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wishing--butterfly · 1 year ago

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hold me, touch me, love me

Characters: Aaron Warner x fem!reader (established relationship)

I imagine reader and Aaron being in their 20s

Genre: SMUT, fluff (just you and aaron being hopelessly in love with each other)

Warnings: SMUT, Unprotected sex (please always be safe), mentions of fingering and oral (f!receiving), a little bit of doggy style at the end, edging (sort of…), cursing, lots of kissing, Aaron being a tease, Aaron Warner (yeah, he’s a warning himself)

Word Count: 3.4k words

A/N: I think I sort of got carried away. Had to write this one because Restore Me constantly mentioned about Aaron’s “breathless gasps” and I know sounds beautiful. I’m hella embarrassed so there’s a chance I might delete this later. Also, beautiful header credits goes to @/cafekitsune !

I’m writing smut for the first time as well. In general, please be nice and respectful to me and everyone.

I hope you enjoy! :) Please do LIKE, comment or reblog if you enjoy ❤️

MINORS PLEASE DO NOT INTERACT! 18+ ONLY.

It was late at night when the two of you indulged yourself in the stillness of the late hours, the darkness enveloping you from the world as Aaron kisses you, holding you flush against his body as you pulled away for air but immediately latched your lips against his defined jaw. His five o'clock shadow tickled your cheeks a little which made you smile against his skin.

Your lips traced his soft skin, sucking and nibbling on spots to ease the pain but in fact it was only making Aaron breathless. A sharp gasp escaped his lips when your teeth slightly grazed the soft spot on his neck, his hold on your hips tightening. Aaron couldn't handle the heat and need to taste you so bad. His fingers tugged on your hair to pull you away from his neck. The action made a moan escape your lips which made Aaron stare at you with hooded eyes; palest shade of emerald irises filled with utmost love and an emotion you were too shy to consider, desire pooling. His lips found yours, hands travelling up and down your body, feeling you up in an intoxicating way.

The way he kisses you, marking your heart and soul made you both feel like there was no neccesity for air. As if you could relinquish oxygen for this. This felt like the best way to go. It was a constant reminder that even after all the wonders and surprises the world could offer, moments like these were always different, always so memorable. Each touch, each sound, each action tattooing in your hearts and souls.

Both of your hearts raced in a steady rhythm. Your heartbeat elevated, the rapid sound of it droning in your ears. He gently placed your hand to let it rest atop his chest, just above his heart. And your eyes stinged with emotion. His was thundering against his chest so loud he was sure you could hear it.

Aaron felt your needy hands travel through the expanse of his torso, tracing his broad chest to his abdomen, heated skin on fire wherever your fingers traced as you reached down to pull him even closer by his belt. He felt shivers down his spine, each touch of yours sending him on a tingling edge, a high he never wanted to come down from. Your hands tugged desperately at his shirt, unbuttoning each button quickly and before you know it, he has already taken it off, pulling away to breath for air. The heat and tension between the two of you clouded your senses, lips chasing his in an attempt to close the distance.

Aaron flashes you a breathtaking smile, dimples and a flush of pink painting his cheeks and he looked so beautiful, so adorable, so enchanting that it made you stop for a moment and marvel at the man in front of you. Aaron was stunning, a dream, someone so amazing inside out. How is he so beautiful?

You probably said those words out loud because he chuckled lightly, the sound tugging at your heartstrings, "You give me too much credit, sweetheart. But thank you so much. It means so much to me hearing that from you."

"Well I'm just stating the truth."

"Mhm, is that so?"

He bites his lower lip to stop a giggle but nevertheless his lips still tugged up with a smile before his hands wraps around your waist and the back of your neck, lips locking with yours hungrily. Aaron pulls your clothed self to his warm body, closer beyond possibilty. You nibbled on his lower lip before opening up for him. You could feel the hard ridges, dips of his muscles, chest heaving with each intake of air, compelling you to touch the smooth skin of his flawless chest. He gently pushes you back, backing away until your knees hit the edge of the bed and you fall backwards, pulling him with you.

The moment causes you both to break the kiss, pulling a smile from the both of you. Aaron leans down to kiss you deeply again, an audible 'mm' escapes his lips at the blissful meeting of your lips with his, the sound making heat pool at your abdomen.

His eyes would occasionally open up a little to look at your reactions, to see if there's any sign discomfort from you. When he found none, he intertwined your hands together, squeezing your hand in reassurance.

Your hands finds solace on his broad shoulders this time, fingers travelling down his bare chest, so warm and firm, his skin soft as your fingers traced valleys and rivers at every dip and curve of his defined muscles. He visibly relaxed under your touch, his free hand reaching down to cup your cheek. Aaron moaned quietly when your fingers caressed his abs, shuffling to cup him from the pants, outline evident through his desire and need for you. His lips part against yours in a soft moan when your fingers teased his clothed length which caused him to involuntarily grind against your hand, making him break the kiss for a moment, a string of saliva connecting your lips.

Your hands unbuckled his belt, unbuttoning the pants. Slipping your hand inside, you started stroking his length in a painstakingly slow motion. He hummed, biting his lips when your thumb pressed on his tip, his eyes blinding with pleasure. Aaron was sure that he was losing his mind, pleasure blurring the edges between reality and an euphoric dream. He stopped your movements when he started feeling too good, white hot pleasure shooting up his veins. He was so close but he wanted to finish with you, inside of you.

He could feel your heat, your need to have him close against you and he has been right there with you; hands fumbling with your jeans desperately. Your actions and need for him left him intoxicated, head fuzzing out all thoughts out of his mind but you, you, you. It felt addicting, unreal, impossible to him that you want him as much as he wants you. So close, so much that it felt unfathomable to thread it through vocabulary.

His lips kissed your jaw, down to your collarbone as he marked you, smiling against your skin at the moans and whimpers of his name you let out.

When he felt your fingers reach his pants to unbuckle his belt all the way to pull him out, he broke away and held both your wrists in one hand. A smooth, unbelievably attractive smirk etched on his lips, "Not so quickly, sweetheart. I have to remove these restraints from yours first. It's not fair that you're fully clothed. "

And soon you found yourself and him naked to each others eyes.

Aaron knelt between your legs in all his glory, chest heaving up and down, a trickle of sweat trailing down his cheek as he held his cock, stroking and squeezing it tight all the while staring at you, intensive gaze filled with so much passion that it felt like he could light your insides on fire. He let go of torturing himself further and hovered above you, one hand caressing the skin of your hips and the other resting beside your head.

He is breathtaking in every way possible. You really need him inside you. But the way he was looking at you, so passionately, gaze filled with unbridled emotions, like he could see right through you. You felt bare underneath him in more ways than one. You almost felt a little self conscious for a moment before his fingers found your weeping entrance, teasing you and never breaking eye contact. And in the stillness of the hour, in the private whispers of the late night breeze Aaron swore, "You are a freaking goddess, baby.”

You moaned, it was impossible to hold yourself; first, his teasing fingers and then the way he was looking at you made you close your eyes just so that you could hold onto your sanity before you let go, before you let your wants devour this man on top of you. His eyes too intense, irises pooling with deepening emotions. Also, he rarely swore but he let go in the moment, too careless to worry about what he was even saying anymore, which was a plus.

His lips kissed down your body, your skin on fire wherever his lips traced invisible lines on your frame. Aaron kissed you in the most sensitive areas, a gasp leaving your lips as your fingers immediately buried in his hair, holding him as if to ground yourself to this moment. He nipped, sucked, ate you out in such a way that you were struggling to breath, one hand clutching the comforter so tight that you were sure it would tear off. The gasping, the heavy breathing, you losing yourself in pleasure made Aaron lose himself in the beauty of your chase. It was an auto pilot response, the way his hips started grinding against the comforter for some friction but you caught on.

"Aaron, I— ah, wait— I see you! Don't you dare! I want to touch you and come with you— " You were cut off when he gently bit the skin under your thigh.

He stopped his movements and stared up at you, his chin glistening in the dim lighting of your room, eyes taunting and teasing in a way that made you clench around nothing, "Oh yeah?"

This side of Aaron Warner has always felt new to you, exclusively and only for you. That teasing gaze filled with mischief and ideas you could only wonder. If he could, he would tease you forever, edging himself and you to the point where later he ends up driving his hips into you to a state of oblivion.

Hard and merciless and heavenly and gentle is Aaron Warner.

"Aaron, please — "

"Please what, baby?" You could hear the smile in his voice. He let go of your thighs to climb up your frame. His thumb tugged at your lower lip, "Look at me, sweetheart. Talk to me."

Aaron could be such a tease that sometimes it made you want to yank his hair out but you knew better. He loves his hair too much so you wouldn't do that ever.

You huffed, eyes still clenched shut, “Need you inside me.”

“Look at me first.” Aaron's voice dropped, husky and seductive, commanding to some degree which pulled you into a trance like the angelic devil he is. So alluring, so seductive.

You opened your eyes to see him scanning your features, tracing from your eyebrows to your eyes, resting a little longer at your lips. But he willed himself to look back up at you.

“I want to touch you, Aaron. Can I?” You asked what you initially wanted before the said confession, chest heaving up and down rapidly as your hands traced his bicep.

Aaron simply smiled, that dimple one, “You don’t even have to ask, love. I’m all yours.” He kisses your nose gently. But when you sat up to touch him, he held your shoulders, “But not today, okay? I really need to be inside you.” His voice was feather soft, caressing your cheek in assurance. He felt a little worried about your reaction but when you saw the look in his eyes, you nodded eagerly and settled down back on the sheets.

“Now tell me what you want me to do.”

You almost choked on air, sputtering, “Wha– you already know! Why do I have to say it…” Heat rushed to your cheeks because of his proposition. You hide your face behind your hands, lightly slapping his arm in protest.

Aaron knows everything so well and knows exactly what you want. It’s just that he has a habit of flustering you to no end, have you all shy in his arms before he indulged in you, devoured you. He finds so much pleasure in seeing you all shy and then moaning out his name to the world the very next moment.

He laughs, “Don’t hide yourself from me now. Or do you want me to tie your hands?”

You pulled your hands away from your face just to squint at him, shooting him a look of faux disinterest as if your heart isn’t just thundering against your ribcage, “You wouldn’t.”

“I never lie, sweetheart.”

That shut you up. You knew that riling Aaron up to no end would just end the night in a completely different state, till dawn even. Not that you minded, because it’s always a win-win situation.

Aaron placed an exaggerated kiss on your tummy, “Now tell me. I need instructions, baby. My patience is running thin.” You felt his thumb unconsciously graze the inside of your thighs.

"Aaron, please... Make love to me. I need to feel you," Your hands travelled up to thread through his hair, fingers caressing and tugging on his blonde locks, "Touch me, Aaron. Want you so bad." You internally whined because of how cringe you thought you sounded, but it’s a totally different story for your lover.

And then he was gone. It was a frenzy of emotions and actions as he sinked into you. Both of you moaned loudly at the feeling; so freakishly insane and beautiful that it knocked the air out of your lungs. It made you mad with emotions, this connection. It’s a reminder that Aaron was really yours and you were his, a reminder that despite whatever the world throws at you, the two of you still believe and love each other.

"I love you, Aaron." Those words escaped your lips inadvertently, his thrusts stuttering for a moment before he picked up his pace.

Both of you lost yourselves in the feeling of each other, each meeting increasing his pace as you met his thrusts. This was always something which felt beyond the description of 'beautiful', a state of infinite euphoria. An addicting ecstasy so delicious that it made you breathless, stars exploding behind your eyelids.

He felt so good, so freaking good. The blunt head of his cock touching parts inside of you that you thought was impossible. A particularly harsh thrust made your eyes roll back to your head. His movements are so fluid, so precise, so deep. He was driving you insane, that being his aim. You are addicted to the feeling, making you arch your back off the mattress.

Your warmth, wetness and tightness embraced him in a deliciously vice like grip, your scent reaching his senses and he was already drunk off of you. The squelching noise between your bodies grew, making your ears heat up but you also couldn't care less. This is your and Aaron's private moment after all.

Aaron groaned, his grunts growing louder with time, movements growing deeper, harder, “Oh, love. My beautiful, beautiful love,” He is practically a babbling mess, breathing heavily when you clenched around his length, your heat pulsing rapidly, “I love you so much, you have no idea.” That tugged at your heartstrings and you wanted to reply but you couldn't; his thrusts rendered you speechless and breathless.

It's pure instinct when he moves to embrace your entire figure within his arms, thrusting into you at a different angle which definitely felt even more deeper, hitting your spot so perfectly. Your gasps and moans fueled his urgent desire to feel you closer and make you come. His biceps flex as he pins you down, pounding mercilessly into you. You moaned his name like a prayer, chanting his name like he’s the only one filling each of your senses. Aaron. Aaron. Aaron.

He stared down at you; head thrown back, eyes clenched shut, moaning out his name in wanton as you moved together with his harsh and fast thrusts. You looked so beautiful in his eyes, his to love and his to hold. You feel like a dream to him, someone so gentle and kind, someone who took care of him in a way he never expected.

His hands grasped the comforter beside your head tightly at the increasing fervour of the movements. The room fills up with the sound of rapid skin-slapping, moans reverberating off the walls. He gasped for air, uninhibited moans escaping his pretty pink swollen lips. Your name leaving his lips in a state of absolute bliss, just you filling each and every fibre of his being. Aaron's eyebrows scrunched together, eyes closed in concentration to not let go soon. Sweat trickled down his temples and clavicle, landing on your chest. His cheeks were flushed pink, lips opening to let out a quiet moan, a whimper even.

Dear God, how is he so pretty?

You tightened so hard making Aaron throw his head back at the bliss, so wet and so warm, so tight; all for him.

That thought ignited something in him, hands fumbling down to hold your hips in place as his fingers trailed down your bottom to the back of your thighs, lifting one leg to wrap around his waist to adjust the angle and pace. He started thrusting harder and faster. Now, he was moving in a completely different pace.

"Aaron— ah— slow down— "

“I can't, love. You feel too good— ” He sucks in a breath when your hands trails up to embrace him, as if holding onto him for dear life.

Your fingers travel down his clavicle and rest just above his chest. Aaron looks down at you with hooded eyes, barely able to keep them open due to the ecstasy filling his senses. His eyes searched yours, for any sign for discomfort. When he found none, he relaxed a little. But then you had to run your mouth,

"God, you sound so good and feel so, so good. I could never— ah, shit— get tired of your voice. Your moans — "

Aaron cut you off with a groan, his hips slamming against yours in an unforgiving pace. He was slowly losing it, having already lost himself in you, he decides this wasn't enough. He needs to have you even closer.

"I need you to flip over for me, love," Aaron huffed, urgency lacing his voice as he pulled out of you. He helped you get into position, taking in a moment to marvel at your beautiful back, stretch marks painting parts of your skin. You are perfect in his eyes.

"You are so beautiful, love." He confessed, caressing your ass before lining himself to your entrance, "Right back in..." He gasped at your tightness again, warmth embracing him, heat travelling up his spine.

You moaned loudly, muffling the sounds against your pillow which smelled so much like Aaron; gardenias with a hint of peppermint. You were right near the edge and knew Aaron is right there with you, his hold on your hips tightening.

“I’m close— ” You breathlessly gasped, the coil tightening in your abdomen.

You were close, so close but Aaron pulled out. A cry of protest settled on your tongue before he flipped you on your back and pushed right back in, your wetness being more than enough lubricant to push himself into your plush warm walls. You screamed, hands wrapping around his neck to pull him closer to you.

“Right there with you, love,” Aaron has a habit, a natural response, an unspoken urge to always see your face when you come undone on him, for him, so lost in the pleasure that your climax always pushed his, “Come. Come on my cock, baby.”

The moment he said those words, the tightening coil inside you snapped. You moaned loudly, the climax hitting you in waves that you had to turn to your side and bury your face in the pillows to calm your voice. But Aaron wasn’t having it. He merely grabbed the pillow and threw it on the floor.

Your tightness triggered Aaron’s climax, hips stuttering against with no rhythm. You stared up at his beautiful face, trying to blink away the blur, “Want to come inside me, handsome?” You teased him which awarded you with a sharp thrust into your already sensitive walls. He playfully glared at you.

“If you continue talking to me like this, I’ll keep you up all the night. Till we see the dawn.” Aaron groaned, to which you feigned nonchalance. But it only ignited your excitement.

He leaned down to kiss you, wanting to muffle his grunts and moans as he felt himself coming. But this time, you are not having it. Wanting to hear his moans, you pulled him away as your fingers tugged on the roots of his hair. Aaron whined, you pulling on his hair immediately making him come.

Even though breathless, he still had to say,

"Oh love, I could stay inside you for the rest of my life. Hide you away from the world if that means I get to take you any time, every time."

• • • • • • • • • • •

(a/n 2: tbh reading his thoughts from his pov and his extreme desires and needs really makes me feel like he does dirty talk but in such a rich way, seducing you to no end)

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

It's been 21 years since Bill Willingham launched Fables, his 110-issue, wide-ranging, delightful and brilliantly crafted author-owned comic series that imagines that the folkloric figures of the world's fairytales are real people, who live in a secret society whose internal struggles and intersections with the mundane world are the source of endless drama.

Fables is a DC Comics title; DC is division of the massive entertainment conglomerate Warners, which is, in turn, part of the Warner/Discovery empire, a rapacious corporate behemoth whose screenwriters have been on strike for 137 days (and counting). DC is part of a comics duopoly; its rival, Marvel, is a division of the Disney/Fox juggernaut, whose writers are also on strike.

The DC that Willingham bargained with at the turn of the century isn't the DC that he bargains with now. Back then, DC was still subject to a modicum of discipline from competition; its corporate owner's shareholders had not yet acquired today's appetite for meteoric returns on investment of the sort that can only be achieved through wage-theft and price-gouging.

In the years since, DC – like so many other corporations – participated in an orgy of mergers as its sector devoured itself. The collapse of comics into a duopoly owned by studios from an oligopoly had profound implications for the entire sector, from comic shops to comic cons. Monopoly breeds monopoly, and the capture of the entire comics distribution system by a single company – Diamond – was attended by the capture of the entire digital comics market by a single company, Amazon, who enshittified its Comixology division, driving creators and publishers into Kindle Direct Publishing, a gig-work platform that replicates the company's notoriously exploitative labor practices for creative workers. Today, Comixology is a ghost-town, its former employees axed in a mass layoff earlier this year:

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-layoffs-comixology-1850007216

When giant corporations effect these mergers, they do so with a kind of procedural kabuki, insisting that they are dotting every i and crossing every t, creating a new legal entity whose fictional backstory is a perfect, airtight bubble, a canon with not a single continuity bug. This performance of seriousness is belied by the behind-the-scenes chaos that these corporate shifts entail – think of the way that the banks that bought and sold our mortgages in the run-up to the 2008 crisis eventually lost the deeds to our houses, and then just pretended they were legally entitled to collect money from us every month – and steal our houses if we refused to pay:

https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-58325420110720

Or think of the debt collection industry, which maintains a pretense of careful record-keeping as the basis for hounding and threatening people, but which is, in reality, a barely coherent trade in spreadsheets whose claims to our money are matters of faith:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/12/do-not-pay/#fair-debt-collection-practices-act

For usury, the chaos is a feature, not a bug. Their corporate strategists take the position that any ambiguity should be automatically resolved in their favor, with the burden of proof on accused debtors, not the debt collectors. The scumbags who lost your deed and stole your house say that it's up to you to prove that you own it. And since you've just been rendered homeless, you don't even have a house to secure a loan you might use to pay a lawyer to go to court.

It's not solely that the usurers want to cheat you – it's that they can make more money if they don't pay for meticulous record-keeping, and if that means that they sometimes cheat us, that's our problem, not theirs.

While this is very obvious in the usury sector, it's also true of other kinds of massive mergers that create unfathomnably vast conglomerates. The "curse of bigness" is real, but who gets cursed is a matter of power, and big companies have a lot more power.

The chaos, in other words, is a feature and not a bug. It provides cover for contract-violating conduct, up to and including wage-theft. Remember when Disney/Marvel stole money from beloved science fiction giant Alan Dean Foster, whose original Star Wars novelization was hugely influential on George Lucas, who changed the movie to match Foster's ideas?

Disney claimed that when it acquired Lucasfilm, it only acquired its assets, but not its liabilities. That meant that while it continued to hold Foster's license to publish his novel, they were not bound by an obligation to pay Foster for this license, since that liability was retained by the (now defunct) original company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/30/disney-still-must-pay/#pay-the-writer

For Disney, this wage-theft (and many others like it, affecting writers with less fame and clout than Foster) was greatly assisted by the chaos of scale. The chimera of Lucas/Disney had no definitive responsible party who could be dragged into a discussion. The endless corporate shuffling that is normal in giant companies meant that anyone who might credibly called to account for the theft could be transfered or laid off overnight, with no obvious successor. The actual paperwork itself was hard for anyone to lay hands on, since the relevant records had been physically transported and re-stored subsequent to the merger. And, of course, the company itself was so big and powerful that it was hard for Foster and his agent to raise a credible threat.

I've experienced versions of this myself: every book contract I've ever signed stipulated that my ebooks could not be published with DRM. But one of my publishers – a boutique press that published my collection Overclocked – collapsed along with most of its competitors, the same week my book was published (its distributor, Publishers Group West, went bankrupt after its parent company, Advanced Marketing Services, imploded in a shower of fraud and criminality).

The publisher was merged with several others, and then several more, and then several more – until it ended up a division of the Big Five publisher Hachette, who repeatedly, "accidentally" pushed my book into retail channels with DRM. I don't think Hachette deliberately set out to screw me over, but the fact that Hachette is (by far) the most doctrinaire proponent of DRM meant that when the chaos of its agglomerated state resulted in my being cheated, it was a happy accident.

(The Hachette story has a happy ending; I took the book back from them and sold it to Blackstone Publishing, who brought out a new expanded edition to accompany a DRM-free audiobook and ebook):

https://www.blackstonepublishing.com/overclocked-bvej.html

Willingham, too, has been affected by the curse of bigness. The DC he bargained with at the outset of Fables made a raft of binding promises to him: he would have approval over artists and covers and formats for new collections, and he would own the "IP" for the series, meaning the copyrights vested in the scripts, storylines, characters (he might also have retained rights to some trademarks).

But as DC grew, it made mistakes. Willingham's hard-fought, unique deal with the publisher was atypical. A giant publisher realizes its efficiencies through standardized processes. Willingham's books didn't fit into that standard process, and so, repeatedly, the publisher broke its promises to him.

At first, Willingham's contacts at the publisher were contrite when he caught them at this. In his press-release on the matter, Willingham calls them "honest men and women of integrity [who] interpreted the details of that agreement fairly and above-board":

https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/willingham-sends-fables-into-the

But as the company grew larger, these counterparties were replaced by corporate cogs who were ever-more-distant from his original, creator-friendly deal. What's more, DC's treatment of its other creators grew shabbier at each turn (a dear friend who has written for DC for decades is still getting the same page-rate as they got in the early 2000s), so Willingham's deal grew more exceptional as time went by. That meant that when Willingham got the "default" treatment, it was progressively farther from what his contract entitled him to.

The company repeatedly – and conveniently – forgot that Willingham had the final say over the destiny of his books. They illegally sublicensed a game adapted from his books, and then, when he objected, tried to make renegotiating his deal a condition of being properly compensated for this theft. Even after he won that fight, the company tried to cheat him and then cover it up by binding him to a nondisclosure agreement.

This was the culmination of a string of wage-thefts in which the company misreported his royalties and had to be dragged into paying him his due. When the company "practically dared" Willingham to sue ("knowing it would be a long and debilitating process") he snapped.

Rather than fight Warner, Willingham has embarked on what JWZ calls an act of "absolute table-flip badassery" – he has announced that Fables will hereafter be in the public domain, available for anyone to adapt commercially, in works that compete with whatever DC might be offering.

Now, this is huge, and it's also shrewd. It's the kind of thing that will bring lots of attention on Warner's fraudulent dealings with its creative workforce, at a moment where the company is losing a public relations battle to the workers picketing in front of its gates. It constitutes a poison pill that is eminently satisfying to contemplate. It's delicious.

But it's also muddy. Willingham has since clarified that his public domain dedication means that the public can't reproduce the existing comics. That's not surprising; while Willingham doesn't say so, it's vanishingly unlikely that he owns the copyrights to the artwork created by other artists (Willingham is also a talented illustrator, but collaborated with a who's-who of comics greats for Fables). He may or may not have control over trademarks, from the Fables wordmark to any trademark interests in the character designs. He certainly doesn't have control over the trademarked logos for Warner and DC that adorn the books.

When Willingham says he is releasing the "IP" to his comic, he is using the phrase in its commercial sense, not its legal sense. When business people speak of "owning IP," they mean that they believe they have the legal right to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

The problem is that this doesn't correspond to the legal concept of IP, because IP isn't actually a legal concept. While there are plenty of "IP lawyers" and even "IP law firms," there is no "IP law." There are many laws that are lumped together under "IP," including the big three (trademark, copyright and patent), but also a bestiary of obscure cousins and subspecies – trade dress, trade secrecy, service marks, noncompetes, nondisclosues, anticirumvention rights, sui generis "neighboring rights" and so on.

The job of an "IP lawyer" is to pluck individual doctrines from this incoherent scrapheap of laws and regulations and weave them together into a spider's web of tripwires that customers and critics and competitors can't avoid, and which confer upon the lawyer's client the right to sue for anything that displeases them.

When Willingham says he's releasing Fables into the public domain, it's not clear what he's releasing – and what is his to release. In the colloquial, business sense of "IP," saying you're "releasing the IP" means something like, "Feel free to create adaptations from this." But these adaptations probably can't draw too closely on the artwork, or the logos. You can probably make novelizations of the comics. Maybe you can make new comics that use the same scripts but different art. You can probably make sequels to, or spinoffs of, the existing comics, provided you come up with your own character designs.

But it's murky. Very murky. Remember, this all started because Willingham didn't have the resources or patience to tangle with the rabid attack-lawyers Warners keeps kenneled on its Burbank lot. Warners can (and may) release those same lawyers on you, even if you are likely to prevail in court, betting that you – like Willingham – won't have the resources to defend yourself.

The strange reality of "IP" rights is that they can be secured without any affirmative step on your part. Copyrights are conjured into existence the instant that a new creative work is fixed in a tangible medium and endure until the creator's has been dead for 70 years. Common-law trademarks gradually come into definition like an image appearing on photo-paper in a chemical soup, growing in definition every time they are used, even if the mark's creator never files a form with the USPTO.

These IP tripwires proliferate in the shadows, wherever doodles are sketched on napkins, wherever kindergartners apply finger-paint to construction-paper. But for all that they are continuously springing into existence, and enduring for a century or more, they are absurdly hard to give away.

This was the key insight behind the Creative Commons project: that while the internet was full of people saying "no copyright" (or just assuming the things they posted were free for others to use), the law was a universe away from their commonsense assumptions. Creative Commons licenses were painstakingly crafted by an army of international IP lawyers who set out to turn the normal IP task on its head – to create a legal document that assured critics, customers and competitors that the licensor had no means to control their conduct.

20 years on, these licenses are pretty robust. The flaws in earlier versions have been discovered and repaired in subsequent revisions. They have been adapted to multiple countries' legal systems, allowing CC users to mix-and-match works from many territories – animating Polish sprites to tell a story by a Canadian, set to music from the UK.

Willingham could clarify his "public domain" dedication by applying a Creative Commons license to Fables, but which license? That's a thorny question. What Willingham really wants here is a sampling license – a license that allows licensees to take some of the elements of his work, combine them with other parts, and make something new.

But no CC license fits that description. Every CC license applies to whole works. If you want to license the bass-line from your song but not the melody, you have to release the bass-line separately and put a CC license on that. You can't just put a CC license on the song with an asterisked footnote that reads "just the bass, though."

CC had a sampling license: the "Sampling Plus 1.0" license. It was a mess. Licensees couldn't figure out what parts of works they were allowed to use, and licensors couldn't figure out how to coney that. It's been "retired."

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/

So maybe Willingham should create his own bespoke license for Fables. That may be what he has to do, in fact. But boy is that a fraught business. Remember the army of top-notch lawyers who created the CC licenses? They missed a crucial bug in the first three versions of the license, and billions of works have been licensed under those earlier versions. This has enabled a mob of crooked copyleft trolls (like Pixsy) to prey on the unwary, raking in a fortune:

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator-5f6360713299

Making a bug-free license is hard. A failure on Willingham's part to correctly enumerate or convey the limitations of such a license – to list which parts of Fables DC might sue you for using – could result in downstream users having their hard work censored out of existence by legal threats. Indeed, that's the best case scenario – defects in a license could result in downstream users, their collaborators, investors, and distributors being sued for millions of dollars, costing them everything they have, up to and including their homes.

Which isn't to say that this is dead on arrival – far from it! Just that there is work to be done. I can't speak for Creative Commons (it's been more than 20 years since I was their EU Director), but I'm positive that there are copyfighting lawyers out there who'd love to work on a project like this.

I think Willingham is onto something here. After all, Fables is built on the public domain. As Willingham writes in his release: "The current laws are a mishmash of unethical backroom deals to keep trademarks and copyrights in the hands of large corporations, who can largely afford to buy the outcomes they want."

Willingham describes how his participation in the entertainment industry has made him more skeptical of IP, not less. He proposes capping copyright at 20 years, with a single, 10-year extension for works that are sold onto third parties. This would be pretty good industrial policy – almost no works are commercially viable after just 14 years:

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright.pdf

But there are massive structural barriers to realizing such a policy, the biggest being that the US had tied its own hands by insisting that long copyright terms be required in the trade deals it imposed on other countries, thereby binding itself to these farcically long copyright terms.

But there is another policy lever American creators can and should yank on to partially resolve this: Termination. The 1976 Copyright Act established the right for any creator to "terminate" the "transfer" of any copyrighted work after 30 years, by filing papers with the Copyright Office. This process is unduly onerous, and the Authors Alliance (where I'm a volunteer advisor) has created a tool to simplify it:

https://www.authorsalliance.org/resources/rights-reversion-portal/

Termination is deliberately obscure, but it's incredibly powerful. The copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin has studied this extensively, helping to produce the most complete report on how termination has been used by creators of all types:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#reverted

Writers, musicians and other artists have used termination to unilaterally cancel the crummy deals they had crammed down their throats 30 years ago and either re-sell their works on better terms or make them available directly to the public. Every George Clinton song, every Sweet Valley High novel, and the early works of Steven King have all be terminated and returned to their creators.

Copyright termination should and could be improved. Giblin and I wrote a whole-ass book about this and related subjects, Chokepoint Capitalism, which not only details the scams that writers like Willingham are subject to, but also devotes fully half its length to presenting detailed, technical, shovel-ready proposals for making life better for creators:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

Willingham is doing something important here. Larger and larger entertainment firms offer shabbier and shabbier treatment to creative workers, as striking members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA can attest. Over the past year, I've seen a sharp increase in the presence of absolutely unconscionable clauses in the contracts I'm offered by publishers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/27/reps-and-warranties/#i-agree

I'm six months into negotiating a contract for a 300 word piece I wrote for a magazine I started contributing to in 1992. At issue is that they insist that I assign film rights and patent rights from my work as a condition of publication. Needless to say, there are no patentable inventions nor film ideas in this article, but they refuse to vary the contract, to the obvious chagrin of the editor who commissioned me.

Why won't they grant a variance? Why, they are so large – the magazine is part of a global conglomerate – that it would be impractical for them to track exceptions to this completely fucking batshit clause. In other words: we can't strike this batshit clause because we decided that from now on, all out contracts will have batshit clauses.

The performance of administrative competence – and the tactical deployment of administrative chaos – among giant entertainment companies is grotesque, but every now and again, it backfires.

That's what's happening at Marvel right now. The estates of Marvel founder Stan Lee and its seminal creator Steve Ditko are suing Marvel to terminate the transfer of both creators' characters to Marvel. If they succeed, Marvel will lose most of its most profitable characters, including Iron Man:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/marvel-artists-estate-ask-pre-trial-wins-superhero-copyright-fight-2023-05-22/

They're following in the trail of the Jack Kirby estate, whom Marvel paid millions to rather than taking their chances with the Supreme Court.

Marvel was always an administrative mess, repeatedly going bankrupt. Its deals with its creators were indifferently papered over, and then Marvel lost a lot of the paperwork. I'd bet anything that many of the key documents Disney (Marvel's owner) needs to prevail over Lee and Ditko are either unlocatable or destroyed – or never existed in the first place.

A more muscular termination right – say, one that kicks in after 20 years, and is automatic – would turn circuses like Marvel-Lee/Ditko into real class struggles. Rather than having the heirs of creators reaping the benefit of termination, we could make termination into a system for getting creators themselves paid.

In the meantime, there's Willingham's "absolute table-flip badassery."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/15/fairy-use-tales/#sampling-license

Image: Tom Mrazek (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Open_Field_%2827220830251%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Penguin Random House (modified) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/707161/fables-20th-anniversary-box-set-by-bill-willingham/

Fair use https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property