armoredsuperheavy

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Menswear peaked at about 1740 and I will fight about it.

a couple centuries of dandies

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Adoro te devote by Linguamortua

Adoro te Devote by Linguamortua (@lingua-mortua)

Kylo is twenty years old, a second-year seminary student passionately devoted to the idea of a life in the priesthood. Beneath his bookish exterior, he has an alarming fixation on the concepts of self-discipline and martyrdom. In another time, he might have a been a monk in some warrior order, or a Jesuit priest travelling the world.

When he’s rewarded for his hard work with the responsibility of teaching a class at a Catholic prep school, he meets Hux, a tearaway rich kid who will challenge Kylo’s faith and shatter his self-control. Kylo knows that a torrid sexual affair with a seventeen year old will end his chances of becoming a priest, and yet for one intense, humid summer, it’s all he can think about.

Visu sim beátus tuæ gloriæ by Fraxiinus A brief coda taking place after the events of linguamortua’s Adoro te devote.

Why bind this?

The fic is great. Gets you right in the feels. Gorgeous work. But beyond that, once again we have one author inspiring another, an example of the way fandom feeds itself. Also the fic features Kylo as a seminarian, and this gave me an excuse to play with religious motifs in the design of the book.

Binding details

Title: Liturgisch

Body: Adobe Garamond Pro.

Faux news articles in Times New Roman with headers in Cheltenham Condensed.

Dead Dove Publishing logo endpapers in gold.

A very rite of reconciliation purple Duo bookcloth on one copy.

Copy 1/2 of 2. Fanbinding project #154 completed in December 2024 by ArmoredSuperHeavy, Dead Dove Publishing.

To learn how to bind books and engage in fandom as a quietly radical and subversive practice come join us at Renegade Bookbinding Guild.

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Kill, Repeat by Elquist

Kill, Repeat by Elquist

The finest in Hydra Trash Party storytelling. (This one's in German)

Title illustration by Stereowire (formerly at stereowire.tumblr.com)

Summary

Der Soldat hebt den linken Fuß und trocknet ihn, lässt das Handtuch fallen und wartet darauf, dass einer der beiden Männer, die ihn mit dem Schlauch abgespritzt haben, ihm etwas anzuziehen gibt, weil sie das werden. Die Kacheln glänzen vor Nässe. Seine Haut fühlt sich rau an, seine Zehen und Knie sind bläulich. Er zittert. Er denkt an nichts. Sein Kopf ist leer, und es ist gut.

The soldier lifts his left foot and dries it, lets the hand towel fall and waits to see whether one of the men who shot him with the hose gives him something to put on. The tiles shine with water. His skin feels raw, his toes and knees are bluish. He shivers. He thinks about nothing. His head is empty, and it's good.

Bind details

Title: Antilles

Text: Adobe Garamond Pro

Binding: Because the fic only ended up 2 signatures long, I used (ironically enough) the German stiffened paper binding method (Steifbroschur), which is versatile and quick. The boards are acid-free mat boards from my frame shop offcut stash.

Fanbinding project #113 by ArmoredSuperHeavy/Dead Dove Publishing, completed December 2024.

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I'm trying to follow your guide, but I don't understand this instruction:

'Find and selectively replace the non-breaking line break with the regular paragraph code. Leave those in for quoted poems etc.'

I've read up on non-breaking lines, and I still don't understand what you mean. Could you please explain?

Image is a screen shot of Word, containing the following text:

The symbol at the end of this paragraph is a regular paragraph break. If you use this at the end of each paragraph, you can use the Paragraph menu to control many aspects of it, including first-line indent rules and spacing between paragraphs.¶ 

The symbol at the end of this line [carriage return symbol] is a soft carriage return. [carriage return symbol] Using this makes Word treat these lines [carriage return symbol] together like a single paragraph. [carriage return symbol] It’s great for poetry.¶ 

Many texts you may copy from AO3 or other sources come into Word using the soft carriage return instead of the proper paragraph break. If you replace them, then you have better control of the paragraph’s display properties.¶ 

I had to look it up that they are called "soft carriage return" rather than "non breaking line break"

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A Burden Shared

A Burden Shared, an orphaned work on AO3.

“Who hurt you, Will?” Will sniffed, though his eyes were dry and clear. “Which time?” he replied.

Will is having trouble focusing on his current case. Dr. Lecter is there to listen.

Titles: Volkszeitung 21

Body: Adobe Garamond Pro

Dead Dove trademark endpapers in silver.

Binding method: German stiffened paper (Steifbroschur)

Covered in dark blue Duo bookcloth and a heroes & villains paper

Copy 1 of 1. Fanbinding project #149 completed in Dec. 2024 by ArmoredSuperHeavy, Dead Dove Publishing.

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i'm guilty of treason (i've abandoned control) by voxofthevoid

i'm guilty of treason (i've abandoned control) is a smokin' hot Steve/Bucky series by @voxofthevoid

Description: S.H.I.E.L.D Agent Bucky Barnes is captured on a mission and meets Commander Steve Rogers, the erstwhile Captain America. It escalates quickly.

The Bind

voxofthevoid's work is uniquely challenging to typeset because of the long lyrical story and chapter titles, written all in lowercase. How do you set these up so that they (1) squish in nicely, (2) look properly elevated as chapter heads, but also (3) retain the impression of nonstandard capitalization?

The solution I found was using the Gobold font family, which has some interesting alternates and ways to title that are less obviously caps-or-minuscule

Title page illustration: @麻痔旳小日子 weibo.com/liduke

Titles: Gobold Uplow

Table of Contents: Gobold Lowplus

Body: Adobe Garamond Pro

silver Dead Dove Publishing endpapers

Case in dark blue Duo bookcloth and Selvedge Indigo patterned paper from Cambridge Imprint.

Fanbinding #157 by ArmoredSuperHeavy/Dead Dove Publishing, Completed December 2024

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The Complete Raffles, Annotated (Rebind)

Who is Raffles?

Written by E. W. Hornung, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, dedicated to ACD, and inspired by the Sherlock Holmes stories, but starring A.J. Raffles, a gentleman of leisure and recreational crime rather than a detective. Accompanied by his admiring friend and narrator, nicknamed "Bunny", mischief is afoot.

It's very shippable, and if you have an interest in historical fiction, Edwardian London, or are a Holmes/Watson fan, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

The Annotated Version

I originally found the annotated stories on the Raffles Redux website and was struck how complete and informative the annotations assembled by Sarah Morrissey and Genevieve L. Morrissey were. In addition to explaining many obscure things the modern reader would otherwise have completely missed, they also collected profuse illustrations from past editions.

I was dismayed that this great addition to the original, public domain Raffles tales was only available (at the time) in this ephemeral form. My reading was greatly enhanced by all these insights into the period and places of the stories. When I recently discovered it was available in an Amazon print on demand edition I immediately bought it.

What a bittersweet experience it was to have the text! Yes! YES! The text is out! In a nice big block with breathing room for the annotations and a handsome typeset at that! What a thoughtful design, but what else should I have expected, considering how well done the annotations were?!

But what was bitter, you ask? Well, that cheap thin cardstock cover, which immediately curled up like Hokusai's Great Wave after I perused 3 pages of the first story. This was infuriating. This book deserves so much better. But! We have the means of production. I couldn't do anything about the "perfect-bound" spine, but i could definitely fix this woefully inadequate cover.

Views of the text, annotations, illustrations.

Let's Rectify This Injustice

I sliced the covers off and removed as much paper from the spine as possible. Scrounged out a moderately "old timey" sheet big enough for endpapers, cut and attached them. Glued mull and an Oxford hollow type kraft paper tube on this bad boy. And then built a case, using the remainder of the endpapers sheet to stretch the book cloth supply.

Then, fortuitously, from the discarded flimsy cover, I was able to salvage the JC Leyendecker portrait of Raffles. This piece was originally done for Collier's magazine, and oozing "late Edwardian cruising". Brother can you spare a light? JCL was a magician.

A sleep overnight in the press and now the complete annotated Raffles (x Bunny of course) finally has the proper treatment, complete with that exquisite side eye right where it deserves to be.

I am Back (ElmoFire.gif)

This is my first finished book project in 4 years. It felt great to get back into it.

I'm finishing up a number of Dead Dove Publishing projects that were partially done when I ground to a halt in summer of 2020. Wish me luck and stay tuned for more...

ArmoredSuperHeavy, 25 Dec 2024

Fanbinding project #162

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Moar Bindings Coming

I'm finishing up a number of Dead Dove Publishing projects that were partially done when I ground to a halt in mid 2020. Wish me luck and stay tuned for more…

ArmoredSuperHeavy, 25 Dec 2024

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SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much.

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Renegade Bookbinding Guild members have bound My Immortal many times, individually and together!

Several members got together and collectively created a properly deranged typeset, with each chapter formatted in new and differently wrong or insane ways, and then we shared it and created binds using it as a base.

The viral, feather-boa legendary bind by @runawaymarbles was first out the gate

a beautiful goth mess by @three--rings

classy and vampiric by @chubsthehamster

In miniature form, we bound many copies as a round-robin souvenir book at the 2023 Renegade Retreat:

There's also a further transformed version bound by @whatapictureisworth-press

and I'm certain there are more!

There’s something cosmically beautiful about bookbinding fanfiction. Not the bookbinding of fanfiction for monetary gain (which is undoubtedly morally wrong) but rather bookbinding as a gift for someone you love. Or simply bookbinding for the sake of having the story in a tangible form. After all, doesn’t it deserve a place on your bookshelf, too?

But that isn’t the beautiful part. It is this: the melding of something new with something as old as language itself. Fanfiction (at least compared with bookbinding) is a strikingly new phenomenon. Modern fanfiction has only been around for a few generations. Bookbinding, on the other hand? It can be traced back to 2nd century India. It’s a dying art — one that’s been reborn in order to immortalize freely written words.

Even better: the scribes in India who first invented the process of bookbinding used it to create religious texts. In a way, aren’t we doing the same? Fanfiction isn’t a religion, of course, but if you love a story enough to bind it, isn’t that a form of reverence in itself? Isn’t it holy?

Yes. You make it so. The needle and the thread, the newly creased paper, the hardly dried ink … your fingers consecrate it. And as you slip the book onto the shelf, you make it a temple.

And isn’t that just lovely?

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Hi there,

I don't think it's overstating to say that I'm the person who first popularized fanbinding on Tumblr. I began binding fic in September 2018. It was and is an exciting, novel way to participate in the traditional fannish gift economy. You do it with your own two hands, and you have the chance to make an extravagant gift to authors whose often very personal work means so much to you. In the process you have many opportunities to create close personal connections within fandom.

Because there are so many wonderful fics out there, one person could never give them all the love and recognition they deserve. I really wanted to see the practice grow beyond myself. I wrote a detailed manual of my process and offered it up for free so other people could join in. In the years since, Renegade Bookbinding Guild has arisen, always as a team collaborative effort, and it's remained a community focused phenomenon that explicitly supports open knowledge sharing without fees, deep respect for fic authors, and fosters more practice of that gift economy. You, dear reader, are welcome to join us in this project. We have bound thousands of books at this point, and every day more books are born.

I'm not on TikTok, but I've been linked to a lot of misinformation being posted on it over the last few years. I've also heard about a lot of profiteering going on, taking advantage of the hard creative work other fans have freely offered to feed our souls. Speaking only for myself, I think it's a damn shame that some are so quick to commodify the work of other fans. Gifts should beget gifts, not grifts.

When we treat fanworks as free "content" from faceless sources, to suck down voraciously and demand more, or make a quick buck off, the supply will start to dry up. Fanworks are labors of love, but they are still a lot of labor. The energy that keeps folks engaged and creating is essentially a feedback loop. Many authors and other creators are spurred onward to make more, write another chapter, draw another porny picture, bind another book, simply because of the sheer joy they see that their act of creation gives to other fans. I see the Renegade philosophy as helping to supply that energy back into the system. Fic authors deserve that we respect their works as their own, and that fic you love that they spent so long writing deserves every bit of fawning, gibbering, ranting, sighing, rec listing, and sometimes binding, that we fic readers might offer it in return.

ArmoredSuperHeavy, Dead Dove Publishing 2024.11.26

people on TikTok don’t realize fic binding didn’t begin with idiots selling mass printed fanfiction on TikTok-Shop. They think it started as a negative thing ON TIKTOK😭it started on tumblr years ago as a way to appreciate authors!! It was never about selling fics, we’re AGAINST THAT HERE and always have been. I am so tired of the way TikTok rewrites fandom culture.

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Hi, are you still accepting people into the book binding discord server?

We absolutely are! Please come and join us!

https://www.renegadeguild.org/about

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Despite mixed feelings about AI generated images, I can't help but appreciate this image as a jumping off point for costume designs.

Admiral Lord Nelson has never been more parade ready

(image source)

(image source)

Manips by ArmoredSuperHeavy. 2024-10-09

an 1800s royal navy captain attending a pride parade as generated by neural network AI midjourney using the above text prompt

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MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE: An Insufferably Queer Film Review

I rewatched MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE (1987) for the first time since it came out last night and WOW I have some thots about this thing. We enjoyed roasting the living shit out of it but there's a few gold nuggets in there despite the brutal budget cuts that impacted the plot and what not.

Contains plenty of spoilers.

God bless Wardrobe

OK so … the film doesn't bother to set up any real motivations for the characters, and He-Man (an incredible looking Dolph Lundgren rrrowrrrr) has almost no dialogue which is such a fucking waste. But this complete lack of narrative framework means we can apply OUR OWN explanations to events.

From the very beginning Skeletor has this obsession with He-Man, which will simmer and then culminate in a final showdown. But before we get to that hot mess, we have to wade through the middle of the film.

He gets as much screen time as He-Man.

Meet the utterly repulsive dwarf scientist Gwildor played by Billy Barty, a rinse-and-repeat of his performance as an utterly repulsive magic troll in Legend (1986). This dwarf is the film's Jar Jar. His face is like a deep dish pizza after an acid attack. His real mouth is visible behind the immobile thick prosthetics and it makes for some truly disturbing close-up dialogue shots. Please, pan away from Pizza the Hutt and give us another shot of Lundgren's pecs please I am begging you, DP

We find ourselves in Gwildor's hobbit hole, and he's a magical inventor. So he has this cylindrical object, it's not clear whether it's a weapon or a teleporter but I'm calling it the Butt-Reamer 9000. Inexplicably, there are two of these things and Skeletor has the other one, and wants to collect both of them. So Skeletor has an excuse to go hunting He-Man as he's hunting his missing McGuffin, er I mean sex toy.

Features rotating ticklers, a big improvement over the Butt Reamer 8000.

The thing about the Butt-Reamer 9000 is its magical power to make even this promising setup devolve into a grind as it whisks the Eternians into the magical, enchanting world of a 1987 New Jersey parking lot. WHO WROTE THIS?

The entire middle of the movie is pretty much hot garbage and involves police detectives, arson, vandalism, high school prom, and other dumb bullshit. Aside from the distractingly naked He-Man, the good guys are an utter bore and include some Eternians, some regular Earth humans and their quotidian concerns which really brings down the fun of the movie. (No, baby Courtney Cox, I don't care about your imminent breakup with your mediocre boyfriend!)

The film owes a second mortgage to Star Wars and steals a lot of ideas from it, from bad guys in shiny black stormtrooper helmets, to heroes shooting blue lasers, baddies shooting red.

Let's turn from this depressing state of affairs and focus back on our cherished villain blorbos.

(L-R: Karg, Evil-Lyn our goddess, and Blade.)

Evil-Lyn is beautiful, evil, a cold bitch queen. Gurl you can do so much better than sticking with this loser Skeletor.

Dump! Him! He's gay anyway!

Skeletor is a shit lazy boss of Greyskull and makes Evil-Lyn run the goddamn place in general. He literally shoots the messenger at one point. Great for morale, there, Skel buddy.

Look closer. Fierce!

There's a number of budget rate henchmen on the job, including Karg, who used a whole can of aqua net this morning and is running around in a white fur capelet with a massive bouffant. He is just doing his best okay, really it's hard to look fabulous around these other bitches.

Blade definitely deserved more screen time

Also, Blade, who had a slutty costume of silvery scale maille or something, and was a bit like a sci-fi bondage Riff Raff / space Judas Priest. Best side character costume.

So, there we have it, the queer coded villain roster of the film.

This homemade collage is for sure taped inside Skeletor's locker at school

Note the gigantic brown eye.

Finally, thank Satan, we return to Castle Greyskull, though it's more like beige-and-brown-skull. But aside from the questionable use of faux marble finishes, this is a quality villain lair with hard points installed directly in the floor of the living room, convenient death pits, and an excellent throne setup that I'm pretty sure they recycled for The Fifth Element.

He-Man is captured alive and brought before Skeletor. Blade does the honors with a 15 foot glowing red bullwhip to He-Man's naked and oiled back, much to the delight of dyed-in-the-wool sadist Evil-Lyn.

Movie is getting good now. Was the side quest to Jersey really necessary?

Skeletor, though, watches this action from the throne and has a lot of interesting responses. We had to conclude that Skeletor is a big old bottom but won't admit it. As a dom he is utterly ineffective. He's trying to make He-man kneel and all this shit but He-Man is not submissive at all. Skeletor is … lol. He really just wants to smell He-Man's dick.

The depths (heh) of his bottom nature will become apparent shortly. But first, a costume change.

Skeletor's glow up --- i'm every woman.

Honey we know you're just trying to impress He-man.

Werk tho.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Hole

The gigantic sky-sphincter directly behind the throne has slid open wide… "Begin! The Goatse Ritual! Join me, He-Man, as I become LORD OF THE GAPE" But He-Man's phallic symbol shines bright in defiance. In the end, Skeletor is vanquished symbolically by his own nature and instead of his hole swallowing He-Man, a gaping hole swallows Skeletor instead.

They don't really explain what happened to Evil-Lyn after He-Man's inevitable victory in final man to man combat but she was too smart to get caught sleeping in there and must have survived. What a hot evil competent BABE. After the events of the film end, I vote that Evil-Lyn seduces Teela (the good guy solder lady) and has a hot toxic lesbian affair with her.

Evil-Lyn serves cunt in hell 4 evar

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Want some more?

Nice fanart

Another breakdown on Buzzfeed if you enjoyed mine this is even more gay headcanon

The movie is free on Tubi if you want to subject yourself to it.

ArmoredSuperHeavy, 19 Aug 2023

[armoredsuperheavy]

The Adventures of the Corto

A little sailboat lost her way En route to French land: Camaret Boat meters eight, her crew just two Captain David knew what to do

Pan-pan call sent - that's not distress They have a trouble. What a mess! But no life's in danger. Only then Do you cry "Mayday" to the wind.

An answer came, "We're on the way! We're setting sail to save the day." Said Swedish tallship Götheborg David cried back "You're much too lorg! With your fast ship, you'll break our craft And there's nothing but water, fore and aft"

"We're fifty meters and three masts! Though our ship is mighty and our crew is vast, We'll gently tow you to the harbor And there re-fill our empty larder!"

Linked by radio and strong rope The crew of the Corto found new hope Götheborg's men were strong, their captain kindly. Even the weather treated them mildly.

And when they arrived at Paimpol harbor The great old ship helped even farther No other boats came out to help and Götheborg ventured into the kelp

David and Simon were safe at last In France, the furthest part from Basque Corto's rudder could be fixed But her destiny was forever mixed

With legendary Götheborg she sailed Now little sister to a ship that hasn't failed A ghost of centuries past, yet living Crewed with generous hearts of giving.

ArmoredSuperHeavy, 2 Aug 2023

Story references: (1) , (2)

ph: David Moeneclaey

[armoredsuperheavy]

I just found your blog, and its an absolute DREAM, i've wanted to bind fic for around a year now but I had no idea where to start, and seeing your google doc and all the info on it was incredible! thank you so much for sharing all of that, I can't wait to try this out, will definitely share once I get around to working on it! thank you again!

Ahh thank you so much!

I can't even compete against our Renegade Bindery members on Discord. If you want more tips and a neverending flood of cool books and craft supply enabling, you should join up!

ASH

[armoredsuperheavy]

How do you send authors (that you don’t know personally) copies of books? Do you ask for a post office or something? I don’t want to invade their privacy

PO box if they have it. Another option is to designate a proxy- a friend or relative that lives nearby them. Whatever makes the author comfortable. It gets easier if they know about this phenomenon and have seen posts of other authors who received their books from you, but hesitancy is totally understandable these days.

ASH