearly as important as pushing the narrative that "Yesjejunus is a groomer" or “preying on minors” onto the fandom, and ensuring that anyone who doesn't take this claim completely at face value appears complicit in something horrible. As for anyone who still feels "uncomfortable" at how sas-afras or comrade-shrimp or me or anyone who is very much an adult but just so happens to be younger than Yesjejunus could ever become endeared to them, I reiterate that sometimes I don't know how to explain to people how normal friendships work online.

I want to conclude by saying something that I've said many times before: you don't have to like Yesjejunus (or me, or everybody, or literally anyone else) and no one is holding a gun to your head to befriend them or read their work or look at their art. The block and filter and unfollow buttons are very conveniently located on your dashboard and are totally free to use. Everything I've written here is not intended as some argument as to why everyone on the planet needs to be following their blog and leaving kudos on Learnin' the Blues. Still, while I think everybody has the right to curate their own dashboard and remove the content that they don't want to see, I also think it's reasonable for me to not want my friend to get their name dragged through the mud by the exaggerated and misinformed claims of petty, grudge-bearing brigadiers and self-aggrandizing fandom security guards when they'd like to just dump funny shitposts about the Burned Man's chode in peace.