#the description are also longer on deviantart too

[celticbotanart]

Been thinking about Bandori again lately, so I dug up some sketches I've done months ago; mostly because I didn't want to draw anything from scratch, but the sketches were good enough and I really liked them a lot already. The only one I drew from scratch is the one on the bottom right corner, to fill up that empty space and make the panel full~

I've noticed I really like to draw these two idiots interacting, which is kinda rare, lol. Interactions are hard for me to draw and I admit I kinda avoid it a lot. They're comfortable and fun for me to draw, especially in random wholesome shenanigans! I guess it's the platonic aspect, I'm not super fan of drawing/writing romantic stuff; I tend to enhance the sisterly relationship the characters already have canonically.

The main drawing here was inspired by an actual picture of Raychell and Risa (their VAs, to those unfamiliar) <3

Another thing I do is making Rei wear shirts of real bands, bands that I like. It's usually Within Temptation, because they are totally a band that would exist in the Bandori-verse; this time though, I made Rei wear a Yuki Kajiura / FictionJunction shirt, I LOVE that cover art so much!! It's another band/project I see existing in that universe!

commission info | patreon | kofi | twitter | bluesky

[sykloni2]

I tried to list longer DP fancomics and comic series I was able to find. Description is included when I could find one written by the artist/author. If I am adding a note myself it's in the brackets below the description. These are not in any particular order except that crossovers are at the end of the list.

Please add links in the reblogs if you have more dp fancomics you know about -I'm sure this list is missing things! :D (Feel free to share recommendations for some one shot comics too, if you have favourites!)

Phantom in the mirror

[COMPLETED] by catesartsworks (tumblr)

After Danny loses everyone he loves, he is determined to seek out a ghost named Clockwork to reverse his fate.

(note: There is even pdf version available of this comic!)

Archetype

[COMPLETED] by Joe-the-Hoe (Deviantart)

Story set in AU where Phantom and Fenton are separate.

(warnings listed by the author: angst, death, violence, gore, psychological horror, some strong language)

Doppelgänger

[COMPLETED] by eirian (tumblr)/skiltaires (webtoon)

Doppelgänger is set in an AU where the Disasteroid never threatened Earth (see: Phantom Planet) and both Danny and Vlad’s half-ghost identities remained hidden. It takes place after Dan makes a return, seeking revenge on Danny for imprisoning him. Once defeated by the young Danny Phantom a second time, Dan finds himself spending many months under the Fentons’ careful watch, mellowing out as a result. However, after learning about an old foe’s return, Dan realizes his problems are far from gone.

A Matter of Time

by sarapsys (tumblr & AO3)

A look into who and what Clockwork was, is, and will become.

The Phantom Comic

by tsubaki94 (tumblr & webtoon)

Danny Fenton has returned to Amity Park after having spent years in Wisconsin at a boarding school and intends to have a typical high school life at Casper High. However the day Vlad Master comes to visit is also the day Danny’s fourteen-year-old life is turned on its head.

Amity Thereafter

by ep-10 (tumblr)/ 阿佑EP (webtoon)

A Danny Phantom fan manhua.

Good Vlad AU

by mfdragon (tumblr)

No one knows AU comic

by pricklenettle (tumblr)

Sam and Tucker never became friends with Danny, so he’s learned to deal with the towns new residents and the ghost attacks alone.

Souls of Stardust

by CorinnetheAnime (tumblr & Deviantart)

(note: To my understanding the comic will be mainly on Deviantart, but you can read at least the first 6 pages also on tumblr.)

Ectober Night

by okkennymay (tumblr)

(note: Older links between pages may not work, so you might need to scroll through the comic's tag instead.)

Danny Phantom: Recollection

by ghoulishautism (tumblr)

"Danny Phantom: Recollection" is a DP Fancomic anthology- loosely connected comics with the goal to reimagine Danny Phantom and its world. With a mix of popular fanon and personal headcanons, this comic aims to take DP places the original 2004 animated series couldn't.

(note: The website version of the blog is very easy to navigate!)

Lingering Spirits

by starlightshore (tumblr)

A Danny Phantom AU where Danny moves to Amity 2 years after the Portal Incident. Combo of Alicia Adoption (Farmboy AU) + Nobody Knows AU

Shared Cujostody AU

by duchi-nesten (tumblr)

Undercover AU

by artistfingers (tumblr & AO3)

Welcome to the Give Your Hidden Identities A Hidden Identity hijinks bonanza! a danny phantom no one knows AU featuring lots of silliness and maybe sometimes a little angst, focusing primarily on the newfound friendship between Phantom, Tucker, Sam… and Fenton. After a lonely year of ups and downs since becoming Phantom, Danny meets Sam and Tuck for the first time while stuck in ghost mode… trying, and failing, to fly under the radar.

DP Mechanic AU

by tatumsdrawing (tumblr)

This is an eventual Dash/Danny AU where Dash works part-time as a mechanic and Danny's car is going through it. Takes place their senior year of high school.

(note: mix of comic and fanfiction -both very good!)

The Amnesiac Ghost King

by ep-10 (tumblr)

Danny had no recollection of his past. It took him a year to adjust to his current state. He managed to find a few jobs and earned enough money to rent an apartment. As time passed, Danny's situation seemed to be getting better, that was, until the Guys In White came into his life.

Red Huntress

by sykloni (tumblr)

A comic that takes place right after Valerie has gotten her new suit.

(Fanning the Flames)

by starlightshore (tumblr)

My take on "Fanning the Flames!" While I like the OG episode, I wanted to take a different route on how it could go down, adding a focus on Ellie. (Danny's alternative timeline self)

(note: doesn't have a title so I put the episode title it's based on in brackets, I hope that's fine. This is a fun comic and I wanted to include it!)

Cheese Melt Comics

by lilianade-comics (tumblr)

(note: This is not a one specific comic, but overall lilianade-comics does a lot of Dani & Vlad comics and various AUs. However there is no masterlist, so you will have to search through the blog yourself.)

Ghost Hunter Family

by qianqiancandyjar (tumblr)

Secret Saturdays AU

The Fentons are supernatural investigators, ghost hunters as well as ecto-energy scientists. Danny and Jazz have been traveling all over the world with their parents to study all kinds of ghosts since they were born. Their goal was to keep the existence of ghosts in secret and protect humans from supernatural forces.

--Next some crossover fancomics!--

DP x SCP Foundation

by alen-lotz (tumblr 0 - 1 - 2)

(note: no master post so I'm linking the parts this far separately)

Half Normie AU

by spookberry (tumblr & Tapas)

“Half Normie AU” is just a Monster High/Danny Phantom crossover AU that I’ve been working on, with a big focus on Werewolf Tucker AU and a bit of Savant Par as well.

DP x ROTTMNT

by chasingrabbits-art (tumblr)

You Smell Like Death

by endouyuu97 (tapas)

DP x Gravity Falls.

(note: You might see the old version of the comic floating around in tumblr reblogs, but since it seems to be deleted by OP I want to respect that and only link the revamped version in tapas.)

Cold Front

https://coldfront.thecomicseries.com/

DP x Gravity Falls

Heroes of Millennium

by drawnfamiliarfaces (tumblr)

Secret trio + others

Age accurate secret trio

by beccadrawsstuff (Tumblr)

(note: couldn't find a working link to the beginning so you may need to scroll through the blog to find where to start reading)

Secret Trio Webcomic

by secretriowebcomic (tumblr)

Secret Trio

by squishy-lombax (tumblr)

(doesn't have a title)

[COMPLETED] by builtintripping (tumblr)

Nictoons unite

Fear of forgetting and being forgotten.

United

by chovomony (tumblr)

Nictoons Unite

5-years later

by The Ink Tank LLC (webtoon)

DP x Ben 10 + others

A cross-dimensional accident forces ghost-fighting superhero Danny Phantom out of a five-year retirement when his old arch-nemesis, Vlad Plasmius, allies himself with Eon, a time-walker on an endless crusade across the multiverse. With the help of the alien shape-shifting space cop, Ben 10, the Heroes must find a way to stop this mastermind. In a story of Morality vs Power, 5 Years Later brings together universes for an epic conclusion that takes them to the next level.

[mightyraptor]

"Commission for Sapiska - A Mystery Route"

Finally coming back around commissions again. And hopefully no more delays but always uncertainty.

Commission for Sapiska.

One of Sapiska's Pokemon Character for the Mystery Dungeon, some Fan Art. While I don't too much to say where this Umbreon, his journey will lead to, Id would say the destination is still way long ahead.

Took longer than it needed take. Not only because of the amount of detail you can see in the art piece itself, but also just like the other post I made not long ago Ive been wanting establish some colors and brushes to use for every piece moving forward so just something to keep in mind for those who've been follow me now longer despite not being active Id hope to be, at least be able organize more too. As well having putting out the descriptions like this.

But if your like type of stuff give it like or share if you want and if wanna see more. And Im also Opening Commissions Again so feel free to Note Me or shout over to me over on Discord if you want I will update when I ever I can on Commission Info too. Hope you enjoy.

https://www.deviantart.com/mightyraptor/art/Commission-for-Sapiska-A-Mystery-Route-1092698368

^ ^ Link To The Art Piece Over on DeviantArt ^ ^

(DO NOT USE, EDIT OR REPOST THIS ARTWORK) ⚠

(And Do NOT use for AI purposes either) ⚠

Artwork MightyRaptor © Character Sapiska © Pokemon/Nintendo Gamefreak ©

[dnschmidt]

Three Quick Writing Tips

Character Development -

A good way to explore a character is using contradictions. They're a soldier and a pacifist. They're a jokester but depressed. They're a violent gangster but also love kittens. Showing how the character can be both of these seemingly contradictory things can help their personality and background take shape.

2. Finding Story Ideas -

Do a little flash fiction writing every day to get your brain into creative mode. The #vss365 prompt works well. Some of your flash pieces may turn out to have enough potential to turn into longer stories.

Random art is good, too. ArtStation, DeviantArt, and subreddits beginning with the word "Imaginary" will give you so much to explore that you will never run out of something to spark your imagination. And I find surrealism and lowbrow art work well, too.

3. Working With Outlines -

First, review the outline to make sure every scene has a purpose, either moving the plot forward or revealing your characters, ideally both.

It’s helpful to add in your purpose or goal for the scene into the outline to make sure you stay focused.

Also, unless you’re writing a series, review to make sure all your plot points get resolved. You don’t want a reader to ask what happened to Susan when she left the bunker and never came back.

Then I like to expand outlines in layers.  I’ll usually add the physical activity, then dialogue, then descriptive details, then add more jokes. Feel free to experiment and figure out what layers work best for you.

[bellalampwickrossi]

Potential new Disney au , Western Disney Character Descriptions : 

Biased on this deviant art western au by daKisha - Hobbyist, General Artist | DeviantArt who is sadly no longer doing this au.

Lampwick is a little varmint who spends way too much time annoying the horses but he’s a good kid. He makes friends easily and he lives with his single mom, ex-saloon gal Carina, his grandma, and his little sister.

Tiger Lily is the Chief's daughter and member of the native band that trades with the town. She’s adventurous and plays a lot with Peter and his friends. She’s not scared of the crabby rancher Hook. She also might be getting a crush on Lampwick.

Alexander is the son of a farmer and he is really smart! He gets the best grades in the school house. He wants to get into something more interesting though and his friend lampwick sure is interesting! So what if they get into trouble if they always get out again?

Eilonwy is the daughter of a farmhand for landowner Adam and now that he’s gone, she’s got the tall order of taking over his work. Fortunately she’s up to the task. She likes to say hi to Alexander when he walks by to school though!

Alice is a student at the local school house. Her school teacher is Miss Jane Porter. She is one of the few children who lives in town. Most of the other students live on homesteads outside of town.

Pinocchio has lived at the Lost Boys Orphanage most of his life, but recently he was adopted by Geppetto. The carpenter has always wanted a son but he never married. Pinocchio wants to be a good son to Geppetto. He doesn't want to go back to the orphanage. But little Pinocchio is always giving to peer pressure and getting into trouble. Minor Characters Peter Pan is an orphan from the Lost Boys Home . He wants to be a cowboy and a gunslinger with a fast horse when he grows up. He works for Belle's father, Maurice, at the smithy stable after school. Peter is trying to save up to buy his own horse. When he's not working at the stable and playing pranks, he can be found talking to Sheriff Hercules about his latest gun slinging adventures.

As an Arabian, Tinkerbell might be one of the most exotic horses in Maurice's Livery Stables, but she has been impossible to sell because of her feisty, stubborn nature and short temper. Peter Pan sees her potential as a great horse and has been trying to bond with her. He hopes that by working for Maurice after school, he can eventually earn enough money to buy her.

Townspeople

As a orphan kid in the city, Hercules was always picked on and bullied. So he ran away from home at a young age to become a cowboy. He never did get the hang of roping cattle, but he found his calling when he meet retired Lone Star Ranger, Phil. Rumor has it his real father is the governor of Texas, and he secretly paid for Hercules's law education. Now, Hercules is the Sheriff of a small town in the Dakotas. He regularly gets offers to work in big cities, but he prefers the quiet life.

Maurice is a blacksmith and runs the smithy stable in town. His daughter, Belle, runs the town's small newspaper. He worries about her courting ranch-owner, Adam, who is known for his 'beast" like temper. He recently hired Peter Pan from the Lost Boys Orphanage. The boy has been a great help around the place in Maurice's older age and he enjoys the young man's company.

Adam is a large landowner who is known as the Beast because of his horrible scars that he keeps hidden under his gloves and high collars. He also is not the most pleasant person to be around. And who can blame him, after years of taunting and torment by the townspeople, he's grown a thick skin.  However, Adam is respected and well like by his ranch hands and workers, the few people who have seen the real side of the so called Beast.  

Miss Jane Porter is the teacher at the local school house. She came out West with her father years ago to explore the new land and it's creatures and Native peoples.

Snow White runs the boarding house in town along with her husband, Florian. Her apple pies are famous throughout the territory. Many miners and railroad workers stay there for extended periods of time, including a troupe of "little people" miners that Snow's grown rather fond of.

Aurora works in the dress shop with her Great-Aunt Flora. Her Great-Aunt Fauna loves to cook and owns Fauna's Cafe, the only other place to eat in town besides the saloon. Great-Aunt Merryweather goes back and forth between the two shops, helping out her sisters. Phillip, a cowboy and ranch hand for landowner, Adam (Beast), is sweet on Aurora and calls her Rose. They've gone dancing a few times but they are in no hurry to start courting. Not yet.

Belle runs the town's small newspaper that is published once a week. Once every two weeks if things are going slow. Her father is the town blacksmith. She tried to do an expose piece on Adam, a huge landowner with a mean attitude that the town's people nicknamed The Beast, only to discover that secretly he is a very gentle soul who has a bad temper. He gave her the rose cameo she is wearing. The town can't stop gossiping about the two of them courting.

[mthofferings2023]

Lady Gigi

See Lady Gigi’s existing works here.

Preferred contact methods: Email: jijikero@yahoo.com Twitter: LadyGigiArt Discord: LadyGigi#5001 DeviantArt: jijikero

Preferred organizations: - Anything from the list of approved organizations

Will create works that contain: Genderswap (F to M), MxM platonic/romantic relationships, Peter Maximoff (Evan Peters), canon, canon-divergent, historical/movie/books/no powers AU, mutual pining, miscommunication, angst, happy ending, domestic/slice of life, fantasy, getting together, established couple, love confessions, first kiss, first time, hurt/comfort angst, dark, mpreg, omegaverse, furry, dubcon, non-con, themes, most kinks/BDSM, incest, SFW, NSFW

Will not create works that contain: Genderswap (M to F), sexual acts with minors and animals (Rocket being the one exception), hetero pairings, FxF pairings, Pietro Maximoff (Aaron Taylor Johnson), bodily waste kinks, food kink, dismemberment/extreme gore, death, mech/machinery, x-ray vision

  -- Art --

Auction ID: 1035

Will create works for the following relationships: Bucky Barnes/Any - Any Universe Logan/Any - Any Universe Loki/Any - Any Universe Peter Parker/Any - Any Universe Remy LeBeau/Any - Any Universe Stephen Strange/Any - Any Universe Steve Rogers/Any - Any Universe Steve Rogers/Tony Stark - Any Universe Tony Stark/Any - Any Universe Wade Wilson/Any - Any Universe

Work Description: I'll create one 1-6 panel(s) A3 size (11"x17") pencil comic page with digital lettering and simple backgrounds of two male characters (for Character/Any: one Marvel male from the relationships listed above and the other male from ANY universe even outside of Marvel if you want). Digital file will be sent by email. If the auction exceeds $75, then the comic page will be inked traditional (digital can be requested but will take longer to complete). If bids exceed $150, then a page will be added (additional pages added in $100 increments at $250, $350, $450, maxing 6 pages at $550). If bids exceed $350, then the pages will be colored in Photoshop. If somehow bids go over $550, then another male character can be added. References such as pictures, descriptions of the clothes/poses/settings, etc. would be extremely helpful but specifically noting the desired universe—while I specialize in comic/anime/manga/chibi, I can imitate other art styles. You can write the dialogue or you can leave it to my discretion. Also, I may be a smut creator, but I do enjoy drawing comedic and wholesome stuff too. After the auction, please reach out to me with a description of your request before the new year (when I will start the request). If this is won by a pod bid, then please have all the details (comics-wise, who's paying for shipping if they want a page and who gets what page) ready by 2024 as well. I will provide a very loose rough draft and allow one round of edits/revisions. After the pages have been completed, the original pencil/ink drawing can be mailed at the auction winner's expense if requested (cost to be confirmed).

Ratings: Gen, Teen, Mature, Explicit

Can pods bid on this auction? Yes - Podbids welcome!

CLICK HERE TO BID ON THIS WORK

-- Art --

Auction ID: 2024

Will create works for the following relationships: Bruce Banner/Any - MCU Edwin Jarvis/Any - MCU Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier - Any Universe Hank McCoy/Any - Any Universe Howard Stark/Any - MCU Quentin Beck/Any - MCU Rocket Raccoon/Any - Any Universe Pietro Maximoff/Any - X-Men movieverse Ultron/Any - MCU Jeff the Land Shark & Loki - Any Universe

Work Description: I'll create one 1-6 panel(s) A3 size (11"x17") pencil comic page with digital lettering and simple backgrounds of two male characters (for Character/Any: one Marvel male from the relationships listed above and the other male from ANY universe, even outside of Marvel if you want). Digital file will be sent by email. If the auction exceeds $75, then the comic page will be inked traditional (digital can be requested but will take longer to complete). If bids exceed $150, then a page will be added (additional pages added in $100 increments at $250, $350, $450, maxing 6 pages at $550). If bids exceed $350, then the pages will be colored in Photoshop. If somehow bids go over $550, then another male character can be added. References such as pictures, descriptions of the clothes/poses/settings, etc. would be extremely helpful but specifically noting the desired universe—while I specialize in comic/anime/manga/chibi, I can imitate other art styles. You can write the dialogue or you can leave it to my discretion. Also, I may be a smut creator, but I do enjoy drawing comedic and wholesome stuff too. After the auction, please reach out to me with a description of your request before the new year (when I will start the request). If this is won by a pod bid, then please have all the details (comics-wise, who's paying for shipping if they want a page and who gets what page) ready by 2024 as well. I will provide a very loose rough draft and allow one round of edits/revisions. After the pages have been completed, the original pencil/ink drawing can be mailed at the auction winner's expense if requested (cost to be confirmed). For Rocket/Any, I would love to draw Rocket/Capwolf.

Ratings: Gen, Teen, Mature, Explicit

Can pods bid on this auction? Yes - Podbids welcome!

CLICK HERE TO BID ON THIS WORK

-- Art --

Auction ID: 3009

Will create works for the following relationships: Bruce Banner & Clint Barton & Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark & Thor - MCU Frigga & Loki - MCU Madisynn King & Wong - MCU Michelle Jones & Ned Leeds & Peter Parker - MCU Nick Fury & Talos - MCU Jeff the Land Shark-centric - Any Universe Bruce Banner & Hela & Loki & Thor & Valkyrie - MCU Edwin Jarvis & Howard Stark & Tony Stark - MCU Peter Parker & Peter Parker & Peter Parker - MCU, TASM, Spider-Man (Raimi trilogy) Floor & Lylla & Rocket Raccoon & Teefs - MCU

Work Description: I'll create one 1-6 panel(s) A3 size (11"x17") pencil comic page with lettering and simple backgrounds for ONE of the ten ships listed. Digital file will be sent by email. If the auction exceeds $100, then the comic page will be inked traditional (digital can be requested but will take longer to complete). If bids exceed $200, then a page will be added (additional pages added in $150 increments: $350, $500, maxing 5 pages at $650). If bids exceed $350, then the pages will be colored in Photoshop. References such as pictures, descriptions of the clothes/poses/settings, etc. would be helpful but not necessary. You can write the dialogue or you can leave it to my discretion. Also, I may be a smut creator, but I do enjoy drawing comedic and wholesome stuff too. After the auction, please reach out to me with a description of your request before the new year (when I will start the request). If this is won by a pod bid, then please have all the details (comics-wise, who's paying for shipping if they want a page and who gets what page) ready by 2024 as well. I will provide a very loose rough draft and allow one round of edits/revisions. After the pages have been completed, the original pencil/ink drawing can be mailed at the auction winner's expense if requested (cost to be confirmed). For the Jarvis & Howard & Tony prompt, I'll draw kid Tony.

Ratings: Gen, Teen, Mature

Can pods bid on this auction? Yes - Podbids welcome!

CLICK HERE TO BID ON THIS WORK

The auction runs from October 22 (12 AM ET) to October 28 (11:59:59 PM ET). Visit marveltrumpshate.com during Auction Week to view all of our auctions and to place your bids!

[skylermadness]

Something To Be Proud Of (Ragh Barkrock TF/PMC)

(Original Date of Upload: May 4, 2022)

Original Description:

A work written in collaboration with two friends of mine. This TF also comes with a sequence drawn by ArticulatedArtisan. He also drew the art that is used as the picture in the cover. The sequence can be viewed here: DeviantArt / FurAffinity Another Dimension 20 TF, and one that has been a few months in the making. Ragh is a really great guy and honestly needed TF into him- so we're here to provide! Admittedly I dealt more with the drafting, so all of this is written by my friend as they handled editing. I've never really done a second-person POV TF before, but I feel like I could go all in and try writing one myself some day. It'll just take some work- I'm also really happy as to how Artisan's sequence came out. It is so good! Just about everything about it feels perfect. Overall, I'm glad that he was a part of this!

   You drew in a deep breath, steeling yourself, and pushed open the door.

   It didn’t stop the wave of high school sport odor from assaulting your nose with enough force to make the tacklers jealous, but you managed to keep from gagging. You really wished you were used to this already, being the team’s waterboy and all.

   Waterboy, Coach’s assistant, whatever- all it meant was that you had to suffer all the drawbacks, like staying after school for practice and having to deal with the gunk and smell of the football team locker room, and none of the benefits- such as, well, being on the team. The coach just put you to work, setting up the equipment for practice, getting fresh towels and water to be ready on hand, and just about anything else Coach or the players needed, but were apparently too wrapped up to handle themselves.

   To Coach’s credit, you didn’t think it was necessarily intentional on his part to put you through all this suffering with no perceived payoff. Back when you first approached him in his office near the beginning of the year, you had wanted to ask about joining the football team yourself. You’d long looked upon these cool, hot jocks around school, joking and jostling each other around, and wanted to play with them, or have an excuse to hang out with them at the very least- maybe you could even be one of the Boys someday, if you did. 

   But Coach had taken one look at you, with your scrawny, somewhat shorter than average form, and completely misinterpreted your approach as you volunteering for the assistant duties. And here you were now, having never moved from the position, because you never had the gut to correct him.

   It wasn’t great- but it could have been worse, surely. You probably wouldn’t have been actually good on the team, anyway.

   You did try your best to make the most of it, though. Being often in relatively close proximity with the jocks and players on the team, and using it as an excuse to talk to them or hang out, was sort of what you had been after the whole time- so you took the opportunities to say hi, and talk to them on occasion longer than a question or two relating to what mess you had to take care of next. Your assistant work more often than not actually cut you off from being able to stay talking for long and kept you busy, regrettably. Even when you did find the time to hang out for a little while, your heart sank, as the Boys were certainly friendly to you- but you never felt it reached the point where you felt you could call it you being friends.

   The raucous sounds of laughter and football practice and buddies and bros being bros in the distance cut quiet in an instant as the door leading back outside swung closed behind you, and you stepped further in.

   You were out on a mission, once again: one of the players, a tall, dark haired one that you wanted to talk with for longer, had forgotten his playing gloves somewhere, presumably left back in the locker room. Coach wouldn’t allow him to let up his reps to go grab them, so he needed to    ask you- and did sound apologetic, very clearly aware that it was something he could go do himself. It didn’t force down the light disappointment of being cut off from talking to and getting to know one of the Boys better for longer, but you did appreciate the sentiment.

   You made to breathe in and retched a little, very quickly wishing you had not let out that breath of fresh-ish outside air so carelessly. Sure, the Boys were generally nice to you and plenty of fun to hang around when you got the chance to, but you couldn’t say you were a fan of their… low-standard sanitary practices. Loose football gear left strewn about the room, over the benches and on the floor. Shoes and socks that anyone could recognize came from an extremely active high school athlete left out on the floor as well, their ripe odors wafting throughout the stale locker room air. Empty bottles of awful 3-in-1 shampoo littered around the showers, collecting near the shower drains, having long since been used or touched.

   Your stomach roiled again at the smell. At least you had somehow convinced them to put their dirty laundry away in the communal bin on their own.

   You hurried around the locker room, eager to find the gloves and escape back into fresh air as soon as you could. It was taking longer than you were hoping for, there was so much gear left sitting around to sift through- where were all the gloves? Half the players out there weren’t even in full gear, surely there’d be at least a few unused pairs that the Boy in need could at least borrow for the day…

   Frustration was beginning to set in. The smell was probably starting to get to you. You were considering calling it quits and apologizing to the Boy back outside for it, when you spotted them- a pair of gloves, haphazardly tossed onto the end of one of the benches. You hastily snatched them up and turned to hurry back out, having had enough of the locker room stink for now.

   Your eyes fell on your prize as you walked quickly, relief suddenly giving way to curiosity as you peered a little more closely at them. These gloves were a hardy brown, made of tough, thick cloth with the sleeves extending past where the wrists would usually end, instead running further up along the forearm than typically. The gloves were HUGE, too- you usually weren’t paying attention to the size of most players’ hands, but you could swear it felt like these gloves in particular could fit three of your own hands inside just one of them, and have space left over to spare. Over the palms and where the knuckleheads would be, were layers upon thick layers of wrappings- having likely once been white, but by now have long since faded and worn out to gray from frequent, rough use.

   Were these… really the gloves that player was talking about? You really couldn’t find any other gloves in the entire locker room, so they had to have been if the Boy was sure he left them in there. But then again- these didn’t look like football gloves in the slightest, and didn’t even have the team’s colors. They almost looked like they were instead gloves for shoving, pummeling, or crushing opponents in melee combat.

   Your vision swam as you blinked away from the sudden thought, feeling a bit dizzy. You were close to further questioning where the thought came from, before you toppled into something and tripped, landing embarrassingly splayed on the ground. Gathering yourself up and looking around to survey the damages, you groaned. Your worst fears had come back to haunt you- you had knocked into the community laundry bin hard enough to leave dirty, smelly athletic clothes strewn all over the floor in front of you. 

   And it was your job to pick it all up.

   You were reminded of the great pains you had taken to avoid having to handle the laundry by the intense, pungent odor wafting up from the scattered pile. You quickly swallowed the bile in your throat before it could rise any further, and grimaced.

   There was no way in hell you were touching any of it with your bare hands.

   Scooting backward, you clenched a hand and felt rough fabric brush against it. You almost ripped your hand away in the fear that you had already touched something from this awful mess, before you realized it was just the pair of huge gloves you had come in for.

   Glancing down at the gloves, an idea came to mind- one that you immediately felt guilty for thinking of. You could use the Boy’s gloves to pick up all the laundry, that was an option… but then again, you wouldn’t wish this smell on anyone- especially something the player would be wearing as soon as it was returned. The odor would be sure to linger on the gloves, and you weren’t keen on giving him a reason to dislike you.

   Although, since the smell came from the laundry bin, which in turn came from the players themselves, maybe they wouldn’t notice if you used these gloves for this, just for a little while…? Nodding slowly, having successfully convinced yourself, you stood up and reached for the gloves.

   This act of handling player gear wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary for you- but something about holding them with the intent to wear them had you shivering a little. Not to be weird about it- but just before you put them on, you felt a sudden sense of… proximity? Like wearing these gloves brought you and the football players closer together, somehow. 

   And in a sense, it was, you laughed to yourself as you slipped the gloves on. This really was the first and probably only chance you’d ever get of seeing what being a jock would feel like.

   You felt a bit silly for being surprised when the gloves didn’t fit, once you had them on. Your hands were pretty average in size, while the tough-fabric gloves were big enough to completely dwarf your hands when you wore them. Your fingers weren’t long enough for the tips to reach the end of the gloves, and the palms were too broad for your hands to really fit your fingers into each respective holes- you ended up constantly bunching up the palms of the gloves in your hands to really get a real grip in order to hold anything with them. 

You withheld a sigh. The huge gloves were a bit annoying and uncomfortable to use, but they’d get the job done.

   You crouched down to get to work picking up the dirty laundry- and were almost immediately assaulted by that disgusting odor again. Athlete sweat and untreated B.O. mixed together in one atrocious concoction of stench, having left to fester in the laundry bin all week. You swore under your breath at the unrelenting attacks on your nose- but you steeled your resolve, and proceeded with picking up the clothing and putting them back in the bin.

   As you’d anticipated, the gloves felt awkward and cumbersome, the most efficient method of picking up the laundry really just consisting of you smashing your gloved hands together around a clump of clothes like the world’s worst sandwich, and depositing it into the now upright bin. You found your frustration dissipating, however, after a moment or two of picking up the mess- the need to constantly hold onto the gloves felt less and less, and you found yourself letting go of the bunches you had been gripping and letting them hang on your hands loosely. It only clicked when you tried smashing another clump of clothes between two gloved closed fists, and paused for an embarrasing three seconds, dumbfounded by the sensation of the motion, and why exactly it felt weird. You had the hang of these gloves now. Your face heated up a little, feeling a bit silly that you’d been picking up the clothes so strangely when you could have just picked them up and grabbed them with your gloved hands normally. The gloves didn’t feel like masses of rough cloth covering your hands, they just felt like gloves- why had you been so weird about it?

   Despite the worn gloves starting to feel a bit tight on your hands, you shook yourself a little to focus and pick up the pace. Now that that weird mental block keeping you from acting normal had cleared, you started picking up larger piles of laundry to put away, some so big your arms burned and threatened to buckle under the weight. You really weren’t expecting a workout when you came in looking for the gloves, but damn if you weren’t getting one right then and there. 

   You made to reach for a jockstrap that you thought for a moment was too far away- your arms burned- and you picked it up, without any trouble. You dropped it on top of the newest colossal load you had gathered, carrying and depositing it all into the bin without any noticeable strain on your arms. You stretched your arms high above your head as a quick rest, finding the feeling of stretching your muscles particularly pleasurable in that moment for a reason you could not pin down, and took a sniff. It was getting easier to breathe, the smell feeling less noticeable than before.

   But it wasn’t gone, and it was still BAD- you could swear it was actually clouding your vision, what with the tint of green your skin had taken when you looked down at your arms. Yeugh, better get this over with quick.

   The short sleeves of your t-shirt were already feeling tight, but that sensation had spread to your neck- and, hell, now that you were thinking of it it was everywhere else, too. It was probably the fatigue setting in, but with every breath you drew in the shirt felt smaller, like you’d put on a size medium you thought you could fit it that day but after the barest physical strain showed exactly how constricting it actually was and how dumb you were for thinking it could fit you. 

   A surge of power erupted from your solid, heavy core and rushed up to your burgeoning pecs pressing so desperately against your shirt, and you fought the sudden urge to wrestle it off of your body. This was the players’ locker room, not yours, and you didn’t have an extra change of clothes here to fall back on if you tore this shirt. 

   Another embarrassing five seconds passed before you realized something was wrong with that thought. Since when had you ever been worried about tearing your shirt? You wiped your sweating forehead with a gloved hand, and the sense of rough fabric dragging along your skin gave you pause. You brought your hands to your face to look closely, and saw two gloves fitting perfectly, if a bit tightly, on two massive, powerful, meaty mitts in the shape of hands.

   It took you a moment to realize, but these were not the hands you had walked into this locker room with.

   You looked down at your body, your brain working overtime trying its best to grasp the situation. You felt around your neck with your huge hands, and felt a short, thick, solid trunk of muscle there, which matched your deeper sounding breathing, you realized. Your scrawny chest and torso were expanding as you watched, the pecs and musculature growing and filling out first, before fat filled in after, greatly softening your pecs and pushing your stomach out into a solid, firm gut. You gave it the smallest of pokes, just to tell if it was real, and your shirt jumped at the chance to survive a moment longer by riding it up, letting your gut touch the open air. The sensations were there, of course, it was there and real and huge- and the skin was the same green as your thick, powerful arms, and deepening in hue by the second. You almost fell over, when your new gut shifted your center of gravity, but you managed to catch yourself and widen your stance accordingly. The things that felt right for your new body felt… really different from what you were used to. But… it was still your body, right?

   You bent down over the remaining laundry, getting back to work- something that you didn’t have to think too hard about, and that was something you needed. Your poor brain felt sluggish, too tired to really understand the changes as they continued. You picked up more dirty clothes, now almost completely oblivious to the lingering smell that you vaguely remembered was still there. You distantly registered the sound of your shirt finally tearing from the strain, and the itch of chest hair pushing out in a smattering across your chest and down your gut. Just a few more rounds, you were sure you’d be finished… with the laundry. Finished with the laundry.

   The lump in your throat grew larger, and your ragged breaths sounded even deeper- even gutteral, a little. Something about your face was tingling, changing, as the changes rose even further up your body. Your head split into a headache from how fast you wanted it to go, you didn’t want to be left behind with everything happening so much. You realized all of a sudden that your face was wrong and out of place it was hurting your brain because of it- then your skull shifted, the bone thickening and squaring off into something tough and not really human, but your lower jaw pushed forward and locked into place and everything felt right again. It felt good, and it really felt good too when two of your lower teeth grew longer and sharper, into the proud tusks of a young adult half-orc poking out of your mouth. 

   The ground grew further away from you as your brain struggled to work things out. Some things were starting to make more sense, and some things were making less and less sense to you- so much so that it hurt to try to think of them now with everything else happening. Instead of trying to think about why it was all happening and why it was- or wasn’t- possible, you focused instead on your legs, as they were up next. They grew longer and thicker, powerful logs of mass you’d forged yourself from pouring countless hours on the Bloodrush field, to be able to carry the mountain of mass and meat you were wherever you needed to go. Even despite the splitting pain cracking your head, you couldn’t help the surge of pride or keep yourself from grinning like an idiot at the thought. 

   Your shorts were barely holding together, looking so small and much shorter on your legs than before, but why? Gears chugged along in your brain and it made the connection- right, your legs were growing, weren’t they? A bit dizzliy, your brain kept flip-flopping between watching the changes in excitement and accepting your new normal. You felt a thrill heave in your throat at feeling your now-tiny shorts ride up your legs and the seat of your pants filling out and pushing up against the shorts, like a bike tire you’d pumped too quickly and was about to pop. Everything was different, but you weren’t scared.

   Why would you be scared? These changes were amazing.

   Why would you be scared? This was just your body, nothing new- but still fuckin’ great.

   You heaved another mountain of dirty clothes into the bin, and clapped your huge gloved hands together once, eyeing the remaining stragglers. One more round.

   Each step you take feels like pounding, stomping on the floor without meaning to. Your footsteps sound heavy, and your feet feel way too tight to feel good. Like you put on the wrong size shoes, these ones way too small… which would be something your dumb fuckin’ ass would mix up, wouldn’t it? Putting on the wrong shoes and not realizing through the whole school day… your powerful lungs let out a gusty disappointed sigh. Typical.

   Your tiny, wrong shoes seemed to think so, too- and with a shrrrrp of cloth, your heavy green feet finally had space to breathe. You tried to kick as much of it off your feet as you can, and turn back to the laundry- y’know, channeling your shit into something productive instead of wasting time being fucking useless.

   Your stomach turned as you bent down to scoop the rest up. It’s… hard not to feel like that, like an idiot who could never get your act together. Struggling in school, making all these dumb decisions, always blowing your top and letting your rage get the better of you… it’s no wonder you could never make the… make the team…

   You stood back up, and the surge of something throughout your body followed by the loud SHRRRRPing of shirt and shorts got you out of your head. You tripped backwards into the line of lockers behind you in surprise, distantly feeling the dented metal under your arms. Your brain registered the tight pressure disappear and what was left of your clothes hanging off your powerful frame, and finally began to catch up with your body. 

   You started to realize and finally understand, just so much has changed about you- and while it’s hard to put them together, all the pieces were there.

   The reason you were wobbling and feeling so unsteady on your feet was because your center of gravity was different from what you were used to. The reason you dented the lockers this badly from punching and elbowing them when you tripped was because you didn’t know your own strength- literally. The reason why your clothes fucking hurt so much and were too fucking small wasn’t because you wore small clothes and put on tiny shoes this morning like a dumbass- because you’re not dumb, yeah you know you’re not smart like the wizards or artificers or whatever, but you’re not dumb- it’s because your body is different! You put on smaller clothes that morning because you were smaller!

   Your thick brow furrowed and your face scrunched up as you mulled it over, as you became more and more sure in yourself. You rubbed your chin with a gloved hand, feeling the coarse stubble smattered across your chin, while you were lost in thought- unflinching despite the rank odor clinging to the gloves after handling dirty sports laundry for like, gotta be more than ten rounds by now. Honestly, you were losing track.

   "Wait- shit, I need to get changed." You blurted out the thought as it bubbled up in your mind, without bothering to think about it first- like the gap between your thoughts and your tusked mouth was getting smaller.

   As soon as that clicked, you felt fabric rustling and moving as it stretched to wrap around your much larger body, covering everything up. The bulging and straining shorts grew down your legs and darkened to blue and hardened into weathered denim, not without its scuffs and tears but still a good, solid pair of jeans. Finally the right size and not feeling like your legs were being choked out, a belt slithered around your waist to complete the look. 

   Your socks and shoes repaired themselves too- the fabric of your socks worn and holey, standing no chance against your massive orc feet, and your shoes concealing the rest of it from view, cutting off the stench suddenly wafting up from them, too. 

   You involuntarily wrinkled your nose, but it honestly didn't smell that bad. Not really any of this did, anymore.

   Your shoes finished off with a splash of red that quickly weathered and darkened from wear- whatever Mending spell was fixing your clothes didn't seem to be able to fix that part of it, turned out. But you didn’t mind, you began to smirk a little as you waggled your now warm feet in a good 17 and a half size pair of sneakers. A perfect fit, for the pair of stompers you’re packin’.

   But the main event was just getting started- you rolled your broad shoulders and thick, muscled neck in anticipation. You could feel it, your brain following the patterns as it sensed the scraps that used to be your shirt shiftin' around, and making the connections. Your shirt was next.

   The cloth rushed around your body, turning stiff and thick as it repaired itself into a shirt sized much, much larger than the size medium tee you had on that morning. The sleeves stretched long and smoothed out into soft white that felt good on your bare arms underneath, topping off with striped cuffs hugging your wrists and sneaking inside the sleeves of your gloves. You couldn't help the smirk of satisfaction cross your face as you flexed, feeling even these large sleeves strain to contain the solid blocks of jockish muscle and mass your arms had pumped out.

   Your eyes followed the middle of your shirt split as buttons popped out into view, suddenly becoming the things holding your shirt together over your bulky chest and gut. The shirt neck pushed up further over your skin- well, more jacket neck than shirt, really. And that meant it made sense that the soft, striped thing around your neck was probably a collar, jackets had those.

   A rich red color washed over the rest of your jacket, over your torso, filling out between the white stripes on your wrists and collar. A bright red that your heart leapt in pride for, even though you didn't recognize it yet- or at least, your head didn't. Your body processing things and acting on them faster than your brain could was becoming a habit, at this point.

   But even at its snail's pace, it was still chugging along- and the pieces were coming together into something that had you excited. With a duly stretched out tank top appearing just underneath, you were wearing a letterman jacket- just like the kind the jocks wore. Laying a hand on your letterman and feeling the hard, solid mass bulging underneath, it wasn't hard to put two and two… er, maybe one and one together, and realize- you'd fit right in with the team, and maybe Coach would finally take you seriously about wanting to make the Bloodrush team. A brown letter "A" stitched itself onto your letterman's breast, like the jacket itself was in full support.

   You didn't think that the team you wanted to join started with an A- or your school, either- but you brain managed to squeeze out the name "Aguefort", and your body relaxed, as if that explained everything. Your chest swelled up again, almost overwhelmed with the pride and team spirit just thinking that name filled you with.

   You squeezed your eyes shut and shook your head. Augh, gods, you really needed to let your brain catch up again. The idea that your tiny fit had just changed into something larger and tougher and more comfortable, was fucking with your mind. Like, you never had the smarts to really get into casting classes, but this wasn't even something you had thought someone could do with magic. Man, maybe you should try taking a spellcasting class or something, see if you could pick anything up before the school year ended- that is, if magic was… real… wait, that didn't sound right…

   You let out a deep, involuntary grunt as a headache pounded through your skull, just behind your eyes, and threatened to knock you off balance. You managed to steady yourself in time, quickly grabbing onto things for support, and your gaze fell onto your gloved hand.

   Once stable, you brought a massive mitt of a hand in front of your face. You snapped it shut into a huge, meaty fist, feeling the powerful grip in your long, thick fingers, and the tough material wrapped around it tight, and then relaxed your hand. The gloves fit perfectly. Everything fit perfectly.

   Everything fit perfectly on your body- holy shit, this was your body now, wasn't it? Your head jerked around, trying to get the best view of the huge orcish form you had found yourself in as you could. No way the Boys on the team wouldn't be jealous as FUCK of your sick gains. And damn, didn't you agree. There was this Pride pushing up in your chest, too- like you deserved a bod with this power and magnitude. Like after all the hard work you put into getting here, training and working out and putting on mass like crazy, there was no way you were going to get a body different from the one you wanted- this one.

   But even as proud of yourself you were, and how pumped and ready to RUMBLE you knew this body was, it…

   Your spirits fell. It still didn't feel like you were one of them. One of the Boys, the Jocks, even with your new varsity jacket, or your huge, jockish body. You weren't part of the team, you were just the… the, uh… well, you just worked there. Picking up nasty laundry. And there was a sinking feeling, that a part of you knew to be true, that told you that's the way it'd always be, wouldn't it.

   You looked over to the stuffed laundry bin, having finished picking everything up, but you couldn't bring yourself to feel happy about it. You sat down on the bench with a gusty sigh, and looked down at your open hands again, huge and strong enough to crush rocks. 

   All that potential, gone to waste from not being put to use on the team, just felt so crushing. 

   You'd be fuckin' great at it, too, you were sure.

   Your fists tighten, open palms snapped shut into that powerful grip. YEAH you'd be fuckin' great at it, you could probably take every game home by yourself if you had to, even without the rest of the team you'd be playing with backing you up! What was Coach thinking, not letting what had the potential be a star Bloodrush player onto the team? Was he out of his MIND?

   You were onto something, it hit you. You stood up from the bench, creaking in relief as your weight lifted off of it, and you began to pace back and forth to give your brain the time it needed to catch up, almost knocking over the laundry bin again. Why wouldn't Coach just let you join? Your face twisted as frustration and borderline rage bubbled up, trying to push past the ache in your head and think a complete sentence for once. Fuck, this train of thought hurt so much it was almost worse than biting glass on accident again.

   In an instant, your head snapped to attention and your eyes darted around the room, suddenly remembering the danger at hand. Glass could be anywhere, and you wouldn't even know if you were about to bite some- it was literally invisible! Your gloved mitt of a hand clapped over your mouth just to be safe, your orcish nose having almost fully tuned out the musky laundry smell the gloves still carried. 

   Your eyes landed on the locker room mirror. That had glass in it- at least, uh, you were pretty sure it did- but it was stuck to the wall, so it was probably fine. Mirror glass was probably different from regular glass, anyway, since it wasn't invisible. 

  You nodded to yourself, relaxing and feeling safer, when your eyes caught on your own reflection next.

   You slowly stepped over to the mirror, the tension of danger all but forgotten as you took in the half-orc standing there, facing you. Now that it was allowed to work on its own time, your brain was finally starting to catch up with your earlier thoughts- just in time for the final changes to make their way up your face.

   You wanted more than anything to join the team, and were probably one of the students at the Adventuring Academy most equipped to be really, REALLY good at it.

   You lowered your gloved hand away from your mouth to reveal it growing, bulking even further, squaring off into a strong, masculine jaw, skin as green as the field turf, with two thick, orcish tusks jutting up proudly from your lower jaw.

   Coach would be crazy to not let someone join the team if he thought they could help them win and play better, and Coach wasn't that crazy. Evil alignment didn't mean crazy, obviously.

   Your eyes clouded over and the colors went inverse as your vision adjusted to naturally see in darkness better, white piercing pupils in pits of black sclera. Your nose and ears grew in turn, ears a bit longer and tapering off into points, and nose wider to fit your orcish face better.

   But even though Coach was Evil- better than the last coach, anyway, Pit Fiend evil didn't turn your stomach as much as abusive homophobic evil did- he wouldn't force someone into playing for the team if they didn't want to. He was nice like that, you knew.

   And then your hair, from the roots up was darkening to a deep, dark green, so dark it was almost black. It swept back into a wilder, slightly unkempt hairstyle over thicker looking side fades, like you'd let it grow out a little after a while without a haircut.

   That meant Coach must not have known how much you wanted to play, even though it was obvious how good you'd be for the team. But why, then? How the hell could he not know? Something wasn't adding up, you realized.

   You took in the tough, proud face of the half orc reflecting back at you in the mirror. It was solid and imposing, but there was a softness to your expression, too- like it was getting more comfortable in wearing things that weren't a scowl or a snarl contorted in rage. The muscles and fat set in your massive jaw rolled at the even the smallest movement, and the whole jaw was sent shifting from the tiny clenches you made with your mouth as you thought. It was still hard to believe that this all only just happened, and you were so different a few rounds ago. The thought of a scrawnier human figure with a much thinner frame floated past behind your now dark orcish eyes, and all at once it hit you.

   Coach didn't know you wanted to play because you never told him you did!

   You clapped a gloved hand to your forehead in understanding as your brain finally made the connection. You remembered first visiting Coach back when you looked like a human, and you hadn't had the nuts to tell him you wanted to join the team- and THAT'S why you'd been stuck as the waterboy ever since!

   Sizing up the massive, half-orc jock reflecting back at you, already wearing the team's varsity jacket, you couldn't help your face splitting into a grinning smirk. That version of yourself felt so far away from you now, as the confidence of a half-orc AND a jock- who was not only centered and assured of who he was, but deeply and unwaveringly PROUD of who he was as a whole person- surged through you, your heart thrumming and shocking your back upright into better posture, only adding to your height even more. Looking how you did, with the huge new body and all, you wouldn't have trouble getting Coach to let you join the team now, that's for fuckin' sure. You even got a letterman of your own already, too! You turn around with your head craned to get a good look at the back of your letterman in the mirror. It'd be easier to just take it off and look at it there- but nah, no way you're taking this thing off anytime soon.

   Even with the added effort of having to read words backwards like that in the mirror, your heart leapt in pride and already knew what the big block letters spelled over the piercing gaze of a snarling owlbear.

   "BARKROCK."

   Your heart already knew, deep down, but now your brain clicked, too. That was- that was your last name. Your last name, Barkrock! Well- it wasn't before, but like- it felt good to hear it. And it definitely fit the kind of person you were now, and maybe it'd be good to sort of start over again with the Coach anyway, too? You weren't sure how you'd explain it all anyway, so just pretending you were a totally different person would be easier, even though you were still the same but you'd just changed a little. Well, a lot. 

   So yeah, you'll keep the name, no sweat. You could probably pass as a foreign exchange student, probably.

   You turned away from the reflection, and headed out the locker room door back outside to the field. You were PUMPED again and ready to go, feeling it in every part of your body- first steps into the new life laid out ahead of you.

   It was a beautiful, clear day with a few clouds about, and you almost didn't realize how different the field and bleachers looked from how they used to, with how familiar everything felt to you at the same time. It was a bit hard to remember what colors the uniforms of the teams on the field had been before, but the red and white they sported now- just like your letterman- felt right, y'know?

   You spotted the team on the field, and were about to call them over and ask them where Coach was- you had a lot to talk about- when one of them spotted you first and waved you over.

   "RAGH, my guy! Where you been, dude?"

   The gap between your thoughts and your mouth was too small to realize the jock had just called you by a name you were pretty sure wasn't yours before you were already hustling over, grinning like an idiot, huge tusks out and proud for all to see.

   "I'm comin', dude, I'm comin'!"

   And you hustled down the field to meet him and all the others, the fat and muscle of your beefy body bouncing up and down in a way that felt so real, so right, so familiar as muscle memory of your favorite sport seared its way into your body. You were a Bloodrush player, through and through- your heart knew that, your head knew that, and now your body knew that, too, which sealed the deal. 

   FUCK that felt good.

   The other players had headed to the benches, taking a quick water break before heading back out to practice. You saw the other players already had their waters and everything, and THAT got you grinning to yourself. You'd never be stuck as Coach's assistant again- at least, not in the way you used to. The faces of the other jocks lighting up when you arrived, and the growing familiarity you had with each of their faces and then names and then who they were and what they liked, told you that. 

   You were also pretty sure that some of the Boys here had changed too, like you did, with pointed ears or flaming hair or fuller beards where you didn't expect, but you didn't care about that, didn't you. This was the team you knew, and that was what mattered.

   The player who called you over clapped you on the back, getting your head in the game with a jump.

   "Jeez, Ragh, you took your time," he laughed, elbowing you in the ribs, sending something fluttering in your chest- something that you knew what it was but you decided you were fine with not following- for now, at least. You were at practice, not prom. "Your gloves that hard to find? Dude, we need you for practice!"

   You glanced down at your rough, worn gloves that’d been with you for ages. You could barely remember what that player who sent you in to grab them in the first place looked like, and looking around at your team and best friends at the Academy, you didn’t recognize anyone that might have used to be him among the humanoids there… almost like he was never there at all. Your head was starting to hurt again- feeling sluggish like it was running on empty when you tried to think about it further, and you made a decision. 

   You held the memory close for a moment, of that nameless player who gave you this chance thanks to his gloves- your gloves- thanked it, and then let it go. Your head felt clearer in an instant, and you shook away the headache, feeling yourself settle back into being comfortable with your friends.

   “Sorry dude, knocked over the laundry bin in there and had to clean up. And fuck, dude, I swear- it took me like, what, 15 rounds to pick it all up. There was so. much. shit in there.” 

   Everything fell into place so easily, the rhythm you had with your friends felt so natural, it really did feel like you’d known these guys and played on the same Bloodrush team for years at this point- which, as far as everyone else was aware, you had. And damn, when you weren’t thinking too hard about how different everything was, it just about had you convinced, too.

   “And honestly? Dude-dude-dude-dude, dudes, can I be real with you?” You directed it to the rest of the team, this time. “Y’all fuckin’ smell, dude.”

   A firbolg teammate in the back called out, “It’s just the musk, dude-”

   “Dude, no, I know the musk. I know the musk, dude, and that laundry bin was like- BAD, dude, even for me. Holy shit. Like, take a fuckin’ shower, guys!”

   Sitting back, laughing and joking with your team for the rest of the water break- you were one of the Boys, one of the jocks. 

   Just like you’d always wanted. 

   Just like you’d always been. 

   Your head wanted to pick one of those over the other to be right so bad, but your heart knew they were both true.

   You stood up, stretching. “Alright, back to practice. I got the scrimmage drills.”

   That confidence, that pride you exuded that kicked your teammates into gear stirred in you something fierce- and hot damn if you weren't fierce- but it also felt like the most natural thing in the world. That sort of authority came with you being the most senior member on the team- even though you weren't the team captain or QB, you knew all the drills, all the exercises, probably even better than Coach did, so you could pretty much run practice on your own when Coach Gorthalax got stuck in a ruby again or something. Getting held back a year or two was crushing back then, but did have its good side, you guessed. You were so familiar with the Bloodrush training stuff from playing year after year, you could probably become a Coach yourself eventually, if you didn't land a job as a star Bloodrush player or bodyguard or something.

   It took for when your teammates lined up for the scrimmage play for it to really hit you- you realized the future you had ahead of you. Before, you'd just been a scrawny human without real friends who could never speak your mind, and now you were a huge half-orc jock who had a team of friends and was proud of who you were. That went to the Aguefort Adventuring Academy, too- training teens and high schoolers in magical or fighting stuff to become adventurers and heroes, or at least learn whatever the fuck Principal Aguefort wanted them to take out of all this- a far cry from the boring ass school you used to go to. You had career options you'd never even heard of lined up ahead of you since you're close to graduating. 

   Fuck, you're close to graduating, too, huh… yeah, that was right, ever since that adventuring party of bad kids you became friends with invited you on a quest and finished it with them, you were on your way to graduation. Fuck, dude, that was something you hadn't though about for a long while, afraid you'd just get pulled back again. Getting through all your identity junk thanks to the school's guidance counselor Jawbone probably helped with that, too, being honest.

   More and more memories of being Ragh Barkrock, the half-orc jock who got your whole life turned around after getting your ass handed to you by the Bad Kids and then meeting with Jawbone to work your personal shit out kept filling your head in that moment- and honestly, you couldn't think of anything you wanted more in that moment. You felt solid, grounded. You knew for sure in your big, thumping, orc heart, of who you wanted to- no, who you were PROUD to be.

   The Bloodrush captain called the play, clear and sharp that cut through your mind like a greataxe through warm cheese, and your body instinctively sprang into action alongside your friends, your teammates. You grit your tusks and teeth, and called up that white hot feeling- in an instant your head, heart, and body finally all in sync. Not so much thinking of anything, or even really being able to think anything other than being laser focused on the play at hand that you knew by heart. 

   You thundered forward, letting loose a snarl and calling up that white-hot rage as you charged the poor humanoid player opposite to you, squeezing the last few thoughts through your head before going blank.

   Your name is Ragh Barkrock, and you're damn proud of that.

[mysticsparklewings]

Mystic's Museletter - Long Time, No Type!

This blog entry was originally posted to Ko-fi and DeviantArt and may also be read in full in either of those places.

Hey there Sparklers; It's been a while, hasn't it? 😅

So I suppose I should start with an apology, because I am sincerely sorry that it's been almost a year now since I was doing my regular "Monthly Museletter/Round-Up" Posts [on dA & Ko-fi, doing them here on Tumblr is entirely new], and it's also been a few months now since I was posting art...really at all, let alone regularly.

And because of that, if it wasn't already obvious, this isn't even going to be quite like my former "regular" long-form posts. It's going to be long, which itself isn't unusual, but because of how much there is to cover, I'm going to try and divide this all up into mostly self-contained sections, and have a list of those sections (marked by headers of the same title) beneath this paragraph so you can jump/scroll around and read "the interesting bits" at your leisure:

Overview of Where I've Been

DeviantArt's Changes

Other Things I've Been Doing - Part 1: Ohuhu Again! - Part 2: Social Sites & Dolls - Part 3: Everything Else

Peeks At Actual Art Things I've Done

Wrap Up

Overview of Where I've Been

So what happened? Well, the Monthly blog posts were just a victim of my executive dysfunction—I got in my head about how long they usually take to put together and when I'd miss one or put it off too long, naturally that would mean the next one would take even longer to catch up and it just spiraled downward from there.

Clearly, if I want to continue with those going forward, I need to make some changes to how they work so I can actually do them. At the moment though I don't have any concrete plans, but I have some general ideas that relate more to the next section.

Okay, but what about Artwork? I was on a pretty good roll there, especially with Winx Art, and then...Crickets.

This one I can't even fully explain myself. At first, I know I was largely bogged down by the fact that I just kept missing self-imposed deadlines to have certain pieces finished by, and my motivation to post art was majorly crippled by some Changes DeviantArt Made, but I feel like those two reasons alone don't cover everything.

My personal life has also been a bit of a roller coaster these past few months, but that is somewhat "normal" for me, so I don't feel right blaming it on that, either.

My best guess is those things combined with my usual Post-Inktober Funk™ and made a kind of "Seasonal Burnout," sort of like Seasonal Depression (as is fairly common for a lot of people to experience around the holidays and winter months). I've had plenty of creative ideas and was even able to do some other creative things I'll touch on more in a bit, but the motivation to actually draw was just...not there.

The other reason I chalk this up as "Seasonal" is because as the weather has finally, slowly started to warm up, I have noticed some internal changes with myself...Nothing major has happened yet, but I feel more squarely pointed back in a "Drawing Direction," if that makes any sense.

I think the last piece of the puzzle to get me at least sort of back on track is related to those Changes I mentioned DeviantArt made. So let's talk a bit about that...

DeviantArt's Changes

Towards the end of October—Naturally, my busiest month!—All of a sudden, I could no longer edit Deviation descriptions directly in Sta.sh, which I'm sure some of you Sparklers are familiar with.

This matters because I found writing & editing descriptions in Sta.sh much more convenient than typing them directly on the Submission Page. Mostly for formatting reasons, but also as a hangover from many years ago when I lost a a few descriptions that were written only on the Submission Page, which didn't (doesn't?) auto-save consistently like Sta.sh did.

So. That wasn't good, but I figured out that I could still edit existing Text documents that I had in Sta.sh, so I took to writing the descriptions in an old one of those and would copy & paste it into the final Art description later. But eventually, that method stopped working too. (I think around mid-November, but I'm not 100% sure.)

As of right now, you cannot edit any text of any kind in Sta.sh anymore. You either handle it directly (on the Submission Page for Artwork, or using dA's on-site text editor for written work), or you don't bother.

Now, I'll wholeheartedly agree that on paper this doesn't sound like a big deal. And it really probably shouldn't be. But nevertheless, to cut an overly long explanation short: It is/was for me. It felt like one of the last few threads tying me here, to DeviantArt, snapped.

Again, to cut an overly long explanation short, emotionally, that really hurt. I have more or less been mourning the loss of the DeviantArt I first joined back in 2011 as a result. 😞

And to cut one more explanation short: I've been thinking for a while now that it might be in my best interest to start up a more proper dedicated blog for my long art descriptions, and this blow to the way I write said descriptions on dA really solidifies that. I still have to figure out exactly where said blog will be—possibly here on Tumblr* which is why I'm posting this here now—but I have pretty much made up my mind that it does need to exist, one way or another.

(*I'd stick it over on Ko-fi, but as it currently stands Ko-fi doesn't have great organization or archive functions for older blog posts; If it's not recent it's difficult to find, and that just won't work with the blog-ish flow I know I'd need, among other small issues with Ko-fi's formatting.)

With all that said...I don't really want to say there's still a bit of light at the end of the tunnel for dA because that doesn't really feel accurate, but that's the closest expression I have.

Very recently, DeviantArt announced a new overhaul coming to the Submission Page, and while I have extremely mixed feelings about it (because I strongly suspect this is exactly why Sta.sh has been crippled)...I don't hate it. There are things I like about it, I'm mainly just bitter and fearful about Sta.sh's future.

But I also haven't fully put this "Studio" thing to the test yet—That requires actually submitting art. So, perhaps there is yet more hope than I think...

Other Things I've Been Doing

To that end, you're probably wondering about those "other creative things" I've been able to do I mentioned earlier, and also if there is any "proper" artwork to show for these past couple of months.

I'll go ahead and spoil that yes, even though there isn't much of it, I do have some "proper" artwork things I can show you, but I think (as this section title implies) it'll be better to address those other creative things I've been doing first.

Part 1: Ohuhu Again!

Probably the most interesting to you Sparklers will be the revelation that I'm in very early stages of working on a kind of "Buying Guide" for the Ohuhu Honolulu Markers.

I'm sure some of you Sparklers are familiar with my Ohuhu Chart and the unofficial "ongoing saga" of keeping that thing up-to-date. Some newer Sparkles may also have originally heard of the chart and/or me from the Ohuhu SubReddit, because I've spent quite a bit of time over there helping people figure out the best way to get all 363 of the Honolulu colors...since unfortunately, Ohuhu has made that process kind of confusing. 😅

Very similar to my chart sorting out confusion over how many colors there are in the first place, I want to make some kind of fixed resource I can point people to that would hopefully help clear up a lot of that said confusion.

I don't want to get to specific on the details of the "final" guide at this point since it is so early; Rather I want to just tell you Sparklers the actual work I've been doing to make it happen, and that all boils down primarily to three things:

Collecting and Organizing some text-based information (mostly in the form of Spreadsheets), and I was already doing a fair bit of this before I decided to even attempt making a Buying Guide

Fixing up my marker storage. I keep my Honolulus in their original bags for space-related reasons, but I've been meaning to make dividers for the bags to make everything more stable, and Spare-Cartoonist6276's Honeycomb method was the final push to do that I needed to actually do it. The only real downside has been that it just takes a while to construct each honeycomb section (and I'm not even bothering with the pretty color-matching cardstock). Fortunately, at time of writing I only have 2 sections left to go out of the original 11!

Swatching & Attempting to sort every color in a "Proper" Color Order. This is also something I've been meaning to try anyway and how useful it would be became pretty undeniable as I started thinking about how this Buying Guide is going to work. I'm in Stage 1 for this process—As I finish a honeycomb section, I swatch the markers in that section, so when the honeycombs are done, the swatches for colors I actually own will also be done. This is also different from my usual swatching because I made very basic little cards with holes punched in them so hopefully comparing colors and physically arranging them is as easy as possible. This swatching has been a long time coming though and is also taking a little bit longer because...I don't actually own every Honolulu color! I'm missing about 35, all of which belong to the "Pesky 43" that only come in certain sets. And with other expenses and trying to save up for a new website (yep, that Ko‑fi Goal is still active, folks!), I just haven't been able to justify dropping $130+ on yet more markers to fix that problem.

However, after some poking around and discussion in the wider Ohuhu Community, a Reddit User by the name of JayZedHorse very kindly reached out and offered to send me physical swatches of the missing colors! They are en route to me as I type!

There are still many small ways in which this isn't a completely perfect solution, but it is still a very solid step in the right direction and I am eagerly counting down the days until I have those swatches in hand!

So at the moment I have the small goal of being finished with the Honeycombs and my own swatches before the swatches JayZed sent me arrive; That way I should be able to jump pretty straight into the comparisons and start on color arrangement. But, fortunately, even if I can't be finished with the honeycombs by then, it won't be the end of the world. Both things will get done either way, it'll just take a little longer.

But that is about all I have to say about this Buying Guide that I think you Sparklers would be interested in, for now, so on to the next subject...

Part 2: Social Sites & Dolls

I'll start by saying there are two Social Media sites I've been semi-active on and so people that either follow me in those places or frequent the same communities I do will probably already have a few ideas of the other ways I've been flexing my creative muscles lately. [...And Members of the Sparklers' Club Discord Server will also have seen a fair bit of the same posted directly in there!]

As I sort of mentioned with the Ohuhu section above, I've been spending quite a bit of time on Reddit. It's not my favorite place on the internet, but I do like that I've been able to have long-ish form discussions about things over there that I would be pretty hard-pressed to cleanly fit inside of art posts. That's where most of my writing muscles have been getting their exercise.

The other one, and probably a little more interesting to you Sparklers, is BlueSky, one of the half a dozen "Twitter Replacements" that's been floating around.

To be fair, there were points where I thought either Mastodon or Threads were going to be my "Twitter Replacement" of choice, but ultimately neither ended up sticking with me and I'm not really sure why. It's possible the same will eventually be true for BlueSky as well, but so far even without fresh art to post it's been jiving decently enough with me.

I've mostly been posting Doll Photos over there; Literally the month after I lost the will to keep up with the monthly blog posts entirely, my interest in Fashion Dolls was finally renewed after a probably 5-6 year hiatus with one Karla Choupette.

I'll spare you Sparklers the nitty-gritty details (especially since I think I may be able to delve into them more appropriately in the future 😉), but suffice to say after falling in love with Karla and Monster High finally producing dolls I actually like again that I've been having a bit of a "Doll Love Renaissance" and I have taken probably a gross and shocking amount of photos of small plastic ladies over the course of the last year.

I don't know what it is about BlueSky that's made me genuinely want to share over there—It certainly isn't a massive following or massive amounts of engagement—but there is something, and it's pretty nice when previously I had to really talk myself into sharing anything that wasn't directly art-related over on Twitter.

Aside from just letting you Sparklers know I'm active on BlueSky at all, this is also relevant because I've taken to fairly regularly making things for the dolls—Mostly tiny crochet clothes, but a few other accessories too, like a belt I recently made to cover up uneven stitching on one doll's dress. And sometimes I re-paint details on certain dolls as well, but nothing super dramatic like some Doll Customizers do!

I would eventually like to compile photos of all (or at least most) of the things I've made for the dolls and maybe actually post them at least over on Ko-fi, and maybe here on DeviantArt too, since I am pretty proud of a lot of them and I think they'd be mildly interesting to my audience. But there are no concrete plans for that at the moment, just wishful thinking.

One related thing I do have slightly more concrete plans for though is the release of a Crochet Pattern—I got a little tired of the lack of pants options for the Rainbow High dolls, especially non-skinny ones, so I did some research and muddled together a pattern for some fitted bell-bottoms. I think the pattern itself is pretty much ready-to-go for sharing, but I did want to make one last test pair of the pants first (this will be the third pair in total) just to make sure one of my yarn recommendations works as well as I think it will.

The pattern will 100% be posted in the Ko‑fi Shop when the time comes, I'm just not completely sure if I'll be attempting to post it (or example photos at least) to DeviantArt as well, but...probably. We'll see!

Part 3: Everything Else

There is one more "not proper art" thing I've been slowly chipping away at that I think you Sparklers will find interesting.

...To be fair, there are some other much smaller things that I've shared with the Sparklers' Club on Discord that would also fit in this category, but they're not as interesting and would normally be saved for the "From the Archives" section in a Monthly Round-Up, so I'd feel out of place discussing them here.

Anyway. I've started the maybe-minorly-insane project of maintaining a Wiki for my Winx Club OCs: "The Mystix Dimension."

I've been keeping a running Google Doc with information about said OCs over the past couple of years as I've been doing major redevelopment on them, but I was getting tired of the limited ways to organize everything in that format.

After a lot of research that ultimately ended up going nowhere, I opted for the format I know best. I spent quite a bit of time making pages for my most-used Winx OCs on the Winx Fanon Wiki back in the day, but in the present I wanted the freedom to mess with the Wiki's code to both make it look more like the "official" Winx Club Wiki and also tailor it more to my own specific needs.

The "Mystix Wiki" is still very Under Construction with a lot of stuff missing, but it is slowly but surely getting there and most of the "bones" are in place.

So if you Sparklers are curious about my Winx OCs specifically, you can pop over there and have a look around—Of the information there, there's already a nice sampling that's pretty different from what long-time Sparklers may remember of my OCs from the earlier DeviantArt days when I was posting about them super regularly. 😉

A side effect of the Wiki that I semi-expected though is that it has made me realize how little I've actually drawn of my OCs even though they've been pretty consistently on the back of my mind for months. So I think pretty soon there are going to be more new Winx drawings in the works as I continue to fill out the Wiki. 😆

And speaking of drawings in the works...

Peeks At Actual Art Things I've Done

Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I definitely don't have a lot in the way of Work-In-Progress (WIP) Drawings, but I do have some that I started on before this unintentional hiatus. While I'd normally save some or even most of the WIPs for a Monthly Round-Up instead, given the circumstances I think it only makes sense to go ahead and share them with you Sparklers here and now.

We'll start with a few that should be recognizable as "updates" from the WIP Palooza that I posted back in August:

Firstly, and this will most likely be the next finished piece I actually post, I did finally polish off that sketch of Karla Choupette in the Winx Club art style. (And this is what I meant earlier when I mentioned I might be able to elaborate on my Doll Renaissance feelings later—The description for this piece would be a good place to do that!)

...I'm not showing the completely finished version here because I would like there to be some surprise when it goes public, and also even after all this time I'm still not 100% on the background I chose. So it could still change before the final post.

But Karla herself I'm happy with. I have no idea if I'll ever draw any more Rainbow/Shadow High characters in the Winx Style, but the door is open if I decide I want to.

Next we have...heh, My Winxsona in the Fan Transformation Formalix, better known as "Winxsona Winter Week 7". Incredibly, unbelievably late for "Winxsona Winter" at this point. But nevertheless, I started on the final two pieces for the series and I do want to finish them!

This one isn't fully finished like Karla, but it isn't too far off. It mainly needs shading and a background...And if I had no clue what to do for a background for Karla, then I have like -5 clues what to do for this one. 😅 I'll figure something out, though!

Likewise, I also have the "finished" sketch for "Winxsona WInter Week 8," or: My Winxsona in the Fan Transformation Dimentix.

Mystic Stars and Above on my Ko-fi already saw this WIP back in July, but this is much further along than you Sparklers saw in the WIP Palooza; At that time I had the concept sketch for the outfit and the wings done, and the pose, but I hadn't drawn the outfit on the pose yet.

The Dimentix wings are also ready for coloring (and the Mystic Stars & Above saw this one already too), but they won't be colored until after I get the flat colors down for the outfit/main image so I have a better idea of what colors should go where:

Again, no clue for the background on the finished Dimentix piece, but push-come-to-shove, I can skip a proper background and just recreate the..."wallpaper" effects that were used for the original Dimentix images made by FlorainBloom back in the day.

That leaves us with the two final WIPs I have to share, but for my Winx-loving Sparklers, I think they'll be the most exciting...

Yes, over a year later, I'm picking up the "series" that technically began with Light that Burns the Sky! 😁

Originally, I wasn't sure "Dark Enchantix" (or, my preferred name that I way overthought: "Incantix") would even be a series, but the response to Bloom and Stella was so positive [the Time Lapse has over 20,000 views on YouTube!!] and I did enjoy the concept so much...Yeah, it only feels right to give the rest of the Winx the same treatment. 😄

​As you can see, I've managed to come pretty far. Tecna and Flora have most of their shading done, so next for them is getting their wings in order, then the background (and I plan to use basically the same background that Bloom and Stella got for everyone, so that shouldn't take too much work). And Layla and Musa are pretty far along too...However, I have gone back and forth a bit on Layla's blues and Musa's golds/yellows.

Once again, I'll spare you the nitty-gritty for now, but was one of the challenges for my "Incantix Vision" from the beginning and is the smaller part of why these two drawings have been delayed so much. [...Y'know aside from the other things we talked about at the beginning of this journal.]

The other thing is that I lost my mojo for these two pieces specifically because I had hoped I'd get them finished by the end of the year to submit to a Winx Club fan project, and clearly that didn't happen. (I did go ahead and submit Bloom & Stella since they were finished, though!)

However, that fan project recently re-opened submissions through the end of May this year, so naturally I'm feeling a bit of an itch to see if I get can them both finished by then, even if it's just the still images and the Time Lapses (which only make sense to make since the first one did so well) have to wait a bit longer.

...Considering it's nearly the end of April now and I'd like to get at least 1-2 other things posted before I jump back into Incantix, and all the other circumstances, I obviously have my doubts about whether or not that will happen. But, who knows, maybe telling you Sparklers about it at this stage will be the extra encouragement I need.

At the very least, you Sparklers now know those finished pieces are coming eventually even if it isn't in May, and that was the main point in sharing the WIPs anyhow.

Wrap Up

​So. Now you Sparklers know where the heck I've been and some of what I've been up to in my time away.

I really didn't mean to more or less up and disappear and I am not happy that I have so little to show for my absence...But there's no time machine to go back and un-do it all, so for better or worse it is what it is.

I am, however, writing this blog post in the hopes that it'll be the "permission" I need to give myself to at least attempt to get back into an art posting rhythm.

As I touched on in the previous section, I do have a vague plan for my next finished piece to post, but it felt kind of wrong to just randomly go back to posting art like the past 4-5 months didn't happen with no explanation, especially over on Ko-fi. So here we are.

And...Beyond that, I really don't know how to end this. It feels a bit cheap to leave on my previous usual blog post send-off when this one is so different in nature...But I also don't consider myself as very good at ending these things in the first place. 😅

I should say though before I go—I really, sincerely do appreciate you Sparklers that have stuck by me in one way or another while I went radio silent. Every like, comment, whatever—I've still seen them all while I was away, and those are the little things that keep bringing me back when I do hit rough patches like this. Knowing that at the end of the day the art things I do matter to someone out there. It means more than I can put into words. So thank you, Sparklers, for just being there.

​Hopefully, it won't be too much longer before I can share some new things with you Sparklers to make it really worth your while. But, until then, as always...

Take Care and Sparkle On ✨

~Mystic~

[datasoulglitch]

[Introduction]

Okay.. after lengthy discussions with my interests, I finally decided to take another shot at creating an account somewhere other than Pinterest.. (I didn't have the most successful attempt with DeviantArt). It has long been no secret that Pinterest, as one of my friends said, does everything to make uploading art to it as inconvenient as possible. But for me this is not the only reason why I decided to partly “leave” that site.. All this is because of my FNF AU, which I almost abandoned due to some personal events. I had a person thanks to whom this AU was born in the first place. But, we haven’t communicated for a very long time by now, this person no longer needs me, I guess. Due that, my motivation to work on this AU, as well as to draw in general, disappeared for quite a long time. I even had the thoughts of ​​giving this AU into the hands of those whom I relatively can trust it.. Now I understand that this is still a part of me more than I thought. Based on the fact that I already had a not very successful attempt to create an account on DA, I already had the idea to devote myself in more detail to my AU. To do this, I need a site that will not only allow me to upload my art, but also will not limit me in the text. And may finally be able to express my thoughts about something outside the context of drawings, too. Previously, I was simply afraid to do this, which is why Pinterest used to be a more ideal place for me, if, of course, it did not have limitations for description, heh.. So, that's why I'm here now. I think I'll link this blog specifically to my AUs more than just the art that I'm still going to upload on Pinterest.. (at least until this place completely collapses.) This means that I will re-upload my art that I drew a long time ago with more detailed text, as far as possible and what I remember. And I will also upload new art dedicated to my AU, and probably some stories too, if there are any.

Maybe because the person who once inspired me for this AU, and who inspired me to draw, no longer communicates with me and this means that new art will be more rare, but I think I can still find sources of inspiration myself, after as soon as I finish reposting my art here and the text dedicated to them..

I love this AU too much to throw everything away just because of such a serious loss for me. It still helps me not to get completely lost in this meaningless existence.. Oh, I guess I forgot the most important thing for itroduction: my name is SoulGlitch/Glitched Soul, or Guritchi for my friends. Some people know me from my Pinterest page.. I'm an FNF fan, more specifically FNF Corruption. I’ll take this opportunity to also say that I’m very surprised to find out that people know about me outside of Pinterest, and that they like my art or AU.. it’s very nice. Probably, to some extent, this also influenced my decision not to quit completely. First step is to get used to this site..

[cassiopee4696]

Let me introduce myself !

Hi Tumblr !

I am Cassiopée, a black cat who is making 3D art (with the MMD software and sometimes with Blender). I've been publishing my works on Artfol (no longer on DeviantArt), Twitter, Tiktok and Youtube and I'll start doing it here too !

I do pictures, videos, and I also share the assets I make. Here is some of my works if you want to take a look :

=CREDITS=

Model YYB, freezychan_3dreams, me Pose me

Accessories Me / Chestnutscoop

Effects Rui / Ikeno, RedialC, 改変 / P.I.P / Soboro / Beamman, Chestnutscoop

=CREDITS=

Model Sour, Pilou La Baka

Pose Me

Effects Rui / Ikeno, RedialC, 改変 / P.I.P

=CREDITS=

Model Animasa, Jomo

Pose Me

Accessories Amiamy111/Clyriss

Effects ましまし/そぼろ/Otamon/Elle/Rui/Ikeno, RedialC (+edits in Krita)

-> Credits in the description

You can see my other works on my other accounts:

Twitter : Cassiopee_4696

Youtube : cassiopee_mmd

Artfol : @Cassiopee4696

Tiktok : cassiopee_4696

Ko-fi : Cassiopée_4696

I'll post new content here soon, so stay tuned !

[rex101111]

I'd love to see some commentary on Swipes of Sword and Fan, I'm curious when it comes to more variety-type fics where the inspiration for different chapters comes from and the like. And here's a ⭐ for anything you'd like to talk about in general about whatever!

Thank you!! Looking back im actually pretty proud of this little collection im slowly building up, though to be honest I didn't give it too much thought when I started.

It started out as a bit of a joke, the first chapter was basically just me posting one of the drabbles I sometimes write when somebody sends me a quick description. I just rolled with the premise while staying as close to those two crazy criminals as I could. I posted it as the first chapter of a "collection" half jokingly as an affectionate jab at a trend in fanfiction that is kinda dead these days but was damn near impossible to avoid just a few years back.

People taking an entire prompts list, anywhere from thirty to a hundred, and using that to make a chronologically loose collection of stories based entirely around one ship or group. A select few went the distance and did the whole bunch, but most of them stopped at around the 15 mark. Which is plenty impressive, sure, but it always struck me as evidence that fanfic writers have an awful little habit of biting off more than they can chew.

A habit I'm sure long time readers of my work will no doubt know that I share. The amount of times I said "IM GONNA MAKE A LONG FIC OUTTA THIS ONE JUST YOU WATCH" to myself only to get distracted later on by scheduling issues or just getting attached to another idea... Ah well.

So, yeah, I posted that first chapter as a bit of a jab at myself "oh yeah sure im going to make a collection out of this, the whole nine yards!...probably gonna make it an even 30, be surprised if it hits 15", and the first few chapters came to me like lightning. Since I established the setting in the summary, I pretty much gave myself the freedom to make any story I wanted so long as it was in that very vaguely defined period of time.

Any story. Any at all. Whatever weird idea came to my head with these two that I could fit on two-three pages. I kinda went nuts. Most chapters were born from a quick idea I had like "hey so what if anji got jealous?" or "how do they deal with bounties anyway?" and others I had to really sit with like "...what were Baiken's parents like?" or "tying shoes must be a pain in the ass" or "oh hey what if Anji actually did feel guilty and afraid of his actions hurting the one person he cared about" and so on.

It's gotten to the point where I'm actually fairly certain I will hit that 30 chapter mark at some point. I'm not putting myself on any time line, I just post whenever I have a suitably dense and short story I wanna add. And boom.

and im gonna use the star as a chance to rant a little about how petty I personally can be about comments. First off, I love getting any kinda comment at all, if its a simple "OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS" or something along those lines, I will gobble it up like its delicious because it is.

But! Personally speaking if you really wanna make me happy as a writer, I really REALLY like those comments that pick a sentence or a segment and go "OH I REALLY LIKE THIS PART HERE'S A QUICK RANT WHY". Been this way since I wrote weird OC shit on DeviantArt back in the day, craving that very specific "you did good" validation.

Seriously tho, if a reader doesn't have it in them to write a Formal Review of my fanfic I'm not gonna hold it against them. I probably won't answer because I'm honestly genuinely awkward like that. But the dopamine shot of "Comment on AO3" lasts longer if the comment is also longer, you know? I've read comments that made me dance in place and pump my fists like I won a marathon. that shit rocks and readers who take the time to indulge my need for overly specific praise are a treasure.

[osterby]

Constructing effective searches is a skill that was taught to me by librarians at the public library and by my father (a programmer), which I then honed on my own as I explored the internet as a teenager. Up through like 2010ish, this was an essential skill for doing anything at all on the internet.

And then Google got better.

In the olden days, you had to put recipe "french toast" in the search bar, quotes and all, to get a bunch of french toast recipies on the first page, but Google improved and was able to give reasonable search results to people to entered how do I make french tost?, with a question mark and a typo and without quotes.

This was a good thing, it meant that casual users (including your granny and your kid sister) could use a search engine and get what they were looking for without having to understand how computers think and without having to isolate the keywords themselves. And french toast recipes are a very simple example, Google's improvements also meant that people could use natural language to search for images, news articles, and location- or time-relevant information; you could search pictures of cats, what were last week's sportball scores? or weather warnings near me and get what you were acutally looking without having to use special search parameters.

This was a meaningful improvement that meant that a lot more people could use search engines, and thus the internet, effectively without having to learn special skills, but it also meant that the average internet user who was just here for recipes and cat pictures and sportball news no longer had the special skills needed for searching a lot of more specific websites. If you want Ever Given/Suez Canal fanfic, you can just type where do I read evergiven fanfic? into Google and the first result is the ship tag on AO3.

But if you want to search AO3 itself and narrow down that tag, you can't just type questions and requests into the search bar, you will have to teach yourself how to actually use a search.

The same is true for places like Twitter, Youtube, any wiki, Amazon and other online stores, your local library's website, The Internet Archive, Pixiv, Deviantart, all those image boorus, heck, even Pornhub. You can even search the backlog of that stupid Discord server that makes you join because they forgot what a wiki is. Some (like AO3) have very good search functionality and extensively tagged content, others are janky and bare bones or fiddle around with your keywords on the back end and mix in suggested crapola, but they've all got search functions that you can learn to use to find the specific thing you're actually looking for. (Tumblr is excluded from this list; no amount of searching skills will save you from their inability to index their own site)

I feel like I need to end this with a simple lesson on how you, too, can put together a better search query, but it really has been over two decades and I don't really remember how I learned all this in the first place.

But to give you the basics: 1.) Approach it as searching for where a specific word or phrase appears, not as requesting a type of thing. eg you are searching AO3 for instances of the tag trans!Jaskier, you are not asking a robot for Witcher fic where Jaskier is trans,

2.) Take some time to explore a website's advanced search page. Click around and see what the options are, read the tooltips (if you're on mobile, long pressing on something will usually bring up a tooltip that mousing over on a desktop does), check out what kinds of things get autofilled where, and if there's no good tutorial and the descriptions aren't very clear, just fool around with searches until you figure out what does what.

3.) Many search boxes, even on fancy modern websites, will accept a few basic boolean operators. If you're not sure if a website you use a lot takes them, it's worth testing it out. "Boolean operators" sounds like scary programmer-speak, but they're actually pretty easy. Here are some of the more useful and easily remembered operators.

- the minus sign is probably the one I use the most often, and is something that more websites seem to accept. It simply excludes the minused word. french -toast will turn up "french vocabulary practice" and will not show you "Grandma's best French toast recipe". Use this one to list all your squicks.

Enclosing something in quotaton marks will search for that exact string; "french toast" looks for things that have those exact two words in that exact order.

AND will search for things that have both the terms: french AND toast searches for anything that has those two words, in any order. The phrase "a toast to the French army" and "Grandma's best French toast recipe" will both show up with an AND search.

OR essentially performs two searches at once. french OR toast will turn up any mention of either word, you'll get "hot buttered toast" and "french vocabulary practice" with an OR search.

The asterisk is a wildcard. Trans* will turn up any word that starts with those five letters, including "transgender", "transsexual", "transition", "transcontinental", "transmission", and "trans*" itself.

And finally, AO3 has a lot of their very own search operators that let you narrow your search by pretty much any criteria you can think of https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/10851

thinking about that post of people assuming ao3 has an algorithm and also about how bonkers persistent the view is that ao3 is social media lite. like with startling regularity I get comments saying something along the lines of "it's probably weird to comment on a fic this old--" no it isn't!!!! this is an archive I am literally just assuming you searched for a selection of specific tags or sorted by kudos or looked back on my pseud or any other number of completely normal ways to use an archive site ?? kill the tiktok ghost in your brain and comment on old stuff it's NOT weird

[itsamepatches]

1, 4, 6, 12 and 13 (for the fanfiction asks!)

(From the "fanfiction asks")

What made you start writing fanfic? Let's see...I remember I was pretty young when I started reading fanfics, including through people's own personal sites outside of ff.net and DeviantArt and thought how neat it was that these people were writing their own stories about characters I knew and loved. Bonus addition to this: What finally made me start writing was reading these old and incredibly ooc D/BZ written by this really sweet person I remember commenting a few times. Last time I checked up on her (4 years ago?), she's still doing things including in that fandom :'B Another bonus!: My first "fanfic" was, of course, script-format since I didn't have a grip on writing traditional novel-style, and it was a PPG fanfic where Blossom and Brick got married despite the fact that I never cared for that ship? I vaguely remember that I noted in the fic that they married on a holiday so they didn't miss school or something...?

4. Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?  It's to be expected, the longer you write, but yeah I've noticed how my writing has changed -- and it's not good, to be honest.

An example is how I was re-reading an old, long VT fanfic I wrote a few years back. I was a lot more descriptive which in turn gave more of an atmosphere for the reader (well, I hope anyways ;; ) but I missed a couple of plotlines I had planned to add.

Compared to my more recent things, I feel like my writing is rambling on without giving much space for development and descriptions, if that makes sense? My only exception to my writing lacking is possibly a FNAF Security Breach story I wrapped up ("REC: Bonnie Bound"). I think the reasoning is that: 1) I took several breaks from writing due to lack of motivation 2) I've read some fanfics that just,,,use too many sophisticated words that the average person neither knows nor has used it in nearly 2 centuries and realized that I did not want to fall into that pitfall, so there's hesitation in what I write.

tldr; yes it has -- it's gotten worse instead of better.

6. Name three stories you found easy to write. 1) REC: Bonnie Bound - FNAF -- was I salty about Bonnie and Foxy not being in Security Breach? haha,,,goodness, no! It was, funny enough, going to be a short one-shot which evolved into a whopping 20k, 2 chapter fic. Safe to say I was inspired by something! 2) In Which Gynophoria Happens - Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass -- I love Linebeck and like every other Linebeck fan, I wanted to do more with his character after the end of PH. Oldie, but a goldie! 3) An Obligatory Starship Genius Epilogue Story - Ratboy Genius -- a fanfic for a semi-obscure fandom! The last time I wrote a RBG fic was around 5 years ago, and I definitely like this more than the previous one.

12. For E-rated fic, what are some things your characters keep doing? Uh...blink? Most of the stuff I write are slice-of-life-ish, so nothing too exciting ;;

13. Name three favorite characters to write. This one might be kinda hard, because I have a lot of fics still under "wip" so it's gonna be a difficult to notice just based on what I've uploaded at the moment...

Foxy -- he's kind of a dumbass but he's also a friend

Lady Parsec -- I'm still getting the hang of how I want to portray Her, but from what I've written so far, She's a bit of a "sneaky sneak" with a slight sarcastic tone, She's a mystery about what She is and where She's from~

Linebeck -- he's Linebeck

[thefaybul]

2023 February Feature

For the February Feature video, I am well aware that we are all likely very tired of winter and so I thought I would heat things up with some great art, a mystery thriller, and plenty more for this feature video. As always if you like what you see in the video please consider supporting the creators by following the links and maybe buying some of these amazing works featured in the video. And on a final note before we get to those creators, if you love winter, then you may need to see a doctor for a prescription of warm summer days and see you in the fall. First up to warm the day up is…

Shaun G. who has a very unique and abstract design scheme that helps to bring to the canvas something truly unique and special to see. These interesting images need a unique eye to create and bring to life. The artist he own statements:

“About me, the condensed version. Homeschooled art nerd from Wisconsin. I went to music school but hated it. I have a solo album out, and I'm working on three more for release soon. I had a running comic in the highschool in my hometown. I've sold maybe something like 50-60 paintings in my career. I've done several shows. I recently quit working to pursue a full-time art career. I was a balloon animal maker for every major sports team in Minnesota, and a face-painter too. I owned my own bonsai, garden, landscaping, and lawn service for 5 years, and also ran a rickshaw business in a small town. I live in the twin cities now and I'm just learning the ropes of the local art profession here.”

You can find more of his works at the links below.

Next up we have a mystery and thriller from writer Maggie Casteen. This is a sequel for the Kathy Hamilton series that she has created. Maggie’s description states,

“In the next installment of the Kathy Hamilton Mystery series a lot of changes are coming for Kathy. After a successful trip in the UK with the Brooks case, Kathy is back home in Rosemont and looking for a chance to work as an investigator. A local defense attorney, Bailey Clark, decides to give her a chance, but her first case could be her last. The client is accused of killing a young woman outside of Delany’s Bar, but the only thing is he can’t remember what happened. Did he do it or is something more sinister at work underneath? Kathy will follow the clues to discover the truth...if it’s not too late.

Full of mystery, twists, and turns Hush Now, Don’t Cry will take you on a ride that will leave you wondering what happens next.” Here is a sample of that great work.

#

Prologue

Her eyes glanced across the room as she walked into the Irish bar. She took a seat at the bar and tried to blend in. “He said he’d be here at midnight.” she said to herself. Sandy looked at the clock behind the bar; fifteen more minutes to wait. She laid her purse on the bar in front of her and tried to stay calm. There were plenty of people there having a good time and making memories that they would laugh about later. Sandy just sat there, keeping her eyes forward. The last thing that she wanted was trouble. In just one week, her life had been turned upside–down. I’m just a waitress, she thought, and now after this I’ll be nobody. Sandy looked at the clock again when she saw a man walking towards her. Oh no, she cringed inside, but it was too late; she had been noticed. 

“Can I buy you a drink?” Sandy looked up and saw a good-looking guy maybe a little over six-foot leaning against the bar. 

“No, that’s ok” she said smiling, “I’m not going to be here much longer.” 

“Aww, come on” he said with a sly smile, “one drink and I’ll help you wait it out.” 

Wow, this guy is not going to go away, Sandy thought to herself. 

“Name’s Chase. What’s yours?” he asked as he held out his hand. 

“Umm, it looks like my friend is late,” Sandy said as she began to leave the bar, “Maybe...”

“Look,” he said grabbing her arm, “all I want is a drink and your name,” he said; the smile had vanished. 

“Stop it!” she said pulling away, “You’re hurting me.” 

She said louder than she intended, and people were starting to look. 

“Hey! Leave the lady alone,” shouted the bartender, approaching Chase. It had been a fairly quiet night and he wasn’t about to let anybody ruin it now. 

“Fine, Kevin,” Chase said as he threw up his hands in retreat. “Go on; leave then,” he spat at her. Sandy grabbed her purse and softly smiled at the bartender as she made her way out. He’s not going to like this she thought as she walked outside and stood beside the bench. She leaned against the glass window that read Delany’s Pub & Pool Hall as she wiped the tear from her check. Then, she started to check her phone when she felt someone come up behind her and point something into her back. God save me, she thought as she felt her tears run down her cheeks. 

“Shhh,” the voice behind her whispered, “hush now, don’t cry.” And then he slowly grabbed her by the waist. “I’m going to take care of you.” Sandy closed her eyes as they started to back into the alley, she knew what was coming...she had been found.

#

Suspenseful writing and great introduction to the book. If you enjoyed the story please go to the links below and get a copy of this great mystery.

Barnes and Noble:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hush-now-dont-cry-maggie-casteen/1139454226?ean=9781098379445

Amazon:

The next up is Stefano Corrao, he is an artist that does some very detailed and interesting art that ranges from comic book art to fantasy landscape art and even caricatures. The pieces are very detailed and well designed. Comments from the artist.

“Hi, my name is Stefano Corrao and I'm an Italian artist, these are some samples of the graphic novel I made about Bob Dylan's life. The book is published by Edizioni NPE : www.edizioninpe.it

The title in Italian is:

"Bob Dylan - La risposta è nel vento"

("Bob Dylan - The answer is in the wind".)

and can be bought on their website, in all the Italian bookstores (I don't know if it's already available abroad) and can also be bought on amazon.

I am a very versatile artist and I can do many different genres and styles, if you could please mention on your magazine also my website: www.stefanocorrao.com where you can view various works.”

Rounding out this month's issue is a great podcast that talks about those family issues and hopes to educate individuals about issues that may arise within family life. From the creator of the podcasts own words.

“My name is Stefanie and our podcast is Table for Four! It is a podcast featuring our Hispanic family talking about all different issues that affect all families.  Talking about the tough topics, funny stories and learning along with our kids from different perspectives. We invite guests on the podcast and we have fun talking with everyone. 

Table for Four is made up of myself, my husband Andre, my oldest son Adriean and my youngest Stefan and we are the Molina Family. We are a Hispanic millennial family trying to navigate this thing called LIFE. We talk about a wide variety of topics that affect all families and we get to use this platform to share our experiences”

Listen to the introduction video right here.

Thank you for joining me for these great creators being featured. Don’t forget to check them out and follow for more amazing content in the weeks ahead. Also remember, Be Your Own Fable.

[miru-p]

Jones-Fiori family tree! Third version, and I hope the last one lol. Open in new tab for better view or check it in my deviantART with longer description! 

Now, under the cut, about the members, from left to right, and up to down:

Angela Fiori (C.V: Yoshiko Sakakibara / V.A: Mary Elizabeth McGlynn) Melissa's grandmother was a very kind woman that Melissa loved with all her heart. When she died at the beggining of 1914, Melissa was totally devastated, and when she returned back to Central and found out that Hughes also had died, only worsened her mental state. Melissa's first daughter is named after her. Alex was who decided it because he knows how much she loved her. Evelyn Jones (C.V: Ayumi Tsunematsu / V.A: Kari Wahlgren) Evelyn, just like her son, is a very warm and friendly person who always cares about others. She was like a mother figure for Melissa, and was an important support for her, especially during her first pregnancy while her mother Beatrice was distancing herself from her. Evelyn gives her, the day of her wedding, a little heart-shaped pendant, that Melissa wears it in a cord in her wrist since that day. Jonathan Jones (C.V: Kazuhiko Inoue / V.A: Illich Guardiola) Jonathan is a verious serious man yet a very warm person. For him, the most important thing in life is his family. He welcomed Melissa to his family when she married Alex, and loved her as his own daughter.

Gabriele Fiori (C.V: Yoshimasa Hosoya / V.A: Richard Epcar) Melissa's father is one of the most important people in her life. He is a very quiet person who rarely shows his emotions but he loves her daughter so much. Melissa is also quiet so she understands him. Besides, Gabrielle also supported her when she though about joining the military. When his mother Angela died, he fell into depression and Melissa tried to make him feel better. Beatrice Fiori (C.V: Sayaka Ohara / V.A: Ellyn Stern) Melissa's mother is a very stric and stoic woman just as Melissa herself. But unlike her, Beatrice is a very traditional woman; something that ruined her relationship with her daughter. First, she didn't support her at all when Melissa decided joining the military because she thought that a woman shouldn't be in a job like that, so she distanced herself from her daughter. Not only that, but also she didn't like so much the idea of Melissa marrying Alex; something that Melissa wouldn't forgive. Lionetta Breuer (C.V: Hitomi Nabatame / V.A: Erica Lindbeck ) Lionetta is Beatrice's sister. She lived in Central and needed help in her store, so she asked her sister if she could. So, in 1889, Beatrice and Gabriele moved to Central and started living there with her, too. Arabelle Jones (C.V: Miki Itō / V.A: Mela Lee) Alex' older sister met Meli when they were children and became friends. Arabelle is a very supportive person, so when Melissa started dating Alex, she welcomed Melissa to her family without even thinking. She was very happy since she always appreacited her a lot, besides she knew about Alex' crush for her since forever. She has a relationship with Lucy Carter (miss-mary-grace 's OC) whose character can totally handle since she has some similarities with Melissa. Alexander Jones (C.V: Yūichi Nakamura / V.A: David Matranga) Alex is a very kind and warm person. Basically the definition of cinnamon roll. Alex met Melissa when they were children in Central and inmediately became friends. Alex was in love with Melissa since they were kids, something that everyone noticed, except Melissa. He was key when Melissa's grandmother and her friend Hughes died, supporting her in everything he could. After the Promised Day, he confessed to her. Months after that, they got married and had their first daughter. Melissa Fiori (C.V: Yōko Hikasa / V.A: Elizabeth Maxwell) Melissa's desire of protect people made her join the military. At first, she worked like secretary principally and did a lot of paperwork for the Major Maes Hughes with whom he became friends due to his easy going personality. She was working under him for a year and was promoted to corporal because of her skills. Since then she worked in the investigation department and is promoted to sergeant major with 24 years. After the Promised Day, Melissa decided to leave the military. She knows for Hughes' death how dangerous their work is and she can't accept that one day the pain that Gracia and Elicia are going through could happen to Alex. Since then, she became an employee in Evelyn's florist shop. Fiorella Fiori (C.V: Rie Takahashi / V.A: Colleen O'Shaughnessey) When Fiorella was born, Melissa looked after her a lot because she thought that as an older sister she had to be like a second mother for her. When they grew up, they still have a very good relationship even thought they were distanced due to Melissa's tense situation with her mother. Fiorella usually tries to reunite her mother and her sister so they can talk and  forgive each other. Angela Jones (C.V: Mariya Ise / V.A: Kelly Sheridan) The first daughter of Melissa and Alex is a hurricane. She's very spontaneous yet responsible. Both Melissa and her have strong tempers so sometimes they argue and Alex has to mediate between them. Thank to her love for music she could meet Vanessa Elric's (novanoah 's OC) beautiful voice and develop a crush on her. When they are older, they started dating. Samantha Jones (C.V: Chiwa Saitō / V.A: Kate Bristol) The second daughter of Melissa and Alex is a very shy child. She has a hard time interacting with others, and is very family oriented since with her relatives she feels more safe. Her most precious possesion is a little rabbit keychain Jansen bought her for for apologizing when he broke her favorite plushie.

Jansen Jones (CV: Nobunaga Shimazaki / V.A: Josh Grelle) The only son of Melissa and Alex is totally opposite character-wise of his twin sister. Jansen is a prankster and is proud himself of how he is. Jansen dream is becoming a famous soccer player, but at the moment he has to deal with her archenemy: mathematics, with Leonard Fuery's (his boyfriend math tutor) help.

[gwemmieee]

Feminism is for everyone. The patriarchy hurts men, too, and they are also people who do not deserve that hurt. Being shitty to people you don't know and calling for harm to an entire category of people based on things about them that weren't actually a choice, is always wrong. This includes men. I stand with you on this.

I would like to chime in though to say that, in my experience as a trans woman who transitioned later in life, this both is and isn't quite accurate.

If we're purely talking about mainstream discourse on social media sites that are either designed to amplify hate and division and infighting or, in the case of Tumblr and TikTok, maybe aren't *designed* that way but also do *nothing* to try to reduce our natural tendencies towards that stuff... You're right. You're utterly correct. And I know why. It's because women don't really get to exist safely online anymore, and are isolated, and are in a place where many of them are much less able to resist lashing out.

I don't know if everyone reading this is old enough to really understand what I'm talking about, but girls used to *exist* online. Like on MySpace, and DeviantART, and Neopets/Club Penguin/etc., Tumblr, and even on YouTube. And not as content creators or influencers, but as fully open people. Young girls used to truly be half of meme culture and participating equally, back in the 00s. But then as the 00s dragged on, we started getting bullied incessantly for our femininity or for certain more feminine neurodivergent tendencies (as most people who spend a LOT of time online are neurodivergent, especially back then). Our entire existence basically became the dominant culture pointed to as cringe. And then GamerGate happened. And before I even knew I was a girl, and without being fully conscious of what was happening at the time, I watched every girl and every woman, neurodivergent or not, who had the ability to go outside and be with people IRL, leave the internet. And they've been outside ever since.

And when you go outside, you will notice that the reality of feminism among healthy adults and their children just doesn't line up with this description. I remember when I was perceived as male, before and during and after GamerGate, in the heyday of pop feminism when it was all about letting men in and teaching them that they, too, can be feminists. But I wasn't actually let in. Even though I wasn't even a man, and I was just an amorphous autistic genuine feminist perceived as a man, I was held at an arm's length and treated like a predator. Unless they wanted to date me, no woman ever actually let me be friends with her besides one close childhood friend and one college friend, both of whom were not passionate feminists or queer. Feminists *told* me that all I had to do to feel fully accepted was agree with feminism, and I believed them, but the check completely bounced.

Nowadays though, living outside among adults, many of whom are the same age as me and the women who kept me away before... I don't know if this is culture evolving, or just the fact that I and my peers are no longer so young as early 20s, could be some of both. But trans, cis, BIPOC, most women in general are so much more welcoming of *any* man who does not prove he's a predator, and so much less TERFy. It really is getting better... just not in these online spaces that all the healthiest women were bullied out of a decade ago. Yeah, we still see women everywhere on Tumblr, but most of them are some flavor of disabled and kind of have nowhere else to go, or they're part of the following sentence. Yeah, we still see women everywhere on TikTok, but there's a difference between dipping into social media between going out almost every night and having a life, and living online, and most women online just don't live there anymore. I would know. I tried so hard to find them online after they'd left and I finally realized who I was, from my disabled and lonely position in a remote forest.

i am not being needlessly alarmist when i say that popular feminism has become extremely radfem-esque and that the normalisation of negative stereotypes towards men needs to be resisted. like. i clearly remember when feminists were derided as "man-hating feminazis" and the main counter-argument to that went something like "we don't hate men, feminism is for everyone, patriarchy harms men too and our goal is to dismantle that oppressive system, this will benefit everyone including men, men can and should be feminists because feminism is a movement for gender equality"

in fact the major rebuttal to men forming "men's rights" movements was always that the issues these groups identified were the negative impacts of the patriarchy on men. they didn't need a separate group because feminism was for everyone and feminist thought and theorising already accounted for the ways patriarchy harms men. which is true! many of the societal issues faced by men stem from white supremacist patriarchy and restrictive gender roles and traditionally feminism has given thought and time to those issues. feminism is for everyone and it is concerned with men's struggles under patriarchy alongside women's.

but somewhere in the last few decades that attitude fell by the wayside and now popular online feminism is this radfem-flavored "all men are bad forever" thing. now mocking, belittling, or hating men is #feminist #praxis. it's feminist to make jokes about #killallmen. it's feminist to view masculinity as inherently bad and dangerous. it's feminist to talk about the men in your life like they're animals who need to be house trained, or emotionally stunted children who need to be babied and distracted.

it's this idea of flipping patriarchy on its head and saying that actually women are the Superior Gender, women deserve to run the world and make all the decisions, and actually it's men who are the Inferior Gender who can't be trusted or left unsupervised.

these attitudes will always have the most severe negative impact on marginalised men. i don't know how we got here but it's past time we circled back around to "feminism is for everyone".