#which was just me complaining about the format of twitter

[skaruresonic]

Once more I must cite sources because folks assume you'll take their "nuh-uh" as a sufficient counterargument.

While there's no "official" count, the general consensus is that there are roughly 50 or more errors within the Encyclospeedia. Greeny has documented some of them, as well as CrystalMaiden77:

Sonic Encyclospeedia Errors: by CrystalMaiden77 on DeviantArt

These are purely factual errors. That's not counting the various formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors:

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"The other writers don't currently have any way to ask for questions reliably" - Sonic Team regularly answer fan questions on Twitter, including Shiro Maekawa.

Dr. Crusher, Did you saw Shiro Maekawa response to someone... (tumblr.com)

"Silver has always been polite" - That is Flynn's own personal interpretation. And it's wrong.

Writings From A Field of Roses — Our monthly live show on YouTube, usually on the... (tumblr.com)

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We've been having this long, drawn-out debate for years because there are many, many layers of inaccuracy, strawman, and ego-flexing going on, but I'll just drop this link to give you a crash-course on the broad strokes:

Encyclopedia Sonnica, ✂️ "Go read something else" (tumblr.com)

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"ST have been using mandated material to govern Shadow as this edgelord over every writer in the past 14 fucking years" - Sonic Reddit invented the concept of Shadow mandates in response to Shadow's poor portrayal in IDW 19, which spread through fandom-wide games of telephone. There's no concrete proof they exist. Nor did Shadow-specific mandates seem to exist before issue 19.

The reason why IDW Shadow acts weird : r/SonicTheHedgehog (reddit.com) Behold, the reason everyone believes the fictitious... – @skaruresonic on Tumblr

The likelier explanation for why IDW!Shadow is a poor portrayal but Dark Beginnings is not is that Flynn receives more feedback on Shadow because he doesn't understand the character.

IDW Sonic "FAQ" - Google Docs

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"Claimed games aren't strong enough when?"

Here:

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If "98%" of references are "impossible to find," why are players complaining about the reference overload in Frontiers' message boards?

The constant attempts to reference past lore is kinda obnoxious. - Sonic Frontiers (gamespot.com)

Not to mention he straight-up plagiarized entire lyrics to a song from a fan band and did not credit them, just as a "reference":

Just in case you thought Ian Flynn putting song lyrics in dialogue was just a Sonic thing. : r/TwoBestFriendsPlay (reddit.com)

But you’re still standing here — Man, Flynn really hates #Playthegames, huh? What... (tumblr.com)

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You're right, he doesn't hate Amy; he simply described her as "all over the place" and not-so-subtly put her and several other prominent girl characters down, calling Blaze the "singular kick-butt female character" among them, in order to imply his OC Tangle was going to fulfill a role none of them could.

His words. Not mine.

Game Informer Interview With Ian Flynn (lastminutecontinue.com)

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“This is how Sonic is, by SEGA, and this is me basically spelling it out, for anyone who hasn’t quite figured it out to this point.” - Flynn

But you’re still standing here — “This is how Sonic is, by SEGA, and this is me... (tumblr.com)

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Encyclopedia Sonnica, I was looking at some posts about Archie sonic,... (tumblr.com)

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"He likes Team Hooligan? That's a problem now?"

It is if he's heavily implying his own fanon is games canon in a lore book that people pay for when it's not.

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Lol the projection is strong in this one.

If he is a credible source on the basis that he, quote, is a "fan" of the series, then he should know something as basic how Chaos Control works within the context of the game in which the move debuted. You can't pick and choose. Either he's a credible source or he's not.

How Chaos Control works is not particularly obscure knowledge that only The Elitest of Sonic fans have.

The whole "Ian isn't an encyclopedia of perfect knowledge guys, come on" thing becomes especially ironic considering how vehemently you insisted the Encyclospeedia has no errors in it just because You Said So(tm).

Sure, Jan. Whatever you say.

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"There are completely fair and respectful critiques of Ian Flynn out there that deserve to be heard and taken in. I am not saying his works are perfect and cannot be critiqued. This is just not how you do it lol."

I don't believe you.

Considering you lot go absolutely bananas whenever people contradict Flynn in any way, shape, or form, no matter how neutral the delivery or how heavily it comes attached with sources and screenshots...

...No. I don't believe you when you say you'll allow for "fair criticism," if there even is such a thing to you guys. Everything is considered "disgusting" and "mindless" hate to you, and this entire counterthread is proof of that. You literally opened your thread describing Greeny's points as evidence of a "disgusting" bias. Well, here I am, shoving the sources in your face. Look at them.

Oh, you'll "allow" the existence of opinions you hate, but only if you personally deem them acceptable enough? How very authoritarian gracious of you.

I have seen, with my own two eyes, someone complain that it's our fault that no one can bring up "reasonable criticism" without getting hounded anyway, as if the conclusion one ought to draw from that is Haters Suck(tm) and not that the call has always come from inside the house.

The harsh truth of the matter is this: people are not going to want to bring up any flavor of criticism around you. Ever. Especially not when you descend like a pack of hellhounds and stalk, threaten, and harass over the slightest disagreement.

People hide behind anons and have decided to confine Sonic discussion to private Discords because of the overreactions of people like you, who cannot grapple with reality and instead choose to project all that hate onto someone stating facts.

[redgoldsparks]

What a time to be trans and alive in America. If you follow me, you are probably already horribly aware of the hundreds of pieces of anti-trans legislation that have been introduced in nearly every state, some seeking to ban trans healthcare for both minors and adults, some to ban drag, to ban trans people from restrooms, from sports teams, and in some of the most extreme cases take trans children away from parents who support their transitions. I highly recommend following The Trans Formations Project for their daily updates on the progress of these bills through the state government. They also have a very helpful tool on their website where you can search representatives by state and see exactly which legislators have introduced or voted on anti-trans bills, so you know exactly who to call and complain to about their terrible policies. The Trans Formations Project is active on insta, tumblr, twitter, discord, tiktok and FB. They are currently seeking volunteers and taking donations through their website. If you have the means, here are some other organizations you can support to combat these bills:

ACLU or especially the ACLU of Tennessee, which is ready to fight Tennessee's new anti-drag bill in court

The Trans Law Center especially their Trans Health Legal Fund, which provides resources for trans people facing investigation, arrest or prosecution for seeking healthcare

Trans Life Line, a crisis support line in English and Spanish

Trans Latina Coalition

The Marsha P Johnson Institute

TGI Justice Project

For the Gworls

Keep up your courage! Keep up your strength! We've also had some pieces of good news this week too- Minnesota has become a refuge state for trans folks seeking gender-affirming healthcare, Michigan just expanded their protections of LGTBQ citizens, and Wyoming rejected a trans healthcare ban. All is not lost, but if you see a bill moving through your state's legislation, please do make some noise about it!

instagram / patreon / portfolio / etsy / my book / redbubble store

[transpersian]

Doc 3 is about PZ's kid

And yes, that means what you think it means. We've been talking. A lot.

From my Twitter thread:

Needed some time to think.

I've been trying too hard to make too many people happy, even with contradictory needs. I've been letting people jerk me back and forth on what they think is right. I've been trying REALLY hard to be nice.

Biding my time. No more.

PZ’s kid is okay.

Back in October, after months of worrying about optics, we decided that it was too important: we had to see if Poppy’s kid was okay. They’d literally ESCAPED, ffs. They’re 23, but still.

And before anyone says anything, I WAS RIGHT. This is the first thing they said to me:

Yes, I understand the delicacy of the situation. Yes, I understand how this looks. But please understand: I’m not just some internet rando who’s in way over her head. I’ve been supporting abuse survivors in deep and intense ways for decades, and I’m damned good at it.

I’d fuck off if they had a negative response. I’d push for them not to be involved in any efforts against their mom. In the end, what ended up being our priority was making sure that The Kid (no real name plz) was okay and knew we were there if they needed help.

Fuck the optics.

I helped them clean up the tracks that led to them, then we started talking. Initially, I insisted on this being strictly for support. They wanted to get involved and I pushed back. Said if they really wanted to, they could send me screenshots, not thinking they’d apply.

Oh boy.

First they sent them to me to illustrate their points, but they insisted that I was free to use any of them. That first batch of 12 was jarring enough.

Then, unprompted, they sent me 70 more.

They want me to tell their story. They want me to show you how PZ lie.

And they’re not in a rush. They want me to be thorough.

So in a move I was barely okay with, they gave me access to their 3200-message Signal chat log so I could figure out where relevant screenshots are and have them take them.

I’m taking my time because they’re hard to read.

My mother left when I was 3. My father remarried 4 years later and she was abusive to me for the following 16 years.

I felt unwelcome in my own home, incapable of doing anything right, constantly eggshelling.

Zena makes my experiences with my stepmom look like Sesame Street.

There are little things you notice when you have texts in DB format.

Like how Poppy said “I love you” to her kid eight times from July ’21 to June ’22.

Only twice from July ’22 to June ’23.

Watching them be believed less and less over Zena, who started blatantly lying.

For the past couple of months, when I’ve been able to, I’ve been studying a way-too-intimate look at the death of a mother’s empathy for her child. I’d chat with them sometimes and give them what support I could. Figure out how to respond to ones like this:

I know I’ll only get one shot at this, so here’s what the doc will consist of:

A more complete intro about the above

Transcripts of when PZ have cited The Kid’s abuse on stream

A tally of claims to track

The screenshots

Examples of the “assignments” they were given

A 3.5-page long, single-spaced list of what they deemed unacceptable treatment, which PZ promptly wrote off as bullshit and complained to their friends about

Screenshots from those friends

Direct rebuttals against PZ’s on-stream claims

Additional context from my conversations with TK

Somehow forgot to mention a major chunk: dozens of screenshots from TK’s personal discord with a few close friends, serving essentially as a diary of their experiences. Purely testimonial on that front, I know, but…

I feel like maybe it's worth seeing what a young adult in their early 20s says to their close friends in private about in what's essentially a group chat.

See, PZ’s 23-year-old kid has POTS, a circulatory disorder that affects your body’s regulatory systems, including respiratory. Things that negatively affect POTS:

Skipping meals

Excessive physical labor

Heat

What if I told you PZ would punish them with food restriction?

What if I told you of at least three separate mentions of TK being worked to collapse or illness? That they ignored TK’s symptoms and scolded them for not just eating better? That they worked TK for 8+ hrs some days?

What if I told you that TK is 5’1” and 80 lbs (unrelated)?

What if I showed you when, on-stream, Poppy accused TK of intentionally crying so intensely that she dissociated? Or of abusing Zena?

Can you imagine being pushed so far by your parents that you're in wailing tears, and they don't stop until it reaches that point? And then they accuse you of manipulation?

If you're like me (and what I'd imagine is many members of The Foundation), you don't have to imagine it.

What if I told you that what PZ called “intentionally faking forgetting instructions” when TK was really just having a hard time?

What if I told you I knew what the mysterious psych test Poppy trotted out as proof on stream actually says? What if I told you that Poppy harassed the kid until they gave it up, even though she’s not legally entitled to any of it? Even though she’s abusing the authority of her license?

Remember how Poppy talked about having to rush to the bank to make changes to her accounts because TK withdrew all of their own trust money? What if I told you I have proof that she was talking to them as early as the next morning and TK was completely cooperating?

I’ve heard a lot of horrific testimonies about the things that Poppy has done, but this… This radicalized me.

And it’s radicalized anyone I’ve shown it to.

TK has asked me to use everything I can from them to expose @ZenaandPoppy for what they are:

Abusive Hypocrites

So ultimately, how does this incredibly personal violation of privacy factor into the big picture? Yes, I know what this is. I know what it looks like.

But these are abusive parents who have been using their platform to use their own victim for pity points. That’s how they win.

What I’ve been trying to prove is abusiveness. PZ are recklessly abusive people who hide behind victimhood (and what they used to disdainfully refer to as “idpol”).

This is extensive proof not just THAT they’re abusive liars, but also HOW.

This is what Zena is like with power.

This is a ways off. Still lots to do. But I just want everyone to finally know why I’m still in this.

I know what Poppy and Zena are. Intimately. Not because I’m a “stalker.” Because I’ve had people come to me about how PZ hurt them. 20+ of them with claims from the past year.

I can’t share all of their claims because they only have so much proof. But I believe victims. And this? This I can prove, extensively.

This is why it’s funny when people accuse me of clout-chasing: I have no online brand to care about, and if I did, this would be insane.

People have asked me what the end goal is.

My goal is COMPLETE deplatforming.

For nobody in this community to trust them with their mental health ever again.

They are justifying their abuse with therapy speak and TEACHING THEIR FANS TO DO THE SAME.

They’re dangerous.

Oh, and Zena! Zena! Yeah, right here. I know you were really sad about being left out of the abuse allegations, but trust me, there will be #noZZerasure on this one. You’re a solid 80% of this one, sweetie! How’s that monkey’s paw working out for you?

And in closing, I’m just going to give myself this one additional… treat.

If you’ve been following for a while, you know this reference.

But this one’s for the abuse mob:

You still don’t take us seriously, do you?

Or rather…

Are you taking me seriously yet?

Because you will. I promise you, you fucking will. Because you’re about to understand that this has never been for me. It’s never been about me.

It’s about making sure you two have as few avenues as possible to prey on this community ever again.

See you in school.

[stillness-in-green]

On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XXI-B + Conclusion, Final War-B: The Hospital Attack)

To preface before I start documenting these final four chapters, there’s been a lot said (not least by me) about how wildly out of touch the resolution to this plotline is.  While I didn't set out to rehash all of that again, it turns out I can't actually talk about how the series portrays heteromorphobia without talking about how it resolves it—if I'd wanted to do that, the place to stop would have been with the last post. This whole piece is also destined for AO3 eventually, so it needs to be readable for those who don't follow me on tumblr. Therefore, if you've been following my #heteromorph discrimination plot posts for a while, there are portions of this post that will be pretty familiar territory!

If you're new and want my full breakdowns, you can find them in my Chapter Thoughts posts or in this pair of posts rounding up the asks I’d gotten on the topic.  Here, I will simply say that I don’t think Horikoshi’s fumbling of the plot can be read to mean that all the stuff I’ve documented thus far was just me reaching too hard, reading stuff into the manga where nothing was intended.  While I’m sure some of it is—I definitely went out on a few limbs!—I think the main answer to, “How can heteromorphobia be such a well-thought-out depiction of a logically foreseeable form of discrimination while also having such a terrible resolution?” is, “Because the mainstream opinion about how best to handle discrimination is wildly different in Japan than it is in progressive American circles.”

That doesn’t mean I’m willing to wave the wand of Cultural Differences over this resolution and forgive everything—there were plenty of Japanese fans critiquing it as well![1]—but it does somewhat modulate my feelings about it.  In any case, let’s get to it.

1: Most of what I saw was on Twitter, but there’s a Japanese site called bookmeter that’s kinda goodreads-esque, and which had several critical reviews posted for the volume, including one that felt like every point laid out was something I’d complained about as well.  Super validating, but a shame it was necessary!

(I'll be changing up my formatting just a bit in hopes that I can find a way to present sub-sub-bullet points that tumblr won't choke on in this 13K post. Pray for me.)

Chapter 370: 

O We open with a scene which we’re led to believe is about Spinner but which the end of the chapter will reveal to be about Shouji.  It’s shockingly open about the extent of the discrimination Shouji faced, and there’s worse yet to come, but here we find people throwing stones at him, telling him to die, saying he has dirty blood that will defile the land, that he should stay inside the house, and that no matter how much time passes,[2] they will never accept “his kind.”

2: Viz renders this as “no matter how much society progresses,” but the word jidai means something more like “the times”/”the age,” and the progression term used can mean improvement, but in the circumstances, probably just means forward movement.  I think the intention is more like, “No matter how much the times march on,” if only because it would be very odd for the people yelling this vitriol to frame it as themselves resisting progression.  After all, bigots don’t typically think of themselves as “regressive” compared to everyone else’s progressiveness; they think of themselves as normal or valuing tradition compared to everyone else’s moral laxity/perversity.

So, remember how I talked about the spiritual/religious charge to the language the CRC used to talk about their “sanctuary” and the League/Spinner’s presence in it?  Here’s the full scope of that.  It’s about kegare, a Shinto concept of uncleanliness associated particularly with blood and death, and while that’s normally something that can be purified simply by undergoing the proper ritual cleansings, when something is, in itself, intrinsically unclean, no amount of purification will fix it; you can only keep it sealed away.  Hence the yelling at Shouji not to leave the house.

The spirituality-based discrimination calls to mind the burakumin, originally an outcaste group of people who made their living working with all the aspects of life Shinto considered kegare—butchers, tanners, executioners and the like.   They were made to dress and cut their hair in ways that identified them on sight, barred from entering temples or schools, and lived in their own villages.  The laws mandating much of this were abolished in 1871[3] and urban sprawl gradually rolled over burakumin villages, turning them into slum areas.  While today it’s not uncommon for people to not even know they’re descended from burakumin lineage unless they’re specifically told,[4] more subtle discrimination does endure.  While it’s clearly not the only inspiration, there’s a lot about anti-burakumin bias that’s reflected in heteromorphobia.

3: Albeit not without considerable and violent protests against the liberation of the burakumin/the idea that they were henceforth to be allowed to hold other occupations and become ordinary citizens.  Arson, destruction of villages, attacks and deaths—all things considered, the anti-Kaihourei riots are probably a decent place to look for inspiration on the historical massacres Spinner’s #2 will be talking about shortly.

4: Or find out because someone who knows the significance of those old neighborhoods finds out first and they’re suddenly on the bad end of some discriminatory act or another.

O We find out that the group Spinner’s leading consists of fifteen thousand people, that number split between PLF remnants and ordinary civilians who support the PLF’s cause.  It’s unknown exactly how that split breaks down, but based on how the rest of the attack goes, I think it’s probable that the group is mostly civilians—if it were more PLF, it probably wouldn’t be so wholly defanged by Shouji’s big plea for peace.  So that’s what we might call a “bad look,” that fifteen thousand ordinary civilians feel so incredibly hard done-by that they not only flock to join a known terrorist, but that they do so for the purpose of attacking a hospital.

O They’re opposed by about two hundred police and heroes, the relevant of whom for our purposes are Present Mic, Rock Lock, Officer Gori, Shouji, and Koda.  With the exception of Present Mic, who will in any case be heading inside very shortly, they’re all minorities of some sort, with Rock Lock being very visibly, obviously Black, and the others being heteromorphs.  None of them are immediately thinking about the composition of the crowd, but rather about how difficult the crowd is being to handle.

O Rock Lock yells out that the rioters are too organized to be some random mob, a dismissiveness that gets him shouted at by the Spinner fanboys—tragically their only appearance in all of this!—that, “Folks with human faces just don’t get it!”  I have to assume that putting Rock Lock in this scene is no accident, but rather is there to make the rioters come off as short-sighted, so deep in their own pain that they lash out at someone who, if HeroAca!Japan is anything like present day Japan, almost certainly understands better than they think!

The phrasing, in any case, points towards the dehumanization that heteromorphs, especially animal-associated ones, are subject to.  After all, as Re-Destro might point out, in the post-Advent world, isn’t it the case that any given heteromorphic human’s face, no matter how strange it may be, is de facto a “human face”?  Yet the vitriol from the Spinner fans clearly reflects how internalized it’s become for them, that they don’t look “human,” despite the fact that “looking human” means nothing at all in the time of quirks.

O Koda gets called a traitor by an elderly beaked heteromorph from, apparently, a rural area, underscoring what’s been alluded to a few times prior to this, and which will be laid out explicitly in a few pages, that heteromorphobia is far, far worse in the countryside than it is in the cities.  Mr. Beak assumes—correctly, it seems[5]—that Koda’s a city kid, because why else other than ignorance would a fellow heteromorph stand against them?

5: Koda’s from Iwate Prefecture, which is only above Hokkaido in terms of population density; a bit of research suggests that its largest city, Morioka, is considered to be a mid-sized city.  So that’s definitely the hard upper limit on exactly how “big city” Koda could reasonably be.  That said, Shouji also identifies Koda as someone who grew up in a city, for which I assume he must have at least some basis.

O Spinner’s #2 fulfills the promise of his early shorthanded characterization of being a fiery, well-spoken zealot by standing on top of a building over the mob and exhorting them onward with revolutionary, inflammatory rhetoric.  And boy, does he bring up a lot to talk about!    

Demagoguery for Fun & Profit

O Quirk counselling and quirk education?  Phony nonsense, he says.  That’s a fairly confusing grievance to bring up in this context, so let’s consider what he might have in mind.

• For quirk education, I would contend that BNHA has shown very little of it, in spite of having Academia right there in the title.  The academics in question are about Heroics, after all, not quirks in and of themselves.  Here’s the complete list of what I would say the reader has seen that could be qualified as actual education about quirks:

Aizawa telling the kids(/low tier villains at USJ) some broad generalities, things like a very basic explanation of how quirks work on the genetic level or how they’re classified.  Most of this is delivered in the context of how his quirk works; the only outlier that immediately comes to mind for me is his explanation of how quirks are like muscles, and can be strengthened via training.    

Mirio and Tamaki’s middle school class doing “quirk training,” which is framed as a P.E. class and is specifically aimed at finding ways for each kid to be “useful to society,” not about them learning anything about quirks in a broader sense.    

Endeavor’s recent reference to Nedzu’s alleged “quirk morality education,” about which I have already registered my skepticism.    

The bit in Re-Destro’s monologue to Shigaraki where he mentions he was taught not to judge others by their quirks.  It’s hard to judge how applicable this is to normal society because Re-Destro was raised in a cult, and the book shown during this sequence was released by Curious’s publisher.

So of those options, what is #2 talking about?  I’d say the last one is probably closest to what he means: don’t judge others by their quirks.  But of course, people judge others by their quirks all the time.  Family, classmates, teachers, people in the same neighborhood, heroes and police—we see examples from literally the first page of characters who are being judged by their quirks or lack thereof.  While that judgement doesn’t apply only to heteromorphs, they are, by dint of their visibility, going to face it everywhere they go, regardless of whether any given situation—say, going to the grocery store or on a date—involves quirks or not.  So, whatever lessons people in this society are getting about quirks and judgement, they clearly aren’t absorbing them.

It also bears pointing out, of course, that #2’s personal affiliation is with the Metahuman Liberation Army, and he definitely shows signs—as I’ll get to in a bit—of the quirk supremacism that group is so unanimously painted with in the endgame.  So while the supremacy he’s preaching is about heteromorphs rather than quirks more generally, he could well be saying quirk education is phony because he’s all for judging people on their quirks!  However, his criteria for that judgement differs from both forms of judgement taught by the society he’s railing against—what they practice and what they preach.

• Then there’s quirk counseling, a practice the story most prominently associates with Toga, who’s barely a twitch of the needle away from baseline (though her abuse is not wholly without reference to her appearance, in that her natural smile is repeatedly branded as scary or deviant).  So why bring it up in association with heteromorphs?  My suspicion is that a heteromorph—especially a heteromorph with an animal-associated quirk!—being visibly “different” in some way makes the people around them hyper-sensitive to behavioral “deviations.”

For a start, you see that hyper-sensitivity brought to bear against Toga.  Curious contends that Toga’s sense of “admiration” was a perfectly normal thing, but it was the tie to blood that made it wholly unacceptable.  It’s notable that, before she snapped, Toga was never shown to actually want to hurt people: the bird was already injured when she found it, her friend got a scrape the way any child might, Saito was involved in a fight Toga had no hand in.  She hurts people now because a lifetime of rejection and dehumanization, but Toga’s admiration of blood was not intrinsically indicative that she’d grow up to be violent; people treated it that way because of cultural attitudes towards blood and blood-attraction.

So, might the same sort of thing be true of e.g. animal-associated heteromorphs?  That they might exhibit behaviors which would, in different circumstances, be totally fine, but which they’re judged for unduly harshly because of cultural beliefs about the animal they resemble?  Let me just spitball a few possibilities:

A cat heteromorph who, as a child, showed affection by nuzzling.  That’s fine when a literal kitten is doing it, and funny and cute when a baseline child sees a cat doing it and imitates it for fun, but when the cat heteromorph does it, he makes people uncomfortable, makes them wonder if he lacks self-control, comes off as weird and too-forward.  So his parents rebuke him and bring him to a quirk counsellor to break him of the habit, leading him to feel ashamed and alienated from a harmless natural impulse.    

A snake-headed girl is the first heteromorph in her family line and the way she stares at people so fixedly, never blinking, creeps them out, makes them feel like she’s dangerous.  She isn’t and has no intention of being so, but she’s sent to quirk counselling anyway and the lesson she learns is to just never look people in the eye at all.    

A condor heteromorph develops a morbid interest in corpses in middle school.  He doesn’t want to eat them, he’s not some kind of cannibalistic animal—at least that’s what he told himself before quirk counselling, where his counsellor, like his teachers, assumed that his interest had to be tied to animal instincts.  He wanted to be a mortician, or join the police and get into crime scene investigation, but when he told people that they just looked at him like he was already holding a fork and knife.  (He ends up getting into photography, and just has to live with the fact that now people have two excuses to call him a vulture.)    

Two children—one with a plant-based emitter quirk, the other an eight-eyed spider heteromorph—are caught in the act of killing some insects by a local police officer.  It’s the sort of innocent childhood cruelty you might find anywhere, and, indeed, when the officer calls their school about it, that’s what gets decided about the emitter—he was just a child who didn’t know any better.  But the heteromorph gets recommended for quirk counselling instead—after all, spiders kill insects.  What if this is an early warning sign for instincts towards predatory behavior?  It’s important to nip these things in the bud.

That’s all off the top of my head or taken from some conversation with friends on the topic, and maybe it’s a reach, but it’s also a very plausible explanation for why a heteromorphic idealogue might bring up quirk counselling as a specific grievance—because, like the Villain-designation for criminals, it’s unevenly and unfairly applied.

O The next point #2 makes, and definitely the one that made the biggest splash in fandom at the time, is his invocation of a pair of historical incidents, possibly both but at least one of which was a mass murder targeting heteromorphs, carried out by a bunch of baseline types.  He names them as the 6/6 Incident and the Great Jeda Purge.  These are both stealth Star Wars references, though the former is disguised a bit better by being in the same format that Japan sometimes uses for naming events like attempted coups.[6]  Given the image we see, it’s fair to assume the event in BNHA was similar.

6: See for example the May 15 Incident or the February 26 Incident, called the 5・15 Incident and the 2・26 Incident respectively in Japan. You see this in China as well, with the Tiananmen Square massacre being referred to there as the 6/4 Incident.

Notice that the perpetrators here are mostly holding weapons.  Were they quirkless themselves, or were they avoiding using quirks such that they couldn’t be branded as Villains?  Knowing the answer to that would give us a timeframe for this.

He goes on to declaim, on the basis of these events, that the history of the paranormal is one of persecution and oppression of those with “differing forms.”[7] The term in Japanese there is kotonaru katachi, 異なる形, which uses a different reading of the kanji in igyou (異形) and muscles in a verb conjugation, which has the effect of softening the harshness of 異 somewhat.[8]  This would be a great catch-all term for those with heteromorphic bodies who might or might not have heteromorphic quirks[9] if it weren’t for the fact that literally the only person we ever hear using it is an anti-social zealot.  No one on Team Hero ever makes this kind of distinguishment.

In any case, #2 is obviously over-simplifying to play to his audience—recall the baseline woman we saw back in that shot of Persecuted Early Quirk-Havers back in Chapter 59—but, as I’ve discussed extensively, being more visible does make one a more ready target.  Also, of course, the presence of the CRC in the story lays the groundwork for this sort of historical horror story even long after the worst days of the Advent.

7: I provide my own translation here because the Viz one, “those who don’t fit the mold,” is vague to the point of uselessness.

8: The koto reading, as best I can tell, seems to be pretty rare, often tagged as archaic in words including it.  The i reading is far more common, in words that denote wrongness, divergence, abnormality, and so on.  But it may be less about the reading and more about the fact that adding the verb conjugation makes the term more of a descriptive phrase than a direct noun.  As ever, take my talk about Japanese language minutiae with a grain of salt.

9: “Differing forms” is broad enough, however, that it could also be read as covering, say, people with amputations, congenital anomalies, or other sorts of non-quirk-related disfigurements from accidents or disease.  As in real life, navigating the linguistic space between specificity and Othering can be tricky.

O Next, #2 rhetorically demands what excuse was given by those who perpetrated these slaughters?  He answers his own question with the quote, “They give me the creeps.” Note how this ties in with my earlier suppositions about the likelihood of discrimination worsening the farther one is from baseline, as well as those about the necessity of putting up a good, positive, appealing front.  It’s a perfectly intuitive leap, that more extreme variants of heteromorphy, or those who evoke negative associations—animals tied to rot or bad luck, people made wholly out of green ooze—are going to be more likely to be found “creepy” than those who look like e.g. sexy bunny girls or straight-laced guys who just happen to have pipes jutting out of their calves.  Of course, that’s on something of a sliding scale; the more biased an area is against heteromorphs in general, the easier it will be to find oneself on the wrong side of that line.

O #2 presents the idea that society has reflected on their actions and made amends, or at least that’s how society’s narrative goes.  Illustrating this, we see two of the three heteromorphs in the police force, as well as Nedzu.  Interestingly, the panel does not include any heteromorphic heroes!  I might guess that this is because heroes are meant to use their quirks to serve others; they’re really just enforcement tools, lacking any particular authority beyond a quirk-use license and some admittedly broad soft power courtesy of the social contract.[10] Conversely, a school principal and a police chief (Gori remaining the outlier here) have actual authority, such that the average heteromorphobia-denier can point to them as evidence that heteromorphobia doesn’t exist anymore.

10: Which is to say, I don’t get the impression civilians are required to take orders from heroes, such that they would actually get in legal trouble for disobeying.  The fact that people do typically follow those orders speaks more to the power heroes wield via their association with the police force, as well as the general tendency of people to assume that someone in a uniform giving orders during an emergency is probably a professional whose orders it would be safe and wise to follow.

In the same panel, we also see a baseline guy palling around with a vaguely murine heteromorph dude (he looks more like a mascot suit mouse than an actual mouse, but he’s certainly nowhere close to baseline!), illustrating another way society wants to pretend it’s moved past heteromorphic discrimination.  I can’t help but note, in regards to this specific pair, that the manga uses faces the readers know to illustrate the point about heteromorphs in positions of authority, whereas to make the point about baseline/heteromorph friendships, it has to make up a new pair to show us because the series hasn’t made the time to actually build any (heroic) relationships that actually look like that!

Now, one could argue that using familiar faces to underscore #2’s speech would imply that he’s aware of those faces, and while that’s fine for figures of authority, there’s no reason for him to be aware of e.g. Natsuo and his mousey girlfriend.  However, the same would apply to anyone placed to demonstrate a random urban friendship crossing the “differing forms” line, including those two strangers.  Who are those two, after all, that #2 is any more familiar with them than he would be of Natsuo and mouse gal?

Honestly, I think the best relationship candidate we have—a pair who would both communicate what the panel needs to communicate to the reader and who would feasibly be enough in the public eye to get pointed at for rhetorical purposes by an in-universe speaker—would be Kamui Woods and Mount Lady.  Unfortunately, they don’t work because Horikoshi has never seen fit to actually reveal Kamui Woods’ real face, so they’re much less visibly “a baseline person being emotionally close with a heteromorph” than the random two Horikoshi made up.

O The oratory continues into discussing the divide between city versus rural views on heteromorphs, and this is, to me, the first clear sign that the series is beginning to lose the thread of this plot.  Taking #2 at his word asks us to concede the heteromorphobia has been completely wiped out in cities, eradicated with that wonderful antidote called “education.”  But discrimination very much does exist in cities!  It may be less violent, less extreme, less vocal, but in the form of things like law enforcement bias, housing discrimination, microaggressions, the quirk counselling #2 himself brought up, it’s very much still there!  Now, it could be that he’s just downplaying that discrimination to focus on the really ugly stuff you don’t see in cities, but I don’t know what his reasons for doing so would be?  Not when there’s so much else he could say that would be equally inflammatory without alienating urban heteromorphs by dismissing their still very much present, modern suffering.

O He then brings up the talk of “light”—echoing Skeptic’s earlier rhetoric—and it not reaching those gathered at the hospital, so they must make their own, for people who’ve never once regretted the quirks they were born with can never be their heroes.  What this primarily puts me in mind of is Hawks’s background with heroes prior to his father’s arrest—that heroes were only on TV, not present to save him in his actual life.  Keep that in mind for Shouji’s response later on.

O Towards the end, #2’s speech finally tips over the line from what could plausibly be read as protesting unequal treatment to an outright call for supremacy.  Notably, he doesn’t call for quirk supremacy, but rather for heteromorph supremacy—for the tables to be turned, the cards reversed, for them to not merely be equal, but rather to be superior.

It’s unclear how much of this he’s sincere about and how much is just convenient rhetoric disguising views that are more quirk supremacist in actuality.  For many reasons, I want to read him in good faith: because the MLA originally struck me as being written in good faith throughout MVA and the first war arc; because #2 never once uses his quirk in this mini-arc, casting doubt on him having such an amazing quirk that he’d benefit overmuch from quirk supremacy anyway; and especially because it would be incredibly bad faith on Horikoshi’s part to make a character delivering a speech like this a total bad faith, manipulative outsider.  Unfortunately, #2’s inner monologue in later chapters will make a good faith read all but impossible to sustain.    

O Halfway through his speech, #2 unmasks himself, revealing both his face—dominated by four pairs of pedipalp-esque mouthparts, though the markings on his head are pretty eye-catching, too—and his scar.  We’re never told how he got it, but the implication is certainly that he was attacked for his appearance.  That may just be a conclusion it serves him to let people make, given his bad faith elsewhere, but thankfully the manga doesn’t go so far as to say that explicitly.  In any case, his deliberate reveal turns his wound into a form of performance art, drawing attention to it, forcing it to be a part of the conversation—the polar opposite of Shouji covering his scars because he doesn’t want them to be a part of the conversation about him, and those scars being revealed because his mask is torn off against his will.[11]

11: This also fits a larger pattern of villains, by and large, choosing their expressions of vulnerability, making deliberate shows of agency in how their weakness is perceived by the broader world—Shigaraki taking his hand off for the first time, Dabi’s video, Toga approaching heroes with genuine questions, and so on.  There are certainly exceptions, but generally if a villain shows his “true face,” it’s because they’re making a conscious decision to do so, and may be actively manipulating how that reveal is going to land.  Conversely, heroes want to present a powerful, confident, untarnished image to the public, so their shows of vulnerability all have to be forced out of them after pitched battles or acts of violence.  Heroes don’t make themselves vulnerable to the public on purpose, which feeds into the way the public then treats them when they are forced into vulnerable positions.

O Spinner’s a mess at this point, and the reason he’s a mess is all tied up in his faith in/desire to help Shigaraki.  It’s not explicitly about heteromorphobia, but on the other hand, given that the thing that drove Spinner to be here at all was his horrifically low self-esteem caused by heteromorphobia, maybe it’s not so irrelevant after all.  It may have taken Spinner longer than the Tenkos, Touyas, and Chisaki Kais of the world to reach the “fall victim to a dark influence due to the neglect and abuse you faced at the hands of Hero Society” plot, but he certainly got there in the end![12]

12: I call this The Sekoto Peak Problem, and it’s a big criticism of mine about how the final arc is framing all these conflicts as being solely brought about because Bad Faith Villain Men like AFO are scooping up vulnerable people and driving them towards violence, without acknowledging the much worse circumstances those vulnerable people might be in if they were just left to their fates.  Touya, for example, if not for AFO’s timely rescue, would likely have simply died on the mountain long before Endeavor was able to find him.

O Shouji takes the mob to task for attacking a hospital without ensuring the safety of the uninvolved innocents within, a laughable bit of sophistry[13] that accurately foreshadows how disastrous his reasoning will be throughout the rest of these chapters.

13: It’s laughable sophistry firstly because the heroes knew this mob was coming but chose to leave Kurogiri at a hospital anyway; one can mount a very reasonable argument that Kurogiri’s teleportation power qualifies him as a military objective, which would make stashing him at a hospital an actual war crime in an international conflict, as well as negating the hospital’s protected status as a civilian object.  It’s laughable sophistry secondly because it criticizes a Villain-led mob for failing to evacuate the building, as if said mob had exactly the same social cachet possessed by heroes, that they could freely walk in the front door of a hospital and start shouting evacuation orders with reasonable confidence that they’d be obeyed.  Finally, it’s laughable sophistry because Shouji is quite simply wrong about the order of the actions he’s describing—the heroes’ evacuation of Ujiko’s hospital was concurrent with their invasion of said hospital, not precedent to it.

   

Chapter 371: 

O Shouji accuses Spinner of taking actions that will set them back thirty years, which is just a really egregiously victim blamey sort of thing to say, placing the responsibility on heteromorphs for the crimes of those who hate them.

O Koda’s perspective gives us a flashback to Shouji telling his classmates about his history—his town and his scars and his reason for wanting to be a hero.  It’s all material that works in the context of all the set-up we’ve gotten—the CRC and the religious inflection of their specific brand of hatred, the rural heteromorphobia, the hints about Shouji’s own discrimination, the attack on the Ordinary Woman, and so on—but that would have been far better served to have been integrated into the story more naturally.  Koda has no specifically established relationship with Shouji (seriously, there is absolutely nothing; it’s shocking how out of nowhere his sudden deep dedication to Shouji is), nor does the scene he remembers have any specific flags for when it might take place,[14] leaving the memory feeling less like a natural extension of their arc than it is a graceless sequence muscled in to attempt to rouse some emotion in the audience when Koda has a quirk awakening he is not otherwise remotely in dire enough straits to have rightfully earned.[15]

14: Shouto and Bakugou being missing might suggest that they’re off at their remedial license course, which would put the scene somewhere in late September up through December (stretching from the aftermath of Overhaul to the introduction of the MLA), save that there are several other students missing as well—Sero, Iida, Sato, and Aoyama, none of whom where in the remedial course.

15: Nearly every other inarguable quirk awakening[※] we know of in the series has as a chief component serious physical injury: Bakugou, Ochaco, Toga.  Geten’s is the only exception, and his is tied to the strength of his feelings for Re-Destro, which are clearly and overridingly his most significant character trait!  Shouji is not anywhere near that central to Koda’s life, and he sure as hell isn’t injured enough to have gotten it that way.

※: By which measure I exclude stuff like the change in Shigaraki’s Decay or Mina’s acid attack against Gigantomachia.  Shigaraki was explicitly just breaking through a mental block to access power he already had.  Meanwhile, if Mina’s Plus Ultra moment had been a sudden quirk evolution, she wouldn’t already have an attack name picked out for it, nor would her horns have gone back to normal after it.  Acidman: ALMA is an Ultimate Move, not Mina having a quirk awakening.

O The flashback itself calls for another subsection.    

Ignoring the Difference Between the Personal and the Systemic for Fun & Profit

O The big thing here the description of the whole town coming out for a “blood cleansing” whenever Shouji touched someone.  This is depicted as Shouji, probably a preteen in this sequence,[16] being savagely attacked with farming tools, the most visible of which is a pitchfork.  This visual, as well as #2’s invocation of historical slaughters, is the darkest heart of heteromorphobia: a child being ritualistically assaulted in the open street as a matter of course, as a consequence for touching someone.  This is the image you should hold in your mind as The Problem through all of the potential answers and responses that get trotted out through the rest of these chapters.

16: Visibly older/bigger than, say, Kouta, but also visibly younger/smaller than middle school Deku.

Before moving on, I do want to examine this image in just a bit more depth.

This is, firstly, the moment that Shouji got those scars, and it’s very important to note that what we’re being shown is likely not a random, representative sample of what the town “coming out in force for a blood cleansing” looks like.  The strong implication is that this is in the immediate aftermath of the sequence we’ll see shortly of Shouji saving the girl from the river: he’s wearing the same clothes and shoes,[17] he’s the same size, and there’s a spray of blood from where he’s being struck across the mouth where he didn’t have his distinctive scars when he saved the girl.  Does that mean the blood cleansings were typically not this violent?  That’s hard to say.  On the one hand, we don’t see any other scars on Shouji, and he wears his arms pretty bare!  On the other hand, we never see any part of his body bare except his neck and arms, and since he can regrow his arms,[18] they’re not exactly conclusive evidence that he’s never been scarred there.  Also, he does say talk about his situation—the scars he bears—as something other children in the country have to bear, suggesting that the norm is rather worse than a little symbolic gash across the palm or something!     17: In fairness, he may not own very much different, as I’ll discuss shortly.     18: The duplicated ones, at least.  I seem to recall reading once that he could regrow the base set as well, but I’m still working on tracking down a citation on that.    

Secondly, as was the case with the image of the historical massacres, the adults here are using tools/weapons in the assault, not quirks.  As I mentioned in a footnote last time, them not using quirks to carry out this attack makes them merely criminals, not Villains, and therefore not nominally a Hero’s job to deal with.  While I can’t imagine any Hero in the manga these days would stand back and let this go on, the absence still stands out—no Hero is participating in this, nor observing from the sidelines, nor trying to intervene.  Heroes simply don’t figure into this picture at all.    

Thirdly, we can see a few children in the background, both there with adults, I assume their parents.  The child on the right is a passive observer, clinging close to their mother and simply watching; their father has one hand supportively on their shoulder.  Neither parent seems distressed, insomuch as we can tell from their somewhat indistinct features and rather clearer body language.  The child on the left is being actively held back by their mother, who’s standing with her back to the violence, her body interposed between it and her child.  The kid is reaching out towards the scene, but it’s unclear what the intent is.  Are they trying to intervene or do they want to join in?     Neither child appears to be the little girl Shouji saved—the one on the right is dark-haired, and the one on the left—the more likely prospect just going by the body language!—is wearing a long, dark T-shirt instead of the little girl’s overalls.  I suppose the left one could be the little girl if we assume she was hustled out of what she’d been wearing by her parents, eager to get her out of now-tainted (and also soaking wet) clothes and into something dry and warm and, in more ways than one, clean.  However, that seems like the sort of thing that would take longer than what looks to have been a pretty impromptu, disorganized bloodletting, unless everyone just held off on assaulting Shouji right out on the street until the “victim” could be present.    

Finally, there’s the pair of adults right at the center of the background.  If anyone in this picture is actually related to Shouji, I’d put money on them being here, watching but not attempting to intercede.  I don’t think it’s conclusive, though; the woman is thin and hunched, making her look older—I’d guess Shouji’s grandmother before Shouji’s mother.  That hunched posture and her hands being raised to her mouth do give her the most obviously distressed appearance of any of the adult, though, to the extent that the person with her is focused on supporting her rather than watching what’s going on in the foreground—and forward attention is what I’d expect if the dark-haired figure is related to Shouji.

So that’s the image we have of the crowd—actively taking part or observing with varying degrees of reaction running from distress to indifference to, potentially, enthusiasm.

O Next, let’s talk about Shouji’s parents.  He implies they were baseline—at the least they were significantly more baseline than Shouji himself, as they lacked arms “like his.”  That makes it quite telling that Shouji’s parents are nowhere to be seen in his story beyond the simple mention of how they were different than him.

Now, I don’t want to suggest here that Shouji’s parents are completely irredeemable people.  While I would imagine that—at least initially—they shared their town’s bigotry, having a heteromorphic child themselves would have exponentially increased the hardship of their own lives.  In a town like that, I’m sure that many if not all of their neighbors must have come to regard them with suspicion of wrongdoing or transgression—recall the first page of the last chapter, where Shouji is accused of tricking the town in his having brought dirty blood to it.  Hie parents almost certainly lost friends and likely became ostracized themselves, and ostracization in a small Japanese town can be a horrifying thing to deal with.

And yet, even with all that being the case, they didn’t abandon Shouji or give him up; they didn’t commit family suicide with him.[19]  Assuming he wasn’t removed from their custody after the incident, they’re presumably paying his school and living costs;[20] likewise, unless he just ran away from home or is carrying out an incredibly elaborate deception about what school he’s attending, they almost had to support his desire to attend a hero school to begin with.  In his situation, parents who support his desire to be a Hero is a big fucking deal.  After all, between the winning and the saving, heroes will de facto be touching people all the time!  If Shouji’s parents still live in his hometown, how do you think those people will take it when someone first realizes the Shouji family sent their kegare-riddled monster off to be a Hero?

19: The history of honorable suicide in Japan casts a very long shadow, and when it’s combined with the meiwaku culture, you get an underreported epidemic of things like parents who can’t see their way out of a bad situation taking their lives and their children’s as well, so as not to leave messy loose ends that others will have to bear the burden of dealing with.

20: I won’t get into whether or not the U.A. students’ parents are paying for any given thing on the following list, but here are some potential costs to consider, assuming that Shouji, like Uraraka, was commuting from an apartment prior to the dorms being implemented: tuition, school uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, school meal plan, food not served at school (e.g. breakfast and dinner or meals when the school is on break), non-uniform attire, personal care and hygiene, housing and transportation costs, a measure of spending money for unanticipated expenses or culturally expected gift-giving, etc.

All that being said, it’s obviously not a glowingly loving relationship, either.  Think back to Shouji’s absolutely barren room in Chapter 99 and consider it in the context of the information we get in this chapter.  Is he really so ascetic by inclination, or is he just used to making do with as little as possible?  After all, it goes without saying that if him coming into contact with someone called for blood purification, anything he himself was in regular contact with was also to be considered incredibly impure.  That includes his clothes, personal belongings and living space; even setting aside his parents’ view on it, who in his hometown would even want to provide or sell things to the family that they think will go to the child with the dirty blood that’s defiling their land?

Shouji’s parents’ absence is also glaring in other ways.  For example:

They’re either not in the beating scene image above at all or they’re that central background couple hanging back and just watching; whichever is the case, what they’re assuredly not doing while their son is being beaten so badly he will still have glaringly visible scars years later is “trying to stop the violence or take the blows themselves.”    

Shouji says he has one single good memory about his body, but his parents are nowhere to be found in that memory.  Ergo, his parents have not given him a single moment of positivity about his heteromorphic form.    

Parents of U.A. students were evacuated to U.A.—not just the ones near it, but even ones like Uraraka’s parents, who live at least a two hour drive away, in a wholly different prefecture with a third prefecture in between them and U.A.  Every student we see in the departure scene in Chapter 342 is shown with their parents except Shouji.

To sum all that up, Shouji’s family situation is not maximally bad, but it’s certainly proximally bad.

O Next, we get Shouji alleging ignorance on the part of heteromorphs raised in cities, that there are still parts of the country in the modern day where stories like his happen.[21]  It’s a milder version of the same assertions made by #2 and the beaky heteromorph last chapter, in that Shouji doesn’t suggest heteromorphobia doesn’t exist at all in cities, simply that there are extremes of violence that can only be found in the country.  It still feels off, however, to suggest that absolutely no one else in Shouji’s class might ever have heard of this through any channel at all: being from similarly small towns, reading about an attack in the news, reading about factors that impact the public approval ratings for Heroes, going through a morbid phase in middle school and researching it, being talked to about it by their parents, etc.

21: The suggestion of the Viz translation of this suggests that city-raised heteromorphs do know this, but only because they’re read about it in textbooks.  My sister-in-law, who does professional translation, tells me this was a subtle mistranslation of the original text, however; the textbook framing is supposed to imply a remove of time, not merely of distance.

It’s not as unrealistic a story beat here as it would be in an American comic, as Japan does tend more towards using silence as a weapon against bigotry—children won’t learn what they aren’t taught, and similar reasoning.  Still, to portray the class as so unanimously ignorant reflects a deep incuriosity, be that in the kids themselves about the world around them or in their author about how the knowledge/perpetuation of discrimination spreads.

This is particularly the case when you consider the story’s handling of the Ordinary Woman—attacked in her own town because people were suspicious of a heteromorph out after dark, turned away from multiple shelters because of her heteromorph status.  It’s certainly true that things got worse for heteromorphs after the first war arc, but for discrimination in that specific form to emerge, there needed to be something for it to draw on.  The fear of villains and the association of villains with heteromorphs are the foundation for the upswelling in anti-heteromorph sentiments in cities.

O Mina’s reaction to all this is one of rather theatrical anger.  That is, no one around her takes her broad declarations—that the world would be better off without the people who hurt Shouji—as anything more serious than hyperbole.  This is, it would seem, the only sort of anger that’s acceptable to show in response to hearing a story like Shouji’s—empathy to the wronged, sure, but no real intent to confront the wrongdoers.

O Mineta stares into space for a second before emphatically apologizing for calling Shouji an octopus once—a call all the way back to his microaggression in Chapter 6!—and asserting that it wasn’t his intention to say Shouji was gross or anything.  Shouji responds gracefully, saying it’s “only natural” that his arms would make people think of octopus.

He doesn’t go on to say, “But that doesn’t mean people have to say it out loud,” but it’s possible that Mineta’s apology is meant to suggest that regardless.  At least, one certainly hopes this isn’t the author’s way of quietly absolving his more popular characters of all the times they’ve done the same thing!  It’s notable, however, that none of the other Class 1-A kids that have done this are in the scene.  Shouto and Bakugou, who have both used that kind of language in anger (and in the latter’s case, also just with no provocation whatsoever) are the missing elephants in the room, and even Sero, who was the actual person to call Shouji an octopus, is, in his absence, Sir Letting The Gag Character Handle This Apology So I A More Serious Character Don’t Have To.

O Shouji brings up the Heroes Who Look Like Villains rankings.  We know the Number 1 on that list is actually Endeavor, per a movie bonus booklet, but bringing it up in this context does implicitly confirm that said rankings have an unseemly slant towards heteromorphs, and what did Skeptic say about Villains and heteromorphs again…?

O Shouji says he wears the mask because he knows that if people see his scars, they’ll wonder about them, and fear he’s out for revenge.  He doesn’t want people to think that, so he covers them up.  He’s praised for this by Tokoyami, and the narrative pretty clearly also thinks it’s admirable and cool.  I have serious issues with this—chiefly that it’s prioritizing the oblivious comfort of the baseline citizens over the fellow feeling and affirmation of other persecuted heteromorphs—but I’m also curious to see if the mask will come back now that its meta-narrative purpose of hiding Shouji’s scars from the reader has been fulfilled.  I note, for example, that Shouji is not wearing the mask in the color spread for Chapter 394, and the color art does have some precedent for being an early predictor of stuff in the body of the manga.[22]

Incidentally, while I’m talking about Shouji’s mask, I do wonder how effective it would even be for him to cover his scars up?  I have my doubts for two reasons.  First and most obviously, heroes are such celebrities, all over the news all the time, such that if Shouji really does get as popular as he intends to, there will be people who want to know what he looks like.[23]

22: The big one is Aizawa’s eyepatch.  It showed up in two pieces of color art (the popularity poll results spread for Chapter 293 and the new art announcing the BNHA Drawing Smash Exhibition) before it was revealed in the manga.  Both pieces released within days of each other in early December, 2020, three months after Shigaraki raked his hand down Aizawa’s face during the war and almost two months before the latter showed up in bandages in the hospital, with another two months to go beyond that before the eyepatch itself made it to the manga in late March.  In a more stealth spoiler, the same popularity spread revealed Shigaraki’s blackened, burned face-hand two chapters prior to Spinner digging it out of Shigaraki’s pants.  The 394 spread is also my basis for asserting that Mina’s horns have gone back to normal after her attack against Gigantomachia, compared to Shouji lacking his mask and Koda having his new horn in the same spread.

23: Edgeshot’s character profile page notes that his fans are split into two factions: those who’re mad to see his real face and those who think the mask is what makes him cool.

O More importantly, though, heroes have to be licensed, and Hero Licenses are photo IDs.  Photo IDs don’t typically allow face coverage because not being able to provide a visual reference to what the bearer looks like defeats the whole purpose.  While we don’t know what full-fledged hero licenses look like to say if they’re taken in or out of costume, we do know the provisional licenses the students carry showed them in their school uniforms, despite the fact that they definitely had working costumes by then:

Pardon the sudden screenshot. The manga has this shot, too, but the anime fills in the details of the text a bit more.

It seems probable to me that the photo on a Hero License must show the bearer’s face, so that if they’re tooling around a crime scene and a cop who hasn’t seen them around before asks for their license, it can reliably be used as a form of identification.  (I wonder how Hagakure manages?)

Also, think back to the press conferences we’ve seen in the story, most recently the one post-war: at every one, the heroes are in serious, solemn black suits, not their costumes.  So at any press conferences Shouji ever has to speak at in the future, he’ll have to show his face there, as well.

O We see a direct flashback to Shouji saving a little girl from drowning in a choppy, swift-flowing river as he says in voiceover that he’d rather cling to the single good memory related to his body than dwell on the bad memories.  He very much uses his quirk to do it, with his right set of limbs used to hold onto the bank while his left ones reach out to the girl, extending out another few “nodes” of arm-length when he at first can’t keep hold of her fingers.  As they sit and catch their breath afterward, the girl clings to one of his tentacles and cries.  This is not quite what his entry in the Ultra Analysis databook was hinting at[24] when it said he wears the mask due to his scary face making a little girl cry; that’ll be next chapter.

24: My apologies for not bringing this up before; it’ll be covered on AO3.  The gist is as detailed above; the databook came out circa the Endeavor Agency arc, so this was a known factoid about Shouji by the time this chapter came out three years later.

O Wrapping up the flashback, we’re left with Koda’s memory of Shouji saying that he knows it’ll take longer than a generation to tear down a wall that’s stood for over a century, so, just as previous generations have done, he’ll keep paying it forward, being the coolest hero the world’s ever seen, “to give good memories to generations to come.”  Which sounds really nice when he says it that way, as opposed to the broader implication that people whose children have been or are in danger of being maimed by bigots should just keep their heads down and “keep paying it forward.”

The whole “be a cool hero and give good memories” bit is particularly egregious to my eye, for a few reasons.

How much good did cool heroes do for Takami Keigo when they were just on TV?  Which is where Shouji will be, because in order to be “the coolest hero the world’s ever seen,” he’s going to have to be at the top of the rankings, and being at the top of the rankings means prioritizing cities, which means all those heteromorphs out in rural areas are never going to see him in person.  And anyway, what’s stopping all those bigots from just changing the channel or going on a rant about Woke Mutie Agendas every time a heteromorphic hero crops up on TV?    

How much did the visibility of previous generations’ cool heroes do for Spinner?  Does Shouji think Spinner was super inspired and uplifted by seeing e.g. Gang Orca on TV using the emitter-like hypersonic waves his quirk gives him to beat up Villains, an undue percentage of whom are also heteromorphs?

It’s certainly nice that Shouji was inspired enough by heroes on TV to want to emulate them, but he is demonstrably not the norm when it comes to wildly disadvantaged and victimized heteromorphs.  Also, I have to wonder how much his admiration of TV heroes would have done him if he’d gotten to the girl just a little later—say, in time to get her out of the river, but too late to be able to save her life without knowing CPR.  As bad as it was for him when he saved a little girl but had to touch her to do it, can you imagine how much worse it would have been if he’d touched her and then failed to save her, being found or having to walk back into town with her body?

I realize that's incredibly dark, but it's the kind of question that presents itself when the story is so insistent on Shouji's exemplary behavior being the model for heteromorphs to follow in their own lives.

   

O Exiting the flashback, when Shouji calls out to the heteromorphs, we finally get a straight-out look at how disastrous this conclusion is going to be in the way he shouts that no, the people who hurt them weren’t justified, but that there has to be a better way, that they should think about how to use their rage—but offers exactly zero suggestions himself for what that better way might be, or what they should be using their rage to do instead.[25]

25: I have seen the argument put forth that Shouji is one (1) teenager, and one (1) teenager cannot fairly be asked to Solve Bigotry.  To this, I would counter that if Shouji doesn’t have even one (1) single idea to offer, why is the camera lens holding him up as the hero who quelled a fifteen-thousand-strong mob with only words?  He doesn’t have to Solve Bigotry, but if he’s going to be used as a counter for other peoples’ misguided but at least active attempts to address the problem, he needed to be better than a mere white knight for the status quo.

Spinner’s #2 calls Shouji out on this directly, saying that if the situation were that easy to resolve, it wouldn’t have come down to this, and accusing Shouji of having no feasible solution to offer, just childish and naïve egotism.  And call me a hopeless MLA Stan and you’d be right, but truly, where’s the lie?

His efforts in this regard, however, wind up pushing Koda to what certainly has all the markings of a quirk awakening because it upsets Koda to see Shouji being “mocked.”  Man, sure is a good thing quirk awakenings are just a dime a dozen and definitely don’t require life-threatening injuries and/or incredibly severe emotional distress over someone who means more to you than your own life, right?

O In a last little stroke of ugliness for the chapter, Spinner calls Shouji gross.  Just to, you know, make it really obvious that the villains are all totally bad faith representation for this cause and thus can be safely dismissed.  (Christ, I hate these chapters.)

   

Chapter 372: 

O We get the flashback of Shouji and Koda asking All Might to assign them to the hospital defense group.  Points of note:

Neither Shouji nor All Might can be bothered to use the Ordinary Woman’s real name, instead just referring to her by her size.  Seriously, I get the intent behind insisting that she’s just an ordinary woman, that there’s nothing in particular stand-out about her in the current age; it’s pretty much the same deal as Shinomori saying that OFA can no longer be wielded by an “ordinary” person, with that phrasing being used to ironically emphasize that quirks are now seen as ordinary, while those without quirks are the unusual ones.  However, it obviously wouldn’t work in-universe for characters trying to specify who they’re talking about to say, “That ordinary woman,” with the end result being that they have to grab for what stands out about her if they want to be understood—in this case, her obviously unusual height.  In trying to emphasize that she’s normal, Horikoshi forces his characters to define her by what makes her stand out.    

Koda says that if Shouji’s going, he is too, a moment that would really land much better if they’d had literally any interactions of note at literally any point prior to this exact moment.  Frankly, even last chapter’s flashback is pretty thin on that front, since Koda is not one of the students who gets speaking lines when cuddling up to Shouji to comfort him.  (I’m not even convinced it’s very in character for Koda to be one of the kids diving in for cuddles—he’s usually pretty shy!)    

Shouji says that he could never call himself a hero if he were to stand back while the hospital attack plays out, implicitly emphasizing the role his reaction to his own oppression plays in his heroic motivation.

O Another flashback[26] gives us Koda’s mother discussing the possibility that he might get horns like hers someday, and what those horns can do, as well as mentioning that she used to have to put up with considerable mistreatment herself, and, lastly, telling her son to grow up into a man who gets angry when people mock those dear to him.

26: The sheer number of them crammed into this mini-arc really says a lot for how rushed it is, but complaining about the structural problems of the last few arcs would be a different essay.

Breaking those down, we’ve got:

The fact that Koda’s mom says he might grow in horns like hers suggests to me pretty strongly that her own horns are a quirk evolution she just doesn’t have the language to name as such.  If it were just a matter of maturation, something that came in with puberty, there’d be no “maybe” about it.  Given what we know about the context of quirk evolutions elsewhere, this in turn suggests that she did not exactly get her horns under peaceful, wholesome, uplifting circumstances!    

This is backed up by her mention of the “real cruelty” she faced.  Interestingly, this kind of raises some questions in relation to Shouji’s assertion last chapter that people like Koda who grew up in cities lack an understanding of the extremes of heteromorphobic violence that endure elsewhere.  Did Koda’s parents move to the city from the country at some point when Koda was young/before he was born, and the “real cruelty” was out in the country?  That might track with the overalls she was wearing.  And of course, Koda’s mother was a younger woman then, so maybe it’s just the fact that heteromorphic discrimination was worse at the time.  Either way, Koda’s mother is clearly open with him about the fact that she was mistreated because of her appearance, though she may have downplayed the severity of it.    

The idea of Shouji being “dear to Koda” is immensely frustrating for how utterly groundless it is, based on absolutely no prior grounding within the story other than the general bond among the 1-A students.  That’s just me complaining, though—more pertinent for this essay is the problem with how this moment frames anger.  Like, the whole mini-arc has the same problem, but this chapter is particularly rotten with it.  To preview: Koda’s anger is portrayed as righteous, as was his father’s, because their anger is about protection, about defensive reaction, about intervening with harm currently in progress—basically all the stuff Heroes are supposed to do.  It is notably not about action based on past harm or proactive attempts to prevent future harm.

O Koda’s bird attack knocks Spinner’s #2 off the roof in one of the most egregious examples of, “I can’t come up with an actual counterpoint for his arguments, so I’ll just shut him up through force,” I’ve ever seen.  Sure, there’s something to be said for not engaging bad faith parties in good faith arguments, but like…  That guy already had a platform of his arguments—he was standing on the roof of a tall building!  The author gave him several pages to make his pitch; the argument’s already out there in the readers’ minds!  The only thing getting rid of him does is guarantee that the person the taciturn Shouji actually has to argue with is…Spinner.  Who is not exactly a born orator at the best of times, and he’s very far from even that level here.

Now, #2 will get a few more lines next chapter, but they’re against one of the people on his own side.  No heroic character has to argue #2 down; instead, they get to match wits with the literally drooling Spin-zilla.  Which is a bit like stepping into the wrestling ring with someone who’s had a bag thrown over his head and his hands zip-tied behind his back.

This confrontation is, woefully, not the only place in the endgame where a heroic character gets all the time and freedom in the world to make their big pronunciations while their opponent gets shut down by some outside factor—interference from other villains, psychological decay, literal possession—but it’s in particularly stark relief here.

O Shouji contends that the crowd is letting their pain be exploited, which is a fair cop, but will become difficult to square with his praise of them next chapter.

O He says that these peoples’ children might be the next targets, presumably because of their actions here today.  This is particularly maddening because it’s coming from someone who was, himself, already targeted as a child!  Not because of anything his parents did, and certainly not because of anything bad he did, but simply because of the bigoted, backwards views of his town.  Children already and still are being targeted!  Shouji’s backstory is all wrong for this stand, and there’ll be another angle on that next chapter as well.

O Here we finally fulfill the promise of Shouji’s databook entry and see the Little Girl Crying Because His Face Was Scary.  She wasn’t crying because she was just scared of his face in isolation, but rather because she sees his face being scary as her fault, directly correlating his wounds to her rescue.[27] Those wounds stand in marked contrast to what happens when other people save small helpless children from danger, and underlines the biggest problem with this whole resolution: the idea that simply Being An Hero will create change.

27: My big question is, “Given that him being in contact with her was so bad it got him scarred for life, how did she even sneak out to see him again to give him this tearful apology?  Did young Shouji even want this apology, or would he have preferred she not risk the two of them being seen together again for both their sakes?

Now, it’s certainly likely in Horikoshi’s world that this little girl will, herself, grow up to be different from the people around her, that she won’t think heteromorphs are tainted.  And like, that’s at least one less person being awful, right?  And doesn’t every one count?

Sure, of course—but what happens when she runs up against that prejudice herself?  Will she try to intervene the next time she sees a blood cleansing?  Will she simply abstain from such action and teach equality in her own household without trying to change the village around her?  Will she simply move away and leave her hometown worse for her absence?  If she does stay in that town, will she herself become an outcast for her views—a form of silent, passive harassment that can be absolutely life-wrecking in those small Japanese villages?  If she gets married and has children, will her husband have her back in trying to raise those kids free of hatred?

For that matter, isn’t there a chance that, being surrounded in people who think heteromorphs are tainted, that she’ll just internalize something like, “It was my carelessness that got that poor heteromorph boy beaten so badly.  He was trying to help, and it only got us both hurt—him for the beatings, me for being in contact with his filth.”  Like, she’s so young in that scene; she’s got a whole lotta years of having the anti-heteromorph narrative reaffirmed at her before she’s old enough to do anything different herself.  It feels to me like the kind of thing that she could easily fall back into as she grows up, only to have a huge spiritual crisis about it once she hits her late teens to early twenties.

In any case, it's just a lot to put on a single child—on her and Shouji both!

O Spinner rallies enough to yell out a message of his own, but it’s just a quote of what he told his followers when he first sent out the call, not anything new to rally them, nor tailored to respond to what Shouji’s saying.  This has been the danger of the plotline all along, and here it comes to fruition: in putting bad faith villains with ulterior motives[28] up against an underdeveloped character who’s hidden the evidence of his mistreatment from Day 1, someone with no apparent intention to ever speak up for others like himself, no one comes out looking good.  Truly, heteromorphs deserve better rep.

28: #2 is the obvious one, but Spinner’s here in bad faith, too.  While I’m sure he’s not totally indifferent to the matter of heteromorph rights, it’s self-admittedly not his current priority.

O That said, if what Spinner says is old hat to the crowd, it is new to the audience, and it serves to sharply up the ante on from what we knew previously about the persecution he faced in his hometown!

But it would have gotten better if he’d just put on a mask and dealt with it, amirite?

Recall that Spinner has previously only said that people in his town called him names—this is self-evidently many steps worse.  Note, though, that it’s another example of the violence heteromorphs face not involving anyone using quirks—that is to say, nothing that’s a hero’s jurisdiction to deal with.  That being the case, how much could Spinner get away with fighting back or running before the “it’s okay to use quirks in self-defense” stops holding?  After all, is it still self-defense if biased cops[29] can accuse him of “escalating” the conflict?  How far away can he get by climbing on walls before it becomes, to some small-town local Hero, unlicensed public quirk use?

29: If policing in HeroAca Japan still works basically the same as it does in IRL Japan, then in truly backwater areas, ones too small to afford the upkeep of a police department, an officer would be sent in from another area to live in a home attached to the police box.  That being the case, it’s not a given that the officer would share the locals’ bigotry.  That’s where we come back to the whole “what percentage of Villain-designated criminals are heteromorphs” statement and what it implies about bias in the law enforcement system.  Also too, building a strong relationship with the community is absolutely essential to rural policing, and there are, oh, so many stories about what happens when someone new in a small Japanese town gets between the inhabitants and their “traditional spiritual practices.”

O Pig Nose Guy starts making an impression by noticing the doctors—most prominently Dr. Yoshi, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a baseline nurse—forming a human chain in front of the hallway leading to the Inpatient Ward.  This drama is undercut on both fronts by the fact that Spinner is not looking for the Inpatient Ward, and in fact barrels right on past that hallway without even glancing in its direction.  So, the mob stops because they’re struck to hesitation by a group of people protecting a part of the hospital that the mob was not even intending to assault in the first place.

O As part of stopping, Pig Nose Guy seems to have some sort of flashback to a time he saw Dr. Toad caring for an elderly baseline man.  This raises a lot of questions to my by-this-time hyper-critical eyes.

What past circumstance brought Pig Nose Guy—presumably fairly rural, as most of this crowd is implied to be—to Central Hospital, the most technologically advanced hospital in the entire country?    •  If Pig Nose Guy is not rural, but was still so fired up about heteromorphobia that he joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital, wouldn’t that suggest that a lot of people in the story have been misleading us about the extent of anti-heteromorph sentiment in cities?    

If the person in the bed is someone related to Pig Nose Guy—perhaps someone with a rare illness that requires specialized treatment?—why is the guy entirely baseline?  If it’s just a friend, then they must be very close, given that PNG was willing to take a trip to the Tokyo metropolitan area to visit him.  But if PNG is that close to a baseline guy, why did he ever believe that baseline folks are such a lost cause that he, again, joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital?    

Why is this important, impactful memory one of a heteromorph in a caretaker role instead of being taken care of?  To elaborate on why that question matters, a common issue you’ll see minority groups raise when talking about representation in media is the role any given minority character performs in their narrative—the gay best friend there to give the straight female lead advice, the Black person there to help a white person self-actualize, that sort of thing.  This is not so much a critique of any given, specific character as it is criticizing the restrictions on of what demographics are allowed to be portrayed as full, rounded individuals in popular media versus which are relegated to stock stereotypes or supporting cast.     This isn’t something BNHA addresses explicitly, but I do think we have some precedent for suspecting heteromorphs in this world have similar problems—think of the image for Class B’s play in Chapter 173, Gang Orca playing the Villain at the license exam, and, most egregiously, the Hug Me Corporation and its all-baseline-all-the-time image of bystanders and victims.  That being the case, it really gets to me that Pig Nose Guy’s memory here has the man in the hospital bed being baseline while it’s the doctor who’s the heteromorph.     Like, what does that communicate about his mindset, exactly?  “Oh, I remember this time I saw a heteromorph who’d managed to actually kind of Make It in society and he was nice to the baseline guy in his care.  But the spider guy leading us, he didn’t sound like he wanted us to be very nice at all.  Is that what I am?  Not nice?”  On the other hand, if the whole point of this memory is to remind PNG that there can be peace and support between heteromorphs and “people with human faces,” why in heaven’s name isn’t this a memory of a heteromorph being cared for and supported by a baseline person?  Why does the person doing the labor in this picture have to be of the oppressed class?

I hate this panel so much.

   

Chapter 373: 

O The last conversation plays out between Pig Nose Guy, #2, and Shouji, revealing #2 to be a bad faith idealogue who thinks of Shouji with microaggressions and his followers as meatshield patsies.  It’s real bad.

O Shouji says that the feelings that led the mob to come today are neither useless nor wrong, and that their willingness to keep thinking about everything makes them look like a bright and shining light to his eyes.  However, he carefully does not engage with the fact that those feelings, which were previously aimless and directionless, were only stirred up and stoked to the point of “coming today” by the villains.  It’s the same sort of thing the villains always get told, really—you may have a point, you have suffered, but when you act on that point, that suffering, then you’ve gone too far.  All you’re really supposed to do with that pain is—what, exactly?  Thinka bout it and choose to Nobly Endure?

O The last little bit of insult to this chapter, to my eye, is #2 getting an apology from some anonymous hero we’ve never seen in our lives, who says, “We’ve heard your voices loud and clear today.  Sorry for not realizing sooner.”

Remember the bit where the person who apologizes to Shouji for the octopus comment is Mineta, the gag character, instead of Sero, the serious character who brought it up in the first place?  Remember the conspicuous absence of Bakugou and Todoroki, who have actually used that language with conscious demeaning intent?  This apology is the systemic version of that absolute unwillingness on Horikoshi’s part to let his sympathetic/popular/important characters look bad.  It’s the same thing that led to none of the heroes who retired after the war being heroes the readers know and care about, the same thing behind the total collapse of the series’ critique of All Might.  Heroes are allowed to be ignorant, but they are not allowed to be complicit.

Notice, too, what this random hero does not say, what Shouji does not offer, the absence that damns this resolution: any promises of concrete change.  We’ve finally gotten to the crux of Horikoshi’s point, as delivered by Shouji, and it really does all boil down to this:

And I can’t overstate enough what a terrible resolution this is, especially given how Shouji’s own experience puts the lie to it.  Remember, Shouji saved a child from drowning, one of the absolute most prototypical actions someone can do and get called a Hero by the bystanders/victims/evening news.  The only thing he could have done that would have been more stereotyped would have been saving her from a burning building!  He saved that little girl from drowning and the townsfolk attacked him with farming tools for it.

How much more heroic would he have needed to be?  How much more of a shining light could he possibly have been?  In what universe could someone with that backstory possibly think that the answer to systemic bigotry—violence that goes wholly accepted by the community and wholly unpunished by the broader society—could be this Model Minority bullshit?

Ultimately, for Shouji’s backstory to realistically have given him the motivation he professes, his actions needed to have changed the people in his village for the better.  If the reader is meant to believe that Shouji’s “answer”—the premise that selfless heroism can change the hearts of bigots—then we have to see it.  And, you know, even if that had been what we got, there would still be grounds to criticize it!  It would still be a perhaps-too-idealistic depiction of fighting oppression; it would still put too much responsibility on the victims!  But at least it would justify Shouji’s own stance.

As it is, we have Shouji choosing to believe in the changeability of people who specifically shouted while throwing rocks at him that, no matter how much the times advanced, they would never accept him.  His answer does not entail a single non-heteromorph working to bring heteromorphs living in the darkness a light; it entails them kindling their own.  As with Pig Nose Guy shutting down in the face of a memory of a heteromorph doctor, this resolution asserts the life-changing power of…being told that heteromorphs have to do all the work to make baseline people feel better.

   

Conclusion

Do I think that this terrible resolution means heteromorphobia was poorly set up or retconned?  No, I don’t.  I just think it means that Horikoshi is a Japanese man writing a Japanese story from a position of demographic privilege in Japanese society.  I think he’s fully capable of setting up a detailed, intelligent, thoughtful discrimination allegory, a logical, internally consistent extension of the discrimination in the world around him to the alternate future he’s created—and then coming to a completely different resolution than I would because his context led him to different answers than I wanted or found acceptable.  Compared to the U.S., Japan as a culture is more communal, more collectivist; they have less history with successful protest movements, more history with protest movements turning violently extremist or just being ignored by those in power.  The idea of “not making trouble for others” is an incredibly deeply engrained value.

I have a decent idea why this resolution is what it is.  I can try to make myself view it through the more generous, forgiving lens of Cultural Differences; I can fail to do so and instead conclude that this is portrayal is much less about Cultural Differences than it is yet another in a long chain of Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Author Writes Discrimination Allegory, Fucks It All Up Because of His Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Centrism.  That doesn’t mean I believe heteromorphobia came out of nowhere, and I hope this essay has at least demonstrated that much, whatever you might think of its resolution.

——————————

Thank you so much for taking this journey with me, all! At 42,000 words and 93 pages in Word, there's definitely more I'd like to do with this, chiefly taking a spin through the Vigilantes spinoff, which I've always found to be very good at grappling with practical questions and concerns BNHA Core largely ignores. The character of Kamayan is particularly relevant to this topic.

However, for now, I'm going to take a break on this subject and turn my attention to something else. I'm not sure what it'll be quite yet, but meta projects that have moved towards the top of my list concern the ridiculous series of nerfs Toga has been subjected to in this endgame, arc thoughts on everything I hate about the stupid, stupid All Mech fight, and an organized argument for the endgame being chock-full of retcons that are obvious if you look at them for more than the five minutes it takes to read a chapter each week.

You may notice that all of those are pretty negative-sounding, and you would be right. Given that the whole reason I stopped doing my chapter posts is that I was weary of the constant negativity, the actual next thing I do will probably be to get back to one of my neglected MLA fanfic projects.

'Til next time, all!

[hamofjustice]

Okay, so, I said I was working on Pokemon Scarlet / Violet fanfic and that's still kiiiinda true? But for the most part the past few months I've instead been working on...

HamOfJustice's League Club Expansion Pack

... which is a text-file-based imaginary mod of the game (but a blueprint for a real one if someone is able to make it, I guess) that massively expands the DLC postgame to include like a hundred things for characters to talk about, adds new friendship storylines, expands their team rosters and battle AIs, and lets them follow you anywhere in the world, making it not really a League Club thing at all except in spirit.

I'm aiming to do the following:

1. Give the players the living-happily-ever-after postgame that they deserve, and that Pokemon SV basegame really seemed like it was leading up to after Area Zero and all those friendship strengthening storylines

2. Prove I know this gamedev thing isn't easy and do all the work myself to see how viable it really could've been for SV and Pokemon games in general to have more meat on its bones, inspired by what we did get from it so far. I'm not asking for much of anything that requires new models, code, or animations, just text, menus, and repurposed features. Even the AI is pseudocoded by myself

3. Live up to the characters' potential more and leave less up to speculation and fanfic to really explore, explain, heal, capitalize on, and have fun with (okay, this is basically fanfic formatted as a fake datamine, but still) while still being consistent with the tone of the game and leaving plenty of subtext and small details to have fun discussing with other readers rather than stating everything outright

Basically, I wanted this so bad I just did it myself instead of complaining some more, and I want everyone who feels the same way to get to have that experience through me. I've been steadily working on this thing for months (the scope got a little out of hand as you can imagine) and I'm pretty close to releasing Nemona's files, which are the parts I'm most passionate about, but I'm hoping to keep at it after that if I can (Nemona, Penny, Arven, and maybe Kieran and Carmine, at least)

Reviews from people who've seen early previews of my project on Twitter or in DMs:

"You legitimately know more about [Nemona and Penny] than Game Freak, there's really no question about that at this point"

"OH MY GOD IM OBSESSED WITH THIS. it amazes me all the time how your characterisation and voice is PERFECT"

"Holy shit this is so cute... This dialogue is stellar"

"Oh wait this is ur fanmade dialogue? DAMN I THOUGHT IT WAS REAL"

"Goddamn, you went HARD. Congrats on writing more and better story in one day than was put into the DLC"

"AKJCJAJFHQBXBXB nemonas dialogue is so perfect like its EXACTLY her 😭😭😭😭 so is everyone's like Penny's too??? you must be some kind of secret game freak writer…. THIS IS AMAZING 💓💓💓💓💓💓"

There's a big ol' batch of old and new samples I've picked out for you today under the cut if you wanna look. Either way, expect the Nemona part of the actual project to be posted for real soon-ish and her friends one at a time after that, once I get past a bit of writer's block on one part and stop trying to make the angsty cathartic bits perfect

[adarkrainbow]

Lost media quest: H&G Epic Tales (part 1)

Some times ago I stumbled upon the trailer for an animated storybook adapting "Hansel and Gretel". I even made a quick post about it and then moved on my way. However, what I was not expecting was that my casual search would end up throwing me into a whole "lost media" investigation...

So I present to you the first report of my search for the lost media "Hansel and Gretel - Epic Tales".

"Hansel and Gretel - Epic Tales" is the English title of an interactive, animated storybook originally created by a Dutch team - hence why it exists also under the Dutch name "Hans en Grietje - Epic Tales".

Its trailer (posted around 2012/2013) is still around the Internet - on both Youtube and Vimeo, in English. It showcases you all the effort put into the product as well as the quality of it all - because when you think "Interactive storybook" you think "Just some still pictures you flip over while a voice narrates in the background". But here, not at all: you have entire animated tableaux allowing for a true point-and-click kind of game, intercut with entire animated segments and sequences - making this interactive storybook quite close to a full cartoon or simplified video-game.

In fact, I am not the only one to say this: numerous reviews pointed out this application could be considered a full cartoon in itself. And if some comparisons are left a bit generic "A cartoon feeling", "It could be a Saturday morning cartoon" I have seen one review even going as far as to compare this traditional 2D animation to a Disney movie!

I especially love the art style here which is reminiscent of classic, old fairytale cartoons - and I will come back to this element later because I do believe the game has easter-eggs or nods to classics of the fairytale animation.

Not only that, but as the trailer indicates, this game was supposed to be the first of an entire line of animated, interactive storybooks, the "Epic Tales" line, each reinventing fairytales, all narrated by the same storytelling character you see in the trailer, Silvertongue the (elf? dwarf?) who beats up gnomes to bring books to life... To have such a big project coming from Dutch folks isn't so surprising given the strong Dutch love for fairytales (it is the land of the Efteling park, after all).

In fact, the Epic Tales line had not only its own website (that you can see in a different promo for the app, here) but also a Facebook page and a Twitter account to promote the release of the game.

The game was released on iOs format and distributed by Apple. You could get it on your iPad or iPhone by just buying it on the App Store or iTunes store. And it was met with very, very positive reviews. Everybody agreed on saying this game was awesome, the dub very good, the interactions fun, the music delightful - in a word, absolutely perfect. Here is a handful of positive reviews I could find in English ; coupled with another handful of articles in Dutch this time. Mind you, some people do complain about the story being a tad bit too "light" for their taste - as in everybody agrees it is a visual treat with splendid visuals and a goofy tone perfect for kids, but some do complain about a lack of "darkness" (one review even regretted the "psycho-drama" of the original story, absent from this light-hearted story). I personally think there's enough dark Hansel and Gretel retellings out there to allow us a nice light-hearted, goofy, innocent version, but oh well, that's just my opinion... I'll return to these changes in a later post.

These online articles are notably quite precious for bringing additional screenshots of this now unfortunately lost media...

Lost yes: for if you check the App stores and iTunes pages today, it seems Apple has removed the game from their offer. And given Apple was the only distributor... it seems you cannot get it anywhere else.

The Epic Tales website (epictales.com) has been brought down - though you can still find it back thanks to Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which did preserve several versions of it. The Facebook page for Epic Tales is still here too, though inactive since the app's release. As for the Twitter account... it seems that after a few years of inactivy it was briefly taken over by a little girl who posted goofy pictures of her on it... Was it the account-owner's daughter, niece or little sister? I don't know but it seems clearly that this account is a dead-end too.

Now, outside of the trailer, official accounts and online reviews, the last remaining official bits of this animated project (because there is one un-official element I will go to later) are the Anikey Studios videos. Anikey Studio is one of the two big teams that worked on the "Hansel and Gretel - Epic Tales" project, alongside Cloud Castle Interactive, and while the Epic Tales line seems dead and gone, Anikey is still working a lot, regularly creating and publishing animated shorts. They have a Facebook, a LinkedIn, an Instagram - but more interestingly a Vimeo account on which they regularly post videos (itself doubled by a Youtube channel). And they post yearly Demoreels collecting bits and extracts from their animation projects. Including "Hansel and Gretel - Epic Tales".

Now, unfortunately they only use the scenes from the trailer of the interactive storybook, so nothing new - but still it worth checking out. The extracts most prominently appear within their Demoreels of the years 2016 and 2012 (I am using the Vimeo version, not the Youtube ones).

And so far, at first glance, this is it. If we do just a superficial search, it is a good-looking app that got removed by Apple ; a big hopeful project with a lot of effort put into it that everybody forgot about or did not notice ; a whole line of fairytale animations that got cancelled right after its first instalment. A first instalment seemingly disappeared into the limbo of "lost media"... But for me, it was only the start of the investigation - because if you know me, you'll know I can get incredibly frustrated when I see something cool I just happened to miss ; and as an enjoyer of both traditional hand-drawn animation and fairytale adaptations, this app seemed so wonderful...

As such, I am currently undergoing a sort of investigation to collect everything I can find and save about this animated storybook. Given I am not an expert "lost media hunter", I might find nothing at all - but at least it will be a fun ride playing the investigator for once! Plus something within the occult forces of the world seem to constantly condemn my blog to focus on "Hansel and Gretel"... I don't know why but every time it gets brought back to me one way or another. So who am I to oppose the mysterious flow of nature?

If any of you ever heard of this app before - if maybe you downloaded it some time ago, if you know someone who played it, or maybe if you still have it somewhere in your Apple product, please do contact me! Even the slightest memory can be of incredible use for such an investigation. Myself I am going to perform a breakdown of all the information I could find, and the following posts of this series are going to try to "reconstruct" what the app was about, and how the story unfold in this version - because here's the thing, it isn't just a regular, straightforward Hansel and Gretel retelling. They actually added and changed several elements in it... But that will be for another post.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. The application is somehow listed within the catalogues of several Dutch libraries. I don't really know much about how these libraries work, but if somehow there is a Dutch person who sees this post, could you eventually bring me some help? It would be very appreciated!

[fayrobertsuk]

Cease and Desist

I really need to rant about the state of UK politics, but also I'm so literally tired of living in an increasingly fascistic, villainously late-stage-capitalist state that I don't know if I can summon up the energy to properly describe (let alone explain) the shitshow that this country is turning into, reminiscent of the worst nadir of the 80s.

Like... have you read Suella Braverman's fuck-you letter to Rishi Sunak yet? That was... certainly something, and honestly looked, to my mind, tantamount to a call to arms for the far-right and offering herself up as a rallying point, probably leadership.

And yeah, it was disturbing.

Her four points which formed part of her conditions to support someone she's now publicly labelled, essentially, a weak leader with little support and reliant on what bigots she can muster to his back... are genuinely troubling stuff. Aggressively regressive and deeply misanthropic. She attacks migrants and refugees, trans people (especially trans youth), and lays it out as though she's being the reasonable one. She's managing to make Sunak look centrist. No mean feat.

Go look at "small boats" as a topic on Twitter, just for an example of who she's representing. Trust me: it's not just progressive folk being sarcastic and/or appalled by the anti-refugee rhetoric, there are a shit-ton of people complaining that not enough is being done to curb "the problem of the small boats". Who've bought into this propaganda wholesale.

If you're not concerned, I'm going to suggest that either you're not paying enough attention, or you consider yourself one of the people her priorities serve.

Either way, you have to know that there's only one real way this shit can go if we don't find a way to stop it.

Because it gets worse, for my money. Tonight (well, 15-Nov-23), the House of Commons had the chance to vote on a proposed amendment to the King's Speech put forward by the Scottish National Party: for the UK to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. And not only did the Tories overwhelmingly vote against that (which we would obviously have expected), but the Labour Party were told: if you're a Shadow Cabinet member and you vote for the ceasefire, you're out, we'll give your job to someone else. Obviously I paraphrase.

Turns out you can go to the Government website and download the raw data about the way the MPs voted (or failed to vote) on the matter of the ceasefire, which gets you the names and parties and which way they went. So I made a graph. And I'm honestly sickened.

(Image description in alt-text; let me know if you need the data in a different format up-front.)

Now, it's not like if all the Labour MPs who'd abstained had voted yes it would have swung it (it would still have been 266 vs. 294), but I know I'd be feeling a lot better, and a lot more confident in our so-called Opposition.

See, the thing is that, to my mind, unless you're genuinely all-for the extermination of all Palestinians in the region, a ceasefire is the only means to an actual solution. I just keep remembering how much progress was finally made in Northern Ireland in the 90s, but that (and I wildly simplify here, I suspect) it took a ceasefire to give stability and space and time in which successful negotiations could happen.

Just as I condemned, and still condemn, both IRA and UDA, and every politician and financier egging them on, so do I condemn the violent extremists on both sides of the equation in Gaza. And I strongly suspect that, if nothing changes, thousands upon thousands of civilians, mostly Palestinian, are going to die through no fault of their own until there's no-one left to annihilate. To dicker about the Right Kind of Cessation of Hostilities is demonstrating a casual disdain for human life that chills me even as I rage.

We all like to think we'd be one of the good guys when we look back at pivotal fascist moments in human history. The truth is that, right now, people's lives are being destroyed while people with unimaginable amounts of power are more concerned with jockeying for more than attempting to stem the tide of dehumanisation we're seeing rising across the world, simultaneously in pretty much every nation this time. I don't see anything like enough happening to stop it, and I'm genuinely scared.

[shmreduplication]

someone had linked me this a few months ago when I was queuing the videos and complaining about how hard it was to find the social media pages for everyone

this turned into a long post. tldr is it's hard to recreate something from 12 years ago even tho it was entirely on the internet

I went thru all of Lydia, Charlotte, and Jane's tumblrs and queued posts that are mostly pics of the characters posted from the blogs rather than reblogs. The people who put together that transcript of all the social media posts clearly had the same idear but only looked thru the tagged posts on each blog because Jane's blog has a few in-character photoshoots that someone didn't tag correctly. Since I'm trying to waste as much time as possible, I actually looked thru the entire blog archive so it was a little easier for me to catch them. Charlotte unfortunately does not have anything worth reblogging, it's mostly movie posters and trailers with a few fan interactions. Jane's blog is a fashion blog so there will be a handful of posts from her, and Lydia does the most fan interactions which includes reblogging gifs and fanart. I was listening to the Wicked soundtrack while working on it so I did add in two posts comparing Lydia to Glinda. She also starts posting her youtube vids on her tumblr, but those are already queued on the main blog so I'm not going to add them to the soc med blog

twitter's UI is not familiar to me and it doesn't seem like they have a good archive function the way tumblr does so instead of pulling from that, I'm copying from the social media transcript, de-formatting it in gsheets, then I'm going to reformat it with a fake tweet generator. If they missed any tweets like they did with the tumblr posts it's going to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ they have some fan-interactions there too but just from skimming it it's only fans who aren't winking at the fourth wall, like asking what kind of camera they use and saying they looked tired in the most recent video and asking if they liked the most recent doctor who episode so I trust their judgement

the different styles of the tweets and tumblr posts are actually really done, shows the team had a very strong sense of character for everyone in the cast. The tweets from the Lees and Darcys are more similar to each other, the tweets from Charlotte and Lizzie are more similar to each other, the tweets from Kitty (a literal cat in this version, her account is run by Lydia) really seems like Lydia tweeting as a cat rather than like someone hired by Hank Green pretending to be a cat

fixing the formatting on the tweets is really boring but I'm getting a much bigger appreciation of the overall ambition and success of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and of the fans who put together the social media transcript, and people who try to do research on internet-based communities. There's sooo many posts spread out over soo many websites, but those are subatomic compared to all the posts on all those sites so they can still be hard to find, and there's always the risk of things being deleted w/no secondary source

[eossa]

How I'd Make Tumblr More Profitable

Yes, this is going to be controversial, since I know nothing about the behind-the-scenes spending, economics, and all that jazz. But I've been on Tumblr for long enough to have a rough idea of the userbase wants - which is what positions Tumblr in a niche other sites don't really utilize. Most of the points I list here are about improving the experience of existing users, as keeping users might be harder for tumblr than attracting new ones.

Please note that this posts reflects my personal opinions and some stuff I've seen people complain about it. Do not attack me over anything I've written here, it's not worth my time and I will resort to blocking if I'm being bothered. Constructive criticism is fine and encouraged!

[under the cut because this got quite long] [last updated 20th July 2023]

Features to Add

Block posts. Xkit has/had this feature, it was great. Sometimes I just don't want to see a specific post, and others probably agree with that.

Send asks and replies from sideblogs. Would literally make a lot of things easier and better.

Delete individual reblog additions from a post. Sometimes, you have a post where there is one"relevant" addition, multiple "irrelevant" additions ("yes!", "[repeated phrase in bold]", "this is a must reblog"), before there is a "relevant" addition again. But right now, you can only remove all reblog additions, not just individual ones. I feel like this would be a neat feature.

Direct blocking of anon hate which also tracks the IP and blocks the associated account(s). No rights for cowards, that's all I'll say.

Features to Bring Back

Reblog chains. Prev tags are the backbone of lots of interactions on here. If I click on someone's username in a reblog chain, I want to see that post on their blog, not their blog starting from the newest post. The loss of this feature is one of the things people constantly complain about in the replies of @changes.

Several text formatting options. As a theme maker, it would be nice to have proper preformatted text again - it makes code so much more legible. Other formatting options I miss are marked/highlighted text and text lines, which are really helpful to visually break apart passages of text.

Features to Ditch

Tumblr Live. There I've said it. If I want to see stuff like that, I have TikTok, IG Reels, Pinterest Reels, and YouTube Shorts. Twitter also has something like this. It's oversaturated, and aparently there are still enough cyber security concerns that it's not even accessible outside of the US and Canada.

Ads in lightboxes. Especially on mobile, there are already more than enough ads on the feed, no need to add more nested inside other elements.

Features that Make Money

Pay for NSFW. If this site allowed full nudity etc. again but hid it behind a paywall, we'd kill two birds with one stone: The site would probably still be allowed on the App Store, and the money influx would be huge. The userbase would also increase again.

(If Tumblr Live is kept.) Pay to snooze Tumblr Live permanently. It's the most complained about thing in changes' replies, so I feel like people would pay on a subscription base just to not see TL anymore.

Pay to increase limits. 250 posts per day is the maximum that can be posted - and there are people hitting those limits. If there was an option to buy a higher limit (500p/d, 750p/d, etc.), people might generally use it. Like those add-on charges for mobile data. Same goes for posts in the queue, posts in drafts, images in a photoset and so on.

Pay to pin posts at the top of a tag or search result. Ebay Kleinanzeigen has this neat feature where you can push your small ads to the top of a search query so that more people can see it. This could be a cool feature to try, as it would work in a more content-aware way than Blaze does.

Pay to buy inactive URLs. There are some really cool usernames on here that are taken by blogs that haven't updated for 5+ years and only have one post (or none at all), and I feel like it would be neat to be able to buy one of these cool usernames attached to an empty account. To make sure that usernames attached to redirect or something else don't get bought, tumblr should send an e-mail to the username owner - if the user doesn't react to that for 3 months, the usernames changed owners. [added 13th July 2023]

Existing Features to Improve

NPF posts. I feel like a combination of legacy and NPF would be neat. Think selecting a main element like in the legacy editor (e.g. video, image, audio) and then adding a caption that can add different content types like NPF does. Or at least create a better overview over NPF variables and release the full base code with documentation to make things easier for the web designers on here. There are more issues with the NPF format but I won't list everything people dislike about it here.

Block people. The block feature should make sure that the person being blocked doesn't see any posts made by the person they were blocked by, even if those posts were reblogged by another user. Also, like IG does, there should be an option to block either just a specific blog or the IP address attached to block side-blogs and other accounts of that user.

Color palettes. The color palette options for the dashboard are generally a nice idea but I think it would be better if there was a dropdown menu to choose a palette from rather than having to click through all the different options. For example, if I want to go from Cement (light mode) to Dark mode, I have to click through 10 options until I reach Dark again. There has to be an easier way. [added 20th July 2023]

Other Improvements Needed

Nuke spam bots. Users are reporting all the spam bots, yet, it doesn't seem like they are dwindling in numbers. Also - at least this is how it's being perceived by the userbase - tumblr isn't doing enough on their end to reduce spam bots. This is definitely something that needs to be fixed.

End hateful and criminal activities. It's the year 2023, yet there are still outright N*zis, violent tr*nsphobes, literal p*dophiles, and other people committing to the daily bit of hate speech and other illegal activities (fraud too considering all those fake GoFundMe sites) on this website. I'm not saying free speech should be banned but there is a bright red line between what is free spech and what is hate speech (or should get you jailed considering fraud and p*dophilia).

A through-out, perhaps even interactive, beginner tutorial. "The site is too complicated to use for new users!" – then explain how it works in easy terms, with examples, images, and videos. Every other application or web app has walk-throughs, just do the same here.

Improved ad relevancy. The ads I see on tumblr are usually so out-of touch with the userbase, and many of them feel like the sort of stuff you see on a spam-ridden torrenting site. I feel like increasing the relevancy of ads to what the users usually blog about would cause a higher click-rate and turn-over-rate than the current ads do.

Summary

There is probably more I could add, but that's it for now. Should I make any later additions directly to this post, I will mention it to prevent misunderstandings. If you have any ideas or constructive criticism, let me hear about it in the replies or reblogs of this post.

[supergoopersworld]

This post assumes you know the basics by now Part 1.

Considering which is the most viewed video on his second channel, I'll assume that my fellow sickos are up to speed with the textbook definition of what a "this shit was meant to be private" type drama looks like, so we won't be delving on what even Tom was talking about. You see, the memories of early 2020 came back to me when people started accusing Flowergothic of SH after Quinton posted his response, hence why I finally decided to start sharing my knowledge.

So, Julia (Flowergothic) decided to leak her entire Discord chat logs almost a month ago just to prove her side of the story and she shared them in multiple file formats to prove they were the real deal. By then most people had moved on and the files are fucking massive so only a sicko would even bother. Well, I'm a sicko.

I will spoil you something important: nothing disproves Julia was into Quinton and the whole "she started stalking me and wanted me to rue the day" happened on Twitter so most of what his response centres around (rejecting her started it all) isn't disproved per se. However, Quinton did lie about other stuff and lucky for you I'm here to walk you through it.

In order to make this more digestible here's a blast from the past. Julia officially started complaining openly March 22, 2022.

Let's start by talking about a big scheduling conflict. Julia was in her last semester of uni when iBinged iCarly was made, in fact about 1/4 of her messages are school related yet she kept a steady stream of project updates and talked about her obligations.

On paper she was meant to get an editing reliever buddy that was never necessary because Julia cruised through her workload like a woman possessed.

She was accepted as an editor right of the bat and one of the first complaints by Quinton was that she took his guidelines "too literally". All of this you can see by scrolling the first few pages of the PDF file. Feedback from here on is largely on the technical side. At this point I want to touch two Quinton counterarguments:

She rushed things. She would have an edit back in 2 days, he would need 2 days to fix it.

So here's Quinton expressing dissatisfaction with Julia's pace and making sure to tell her she should take her time.

Sicko Fact #1: Did you notice the pace of release of the NSU miniseries slowed down dramatically after Flowergothic left?

Did you also noticed Quinton excerpted such a tight grip on the project both the project and project files had to be the same name so he could make additional tweaks to what was sent to him? She even ran copyright checks for him.

Julia agreed to her paycheck.

Not a lie, but that wasn't her complaint rather that she was paid less for more work. Bare in mind she is credited as the editor for Season 1 in iBinged iCarly and is the sole guest editor for The End of iCarly, in layman's terms, she was the one that arranged footage whenever Quinton wasn't on screen.

She was paid less for more work, that was her complaint. And had to negotiate a raise.

Considering how long this post is already I will cover the more notable aspect of this thing in the next post.

Here's the Drive link with the chat log files: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1b3-rLmMYK7EFMFsA4aNITLKgtH6ILWeB?pli=1

[ltleflrt]

AO3 tos anon here, thank you for all the explanation.

I actually sometimes wonder myself what’s my stakes in following a lot of spntwitter drama 🙈 I think in this particular case, I just wanted to know the truth. I understand you don’t have concrete proof but as I said I take your word because I know you from outside of the twitter echo chamber and trust you. I also wanted to figure out if AO3 is basically deleting fics just like that but your explanation makes sense as to why they’re doing it.

The fact that reporting trolls should chill, though, I fully agree with.

GAH, THE TUMBEASTS ATE MY FIRST ANSWER. I'm still gonna end up being long winded about this though cuz it gets me pretty heated. I try not to talk about it, but then someone asks me about it and oh lord here I go lol

I honestly don't care if there's a ringleader or just a well organized group. I just wish that the Reporting Trolls would consider printed fics the same as classic 'zines and get the fuck over it. Reporting printed fics can bring down the attention of the IP holders too, so they're not the Fandom Heroes they think they're being.

And when it comes down to it, I don't think they're really trying to protect fandom. If that was the case, there wouldn't be fanfics publicly posted on Lulu that have been sitting their for several years. They're targeting specific creators who have gone out of their way to keep the links hidden or private. So I think there's a kernel of truth to the idea that they're doing this out of jealousy. If it's That One Author that seems to be the ringleader, she may be upset that other people are getting more attention than she does. If it's her fans, they may be upset that their favorite author isn't getting as much attention as they think she deserves. It's even possible that they're not aware of what they're really doing, so they fall back on "BUt pRoFIT".

This whole thing about "but Lulu makes money!" will forever drive me nuts. Lulu would make the same amount of money selling paper and ink on a book that's just 700 pages of the word "Orange" typed on repeat as they would selling paper and ink on a book that's 700 pages of my story. The paper and ink is only worth paying for because of me, and I'm not making any money from the work I'm doing.

Look I can prove that, at least :D

Hell, I'm losing money on it. I pay fanartists to create covers for me. I'm bad at formatting the PDF, so I pay people to format it properly for me. I've spent hundreds of dollars to make these prints look nice and semi-professional. I give away copies for free to the artists and the people who help me with the formatting, and some of these are over $20 because of how thick they are.

Everyone is getting something out of this EXCEPT for me!

*huffs and puffs in irritation*

The AO3 stuff is, unfortunately, squidgy. Over the years I've heard of other things getting reported on AO3 where authors have complained that they weren't given enough opportunity to clean up whatever the violation was, or the AO3 staff wouldn't/couldn't tell them where the violation was hiding. If something is reported, it's going to come down to a judgement call from an AO3 employee. As someone who has had to make judgement calls on things that are grey areas, I can tell you it's tough. And sometimes it's best to err on the side of caution, which is usually not in the customer's favor. Without knowing exactly what was behind the AO3 staff's decision to delete, I can't say whether their decision is fair or not. It is scary though, because it's hard to tell whether an offhand comment will get you in trouble or not, and it puts us all on edge when we hear about something getting deleted.

Anyway, sorry I went on a vent session again. I'm glad you got some answers that at least made you feel better ;D

[funkii4-blog]

It’s honestly heartbreaking seeing the unraveling of this game in real time.

(This is really long sorry I’m just passionate about pcotr)

I initially just started playing Paladins in late 2018 as a sort of substitute since Overwatch hadn’t come out on Switch yet; however i very quickly got really attached and have grown to love this game more than I could ever love OW. I used to play nonstop in high school (which isn’t really that far behind me but still). I have a bunch of core memories related to it, like when i sat on my floor in the middle of the night watching io’s reveal trailer and how proud i was when i 100% completed the community pass, quests and all.

But sadly that all feels so distant now. The game has changed so much it’s not really recognizable, and it feels like it’s suffering and being suffocated by its own developers. This update made that clearer than ever to me and its devastating to watch. U/mesprizero made a post on Reddit that explains it pretty well but i still wanna share some opinions of my own.

I never did much with the bounty store so I don’t mind that being gone, i got maybe 5 skins i liked from it total. Indifferent.

The first thing that irked me about this update was the departure of the Trials, i liked doing those to get rewards since the short format of the current event passes gives so little, especially for players that don’t pay for the full pass. One major change I’d make is bring the 100-level battle pass format back for sure. It feels like there’s next to nothing to work towards with how things are now.

I know we’ve all complained about how painfully basic Nyx’s design is (she’s the Queen of the Abyss for crying out loud), but her damage output is horrendous as well. I get she’s a tank and not DPS focused but even most tanks can sustain decant damage rates on their own. And her voice literally sounds exactly like Octavia’s, there’s nothing unique about her in that regard.

That brings me to the part of the update that was by far the most infuriating to me; the total removal of the splash arts. My discovery of that made me so angry; Thunderbrush and all the artists that worked on those with/before him spent so much time on the thousands of existing arts and they just casually all get shelved and replaced with incredibly lazy render screenshots of the models. It’s unbelievable, truly. I can’t properly put into words how much this pisses me off especially.

The new UI is fine, it could obviously use some polishing since its new but its not particularly bad to me. Indifferent.

Another thing that made me irrationally upset, the fact that Payload mode is straight up not available on the Switch at all. It’s pretty obvious the devs have seriously neglected its Switch players (textures don’t load most of the time & the game has reached a point where it constantly crashes), but this feels particularly disrespectful in a weird way. I never got to play Payload during its original run so i was excited to try it for the first time, only for the official twitter to state THE DAY BEFORE THE UPDATE that its not available on there, too bad. That just feels like a kick to the face as a Switch player, y’know? I know what you’re thinking, ‘just play on another platform’, that’s the thing, i don’t have another platform to play the game on. Switch is my only option. Not everyone can afford a gaming PC or another console, i certainly can’t. If you’re gonna make a game multi/cross-platform, please make everything on all the platforms the same. Is that too much to ask lmao

If i need to add stuff later i will, but i think thats it for now. As much as i don’t want to give up on this game I’ve held dear for so long, it’s become practically impossible in it’s current state. I have no hope left for it’s future. :((

[risingpilots]

I posted 3,494 times in 2022

15 posts created (0%)

3,479 posts reblogged (100%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@philip-the-nickel

@strangeauthor

@orallech

@mahalidael

@punchingbakugodaily

I tagged 31 of my posts in 2022

#hush ke - 9 posts

#hello??? - 3 posts

#tik tok - 2 posts

#martin scorsese - 1 post

#dog ear - 1 post

#me rn - 1 post

#what a world we live in - 1 post

#indigenous - 1 post

#native american history month - 1 post

#idk what to tag this as - 1 post

Longest Tag: 113 characters

#it sounds like she just learned those terms from stan twitter and is trying to fit in with them to sell her music

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

My spotify wrapped for this year

6 notes - Posted November 30, 2022

#4

I am officially 23 years old

6 notes - Posted July 17, 2022

#3

Here's an article and indigenous warrior women. Some of these women were two-spirit and queer.

I think my favorite story in here is about Gouyen who killed the man who killed her husband.

39 notes - Posted November 23, 2022

#2

YALL MARTIN SCORSESE KNOWS ABOUT THE JOKE

150 notes - Posted November 25, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

There's this thing on tik tok that is interesting to me and it's the cooking videos. Like the ones where someone will share a quick and easy meal that they make.

And its usually really simple. Like maybe chop up a few vegetables and put some meat in a pan. Or just let something simmer for a bit. Or I saw this one video and a lady just cut a bell pepper in half and put an egg in the hole with the seasoning.

And the comments on those videos are always along the lines of "that's not quick and easy" and complaining that they chopped something or used a skillet. And that the commenters idea of a quick and easy meal is just eating cheese out of a bag or a pb&j or just a plain quesadilla. Which are all valid things to eat btw. There are some days where I will just make a sandwich.

But the thing that interests me is that the comments are always based on what the op does in the video. Its never about how much things cost. And that makes me realize that a lot of those ppl just refuse or don't know how to cook something simple. And I think part of that comes from wanting to follow the directions to a T. Which when cooking food... you don't really have to do.

Like you don't have to buy fresh vegetables. They sell frozen ones. They sell diced up frozen chicken. They sell minced garlic in a jar. I've seen things like fish and chicken already seasoned up in the pack, you just gotta cook it. Like...obviously cooking isn't for everyone and sometimes we just don't feel like it. But there are like easier alternatives out there to make an actual meal and not just having to eat bagged cheese all the time.

169 notes - Posted November 18, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[arwainian]

My Reading This Week

formatting changes, what do we think about italics for book titles and authors to set them apart from what I write about them? (maybe i should try color coding?)

Lots of reading this week because I had half the week off to go home for the holidays, but honestly I spent more time crocheting than reading, which I won't complain about

Finished:

Boy Oh Boy by Zachary Doss

recommended to me by @unfathomabletortoise , and I'm still rotating the themes and such of it around in my head. one that was on my mind this week was where your boyfriend lives literally inside your body. the like... "oh i'm so close to you, i'm with you all the time" but really you're not close at all you're just being used. but ALSO the intimacy of loving someone so much, physical affection as the closest substitute we have to unzipping someone else and living inside them... much to think about. as I said on my Twitter thread, I may recommend this collection to my queer scifi teacher from a few years back

Ambrosia, edited by Tab Kimpton & Jade Sarson

started reading this a while back! i will keep most of my thoughts on this private ;), but i will say I'm glad this exists

Started and Finished:

Lucky Charm by Chase Verity

this was cute, but just. so short. too short. like how short it was really worked to its detriment because I think it could have really benefitted from taking more time to flesh out the characters and their relationship. i really enjoyed the concwpt though and it made me want to look into deaf silent film stars (have yet to do so, someone remind me)

Mob Psycho 100, Vol. 9 by ONE, translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian

mp100!! i just. really like this manga. i dont have many longering thoughts from this volume except just like excitement at its existence and god i love reigen and mob and this was fun to read even if i already watched the anime

Daniel Cabot Puts Down Roots by Cat Sebastian

i was about to say i thought i didnt have much to say about this one. but then i remembered that actually i do, i even started my brand new reading journal saying stuff about it: this was cute and sweet and low stakes! i am technically in the acknowledgements of this book by virtue of being in the author's writing discord server, which she mentions! I will say, there were a few too many [typos/apparent name mix ups/one instance where a character says "fifth disease" in a bit of dialogue which was clearly just meant to be a placeholder for an actual disease to add to the list] for me to fully overlook, so i got a little bit frutrated. doesnt take away from the good character work, but did give it a bit of an unfinished feeling

Uncommon Charm by Emily Bergslien & Kat Weaver

like the above this book is more quiet vignette and low stakes character work than plot-y plot, but this book just hit Perfectly for me. i think because i loved the narrator/pov character so much. i am gently shoving this novella into my bf's hands when i next see him.

Ongoing:

Blood Sisters: Vampire Stories by Women edited by Paula Guran

La Dame by Tanith Lee Chicago 1927 by Jewelle Gomez Renewal by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro Blood Freak by Nancy Holder The Power and the Passion by Pat Cadigan The Unicorn Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas This Town Ain't Big Enough by Tanya Huff Vampire King of the Goth Chicks by Nancy A. Collins Learning Curve by Kelley Armstrong The Better Half by Melanie Tem Selling Houses by Laurell K. Hamilton Greedy Choke Puppy by Nalo Hapkinson Tacky by Charlaine Harris Needles by Elizabeth Bear From the Teeth of Strange Children by Lisa L. Hannett

I said last week that I had trouble sitting down and reading multiple stories from this in a row, but that was not a problem for me this time! as of writing i only have five stories left to read from this anthology, and those amount to less than 100 pages.

i've idenfitied a repeated theme (though not one present in even half the stories here) of several lady vampires presenting a sort of 'to defeat a predator you have to become one' rape-revenge sort of monster hunting fantasy. like i said, this is FAR from a uniting theme, but its an interesting motif. also several stories deal with very predatory vampires without being the above, and having read Dracula earlier this year i appreciate vampire fiction grappling with the themes of vampirism and sexual assault that were set up in the classics

[fluffybunnybadass]

the fact that y'all turned comments/ replies off means you're well aware that you're ringing the death knell for the website and are turning it into the things ppl are running away from. which, in turn, is going to cause an exodus again, and not because you have to abide by some app store rules-- simply because you want to capitalize on the people who are leaving other, failed websites for here.

literally no one wants this change that is a user

also it's rude to think "a user should not know how it works" as a starting point, because the way it sounds is like. you must always assume we're stupid and thus change the current social ecosystem, not realizing that by doing this you're harming it. Like, idk, The fact that you guys had to bold italicize it? (which, ironically, is something giving me issues to format while writing this post on mobile-- maybe you should look into that instead? ) feels so incredibly rude lol

anyways, what current, active, long time users are complaining about these things? new users are going to adapt, because that's what we used to do back in the day, before every alleged social media website decided to turn into the same, basic, annoying formula that LACKS PROPER CURATION. tumblr users have been making and spreading out as many "WELCOME TO TUMBLR!!" guideline threads and posts to help BOTH Twitter and reddit users adapt.

and i'm sure many others are going to agree that the site IS easier to curate than literally any of these other current platforms people have been migrating from. i can LITERALLY KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT when i come on here to look at my dash. i don't have to get annoyed by the 20th advertised tweet in a set of 30 tweets, because the ads don't look like regular posts (thank God), (and also don't act like them either, which makes them at the very least visualizing interesting too linger on for a break). I don't have to worry about being shown things that I'm not following, beyond the occasional blaze post, which has so far quickly AND PROPERLY adapted to what kinds i want to see and hasnt shown me "random selfie of hot person 3477412" like it did at first. (and by using the "this post isn't for me" or whatever button it was, i haven't needed to remove a post)

also? we can inject random content onto our feed already if we turn on "include posts from followed tags"? and we can chronologically search posts, so we can also see stuff that's not popular in a tag? or at all if we've set our dash to it?

all in all I'm not seeing a single thing listed here that wasn't already being accomplished. you're just making mountains out of ant hills that don't even exist to the average user, and despite our propensity for sarcasm, tumblr users are actually genuinely willing to help someone new to the platform "learn the ropes". Just pay attention to people who are actively trying to harm and maybe look at things people are actually having issues with STILL instead of, well, making more issues.

thanks,

a 2011-ish tumblr user

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[kaisooficpodcast]

Bunny's Young Family kaisoo SNS AU

I am Alexio Sospranio and you’re listening to the kaisoo fic podcast. 

This episode is slightly different because we will be going through an SNS au that is posted on twitter. Now for those who are not aware, SNS basically means Social Networking Service. In this day and age where we are chronically on our phones on twitter with memes and reaction pics saved, what would a universe look like if our exo members were in a universe whose main point of communication is twitter? Unlike ao3 fics which are text based, SNS au’s content itself follows the format of… twitter basically. There are comments which a character can tweet, and its followers are able to respond as a quote or in the thread. Alongside with that are the twitter DMs and iMessage. Occasionally, as with life, not everything can be through Twitter or message, so usually to give more context or for physical human interactions with dialogue and narration, sns au authors will post screenshots of their notes or docs for it.

Now for the SNS au we will be looking at today is, bunny, or @/meokmooi double ‘o’ on Twitter.

In this SNS au, kaisoo are in an established relationship, happily married. One or two hiccups along the way but nothing that tips the boat over, or ship for that matter. 

Introducing a bit on the author: 

Bunny has been in this fandom since 2015, that’s about��10 years. The pull factor that got her into this fandom was (baekhyun) when she saw a gif on him on tumblr throwing a bottle accidentally at his face LMAO) but became a minseok/luhan stan when she properly got into exo. Then the second time she saw exo was at the 2016 EXO'rdium concert. Bunny was in the standing area and kyungsoo was externally close to her 😭 and pretty much entered the concert as a minseok stan and left a kyungsoo stan. Bunny is currently into (exo, kaisoo, dogs). 

I have my beta Dudu with me today, 

Hello

and she will be taking the persona of Bunny. I asked our author of the day some questions prior to this session and this is what she had to say.

I note you mostly write parents kaisoo or lactating Kyungsoo, and the ongoing one you’re doing now is no different, which is perfectly fine. But my question is what about kaisoo in real life inspired you to have this SNS au, if any?

First of all I’m astounded to be known as someone who mostly writes lactating kyungsoo 🤣🤣

Haha, of course! You have like 4 different aus with lactating Kyungsoo.

I think what inspired me about kaisoo was mostly how clingy and childlike Jongin is with Kyungsoo, and how Kyungsoo in turn tends to mother him a little. Kyungsoo is naturally domestic and cares for his members and everyone around him. Seeing the video of when kaisoo had a cooking competition and Kyungsoo won, his cheeky expression towards the latter made me laugh- they bicker like an old married couple. 

Indeed they bicker like an old married couple! Really love that cooking competition and it really sets butterflies in MY stomach… i can’t imagine what it does to kaisoo in real life!

Now, bunny, —

The premise of this fic started off with Kyungsoo complaining about how Haesoo looks like Jongin when it was him who carried their baby. And of how we slowly get an in on how there was this bitch who wanted to steal Jongin from Kyungsoo and that taps onto Kyungsoo’s insecurities, which, thank kaisoo, Jongin eased Kyungsoo’s worries and I quote: 

Kyungsoo sobs, his face flushed from embarrassment. “I’m not your petite little sweetheart anymore”

“I know you don’t feel it, but to me, your postpartum body is my favourite. It’s sexy as hell. I love your stomach because that’s where our babies grew so healthy and safe.”

This moment… this intimate moment where one had just barred his heart vulnerably to show his insecurities… and then the other consoling him… it just sets the bar up so high. Like in real life, i know of married men who would go on dating apps to fuck bitches just because their wives are too loose from giving birth to their child? Which is honestly the most messed up way of thinking. But with kaisoo in this au, true love in real life is not entirely lost…

I follow this account where she would post up fiction related posts like talking about fanfic tropes, relationship dynamics and ao3 tags. And in one of her posts, read this and i quote: There’s something profoundly comforting about reading stories where characters who are struggling are deeply loved by someone who isn’t scared of their flaws. Even if it’s fiction, it exists in someone’s mind, in their heart, which means it’s not impossible to find in real life.

Bunny, what do you think?

I feel like Jongin was literally written by a woman. I can’t fault anything bad about him   . I can’t fault anything bad about him (except his questionable taste in shoes) 

I don’t have any desire to marry and have kids because of many reasons, but if I ever did it would be someone like kaisoo 🥲 i haven’t dated since getting into exo because they have highered my standards too much 😂

Honestly, that’s perfectly understandable. Especially now in this day and age… phew getting married and having children will be a huge struggle. 

Bunny, do you write kaisoo here, more specifically Jongin, to be someone who really shows how loving someone should be? Do you see any reflection of your own life in this sns au you have written? Be it the plot or the characters? You don’t need to go into intimate detail, maybe just a snippet of what inspired you in real life to write this fic.

I think I write him in a way I wish more men would be. I’ve had toxic relationships and part of my perspective with Jongin is my dream guy. I’ve not been with someone who is so loving like him, I’m probably delusional in hoping there is someone out there just like him though.

Aw that’s kinda sweet tho? You write Jongin as a projection of how you want your dream guy to be! Let’s manifest that! I hope you get someone like Jongin.

My next question is what was your favourite part of piecing up a story like in this kaisoo family sns au? 

Writing about stuff that not many writers write about (*ahem* 🍼 ) and also kinda playing out my own little fantasy of them 😂

What was the most challenging part of writing this particular AU? 

writing smut and conversations 🥲

Was this the original idea you had in mind when you first drafted the fic? How much has the story grown or changed while writing?

Not really, It was just going to be a one shot but here we are… 😂

Yea! And i am aware you started off this SNS au in October last year, 2023 and initially wanted it to be just a one tweet post, I mean this in the best way possible, but how did it escalate for it to be still ongoing in March 2024?

The amount of retweets and comments it received made me want to add more and I guess it escalated from there 😅 Because I have ADHD it’s taken me a lot longer to complete it and to come up with new ideas.

The power of comments from readers really do send a spur of energy for writers and that should encourage readers to always drop love and comments down to fics.

And bunny i just want to say that the photos you pick out are insane… Like how it is that you manage to find Kyungsoo’s pale skin sucking on a pacifier, kaisoo’s height difference, baeksoo huddled together on the street. Like it’s just crazy similar!

So my question here is: How does your search bar look when you look for the memes or reaction pics or those romantic pics that really look like the exo members?

Lots and lots of research on twitter and pinterest. my close mutual @moondaes (mimi) and i send a lot of pics and videos of “kaisoo look alikes” to each other, 95% of the content is NSFW 😅 when i’ve been needed a specific picture, she’s someone who i can ask for help. 

for memes, mostly twitter, i have a whole album just for memes on my phone and pinterest 😂 

I’m also in a kaisoo cult gc with 30 members that share some of the most questionable and unhinged memes.

OuO interesting!!! Upon doing your research and collecting resources, what is the process of making an SNS au? 

Mostly collecting pictures of their kids and the couple into a folder on pinterest- if something comes up i’ll add it to the folder to use for future tweets. I use the app TwiNote and Memi Message for the fake tweets and messages. I don’t really structure the posts or organise anything *damn you ADHD brain* I pretty much just go with it 😂

–

I see so you dont really structure anything… so its more or less self indulgent postings, which is so cute and it does make it very fun to read as well.

Which part of the process of building the plot, getting the photos and piecing it all up together is your favourite part?

I think people’s reactions and comments is my favourite part, seeing that there are people out there who enjoy my au honestly makes my day 🥲

Aw, again, listeners, readers, do leave comments!

Are we nearing the end of this SNS au? Could you give us a snippet of what’s next in our lovely kaisoo family?

We are!

A few more posts and we will be looking at the end. 

Hmmm, I’m thinking there might be another sibling or two ☺️

Now, dear bunny, do you have any other comments you want to share with listeners? Any teasers for ongoing AUs or a hint of upcoming AUs you have in your work in progress stage? 

I had to check my notes- I’ve got a few ideas that have been abandoned because they are too NSFW for myself and twitter and I don’t want to get mass reported 😂 I also struggle with writing scenes, especially smut. that’s why i find making these twt aus easier, more fun and realistic! 

After this au I will be making the prequel, so we will be able to see how the kaisoo in my current au all started! From meeting, first kiss, first everything. Moving in together, getting married, expecting their first child. But not without a lot of ups and downs - stay tuned!

Thank you bunny for your time in being on board with this kaisoo fic podcast, for your replies to my questions.

Dear listener, the link to the author’s twitter profile will be given below in the notes section. And with that we have come to the end of today’s episode. We will have a pause in April, and so do keep a lookout for new episodes May 13th and every 13th of the month onwards. 

To reach me, i am kaisooficdrunk on twitter and if you want you can drop me questions on my curious cat you can do so with the same username. There will also be another link that brings you to my tumblr blog with the transcription for today’s episode. There you can also find the other scripts for other episodes as well.

Thank you for listening, have a good day, dear kaisooist, and we look forward to the next episode. Stay tuned.